Judy looked at him with surprise. Her tears had ceased flowing by this time.
“Of course,” she said. “Didn’t you?“ There was pain in her voice in addition to blank astonishment.
“Of course we did,” said Uncle Felix quickly with decision. “Of course we did.”
As they went into the house, however, Uncle Felix lingered behind a moment as though he had forgotten something. His face wore a puzzled expression. He seemed a little bewildered. He walked into the hat-rack first, then into the umbrella-stand, then stopped abruptly and put his hand to his head.
“Headache?” asked Tim, who had been watching him.
His uncle did not hear the question, at least he did not answer. Instead he pulled something hurriedly out of his waistcoat pocket, held it to his ear, listened attentively a moment, and then gave a sudden start.
“What is it, Uncle?”
“Oh, nothing,” was the reply; “my watch has stopped, that’s all.” He stood still a moment or two, reflecting deeply. His eyebrows went up and down. He pursed his lips. “Odd,” he continued, half to himself; “I’m sure I wound it up last night…!” he added, “it’s going again now. It stopped—only for a moment!”
“Aha,” said Tim significantly, and looked about him. He waited breathlessly for something more to happen. But nothing did happen—just then.
Only, when at last Uncle Felix looked down, their eyes met and a flash of knowledge too enormous ever to be forgotten passed noiselessly between the two of them.
“Perhaps…!” murmured his uncle.
“I wonder…!”
That was all.
CHAPTER XI: JUDY’S PARTICULAR ADVENTURE
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ADVENTURE MEANS SAYING YES, AND being careless; children say Yes to everything and are very careless indeed: even their No is usually a Yes, inverted or deferred. “I won’t play,” parsed by a psychologist, means “I’ll play when I’m ready.” The adventurous spirit accepts what offers regardless of consequences; he who hesitates and thinks is but a Policeman who prevents adventure. Now everything offers itself to children, because they rightly think that everything belongs to them. Life is conditionless, if only people would let them accept it as it is. “Don’t think; accept!” expresses the law of their swift and fluid being. They act on it. They take everything they can—get. But it is the Policeman who adds the “get,” changing the whole significance of life with one ugly syllable.
Each of the children treasured an adventure of its very own; an adventure-in-chief, that could not possibly have happened to anybody else in the world. These three survivals in an age when education considers childhood a disease to be cured as hurriedly as possible—took their adventure the instant that it came, and each with a complete assurance that it was unique. To no one else in the world could such a thing have happened, least of all to the other two. Each took it characteristically, according to his or her individual nature—Judy, with a sense of Romance called deathless; Tim, with a taste for Poetic Drama, a dash of the supernatural in it; and Maria, with a magnificent inactivity that ruled the world by waiting for things to happen, then claiming them as her own. Her masterly instinct for repose ran no risk of failure from misdirected energy. And to all three secrecy, of course, was essential: “Don’t never tell the others, Uncle! Promise faithfully!”
For to every adventure Uncle Felix acted as audience, atmosphere, and chorus. He watched whatever happened—audience; believed in its reality—atmosphere; and explained without explaining away—chorus. He had the unusual faculty of being ten years young as well as forty years old, and a real adventure was not possible without him.
The secrecy, of course, was not preserved for long; sooner or later the glory must be shared so that “the others” knew and envied. For only then was the joy complete, the splendour properly fulfilled. And so the old tired world went round, and life grew more and more wonderful every day. For children are an epitome of life—a self-creating universe.
That week was a memorable one for several reasons. Daddy, overworked among his sealing-wax, went for a change to Switzerland, taking Mother with him; Aunt Emily, in her black silk dress that crackled with disapproval, went to Tunbridge Wells—an awful place in another century somewhere; and Uncle Felix was left behind to “take charge of ‘’em’"—"‘em” being the children and himself. It was evidence of monumental trust and power, placing him in their imaginations even above the recognised Authorities. His sway was never for a moment questioned.
