CHAPTER VI.
Nothing showed more vividly the peculiarity of Joan’s unearthly airiness than the way in which the death affected her. It was the first time the great thing all talk about but none realise until they touch it, had come near her. It gave her a feeling of insecurity. She felt the solid earth — so called — unreal. Not that she had a feather of affection for her mother’s father. She regarded him as a second-rate animal of prey, like a jackal, and always shrank when he was near. There was something ‘sticky’ in him; she classed him with her father’s father, earthy, but not ‘clean-earthy’; muddy rather. But that an earthy person could disappear in such a way made her feel shaky. If he couldn’t stay on the earth, who could?
Outwardly, and according to the newspapers, he had died rather well, leaving money to hospitals and waif Societies; but, inwardly, he had died in deep disgrace, a bankrupt soul with a heavy overdraft at the bank. He had been a self-seeker of that notorious kind that achieves worldly success without much thought for others. Now that he was gone, mother declared he was a hero, father denounced him privately as ignoble, — and their daughter divined secretly that he was a jackal.
His record, however, has nothing to do with this story, and is mentioned only because his departure affected the members of his family. Mother wept and pasted the obituary notices from the Norfolk papers in a book; father soothed her with ‘earth to earth, my dear, you know,’ and Joan remarked beneath her breath ‘he belongs there, he never really left it.’ And felt an entirely new sensation.
For death puzzled her. She realised it as a fact in her own life — she, too, would come to an end, stop, go out. Yet that life could come to an end astonished her; she simply didn’t believe it. In her own queer way she looked into the odd occurrence. The corn-chandler’s death had raised a dust; but it was an unjustifiable disappearance somehow; once the dust settled she would surely see how and why it was unjustifiable. He would still be on the earth. But the dust did not settle, the chandler did not come back. He was beneath the earth. The feeling of insecurity remained in her. Earth, evidently, was not her element.
She envisaged then suddenly a delightful thing, and possibly being a mere child still, in spite of her years, she actually believed it. It was wondrous enough anyhow to be worth believing. For it occurred to her that the body of earth went back merely to its own, earth to earth, sweetly, naturally, while Something that had used that bit of earth, borrowing it, was set free. It — that marvellous Something — likewise returned to its own element — air. ‘The airy part — that’s me — flies off, if it’s there at all.’ Only grandfather had made the mistake of identifying himself with his borrowed earth, so he was finished and done with. Mother had the same downward tendency. If she wasn’t careful, she would be finished and done with too. It was a matter of choice. But how could they? How could any one? She and her father ‘knew different’ — it was mother’s phrase — and identified themselves with the airy part that was the reality.
She looked the thing in the face as well as she could, trying to hold it steady for a photograph. Death, to her mind, seemed to photograph the life it put an end to. The long series of acts and movements ceased. There came an abrupt full stop. Like a photograph this was somewhere, somehow, false. Wings folded for the last time; air failed for ever; there was a sudden drop to earth. Her grandfather, whom death had photographed, had gone, yet surely only gone — elsewhere; his record in the world of men and women was his attitude in the photograph; he was posing elsewhere now, but even he had not really stopped. Her little Song of Being did not mention anything of the sort. ‘Flow, fly — stop! Wherever I am — I drop!’ was merely wrong. A living thing could never end. It could neither drop nor stop. Some one had made a big mistake about death. She felt insecure.
