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THE PASSING OF JOHN BROADBANKS

THE population of the world seemed reduced that day to one. It was a Sunday, and one of the loveliest Sundays of the whole round year. The date is indelibly recorded. For years I have made a note of the exact day on which the elms around the house, having attired themselves in all the bravery of their new spring dresses, have curtained from me every object lying beyond themselves. During the winter they are diaphanous: I see the houses and the street as plainly as though the elms were not there. But spring-time makes them jealous, and they insist on my fastening my admiring gaze on them and on them alone. For three successive years the date bas been the same. On the eleventh of September my eye has been able, at one or two places, to pierce the graceful drapery of the soft green foliage ; but on September the twelfth it has been impossible.

This was the experience that greeted me on waking to the loveliness of that memorable Sunday morning. I was early at the window. The garden was bathed in the rich, luxurious sunshine. The air seemed quivering with the delicious trill of spring-time. The bees were already busy among the azaleas. The song of the birds alone broke the perfect Sabbatic quiet. A thrush was splitting his throat in a wattle over the way. A butterfly went dancing across the lawn, and, settling on one of the rose-trees, expanded and contracted his glorious wings in the ecstasy of being alive on such a golden morning. I felt that I, too, ought to be extremely happy; but honesty compelled me to confess to myself that I was not.

I had a vague feeling that something was wrong. It clung to me all through the day. I reminded myself  a score of times that I was well ; that I had every cause for gladness and none for anxiety; but it was of no avail. People startled me by commenting on  the beauty of the day. I replied with hesitation. I seemed to have registered an impression that the sky was overcast and gloomy; and it was only when the observations of my friends compelled me to review the position that I discovered that they were unquestionably right. The day was radiantly fair; yet its splendours were lost upon me. I was puzzled at my own confusion.

John Broadbanks met me everywhere that day. As I sat at the open window, listening to the thrush and admiring the butterfly, my mind flew back to Silverstream, and I conjured up the memory of a very similar morning that I had spent at the manse there•with him. When, later on, I went to my desk to put the finishing touches to my pulpit preparation, my eye was arrested by the corner of a letter, written in his familiar hand, peeping out from under a huge pile of correspondence; and, although time was precious, some resistless impulse led me to withdraw it from the heap of papers and to peruse it afresh. There was nothing in it; just a frank and characteristic out­ pouring of his heart concerning all the places he had visited, the people he had met, the experiences he had encountered, and the books he had read. He gratified me by making numerous references to the walks and talks that we had enjoyed together in the old days. I restored the letter to the heap beside me and focussed my attention on my sermon.

And then I found that, in reading the letter, I had not wasted time. For, somehow, I seemed to have caught John’s spirit; I looked through his eyes at the theme with which I was about to deal ; and, at the last moment, I introduced one or two ideas that would never have entered the sermon but for him. After the service, a lady who had been passing through deep waters thanked me for one of the suggestions that I had thrown out ; and it was on the tip of my tongue to repudiate the credit and to attribute the idea to John Broadbanks.

On my way to church in the evening, I fancied, for the fraction of a second, that I saw him in the distance.  I instantly rebuked my own stupidity; I reminded myself that he was in New Zealand and I in Australia, that we had not met for years and were not likely to meet for years to come; and, when the man whose form I had mistaken for his drew nearer, it seemed ridiculously unlike him.  I only mention such a triviality in order to show how little it took that day to call my old friend most vividly and realistic- ally to my mind. I could see his stalwart figure everywhere: I could hear the accents of his voice as distinctly as though he had just spoken.

Before retiring for the night, I took from the drawer of my desk the carbon copies of my own letters to him. I read the top one-the latest.  It had been posted about a fortnight.  I wondered if he had yet received it. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, and the fancy pleased me. ‘perhaps he is reading the original whilst I am glancing at the copy.’ As I read on, I came upon a sentence· or two that affected me more at that moment than at the time of writing. ‘I suppose,’ I had said, ‘I suppose a man takes the path of safety when he follows the gleam, and certainly the rewards are always ample.  Yet he has, at the same time, to pay a heavy penalty.  I can never regret having accepted the call which, by bringing me away from New Zealand, tore you and me apart. But, when I recall the times that we spent together in the old days, I seem to have paid a heavy price for the new life that has opened to me. I often wish that we could t down and have a good long talk about things.  Yet, after all, I suppose we·are here to work; there will be plenty of time for talk when it’s all over.’

