Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘Tom’s doing exceptionally, I’m glad to say,’ she resumed, by way of relieving an emotion that exasperated her. ‘He’ll make money. He’ll be somebody — some day.’

  ‘Tom’s a good boy. He’s safe and normal,’ agreed her husband.

  When the taxi had rushed them back to Maida Vale, and Mrs. Wimble had gone up in the lift, Mr. Wimble decided that he would like to go for a little walk before coming in. It was towards sunset as he ambled off. Joan, from the roof, watching the birds as they dashed racing through the air at play, caught sight of him below and waved her hand. But he did not see her; he did not look up; his eyes were on the ground. Yet he had a springy walk as if he might rise any moment. Joan watched him for some time, signalling as it were, making a series of slight movements and gestures that seemed a method of communication almost. Had he glanced up and seen her he must have noticed and understood what she was trying to say, as a bird on the lawn would understand what its companion, perched in the cedars overhead, was saying, distance no bar at all.

  CHAPTER VII.

  And then, suddenly, he did look up. Feeling his attention drawn, he turned and raised his eyes to her. The rays of the setting sun fell on her dress of white and yellow. She looked like a bird showing its under-plumage. He waved his hand in return, instinctively making gestures similar to her own, and as he did so, a Flock of Ideas flew down upon him like a shower of leaves — nothing very distinct and sharp, but just loose, flying ideas that were in-the-air-to-day.

  They seemed to result from the signalling; they interpreted something he could not frame in words. They fluttered about his mind, trying to get in and lodge. It was wireless communication — the kind used by animals, fish, moths, insects, above all, birds. He remembered the female Emperor-moth that, hidden in a closed box during the short breeding season, summoned the males across twenty miles of country until her antennae were cut off, when no male came near her. He felt as if Joan transmitted ideas to him, shaking them through the air from invisible antennae. He received the currents, but could not properly de-code them. He waved back to her again, then was lost to view round the corner.

  ‘It’s a queer thing,’ ran through his mind, as though catching the drift of something she had flashed towards him, ‘but Joan’s got something no one else has got — yet. It’s coming into the world. Telepathy and wireless are signs, only she’s got it naturally, she’s born with it. She’s in touch with everything and everybody everywhere, as though Time and Space don’t trick her as they trick the rest. It’s life, but a new kind of life. It’s air life. That’s what she means by saying she’s an all-at-once and an all-over person. I understand it, but I haven’t got it myself — and, as if to prove it, he ran into another pedestrian who cursed him, and, before he could recover himself, collided the next minute with a lamp-post.

  The current that had been pouring through him was interrupted; it switched elsewhere.

  ‘When more of us get like that,’ it went on brokenly, ‘when the whole world feels it’ — he snatched at an immense and brilliant certainty that was gone before he could switch it completely into his mind— ‘it will be brotherhood! The world will feel together, — one! It’s beginning already. Only people can’t quite manage it yet.’

  And the strange lost mood of his youth poured through him, the point of view that made everybody seem one to him, when air and birds offered the dream of some inexpressible ideal. . . . He lost himself among the buttercup fields of spring . . . wandered through Algerian gardens where the missel-thrush sang in the moonlight and the radiant air was perfumed with a thousand scents . . . then pulled himself up just in time to avoid collision with a policeman who came heavily along the solid earth against him.

  ‘Look where you’re a-going,’ growled the policeman.

  ‘Go where you’re looking,’ he answered silently in his mind. ‘That’s the important thing — to look and to go!’

  He steadied himself then. His mind scurried through the Primers, but found nothing that helped him much. Joan had asked him about Time and Space, and he had replied almost as though she had put the words into him first. Never before had he actually thought in such a way. Time and Space, as a Primer reminded him, were merely ‘Modes under which physical phenomena are presented to our consciousness, under which our senses act and by which our thoughts are limited.’ Both were illusory, figments of our finite minds; both could be subdivided or extended infinitely; both, therefore, were unrealities. They were false, as a picture is false that makes a pebble in the foreground as large as a cathedral in the background in order to convey so-called perspective.

