‘Coal’s getting very expensive,’ mentioned Mother, as she leaned forward beside him to poke the fire. ‘We’d better mix it with coke. You might find out, Joe. We can’t go on at this rate.’
‘I will, dear,’ he replied. ‘I’ll write to Snodden and Tupps at once.’ He patted her knee and got up to go to his little den where he kept his papers, books, and pipes, reflecting as he did so that it was easy enough to love the world; it was loving the individual that breaks the heart. Pricked by an instant of remorse, then, it occurred to him that a pat on the knee, as a sign of love, might be improved. He trotted back and kissed her. ‘We must flock more and more and more,’ he mumbled, and before she could say ‘What, Joe?’ he gave her another kiss and was gone to write to his coal merchant as she had suggested. He would bring back the bird into Mother’s heart or die in the attempt. If the new thing he dreamed about didn’t begin at home, it was not worth much. He felt happy, so happy that he longed to share it with others; he would have liked to mention it in his letter to the coal merchant. Instead, he merely began, ‘Dear Messrs. Snodden and Tupps,’ yet signed himself, ‘Yours full of faith,’ since ‘faithfully’ alone sounded insincere.
‘Odd,’ he reflected, ‘that unless happiness is shared, it’s incomplete, unsatisfying. The chief item lacks. Selfish happiness is a contradiction in terms. We are meant to share everything and be together more. There’s the instinctive proof of it.’ If the coal merchant felt equally happy, he might even have shared his coal. ‘But he’d only think me mad if I suggested that,’ thought Wimble, chuckling. ‘We can exchange coal and money and still love one another.’ He posted the letter before he could change his mind, and came back to his wife. ‘Some day,’ he said, as he sat down and poked the fire, ‘some day, Mother, and not very far off either, we shall all be sharing everything all over the world, just as birds share the air and worms and water.’ This time she did not ask him to repeat his words. She smiled a comfortable smile half-way between belief and incredulity. ‘You really think so, Joe?’ ‘It’s coming,’ he rejoined; ‘it’s in the air, you know, for I feel it. Don’t you?’ he added. He leaned nearer and softly whispered in her ear, ‘You’re happy here, aren’t you, Mother? Much happier than you used to be? ‘She smiled again contentedly. ‘The country air, Joe dear,’ she replied. ‘The bird’s flown back into you,’ he said, taking her hand and ignoring the bunch of knitting-needles that came pricking with it. ‘Perhaps,’ she mumbled, ‘perhaps. Life’s sweeter, easier than it used to be — in some ways.’ She flushed a little, while Wimble murmured to himself, yet just low for her to hear, ‘and in your heart some late lark singing, dear. A new thing is stealing down upon us all.’ ‘There’s something coming, certainly,’ she agreed. ‘Come,’ he corrected her, ‘not coming. It’s here now.’ Holding hands, they looked into each other’s eyes, as Joan’s little song and dancing steps went down the passage just outside.
CHAPTER XIX.
January sparkled, dropped like a broken icicle, and was gone; February, so eager for the sun that she shortens her days while lengthening her searching evening hours, summoned one night the tyrant winds of March; these shouted and blew the world awake, then yielded with a sigh to the kiss of April’s laughter. A disturbing sweetness ran upon the world, agitating the hearts and minds of men. Yearning stirred even among deep city slums; in the country hope and desire burst into glad singing. Spring returned with her eternal magic. The hawthorn was in bloom.
The birds came back, filling the air with song, with the glance of wings and the whirr of feathers, with the gold and confidence of coming summer. The air was alive again with careless joy. Wimble responded instantly. The thrill pierced to his very marrow. Memories revived like wild-flowers, and his thoughts, shot with the gold and blue of lost romance, turned to the open air. He got some sandwiches, mounted his bicycle, and, followed by Joan, started in a southerly direction as once, long years ago, he had escaped from streets and lectures to spend a day with his beloved birds. This time, however, it was not the willow-haunted Cambridge flats that were his aim. He took Joan with him to the bare open downs above the sea.