And then she saw the matter differently, as though her mind made a sudden swerving turn into bright sunlight. And the sense of insecurity began to pass. This act of death revealed another meaning, connecting her with a vaster centre somehow, joining her up with a main central power. Death was returning to the main. She recovered the immense sense of unity she had momentarily lost. It made her realise that this tremendous centre, this main, was elsewhere than on the earth. Her conception of this unity deepened. To join the majority was more than a neat phrase. The photograph analogy came back of its own accord. Life here on the earth was indeed but a photograph, taken almost instantaneously though it seemed quite long, of a — moment’s pose. The shutter snapped, the sitter flashed elsewhere, flashed away to resume big interrupted activities, behind space, behind time, where no hurry was — into a universal, mothering state she felt as air. Man’s life was a suburb of this state, a furnished house in that suburb, a Maida Vale tenancy, as it were; but there was this vast metropolis of air, the main, the centre, where the ‘majority’ lived, and whither all lines of flight converged. A thought of Everlasting Wings came to her with amazing comfort. And she realised that the insecurity she felt belonged to the suburb earth, rather than to herself. Others looked upon it as the one secure and solid permanency; for air was unsafe but earth did not change; air meant giddiness, absence of support, bewilderment, and terror of being lost, while earth stood for the reverse of all these dangers — permanent security. Her mother, for instance, simply dared not leave it for an instant. Whereas, it came to Joan suddenly now, that it was earth that crumbled, melted, got easily broken and dispersed, while air, though it moved, could never be destroyed. ‘You can photograph earth,’ she said, ‘but no one has ever photographed the air.’
‘A person just goes out — like that?’ she asked her father, snapping her fingers. ‘How can it be, exactly? Time ends for him: is that it?’ Her face was distressed and puckered. She had no language to express the ugly thing that blocked her running, flowing mind. ‘Once you’re in among minutes, hours, years,’ she went on, ‘how can you ever get out of them? They don’t stop.’
It seemed to her, apparently, that once a living thing exists it should not cease to exist unless Time, which bore it, ceased as well. And then another notion flashed upon her.
‘Or perhaps they’re just a trick,’ she exclaimed, referring to days and minutes, ‘and you’ve been alive somewhere else all the time too — and when you die you go back to that!’
Her father glanced up from the ordnance map he was studying and smiled with a sort of bewildered happy amusement on his face. Mother, however, turned with an uncomfortable sigh. ‘That reminds me,’ she stated inconsequently, ‘I must go and sit in the Park.’ She turned as a cow that prefers the rain upon its tail instead of in its eyes. ‘I’ll take a taxi, dear,’ she added from the door. ‘Do,’ said her husband, suppressing with difficulty an intense desire to laugh out loud. ‘Ask the porter in the hall. Or shall I call one for you?’ ‘The porter’ll do,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and get ready.’ He said good-bye kindly, and she went.
‘Time doesn’t stop, of course,’ he went on to Joan. ‘You don’t stop either, I suppose, if the whole truth were known.’ He eyed her quizzically, for he delighted in her wild, nonsensical questioning. Behind it he divined that she knew something he didn’t know, but only guessed. Or perhaps he had known it in his youth and since forgotten it. He remembered the ecstasy which had produced her.
‘But why do we know a bit of the truth and not the whole? It’s all one piece. It must be, father. What hides the rest, then?’
But he ignored the new questions. ‘At death,’ he said, ‘you just go into another category perhaps. I suspect that’s it. You continue, sure enough, but in another direction, as it were.’
Joan brushed the map aside and lit with a hop upon the table as though she fluttered down from above his head. Her hands rested on his shoulders, and her eyes stared hard into his own. They were very bright and twinkling. ‘That’s just throwing words at me,’ she told him earnestly. ‘That catty-thing, as you call it, isn’t in our language and you know it. You nipped it out of a book.’ She shook her finger at him solemnly. ‘What I mea
n is’ — thrusting her keen face with its London pallor and shining eyes closer to him— ‘how in the world can any one get out of Time, once they’re in it?’ She drew back as though to focus him better and command a true reply. ‘Tell me that, please, father, will you?’
‘That’s a question, isn’t it?’ he said laughingly, yet not really trying to evade her. He wanted to hear her own answer, her own explanation. He knew quite well — had not the Primer on Expression said so? — that the things they discussed in this way lay just beyond known words. Only by apparent nonsense-talk could they be brought within sight at all.
‘It’s a thing we ought to know,’ Joan went on gravely. ‘I do know it somewhere — only I haven’t found it out quite.’ Then, with another flash of her blue eyes, she stated: ‘If a person goes from here — from now, I mean — they must go to somewhere else. I suppose they go back to the bigger thing. They go all over the place at once, perhaps.’ And again she drew back a moment, staring at him as if judging height and distance before taking a breathless swoop down into a lower branch.