  And Joan, somehow or other, was aware of this, for she saw things all-at-once and all-over. He thought of her word ‘throughth’; it wasn’t bad. For she applied it to time as well as space. Time was more than a line to her, it had several directions, like space. He smiled and felt light and airy. Joan knew a landscape all at once, as though she had another sense almost. Every man believes he sees a landscape all at once, but in reality each spot is past by the time he sees it; it happened several seconds ago; he sees it as it was when the light left it to travel to his eye. Each spot has its separate now; there is no absolute Now. He had been wrong to tell her there was only the present; he saw it; she had flashed this into him somehow. To think the future is not there until it is reached was as false as to think his flat was not there until he stepped into it. He laughed happily, aware of a strange, light-hearted carelessness known in childhood first, then known again when he fell in love and so shared everything in the world. An immensely exalted point of view seemed almost within his reach from which he could know, see and be everything at once. Joan would know and understand what it meant; yet he had created Joan . . . and had forgotten . . . He thought of light.

  By overtaking the rays of light thrown off from the battle of Waterloo he could see it happening now; if he moved forward at the same pace as the rays he could see Waterloo stationary; if he moved faster he could see the battle going backwards, of course. But Waterloo remained always — there. Time and space were mere tricks. The unit of perception decided the childish dream of measurement. ‘Ha, ha!’ he chuckled. ‘Real perception is for the inner self, then, omnipresent, omniscient — at-once and all-over.’ To realise ‘I am’ was to identify oneself with all, and everywhere. ‘Wherever I am, I — go!’

  ‘That’s it,’ he concluded abruptly, dropping upon a bench in a little Park he had reached, ‘Joan doesn’t think or reason. She just knows. She’s an all-over and all-at-once person!’ And he put the Primers, with their neat, clever explanations, out of his head forthwith.

  ‘Cleverness,’ he reflected, leaning back in the soft smothering dusk, ‘is the hall-mark of To-day. It is worthless. It is the devil. It separates, shuts off, confines and crystallises what should flow and fly. Birds ain’t clever. They just know. There’s no cleverness in that Southern Tour, there’s knowledge — all shared together.’ The Primer writers, men who had made their names, were clever merely. By concentrating on a single thing they could describe it, but they didn’t know it, because the whole was out of sight. They explained the bit of truth. Joan, ignorant of the photographic details they described and explained, yet knew the whole — somehow. But how? Wherever she was, she went!

  He drew a long breath as if he had flown ten miles.

  ‘She’s something new perhaps,’ he felt run through him, ‘something new and brilliant flashing down into the old, tired world.’ He lit his pipe with difficulty in the wind, fascinated by the marvel of the little flaming match. ‘She’s off the earth — a new type of consciousness altogether — sees old things in another way — from above and all at once. She’s got the bird in her— ‘Half-angel and half-bird,’ he remembered with a sigh. Only that morning an essay on Rhythm in his newspaper, The Times, had mentioned: ‘Angels have been called the Birds of God, and an angel, as we imagine him, is a being that can do all good things as easily as a bird flies. When we represent him with bodily wings w
e are thinking of the wings of his spirit, and of a soaring power of action and thought for which we have no analogy in this world except in the physical beauty of flight.’ ‘By Jove!’ he cried aloud.

  A flock of sparrows, startled by a cat, rose like a fountain of grey feathers past him, whirring through the air. There were fifty of them, but they moved like one.

  ‘Got a whole flock in her!’ he added.

  He watched the fluttering mass of busy wings as they shot into a leafy plane tree overhead and vanished. A touch of awe stole over him. ‘There’s a whole flight of birds in her. She’s a lot, yet one,’ he went on under his breath, thinking that the fifty sparrows went out of sight like one person who turns a corner and is gone. How did they manage it? By what magical sympathy, as though one single consciousness actuated them all, did they swerve instantly together?