‘When it’s all over I’ I replaced the portfolio in the drawer, shut down the desk, switched off the study light, and went to bed. ‘When it’s all over!’ Those words from my own letter beat themselves through my brain as I threaded the misty borderland between waking and sleeping. The re-knitting of severed friendships, the renewal of old experiences, the gathering of life’s broken threads when it’s all over! In the drowsy haze that enfolded the semi-conscious­ ness of that strange night, I fancied that John Broad­ banks and I were seated together in the New Zealand bush. The old hill-side seemed wonderfully familiar, and the blue, blue sea spread out before us had not changed in the least. We were discussing the theme on which, an hour or two earlier, I had been preaching. John’s remarks were as arresting, as luminous and as suggestive as ever. I felt a sense of exhilaration in his delightful company ; and, soothed by that restful satisfaction, I fell fast asleep. So ended that strange September Sunday!

The cablegram arrived next day.  On my way out, I had selected a cream rosebud for my buttonhole, and was just cutting it when I heard the click of the gate. I turned and greeted the telegraph boy. ‘John died suddenly yesterday—Lilian.’ Was I surprised? I scarcely know. Was I sorry? I cannot say. There is a sense in which death-even the death that has been long expected and that has crept upon one very gradually—is always a bewildering surprise. The sick man is alive one second and dead the next; and the change is so stupendous that we are never quite prepared for it. How much more astounding, then, must be a swift translation such as this! And yet, I was not surprised. The inexplicable experience of the day before-the strangely shadowed sunshine and the persistent emergence of John’s personality at every turn-had prepared me for anything. Although he owed me no letter, it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world if, at breakfast-time, the postman had handed me an envelope bearing the Silverstream postmark; I should not have felt unduly startled if John himself had suddenly walked in; and even the fatal cablegram did not come upon me like a bolt from the blue.

No, I was not surprised; and, in any way, I was not sorry. One cannot altogether account for his feelings at such a time. The thoughts that surge uninvited into one’s mind are a law unto themselves. Somehow I dimly felt that John was nearer to me than he had been for many a long day. ‘For years,’ I said to myself, ‘we have lived our lives a thousand miles apart, And now——.’ I had no theory as to where be was. My ideas as to the conditions of life within the veil are of the haziest kind. I only felt that he had escaped from the tyrannies that had so doggedly separated us. It seemed utterly inconceivable that there could be a geographical bar between us any longer. I felt that he was near-nearer than he had been for years nearer than he could possibly have been had he gone on living at Silverstream—and that indefinable, inexplicable sense of nearness obliterated most of sorrow.

I grieved for Lilian; it would be difficult for her to feel that he was as near as he had always been. And then there were his people. I knew how they would miss him. For more than thirty years he had been the central figure in their homes on every day of gladness and of sorrow. Everybody loved John, and everybody felt that to love him was a luxury. The younger people could remember no other minister. The brides and bridegrooms of his later years were mere babies when he went to Silverstream; many of them, indeed, had been born after his advent. In matters of crops and cattle, the farmers had implicit confidence in his judgement.  Few of them would have dared to buy a horse, or to send a lad to a school or a situation, in the teeth of his advice. When the course of true love failed to run smoothly, it was often his skilful fingers that straightened out the awkward tangle. He was the trusted custodian of everybody’s secrets. Silverstream was his only charge, and if, instead of dying in the fifties, he had lived to be ninety, he would have accepted no call that would have taken him from it.

‘I believe in long pastorates,’ he said to me one evening, as we sat together on the rocks at the Nuggets, watching the advancing tide swirling about our feet.’ A long pastorate gives an ordinary fellow a chance of doing a decent life-work. Now look at me! I’m no star preacher; I should never set the Thames on fire along that line. If I move about-a year or two here and a year or two there—I shall never accomplish anything. But if I stay at Silverstream all my days, and do my best to fleet each of my people’s lives by that cumulative influence which only comes with the passage of years, I may yet do a work that will be equal in value to that of far more brilliant men. I have often noticed that a minister who spends his life in one place gets himself enthroned in the hearts of the people, even though nobody can remember a single, sermon that he preached.’

John held true to that youthful ideal, and, as I slipped the cablegram into my pocket, I knew that the lamentations at Silverstream would prove that, in this respect as in so many others, his judgement was wonderfully sound.