‘Something like that, I imagine,’ her father began. ‘Time, you see, is only a point, a single point — the present. And if — —’
But Joan was already following her own wild swoop, and hardly listening.
‘That I can understand,’ she said rapidly. ‘You escape at death from a point where you’ve been stuck — like in a photograph. You go all over then.’ Her mind tried to say a hundred things. ‘I understand. That’s easy. I’m an all-over person myself; I do several things at once — like a flock of birds or a great high wind. And when I do things like that they’re always right, but if I wait and think about one of them, they go wrong and I’m in an awful muddle — —’
‘Your intuition being stronger than your reason,’ he put in with a gasp.
She did not notice the interruption; she had reached her tree; she saw a thousand things below her simultaneously, grouped, as it were, into one.
‘But what I don’t see plainly,’ she returned to her original puzzle, ‘is how a person — by dying — can get out of all this.’ She flung her arms out wide to include the room. ‘Out of all this air and stuff.’
‘Space?’
‘Yes, Space!’ She darted upon the word with a twitter of satisfaction. ‘I feel much more free among yards and miles, up and down, across and round and through — than I do just in minutes and days and years. Oh, I’ve got it,’ she cried so suddenly that it startled him; ‘Space is several things, and Time is only one. Space has throughth — you go through it in several directions at once. Time hasn’t!’
He caught his breath and stared obliquely at her, for the fact was she was taking these ideas out of his own head. He had found them in his Primers, of course; now, she was taking them from his mind, sharing his knowledge by some strange, instinctive method of her own. In some such way, perhaps, birds shared and communicated ideas with one another. He felt dizzy; there was confusion in him as though he flew at fifty miles an hour through the air and was without support, seeing many things at once below. One of those moments was near when he stood upon his head. He was up a tree with the girl; he felt the wind; he, too, saw a thousand things at-once; he swayed.
‘Space,’ he mentioned, as soon as he had recovered breath, and drawing upon his inexhaustible reserve of Primers, ‘has three dimensions, height, breadth, and length. But Time has only one — length. In Time you go forwards only, never back, or to the left or right. Time is a line. Don’t pinch — it hurts!’ he cried, for in her excitement she leaned forward and seized his coat-sleeve, taking up the flesh. ‘So, possibly, at death,’ he continued as soon as she released him, ‘a person — —’
‘Goes off sideways,’ she laughed, clapping her hands; ‘disappears off sideways — —’
‘In a new direction,’ he suggested. ‘That’s what I said long ago — another category, where a body isn’t necessary.’
‘It’s not a full stop, anyhow,’ she cried; ‘it’s a flight.’
‘Provided you’ve been already moving,’ he said; ‘some people don’t move. They haven’t started. And for them, I suppose, it’s a biggish change — difficult, uncomfortable, painful too, possibly,’ he added reflectively.
‘They start for the first time — at death.’ She ran to the window, but the same second was back again beside him.
‘They get off the ground — off the map altogether. But they go into the air. They get alive,’ and she picked the ordnance maps from the floor where her impetuous movements had tossed them. ‘Death is just a change of direction then, really; that’s all.’ And the door slammed after her flying figure, though it seemed to her father that she might equally have gone by the window or the chimney, so swift and sudden was her way of vanishing. ‘Bless me, Joan, how you do fly about, to be sure!’ he heard his wife complaining in the passage. ‘You bang about like a squirrel in a cage. Whatever will the neighbours say?’
She had taken all this time to clothe herself suitably for the Park. Mr. Wimble saw her to the lift.
‘That’s it,’ he reflected a moment, before returning to search the map for a suitable country place to settle down in; ‘that’s it exactly. Mother says “Who was she?” and “What’ll people say?” Joan says “Where, why, who am I?” Mother is past and Joan is future. That’s it exactly. And I — well, what do I say?’ He rose and looked at himself in the mirror with the artistic frame his wife had ‘selected’ at Liberty’s Bazaar.