“No lessons, then!” he had insisted as a condition of acceptance, and after much confabulation the point was yielded with reluctance. It was to be a fortnight’s holiday all round. They had the house and grounds entirely to themselves, and with the departure of the elders a sheet was pulled by some one off the world, a curtain rolled away, another drop-scene fell, the word No disappeared. They saw invisible things.
Another reason, however, made the week memorable—the daisies. It was extraordinary. The very day after the grown-ups left the daisies came. Like thousands of small white birds, with bright and steady eyes, they arrived and settled, thick and plentiful. They appeared in sheets and crowds upon the grass, all of their own accord and unexplained. In a night the lawns turned white. It seemed a prearranged invasion. Judy, first awake that morning, looked out of her window to watch a squirrel playing, and noticed them. Then she told the others, and Maria, one eye above the blankets, ejaculated “Ah!” She claimed the daisies too.
Now, whereas a single daisy has no smell and seems a common, unimportant thing, a bunch of several hundred holds all the perfume of the spring. No flowers lie closer to the soil or bring the smell of earth more sweetly to the mind; upon the lips and cheeks they are as soft as a kitten’s fur, and lie against the skin closer than tired eyelids. They are the common people of the flower world, yet have, in virtue of that fact, the beauty and simplicity of the common people. They own a subdued and unostentatious strength, are humble and ignored, are walked upon, unnoticed, rarely thought about and never praised; they are cut off in early youth by mowing machines; yet their pain in fading is unreported, their little sufferings unsung. They cling to earth, and never aspire to climb, but they hold the sweetest dew and nurse the tiniest little winds imaginable. Their patience is divine. They are proud to be the carpet for all walking, running things, and in their universal service is their strength. The rain stays longer with them than with grander flowers, and the best sunlight goes to sleep among them in great pools of fragrant and delicious heat. The daisies are a stalwart little people altogether.
But they have another quality as well—something elfin, wayward, mischievous. They peep and whisper. It is said they can cast spells. To sleep upon a daisied lawn is to run a certain risk. There is this hint of impudence in their attitude, half audacity, half knavery, that shows itself a little in the way they stare unwinkingly all day at everything above them—at the stately things that tower proudly in the air—then just shut up at sunset without a word of explanation or apology. They see everything, but keep their opinions to themselves. Because people notice them so little, and even tread upon their tiny and inquiring faces, they are up to things all the time—undiscovered things. They know, it is said, the thoughts of Painted Ladies and Clouded Brimstones, as well as the intentions of the disappearing golden flies; why wind often runs close to the ground when the tree-tops are without a single breath; but, also, they know what is going on below the surface. They live, moreover, in every country of the globe, and their system of intercommunication is so perfect that even birds and flying things can learn from it. They prove their breeding by their perfect taste in dress, the well-bred ever being inconspicuous; and their simplicity conceals enormous, undecipherable wonder. One daisy out of doors is worth a hundred shelves of text-books in the house. Their mischief, moreover, is not revenge, though some might think it so—but a natural desire to be recognised and thought and talked about a little. Daisies, in a word, are—daisies.
And it was by way of the daisies that Judy’s great adventure came to her, the particular adventure that was her very own. For she had deep sympathy with flowers, a sympathy lacking in her brother and sister, and it was natural that her adventure in chief should come that way. She could play with flowers for long periods at a time; she knew their names and habits; she picked them gently, without cruelty, and never merely for the “fun” of picking them; while the way she arranged them about the house proved that she understood their silent, inner natures, their likes and dislikes—in a word, their souls. For Judy connected them in her mind with birds. Born in the air, they seemed to her.
As has been seen, she was the first to notice the arrival of the daisies. From the bedroom window she waved her arm to them, and showed plainly the pleasure that she felt. They arrived in troops and armies. Risen to the surface of the lawn like cream, she saw them staring with suspicious innocence at the sky. They stared at her.