There was another reason for the absence of sorrow, I do not know that I thought of it at the time; but I can see now that the very suddenness of John’s translation pleased me. It seemed so exquisitely fitting. Lilian knew us both fairly well, and l fancy that some such thought moved her to include the word ‘suddenly’ in the cable. She knew that it would gratify me to think of John as unchanged to the last. He was always so sturdy, so vigorous, so robust, that the intervention of a long and wasting sickness would have seemed like an alien clement thrusting itself between us. I should have felt that he had entered a realm that seemed foreign to his own nature and to my knowledge of him. But that word reassured me: I was glad to think that John Broadbanks was the same old John Broadbanks to the very end.

‘It all happened on Sunday morning,’ Lilian said, in the letter that I received a fortnight later. As we sat at breakfast with the windows open on to the lawn, Don Wylie came to say that his sister, Gladys, had taken a critical tum in the night, and they thought she was rapidly slipping away. All through her long sickness (she has been in consumption for years) John has been to sec her once or twice a week ; she was very fond of him ; and he could not bear to think that she might pass away without his seeing her again. How little we dreamed that he and she were both to go home on the same day, and that he was to go first ! He left the table ; completed his preparations for the morning service;  took his notes into the vestry in case he had not time to come to the manse on his return ; and then set out for the Wylie’s cottage. You will remember the place; you have described it in one of your books ; you went to it once with John. He must have stayed longer than he intended, and, as a result, had to hurry back. The rush, added to the emotional strain of taking farewell of Gladys, as well as the anxiety as to whether he would be in time for the service, was too much for him. He was looking very pale, the officers say, when he arrived at the vestry. He just smiled; walked round to his big armchair; threw himself into it; and was gone. God had “laid His hand upon his heart and healed it for ever.”

I cannot write as fully as I should like: you will understand; but I knew that John would have wished me to tell you everything. We all had such a happy day together on Saturday : Goldilocks was home; and, as it happened, your letter arrived at dinner-time. John read bits of it aloud, especially the sentence in which you said that you would love to sit down and have a good long talk with him, but that there would be plenty of time for that when it was all over. John was very much struck with that remark; it was strange that you should have made it in that particular letter.

‘John loved to dwell upon your friendship. He used to laugh and say that he would do something to offend you in order to prevent you from writing anything more about him. He thought you made far too much of him. People, he said, would be asking the way to Silverstream, and would be horrified to find that John Broadbanks was such a very ordinary mortal.

‘Everybody—the ministers especially wished that you could have conducted the funeral; but Mr. Sidwell, of Balclutha, who had known John for many years, was very kind. He referred to you and your admiration and affection for John; and he quoted many beautiful tributes that he had heard paid to John’s character. He described John as a minister who knew how to mind his own business. He never attacked or criticized others; he seldom meddled in matters outside his own proper sphere; he did not hanker after office or prominence or publicity; he raised no dust. He dwelt among his own people; he made up his mind that it was his business in life to be a good minister of Jesus Christ; and he was, never so happy as when bringing the members of his congregation into closer touch with Him. You and I know how richly such words were deserved. John used to speak of himself as ordinary; but he was not ordinary. As you have said in your books, he could have secured great fame and wide popularity if he had courted it; but he deliberately chose the better, and quieter, part.’

So ends the letter. And so, for the time being, ends my fellowship with John Broadbanks. A massive human, sharing to the full the interests, the excitements and the emotions of his fellowmen, he dwelt in the secret place of the Most High and abode under the shadow of the Almighty. A prophet in his sensitiveness to the immanence of the Unseen; a prince in his magnetic authority over individuals and assemblies, he walked with men and walked with God. He was above all else a good minister of Jesus Christ. For many long, long years to come his name will be cherished, like a fragrant and beautiful tradition, by those whose homes have been brightened, and whose loads have been lightened, by the tenderness, the chivalry and the courage of his rich and noble ministry.

As I let Lilian’s letter flutter from my hand to the desk, my mind swung to the words with which Charles Dickens closes the greatest of his stories. He makes David Copperfield refer to Agnes, the soul of his soul, as ‘ still near me, pointing upward.’ It is the finest expression known to me of the abiding influence of a valued friendship.  When the first cream blossoms come to the rose-tree by the gate; when the bees are busy in the azaleas; when the elms have donned their impenetrable summer foliage; and when the thrush is calling, calling, calling from the wattle over the way, I shall look with new eyes and listen with new ears. For the thrush will be telling me of John Broadbanks; he will be telling me that he is still near me; he will be telling me that he is still near me, pointing upward!

F. W. Boreham