The Roadmender | Page 4

as I mend my
road.
Two tramps come and fling themselves by me as I eat my noonday
meal. The one, red-eyed, furtive, lies on his side with restless, clutching
hands that tear and twist and torture the living grass, while his lips
mutter incoherently. The other sits stooped, bare- footed, legs wide
apart, his face grey, almost as grey as his stubbly beard; and it is not
long since Death looked him in the eyes. He tells me querulously of a
two hundred miles tramp since early spring, of search for work, casual
jobs with more kicks than halfpence, and a brief but blissful sojourn in
a hospital bed, from which he was dismissed with sentence passed upon
him. For himself, he is determined to die on the road under a hedge,

where a man can see and breathe. His anxiety is all for his fellow; HE
has said he will "do for a man"; he wants to "swing," to get out of his
"dog's life." I watch him as he lies, this Ishmael and would-be Lamech.
Ignorance, hunger, terror, the exhaustion of past generations, have done
their work. The man is mad, and would kill his fellowman.
Presently we part, and the two go, dogged and footsore, down the road
which is to lead them into the great silence.
CHAPTER III

Yesterday was a day of encounters.
First, early in the morning, a young girl came down the road on a
bicycle. Her dressguard was loose, and she stopped to ask for a piece of
string. When I had tied it for her she looked at me, at my worn dusty
clothes and burnt face; and then she took a Niphetos rose from her belt
and laid it shyly in my dirty disfigured palm. I bared my head, and
stood hat in hand looking after her as she rode away up the hill. Then I
took my treasure and put it in a nest of cool dewy grass under the hedge.
Ecce ancilla Domini.
My next visitor was a fellow-worker on his way to a job at the
cross-roads. He stood gazing meditatively at my heap of stones.
"Ow long 'ave yer bin at this job that y'ere in such a hurry?"
I stayed my hammer to answer--"Four months."
"Seen better days?"
"Never," I said emphatically, and punctuated the remark with a stone
split neatly in four.
The man surveyed me in silence for a moment; then he said slowly,
"Mean ter say yer like crackin' these blamed stones to fill 'oles some
other fool's made?"

I nodded.
"Well, that beats everything. Now, I 'AVE seen better days; worked in
a big brewery over near Maidstone--a town that, and something doing;
and now, 'ere I am, 'ammering me 'eart out on these blasted stones for a
bit o' bread and a pipe o' baccy once a week--it ain't good enough." He
pulled a blackened clay from his pocket and began slowly filling it with
rank tobacco; then he lit it carefully behind his battered hat, put the
spent match back in his pocket, rose to his feet, hitched his braces, and,
with a silent nod to me, went on to his job.
Why do we give these tired children, whose minds move slowly, whose
eyes are holden that they cannot read the Book, whose hearts are full of
sore resentment against they know not what, such work as this to
do--hammering their hearts out for a bit of bread? All the pathos of
unreasoning labour rings in these few words. We fit the collar on
unwilling necks; and when their service is over we bid them go out free;
but we break the good Mosaic law and send them away empty. What
wonder there is so little willing service, so few ears ready to be thrust
through against the master's door.
The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual effort, and
turning man into the Daemon of a machine. To and fro in front of the
long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he who once with
painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle. THEN he tasted the joy of
completed work, that which his eye had looked upon, and his hands had
handled; now his work is as little finished as the web of Penelope. Once
the reaper grasped the golden corn stems, and with dexterous sweep of
sickle set free the treasure of the earth. Once the creatures of the field
were known to him, and his eye caught the flare of scarlet and blue as
the frail poppies and sturdy corn-cockles laid down their beauty at his
feet; now he sits serene on Juggernaut's car, its guiding Daemon, and
the field is silent to him.
As with the web and the grain so with the