  There was something uncanny about it. He felt a little creepy even. . . . The shadows were stealing over the deserted Park. A low wind shivered through the iron fence. A vast nameless power came close. . . . He got up slowly, heavily, and went out into the crowded street, glad a moment to feel himself surrounded by men and women, all following routine, thick, solid, reasoning folk, unable to fly. A swallow, flashing like visible wind across the paling sky of pink and gold, went past him. He looked up. He sighed. He wondered. Something marvellously sweet and lofty stirred in him. With intense yearning he thought of his little, strange, birdy daughter, Joan, again. His absorbing love for her spread softly to include the world. ‘If she should teach them . . .!’ came the bewildering idea, as though the swallow dropped it into him. ‘Drag them out of their holes, show them air and wings, make them bird-happy . . . teach them that!’

  A tremendous freedom, lofty and careless, beckoned to him, — release, escape at full speed into the infinite air; all cages opened, all bars destroyed, doors wide and ceilings gone; that was what he felt.

  But lack of words blocked the completion of the wild, big thought in him, for he had never felt quite like this since early youth, and had no means of describing the swift yet deep emotion that was in him. He could not express it — unless he sang. And he was afraid to sing. The County Council would misinterpret Joy. There was an attendant in the Park, a policeman in the road; he would be locked up merely.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  He plunged into the stream of pedestrians and it struck him how thickly, heavily clothed they were; the street resembled a sluggish river of dark liquid; he struggled through it, immersed to his shoulders.

  And the flock of curious, elusive thoughts, half-formed, fluttered above his mind just near enough to drop their shadows before they scattered and passed on. Much as a kitten pounces on the shadow of shifting foliage on a lawn his brain pursued and pounced upon them, bringing up the best words available, yet that did not suit because the necessary words do not exist. It was only the shadow of the ideas he captured.

  ‘A new language is wanted,’ he decided, ‘a flying language, with a rapid air vocabulary, condensed, intense. Everything else is speeding up nowadays, but language lags behind. It’s old-fashioned, slow. All these ideas I’ve got, for instance, ought to go into a word or two by rights. Joan put ’em into me just now from the roof by a couple of gestures — enough to fill a dozen Primers with words. Ah, that’s it! What comes to me in a single thought — and in a second — takes thousands of words to get itself told in language. Words are too detailed and clever: they miss the whole. Aha! There’s a new language floating into the world from the air — a new way, a bird-way, of communicating. We shall share as the birds do. We shall all understand each other by gesture — thought — feeling! Instant understanding means a new sympathy; that, again, means a divine carelessness, based on a common trust and faith.’ And the immensely lofty point of view — as from a dizzy height in space — once more floated past him.

  He steadied himself by pausing to look in at the shop windows. On a chemist’s shelves he saw various things to stimulate, coax and feed people into keener life. The Invisible Sticking Plaster was there, too, to patch them up. Next door was a book-shop, where he remained glued to the window like a fly to treacle-paper. ‘Success and how to attain It,’ he read, ‘in twelve lessons, 1s.’; ‘Train your Will and earn more Money, 4½d.’; ‘The Mysteries of Life, Here and Hereafter, all explained, 6d. net.’ And second-hand copies of various books, marked ‘All in this row tuppence only,’ including several of the ‘What’s-in-the-Air-To-day’ Primers.

  Beyond was a window full of clothing, woollen garments guaranteed not to shrink; electric or magnetic belts, to store energy, ‘special line — a bargain,’ and various goods for keeping warmth in various parts of the body. All these shops, he reflected, sold things intended to increase or preserve life, artificial things, cheaply made, and sold to the public as dearly as possible, things intended to increase life and prevent its going. In other shops he saw mechanical means for stimulating, intensifying, driving life along. Life had come to this: All these artificial tricks were necessary to keep it going. Food, knowledge, clothes, speed that a bird possessed naturally in abundance. A robin’s temperature in the snow was 110°. Yet human beings required thousands of shops that sold the conditions for keeping alive, — at a profit. He passed an undertaker’s shop — to die was a costly artificial business too. There was too much earth in the whole affair. He remembered that no one ever saw a bird dead, when its death was a natural death. It slipped away and hid itself — ashamed of being caught dead!

  A crowd collected round him, thinking he had discovered something exciting, and it jostled him until he elbowed his way out. He swerved dizzily amid the booming, thundering traffic, as he crossed the road and brought up against a toy-shop, where the sight of balls and butterfly nets, ships and trains and coloured masks restored his equilibrium. ‘Real things are still to be had,’ the fluttering shadows danced across his mind, ‘And there are folk who like them!’ he added in his own words, as two tousled-headed children came up and stood beside him, staring hungrily. He gave sixpence to each, told them to go in and buy something, and then continued his evening walk along the crowded pavement. ‘Life is a great grand thing,’ he realised, ‘if we could all get together somehow. It’s coming, I think. A change is coming, something light and airy penetrating all this — this sluggish mass — —’ he broke off, again unable to express the idea that fluttered round him—’ ah! it’s good to be alive!’ he went on, ‘but to know it is better still. But you have no right to live unless you can be grateful to life, and create your own reason for existing. It means dancing, singing, flying!’ He felt new life everywhere near him; a new supply of a lighter, more vivid kind was descending from the air. ‘It’s a new thing coming down into the world; it’s beginning to burst through everywhere: a change, a change of direction — —’

  He repeated this to himself as he moved slowly through the surging crowd. Joan, he remembered, had called death a change of direction only. But as he reached the word ‘change,’ it seemed to jump up at him and hang blazing with fire before his eyes. He had caught it flying; he held it fast and looked at it. The other shadows careered away, but this one stayed. He had caught the thing that cast it. The flock of shadows, he realised, were not cast by actual thoughts; they were the faint passage through his mind of mysterious premonitions that Joan’s gestures had tossed carelessly towards him through the air. Coming ideas cast their shadow before. This one, at least, he had captured in a word, a figure of speech. He had pounced and caught it by the tail. It fluttered, but could not wholly get away.

  Change was the keyword. A gigantic change was coming, but coming gently, stealing along almost like a thief in the night, emerging into view wherever a channel offered itself. Life was being geared up everywhere. Human activities, physical, mental, spiritual, too, were increasing speed. Humanity was being quickened. They were passing from earth to air.

  Signs were plentiful, though mysterious. His mind roamed through the Epitomes of his Primers, skimming off the cream. T
hinkers, artists, preachers, although they hardly realised it, were beginning to look up instead of down; from pulpit, press, and platform the little signs peeped out and flashed about the mass of expectant men and women. The entire world seemed standing on tip-toe, ready for a tentative flight at last. There was a universal expectation abroad that was almost anticipation.

  But change involved dislocation here and there, and this dislocation was apparent in the general confusion that reigned in the affairs of the world. Stupendous hope was felt, though not yet realised and fulfilled. No one as yet could justify it. Pessimism and confidence, both strangely fundamental, were violently active. So long accustomed to terra firma, the world asked questions of its little coming wings, and the new element of air frightened even while it attracted — nervous, timid, wild, uneasy questions were asked on every side. Deprived of the old, comfortable ideas of Heaven and Hell, and suspicious of the newly hinted promise of survival, hearts trembled while they listened to so sweet whispers of escape into the air. The old shibboleths, distrusted, were slinking one by one into their holes. Science could, perhaps, go usefully no further; Reason, still proud upon her pinnacle, yet hesitated, unable to advance; Theology looked round her with dim, tired eyes. The whole starving earth paused upon a mighty change that should usher in a new and single thing — a new direction. Alone the few who knew, felt glad and confident — joy. But they felt it only, for as yet they could not tell it in language usefully.

  They might live it, though!

  ‘Live it — ah!’ he exclaimed, and his thoughts came back again to his queer, birdy daughter. For Joan, he told himself, brimmed over with it. She had in her the lightness, speed, and shining of the new element; she was glad and confident, full of joy, bird-happy, aware of principles rather than of details. She sang. Of all creatures this spontaneous expression of joy in life was known to birds alone. No other creatures sang. The essential ecstasy that dwells in air, making its inhabitants soar, fly, sing, was liberated in her human heart.