‘I just say “I am,”’ he concluded. ‘So I’m present. That’s it exactly.’ He chuckled inwardly. ‘Past, present, future, that’s what we are! Yet somehow Joan’s all three at once, a sort of universal point of view. Ah!’ He paused. ‘Ah! she’s not future. She’s now!’ He caught dimly at the idea she tried to convey. To think of many subjects simultaneously was to escape time, avoiding sequence of events and minutes, obliterating — or, rather, seeing through — perspective which pretends that a tree ten yards away is nearer to one than the forest just beyond it. The centre, for her, was everywhere. To see things lengthwise only, in time or space, was a slow addition sum achieved laboriously by the mind, whereas, subconsciously, the bird’s-eye view (as with the prodigy) perceived everything at once, making separate addition, or two and two make four, absurd. He was aware of a power in her, an attitude, a point of view, higher than this precious intellect which knows things lengthwise only, concentrating upon separate points, one at a time, consecutively. Joan knew everything at once. Her conception of perceiving things was all-embracing — as air. She flew; wherever she was, she went. ‘Throughth’ was the word she coined to express it.
He felt very happy, there was a peculiar sense of joy and lightness in him, and yet he sighed. It was his mind that sighed. He was completely muddled. Yet another part of him, something he shared rather, was bright and clear and lucid. And, putting on his hat, he went after his wife and sat with her in the Park for half an hour, feeling the need of a little wholesome earth to counteract the dose of air Joan had administered to him.
They watched the people pass, the distinguished people as his wife called them, but actually the people who were dressed in the fashion merely, ordinary as sheep, shocked by the slightest evidence of originality, — un-distinguished in their very essence. Mr. Wimble knew this, but Mrs. Wimble remained uninformed. The review of rich, commonplace types passed to and fro before their penny chairs, while they eyed them, Mrs. Wimble thinking, ‘This is the great London world, the people whose names and dresses the newspapers refer to in Society columns. Oh dear!’ Park Lane was the background; none of them dined till half-past eight; they kept numerous servants and were carelessly immoral, carelessly in debt, intimate with ‘foreign diplomats,’ reserved and unemotional — the aileet, as Mrs. Wimble called them. But, according to Mr. Wimble, they were animals, a herd of animals. They couldn’t escape from the line of Time. They knew ‘through’ in Space, but not in Time. The bird-thing was not in them.
‘Joan’s coming on
a bit,’ ventured the father presently, trying to keep himself down upon the earth.
‘If you call it coming on,’ replied his wife, with a touch of acid superiority she caught momentarily from her overdressed surroundings. ‘It’s a pity, it seems to me. She’s not English, Joan isn’t, whatever else she is.’
‘Oh, come now,’ said Mr. Wimble cautiously, adding, a moment afterwards, ‘perhaps.’
‘It’ll be the ruin of her, if we don’t stop it in time,’ came presently in what he recognised as her ‘Park’ voice. ‘She don’t get it from me, Joe.’ Her words became inaudible a moment as she turned her head to follow a vision she imagined was at least a duchess, though her husband could have told her it had emerged, like themselves, from a suburban flat. ‘I sometimes think the girl’s got a soupsong of the East in her,’ continued Mrs. Wimble, glancing with what she meant to be an aristocratic hint of wickedness and suspicion at her untidy husband.
‘She may have,’ he replied innocently, ‘for all I know. Something very old and very new. It’s not silly now, but it might become silly. She’s too careless somehow for this world — and too wise at the same time. I can’t make it out quite.’ He looked up at the trees as the wind passed rustling among the dull green leaves. How blue the sky was! How sweet and fresh the taste of the air! There was room up there to move in. He saw a swallow wheeling. And the old yearning burned in him. He thought of the phrase ‘bird-happy’ — happy as a singing-bird.
‘It’s a pity she’s so peculiar. She’ll make a mess of her life unless you’re careful, dear.’ Mrs. Wimble said it out of a full heart really, but she used the careless accent her surroundings prompted. She said it with an air. And, to her keen annoyance, the County Council man came up just then and asked for tickets, Mr. Wimble producing two plebeian coppers out of a dirty leather purse to settle the account. The pennies spoilt her dream. Money — but a lot of money — was what counted in life.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 201