It was on Christmas Day, 1914, that I received one of the strangest documents I had ever read. It was in the form of a letter from Jonathan Martin, who had made himself a torch of ambition and fear to many moths in London by painting portraits that were certain to be the pictures of the year, but also certain to reveal all the idiosyncrasies, good and bad, of their subjects. It was the fashion to call him cynical. In fact, he was an artist, and a great one.

His unusual power of eliciting unexpected meanings from apparently meaningless incidents and objects was not confined to his art. In private conversation, he would often startle you with a sentence that was like the striking of a match in a dark room. You didn't know that the room was dark until he spoke; and then, in a flash, mysterious relationships at which you had never guessed, were established. You caught a glimpse of an order and a meaning that you had not discerned before. The aimless thing over which you had barked your shin became a coal scuttle; the serried row of dark objects that irritated your left elbow became the works of Shakespeare; and, if you were lucky, you perhaps discovered the button by which you could switch on the electric light, and then sit down by the hearth and read of "beauty, making beautiful old rhyme."

But this is a very faint hint of the kind of illumination with which he would surprise you on all kinds of occasions. I shall never forget the way in which he brought into a queer juxtaposition "the Day" that Germany had been toasting for forty years and the final request for an answer before midnight, which was embodied in the British ultimatum. He would give you a patch of unexpected order in the chaos of politics, and another in the chaos of the creeds—patches that made you feel a maddening desire to widen them until they embraced the whole world. You felt sure that he himself had done this, that he lived in a re-integrated universe, and that—if only there were time enough—he could give you the whole scheme. In short, he saw the whole universe as a work of art; and he conceived it to be his business, in his own art, to take this or that apparently isolated subject and show you just the note it was meant to strike in the harmony of the whole. He was very fond of quoting the great lines of Dante, where he describes the function of the poet as that of one who goes through the world and where he sees the work of Love, records it. But, please to remember, this did not imply that the subject was necessarily a pleasant one. Beauty was always there, but the beauty was one of relationships, not of the thing itself. As he once said, "an old boot in the gutter will serve as a subject if you can make it significant, if you can set it in relation to the enduring things." It is necessary to make this tedious preface to his odd letter, or the point of it may be lost.

"I want to tell you about the most haunting and dramatic episode I have encountered during these years of war," he wrote. "It was a thing so slight that I hardly know how to put it into words. It couldn't be painted, because it includes two separate scenes, and also—in paint—it would be impossible to avoid the merely sentimental effect.

"It happened in London, during the very early days of the struggle. One afternoon, I was riding down Regent Street on the top of a bus. The pavements were crowded with the usual throng. Women in furs were peering into the windows of the shops. Newspaper boys were bawling the latest lies. Once, I thought I saw a great scribble of the Hand that writes history, where a theater poster, displaying a serpentine woman, a kind of Aubrey-Beardsley vampire, was half obliterated by a strong diagonal bar of red, bearing the words, 'Kitchener wants a hundred thousand men.' My mind was running on symbols that afternoon, and I wondered if it did perhaps mean the regeneration of art and life in England at last.

"Then we overtook a strange figure, a blind man, tapping the edge of the pavement with a rough stick, cut out of some country hedgerow. He was carrying, in his left hand, a four-foot pole, at the top of which there was nailed a board, banner-wise, about three feet long and two feet wide. On the back of the board, as we overtook him, I read the French text in big red letters: 'Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes travaillÉs et chargÉs, et je vous soulagerai.'

"On the other side of the board, as we halted by the curb a little in front of him, there was the English version of the same text, in big black letters: 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and i will give you rest.'

"The blind man was tall and lean-faced, and held himself very upright. He was poorly dressed, but very clean and neat. The tap of his stick was like the smart tap of a drum, and he marched more rapidly than any of those who were going in the same direction.

"There were several things about him that puzzled me. There was no advertisement of any sect, or any religious meeting, nothing but the two texts on his placard. He went past us like a soldier, and he carried it like the flag of his regiment. He did not look as if he were asking for alms. The pride on his face forbade the suggestion; and he never slackened his quick pace for a moment. He seemed entirely unrelated to the world around him.

"Possibly, I thought, he was one of those pathetic beings whose emotions had been so stirred by the international tragedy that, despite their physical helplessness, they were forced to find some outlet. Perhaps he was an old soldier, blinded in some earlier war. Perhaps he was merely a religious fanatic. In any case, in the great web of the world's events, he seemed to be a loose fantastic thread; and although he was carrying a more important message than any one else, nobody paid any attention to him.

"In a few moments, the bus had carried my thoughts and myself into other regions, and, for the time, I forgot him. I occupied myself, as I often do, in composing a bit of doggerel to the rhythm of the wheels. Here it is. It is pretty bad, but the occasion may make it interesting:

"Late in the afternoon, I was returning westward, along the Strand. I remember walking slowly to look at the beauty of the sunset sky, against which the Nelson column, in those first days of the fight, rose with a more spiritual significance than ever before. The little Admiral stood like a watchman, looking out to sea, from the main mast of our Ship of State, against that dying glory. It was the symbol of the national soul, high and steadfast over the great dark lions, round which so many quarreling voices had risen, so many quarreling faces had surged and drifted away like foam in the past. This was the monument of the enduring spirit, a thing to still the heart and fill the eyes of all who speak our tongue to-day.