“Just when the others have gone away!” was her instant thought, though unexpressed in words. There was meaning somewhere in this calculated arrival.
“They are alive,” she asked that afternoon, “aren’t they? But why do they all shut up at night? Who—” she changed the word—"what closes them?”
She was alone with Uncle Felix, and they had chosen with great difficulty a spot where they could lie down without crushing a single flower with their enormous bodies. After considerable difficulty they had found it. Having done a great many things since lunch—a feast involving several second helpings—they were feeling heavy and exhausted. So Judy chose this moment for her simple question. The world required explanation.
“There’s life in everything,” he mumbled, with his face against the grass, “everything that grows, especially.” And having said it, he settled down comfortably again to doze. His pipe was out. He felt rather like a log.
“But stopping growing isn’t dying,” she informed him sharply.
“Oh, no,” he agreed lazily, “you’re alive for a long time after that.”
“You stopped growing before I was born.”
“And I’m not quite dead yet.”
“Exactly,” she said, “so daisies are alive.”
It was absurd to think of dozing at such a time. He rolled round heavily and gazed at her through half-closed eyelids. “A daisy breathes,” he murmured, “and drinks and eats; sap circulates in its little body. Probably it feels as well. Delicate threads like nerves run through it everywhere. It knows when it is being picked or walked on. Oh, yes, a daisy is alive all right enough.” He sighed like a big dog that has just shaken a fly off its nose and lies waiting for the next attack. It came at once.
“But who knows it?” she asked. “I mean—there’s no good in being alive unless some one else knows it too!”
Then he sat up and stared at her. Judy, he remembered, knew a lot of things she could tell to no one, not even to herself—and this seemed one of them. The question was a startling one.
“An intellectual mystic at twelve!” he gasped. “How on earth did you manage it?”
“I may be a mystillectual insect,” she replied, proud of the compliment. “But what’s the good of being alive, even like a daisy, unless others know it—us, for instance?”
He still stared at her, sitting up stiffly, and propped by his hands upon the grass behind him. After prolonged reflection, during which he closed his eyes and opened them several times in succession, sighing laboriously while he did so, low mumbled words became audible.
“Forgive my apparent slowness,” he said, “but I feel like a mowing-machine this afternoon. I want oiling and pushing. The answer to your inquiry, however, is as follows: We could—if we took the trouble.”
“Could know that daisies are alive?” she cried.
His great head nodded.
“If we thought about them very hard indeed,” he went on, “and for a very, very long time we could feel as they feel, and so understand them, and know exactly how they are alive.”
And the way he said it, the grave, thoughtful, solemn way, convinced her, who already was convinced beforehand.
“I do believe we could,” she answered simply.
“I’m sure of it,” he said.
“Let’s try,” she whispered breathlessly.
For a minute and a half they stared into each other’s eyes, knowing themselves balanced upon the verge of an immense discovery. She did not doubt or question; she did not tell him he was only humbugging. Her heart thrilled with the right conditions—expectation and delight. Her dark-brown eyes were burning.
He murmured something that she did not properly understand:
Expect and delight
Is the way to invite;
Delight and expect,
And you’ll know things direct!
“Let’s try!” she repeated, and her face proved that she fulfilled his conditions without knowing it; she was delighted, and she expected—everything.
He scratched his head, wrinkling up his nose and pursing his lips for a moment. “There’s a dodge about it,” he explained. “To know a flower yourself you must feel exactly like it. Its life, you see, is different to ours. It doesn’t move and hurry, it just lives. It feels sun and wind and dew; it feels the insects’ tread; it lifts its skin to meet the rain-drops and the whispering butterflies. It doesn’t run away. It has no fear of anything, because it has the whole green earth behind it, and it feels safe because millions of other daisies feel the same"—
“And smells because it’s happy,” put in Judy. “Then what is a daisy?
What is it really?”
She was “expecting” vividly. Her mind was hungry for essentials. This mere description told her nothing real. She wanted to feel “direct.”
What is a daisy? The little word already had a wonderful and living sound—soft, sweet, and beautiful. But to tell the truth about this ordinary masterpiece was no easy matter. An ostentatious lily, a blazing rose, a wayward hyacinth, a mass of showy wisteria—advertised, notorious flowers—presented fewer difficulties. A daisy seemed too simple to be told, its mystery and honour too humble for proud human minds to understand. So he answered gently, while a Marble White sailed past between their very faces: “Let’s think about it hard; perhaps we’ll get it that way.”
The butterfly sailed off across the lawn; another joined it, and then a third. They danced and flitted like winged marionettes on wires that the swallows tweaked; and, as they vanished, a breath of scented air stole round the trunk of the big lime tree and stirred the daisies’ heads. A thousand small white faces turned towards them; a thousand steady eyes observed them; a thousand slender necks were bent. A wave of movement passed across the lawn as though the flowers pressed nearer, aware at last that they were being noticed. And both humans, the big one and the little one, felt a sudden thrill of happiness and beauty in their hearts. The rapture of the Spring slipped into them. They concentrated all their thoughts on daisies….
“I’m beginning to feel it already,” whispered the Little Human, turning to gaze at him as though that breath of air impelled her too.
The wind blew her voice across his face like perfume; he looked, but could not see her clearly; she swayed a little; her eyes melted together into a single lovely circle, bright and steady within their fringe of feathery lashes. He tried to speak—"Delight and expect, and we’ll know it direct"—but his voice spread across whole yards of lawn. It became a single word that rolled and floated everywhere about him, rising and falling like a wave upon a sea of green: “Daisy, daisy, daisy.” On all sides, beneath, above his head as well, it passed with the music of the wandering wind, and he kept repeating it—"Daisy, daisy!” She kept repeating it, too, till the sound multiplied, yet never grew louder than a murmur of air and grass and tiny leaves—"Daisy, daisy, daisy.” It broke like a sea upon the coast-line of another world. It seemed to contain an entire language in itself, nothing more to be said but those two soft syllables. It was everywhere.
>
But another vaster sound lay underneath. As the crest of a breaking wave utters its separate note of foam above the general booming of the sea that bears it, so the flying wave of daisy-tones rose out of this deeper sound beneath. Both humans became aware that it was but a surface-voice they imitated. They heard this other foundation-sound that bore it—deep, booming, thunderous, half lost and very far away. It was prodigious; yet there was safety and delight in it that brought no hint of fear. They swam upon the pulse of some enormous, gentle life that rose about and through them in a swelling tide. They felt the heave of something that was strong enough to draw the moon, yet soft enough to close a daisy’s eyes. They heard the deep, lost roar of it, rising and coming nearer.
“The Earth!” he whispered. “And the Spring is rising through it.
Listen!”
“We’re growing together,” replied the Little Human. “We’re rising with the Spring!”
Ah, it was exquisite. They were in the Daisy World…. He tried to move and reach her, but found that he could not take a step in any direction, and that his feet were imbedded in the soft, damp soil. The movement which he tried to make spread wide among a hundred others like himself. They rose on every side. All shared his movements as they had shared his voice. He heard his whole body murmuring “Daisy, daisy, daisy….” And she leaned over, bending towards him a slim form in a graceful line of green that formed the segment of a circle. A little shining face came close for a moment against his own, rimmed with delicate spears of pink and white. It sang as it shone. The Spring was in it. There were hundreds like it everywhere, yet he recognised it as one he knew. There were thousands, tens of thousands, yet this one he distinguished because he loved it.
Their faces touched like the fringes of two clouds, and then withdrew. They remained very close together, side by side among thousands like themselves, slowly rising on the same great tide. The Earth’s round body was beneath them. They felt quite safe—but different. Already they were otherwise than they had been. They felt the big world flying.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 114