It was a radiant morning, and a south-west wind blew gently in their faces. Wimble’s felt hat fluttered behind him at the end of a string, as they skimmed down the sandy lanes towards Lewes, the smooth, scooped hollows of the downs coming nearer every minute. Their majestic outline seemed hung down from the sky itself, yet in spite of their mass they had a light, almost transparent look in the morning brilliance. They melted into the air. The noble line of them flung upwards the space as though time met eternity and disappeared.
Down the long hill into the ancient town Joan shot past him. He noticed her balance, and thought of the perfect equilibrium of a bird that shoots full speed upon its resting-place, then stops, securely poised, making no single effort to recover steadiness. For all its tiny legs, no bird wobbles or overbalances, much less trips or stumbles. Joan flew ahead of him, both hands off the bars. The careless gesture reminded him of the matchless grace of the wagtail. He laughed aloud, coasting after her unconscious ease with his own more deliberate, reasoned caution. ‘She could fly to Africa without a guide!’ he thought, aware for an instant of the great subconscious rhythm in Nature birds obeyed instinctively. No wonder their purposes were carelessly achieved. ‘She’s sure,’ he added. ‘Something very big takes care of her, and she knows it.’
They walked up the steep hill out of the town, ran to the left along a chalky lane, dipped in between the folds of grassy hills and great covering fields, Joan leading always without hesitation. Once they paused to watch the aerial evolutions of a body of plover, rising, falling, tumbling, turning at full speed without confusion or collision, as though one single telepathic sympathy operated throughout the entire mass of individuals. Instinct the Primers called it, but Wimble, recalling the Aquarian lecture, caught at another phrase — subconscious unity. It was a power, at any rate, beyond man’s conscious reasoning mind. The careless safety of the birds amazed him. ‘Air wisdom!’ he exclaimed aloud to Joan; ‘we shall all have it some day!’ It was odd how that crazy lecture had lodged ideas in his thoughts, claiming confirmation, returning again and again to his memory. They coasted down a grassy track into a village, left their bicycles behind a farmer’s gate, and sat down a moment to recover breath. It was ten o’clock in the morning.
From the tiny hamlet, where a few flint cottages and barns clustered about an ivied church, they took the path southwards up the slope. In the cup or the hills below them sheltered the toy buildings and the trees. The rooks, advertising their clumsy flight and semi-human ways, cawed noisily, playing in the gusty wind. They showed off consciously, devoid of grace. One minute the scene was visible below, a perfect miniature; the next it was hidden by a heavy shoulder of ground; the earth had swallowed it, church, houses, trees, and all. No sound was audible. Even the rooks had vanished. In front stretched an open and a naked world. The human couple paused a moment and stared. The wind went past their ears. There was a sense of immensity and freedom. There was great light. They were on the Downs.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ cried Joan, ‘we’re out of England! This is the world!’
‘And the world has blown wide open!’ he replied. ‘I feel everywhere at once!’ The gust whirled his words and laughter into space. ‘The misunderstanding of streets and houses leaves — —’ he snatched at the same time at his vanishing hat and seized the cord.
Joan flung herself backwards against the wind with arms spread out, her hat in one hand and a blue-ribbon that had tied her hair fluttering in the other. The loosened hair streamed past her neck, great strands of it flattened against the curve of her back as well, her short skirts flapping with a noise like sails. Then, turning about, she faced the gust, and everything streamed the other way. The wind clapped the clothes so tight against her slender figure that it seemed to undress her, or rather made them fit as tight and neat as feathers. Like some bird of paradise, indeed, she looked, the slim bla
ck legs straining to take the air. She began to dance.
And as he watched the golden hair against the blue, there flashed into him the memory of a distant day, when a saffron scarf had set his heart on fire with strange airy yearnings, and the blue and golden earth had danced to the tune of another spring. The tiny human outline amid this vast expanse seemed wonderful, so safe, so exquisite, caught in some rhythm born of the immensities of sky and earth and ocean. A mile to the southward lay the sea. There was a taste of clover-honey, a tang of salt, and the gorse laid its sweetness in between the two. Memories crowded upon him as he watched Joan playing and dancing. The fervour and earnestness of her pleasure exhilarated him. ‘Blithe creature,’ he said to himself, ‘you were surely born to fly!’ — and remembered Mother as she once had been and as she was now. Why had it all left her, this joyous rapture of their early days together? Had the bird flown really from her heart and into Joan? Was it not merely caged awhile? Had he himself not helped to cage it? He recalled her radiant face beside the pond among the emerald Cambridge fields, and the old first love poured back upon him in a flood.
In a lull of the wind he caught the ecstatic singing of a lark, and at the same moment Joan danced back to his side suddenly and seized his arm. Her voice, it almost seemed, carried on the trill and music of the lark. ‘It’s all new as gold,’ she cried. ‘Everybody’d live for ever up here. We must bring Mother. She’d flow fly flow all over!’
‘Dance, my child,’ he exclaimed, ‘don’t talk! Go on with your dancing. It gives me ideas.’
‘But you’re always thinking,’ she said, still breathless from her exertions. ‘It spoils everything, that thinking and thinking — —’
‘It’s not thinking,’ he interrupted, ‘it’s seeing. When you dance I see things. I see everything at once. It’s like a huge vision, yet so small and simple that it’s all in my head at once. It explains the universe somehow to me. Thinking indeed! Why, I never thought in my life — —’
‘There’s a bird for me, On the apple tree, It’s explaining all the garden,’ sang the girl, dancing away towards the yellow gorse. Her father’s words conveyed no meaning to her; she had not listened. He watched her. Her movements, he felt, obeyed the great unconscious rhythm that breathes through nature, through the entire universe, from the spinning midge to the most distant sun. Surely it must include humanity as well, these millions of separate individuals who had lost it temporarily, much as Mother had lost the ‘bird.’ He, too, was caught along with it, as though he shared it, did it, danced it. He could see what he could not say. He understood. Immense, yet at lightning speed, the meaning of Air slid with that simple dancing deep into his heart. It was unity of life everywhere that he saw interpreted, and the ease, the grace, the carelessness were due to their being mothered and inspired by Nature’s great safe rhythm. Relying on this, as birds did, there was safety, unerring intelligence, infallible guidance, flight from Siberia to Abyssinia possible without a leader. Birds migrated at night, he remembered, stopping at dawn to rest and sing, then going on again in the twilight: surer of their inner guidance in the darkness than in the blaze of daylight. Amazing symbol! Instinct, unconscious, subconscious — whatever it might be called in rigid language, this deep attitude, poised and steady, obeyed the mighty rhythm that realised the underlying unity of all that lives, of everything. Thought breaks this rhythm, which it should merely guide; reason reduces, opposes, and finally interrupts it. His backward child — and she was still a child for all her eighteen years — had somehow tapped it.
‘Dance, my child, dance on!’ he cried as he followed her. ‘You dance joy and brotherhood into my heart.’ And, looking more like a mechanical gollywog than a human being who has discovered truth, he floundered after her as a gnome might chase a butterfly. Thus, swinging along between the yellow gorse, over the tumuli, leaping the rabbit holes, he realised that the love and joy he sought and dreamed about was here and now; not in some future Golden Age, but at his very feet upon the earth. All that he meant by Air and the Airy Consciousness was now. This little prophet without a lyre saw it clear. Torn by the brambles, tripped by the holes, he chased his marvellous dream as once, years before, he had chased an elusive streak of gold across the Cambridge flats. He was caught by the elemental rhythm of the Downs, borrowed in its turn from the suns of uttermost space that equally obeyed and shared it.
He looked about him. Immense domed surfaces, smooth as a pausing ocean, stretched undulating to dim horizons; air lifted the earth into immaterial space; they intermingled; and sight roved everywhere without a break. Upon this vast expanse there were no details to enchain attention, blocking the rhythm of the eye; no points of interest stood up, as in mere ‘scenery,’ to fasten feeling to a limited area. Enjoyment soared, unconfined, on wings. He saw no barriers, no trees, no hedges or divisions; no summits startled him with ‘See, how big I am!’ all self-asserting items lacked. Wind, sky, and sea offered their unconditioned, limitless invitation. Even the flowers were unobtrusive, the ragwort, thyme, and yellow gorse claimed no deliberate notice, and the thistle-down flew past like air made visible. It was, in a word, this liberation from detail, snapping attention with definite objects, that set him free in mind, as Joan already proved herself free in action. Earth here was sublimated into air.
‘Good heavens!’ his heart cried out. ‘It’s here, it’s now — this new thing coming from the Air!’
This deep rhythm of the landscape caught his very feet, making even his physical movements elastic, springy, sharing the rise and fall of flight expressed in the waving surface of the world about him. He no longer stumbled. Joan’s dancing, though apparently she merely leapt to catch the thistle-down, or played with her flying hair and fluttering ribbon, interpreted in the gestures of her young lithe figure all he felt, but reproduced it unconsciously.
This was, indeed, not England, but the world.
‘We’re over the edge of everything,’ sang Joan, catching at his hand. ‘Hold up, Daddy! Hold up!’ She tugged him along to join her wild, happy dance. ‘You ought to sing. We’re over the edge of the world!’
‘Above it,’ he cried breathlessly. ‘We’re in the air. Look out, my dear —— !’
She had suddenly released his hand and sent him spinning with the unaccustomed momentum. Her yellow hair vanished beyond a sea of golden gorse. Her figure melted against it, she was out of sight. ‘I’m not a bird yet, at any rate,’ he gasped, settling to rest upon a convenient mound and mopping his forehead. ‘Not in body, at least. I’ve got no balance to speak of. I think too much — probably.’ He heard her singing somewhere far behind him, and again a lark overhead took up the note and bore it into space.
But with the repose of his creaking muscles and elderly body, the rhythm he had tried to dance now slipped under his ageless and untiring soul. Like a rising wind the Downs were under him and he was up. Seeking a point to settle on, his eye found only strong, subtle lines against the blue, and running along these lines, his spirit was flung forwards with them, upward into limitless space. No peak, no precipice blocked their endless utterance; they flowed, they flew, and Wimble’s heart flew with them. The sense of unity, characteristic of airy freedom, invaded his soul triumphantly with its bird’s-eye view. He saw life whole beneath him. Perhaps he dozed, perhaps he even slept; at any rate he knew this strange perspective that showed him life, with its huge freight of plodding humanity, rising suddenly into the air.
To rely upon inner, subconscious guidance was to rely upon that portion of his being — that greater portion — which obeyed spontaneously an immense rhythm of the mothering World-Spirit. Thought broke this rhythm; Reason was clever but not wise. The subconscious powers, knowing nothing, yet approached omniscience; enjoyed omnipresence, while still being here. In that state his individuality pooled in sympathy with all others everywhere, tapping a universal wisdom which is available to intuition but not to argument, and is so simple that a child, a bird, may know it easily, singing and dancing its exp
ression naturally. Unerring, infallible, it is the rhythm of divinity, it is reliance upon deity.
This germ of understanding sprouted in his heart, and practice would develop it. He realised himself linked up, not alone with Nature, but with the entire human family — and hence, with Mother. The practice, it was obvious, began with Mother. He must see to it at once. Yet, though clear as crystal in his heart, in his mind it all remained confused, too shy for language, so that he recalled what the railway guard had said — it cannot yet be told, but it can be lived.
His heart flew like a bird through empty space, above all obstacles, above all barriers. There was no detail to enchain attention, nothing to obscure free vision; the soul in him, grand super-bird, took flight. The airy attitude to life became divinely clear and simple, because, with this bird’s perspective, he saw life whole. Details that blocked creative energy on earth with fear and difficulty, seemed negligible after all; they were places to take off from. As wings trust carelessly for support upon the universal, ethereal element enveloping them, so could, so must, his will know faith and safety in the immense and powerful rhythms that guide that delicate thrush, the redwing, from Siberia to England every autumn, and steer Sirius unleashed, untroubled, towards his eternal goal. He watched the little wheatears, back from Africa, flitting from perch to perch of tufted grass, soon to leave for their summer in distant Norway. Obedient to this serene and mighty guidance, secure upon these everlasting wings, he saw the bird in humanity open its wings at last. A new reliance upon subconscious inspiration, linking all together, from the butterfly to the angel, flashed through him, air its symbol, wings and flight its emblem. He realised, with an instant’s strange intensity, the unity of indivisible air manifested in all forms of life the planet bore.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 214