"I was so absorbed in it that I did not notice the thick crowd, choking the entrances to Charing Cross Station, until I was halted by it. But this was a very different crowd from those of peace-time. They were all very silent, and I did not understand what swarming instinct had drawn them together. Nor did they understand it themselves—yet. 'I think they are expecting something,' was the only reply I got to my inquiry.

"I made my way round to the front of the station, but the big iron gates were closed and guarded by police. Nobody was allowed to enter the station. Little groups of railway porters were clustered here and there, talking in low voices. I asked one of these men what was happening.

"'They're expecting something, some train. But we don't know what it is bringing.'

"As he spoke, there was a movement in the crowd. A compact body of about forty ambulance men marched through, into the open space before the station. Some of them were carrying stretchers. They looked grave and anxious. Some of their faces were tense and white, as if they too were expecting something, something they almost dreaded to see. This was very early in the war, remember, before we knew what to expect from these trains.

"The gates of the station swung open. The ambulance men marched in. A stream of motor ambulances followed. Then the gates were closed again.

"I waited, with the waiting crowd, for half an hour. It was impossible now to make one's way through the dense crush. From where I stood, jammed back against the iron railings, in front of the station, I could see that all the traffic in the Strand was blocked. The busses were halted, and the passengers were standing up on the top, like spectators in some enormous crowded theater. The police had more and more difficulty in keeping the open space before the station. At last, the gates were swung apart again, and the strangest procession that London had ever seen began to come out.

"First, there were the sitting-up cases—four soldiers to a taxicab, many of them still bandaged about the brows with the first blood-stained field dressings. Most of them sat like princes, and many of them were smiling; but all had a new look in their faces. Officers went by, gray-faced; and the measure of their seriousness seemed to be the measure of their intelligence, rather than that of their wounds. Without the utterance of a word, the London crowd began to feel that here was a new thing. The army of Britain was making its great fighting retreat, before some gigantic force that had brought this new look into the faces of the soldiers. It was our first real news from the front. From the silent faces of these men who had met the first onset with their bodies, we got our first authentic account of the new guns and the new shells, and the new hell that had been loosed over Europe.

"But the crowd had not yet fully realized it. A lad in khaki came capering out of the station, waving his hands to the throng and shouting something that sounded like a music-hall jest. The crowd rose to what it thought was the old familiar occasion.

"'Hello, Tommy! Good boy, Tommy! Shake hands, Tommy! Are we downhearted, Tommy?' The old vacuous roar began and, though all the faces near me seemed to have two eyes in them, every one began to look cheerful again.

"The capering soldier stopped and looked at them. Then he made a grotesque face, and thrust his tongue out. He looked more like a gargoyle than a man.

"The shouts of 'Tommy, Tommy,' still continued, though a few of the shouters were evidently puzzled. Then a brother soldier, with his left arm in the sling, took the arm of the comedian, and looked a little contemptuously at the crowd.

"'Shell-shock,' he said quietly. And the crowd shouted no more that day. It was not a pleasant mistake; and it was followed by a procession of closed ambulances, containing the worst cases.

"Then came something newer even than wounded men, a motley stream of civilians, the Belgian refugees. They came out of the station like a flock of sheep, and the fear of the wolf was still in their eyes. The London crowd was confronted by this other crowd, so like itself, a crowd of men in bowler hats and black coats, of women with children clinging to their skirts; and it was one of the most dramatic meetings in history. The refugees were carrying their household goods with them, as much as could be tied in a bundle or shut in a hand-bag. Some of the women were weeping. One of them—I heard afterwards—had started with four children but had been separated from the eldest in the confusion of their flight. It was doubtful whether they would ever be re-united.

"Now, as this new crowd streamed out of the gates of the station towards the vehicles that had been prepared for them, some of their faces lifted a little, and a light came into them that was more than the last radiance of the sunset. They looked as if they had seen a friend. It was a look of recognition; and though it was only a momentary gleam, it had a beauty so real and vivid that I turned my head to see what had caused it.

"And there, over the sea of faces that reached now to the foot of the Nelson column, I saw something that went through me like great music. Facing the gates of the station, and lifting out of the midst of the crowd like the banner of a mighty host, nay, like the banner of all humanity, there was a placard on a pole. The sunset-light caught it and made it blaze like a star. It bore, in blood-red letters, the solemn inscription that I had seen in the earlier part of the day: 'Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes travaillÉs et chargÉs, et je vous soulagerai.'

"My blind man had found his niche in the universe. It was hardly possible that he was even conscious of what he was doing; hardly possible that he knew which side of his banner was turned towards the refugees, whether it was the English, that would mean nothing to them, or the French that would speak to them like a benediction. He had been swung to his place and held in it by external forces, held there, as I myself was jammed against the iron railings. But he had become, in one moment, the spokesman of mankind; and if he had done nothing else in all his life, it had been worth living for that one unconscious moment.

"You may be interested to hear the conclusion of the doggerel which came into my head as I went home: