‘You’ll stay and have a bite with us, won’t you then? It’s just time,’ was the genial invitation, given to hide his excusable lack of recognition. There was no mention of the damaged fields nor of the trespassing. ‘Come, Joan, let’s get at it, for I’m starving.’
The name sounded wonderful, but Joseph knew it already and had already used it, his face close against her red lips and shining eyes. He also knew his fate was sealed, and he wished to heaven his own father was as nice as hers.
‘I’m a chandler,’ he was told in the course of the talk across the luncheon table by the window while the birds hushed their song outside, well knowing it was noon, ‘a corn-chandler down in Norfolk. But I’ve got two farms up here in Cambridgeshire, and I’m just up to look over ‘em for a chap as wants to buy ‘em off me.’ He was a rough-and-ready type, free in his drink and language, using meaningless oaths more frequently as intimacy grew, and betraying a somewhat irascible temperament as well. Yet he was kindly enough. And before Joseph left to go back to his forgotten lectures there had been an invitation too: ‘You must come down and see us there some time if you don’t mind a bit of roughing it. We live very simple.’
From all of which it was clear that the corn-chandler was favourably impressed by the visit of an Undergraduate of Cambridge University, and would not be at all averse to marrying his daughter to the first available young man with reasonable credentials. It was all so easy, instinctive, natural. It ran so smoothly. It flowed, it flew. No obstacles appeared. There was flight and rapture in it from the very start. The couple managed to see one another once a day at least for the next three weeks, but before the first week ended they were engaged. Young Wimble said nothing at home because he knew his father would object to the daughter of a corn-chandler who lived in Norfolk. By September they were married. But by the end of September Joseph realised that they were married—quite another thing. For his father meant what he said, and beyond a modest allowance from the chandler to his daughter, they started life with nothing but the small lump sum by means of which Mr. Wimble senior eased his conscience and set himself right with the outside world. The capitals of Europe were not visited.
Joseph and Joan, however, took the situation like a pair of birds, lightly and carelessly. They were as thoughtless as two finches on the lawn, and as faithful as red linnets. The game of the yellow wagtail chase was kept up between them. He pretended that it was her flying scarf he had seen shining two miles across the buttercup fields, and she declared that she had gone to the willow pond on purpose, knowing in her bones—she called them feathers—that one day some one would find her there and capture her. The actual wagtail was a real decoy. It was his yearning and her own materialised.
They laughed and played with the idea till it grew very real. And the future did not frighten them a bit. They took their money and spent it on their honeymoon, leaving for the south in October with the birds. They started on the great Southern Tour, building their first nest far away in a sun-drenched Algerian garden where the air, soft with the bloom of an eternal summer, mastered the earth and made it seem of small account. Nothing could weigh them down, nor cage them in. They led a true air-life together, the winds were softly scented, stars shone nightly above their cosy tent, they sang in the golden sunsets and washed their young bodies in the morning dew.
It was the paradise of a realised dream, a sparkling ecstasy they thought could never end. Her beauty seemed to him the one thing necessary. The autumn migration of the birds, mysterious with grandeur, had always suggested to him a passing-away from earth, a procession to another life, and a returning to sing of it with rapture in the spring. Their honeymoon was this dream come true. They mated and married as birds do, on the wing, and singing. And their first-born, a girl, was the offspring of a passion as intense and radiant as any passion can be in this world. Their imaginative ecstasy, prolonged wondrously through golden months, lifted them from the earth towards the very stars. In it was singing, flight, and rapture, the freedom of wild free spaces and the glory of flashing, coloured wings.
It was of the air. They fluted to one another beneath the moon; they soared above the noonday heat, they warbled in the scented dusk. Their child, conceived of sun and wind, in a transport of bliss akin to that careless passionate happiness that makes bird-life a ceaseless running song, was born where the missel-thrush sings in the moonlight, and the nightingales in February. She was a veritable child of air. A bird on the wing dropped her to earth in passing, and was gone. . . .
But something else was gone about that time as well. There came the collapse of inevitable reaction—tragedy. It was as pitiful as anything well could be. Having accomplished her chief end in life, the wife’s strange beauty faded: her lightness, brilliance waned, her rapture sank and died; she became a heavy, rather stupid mother; she returned to type whence youth and imagination had temporarily rescued her. Her underlying traits of ordinary texture dulled the colour of her yellow wings. She bequeathed her all to this radiant, sparkling firstborn, and herself went out. The thing he loved in her vanished or became obliterated. He had caught her main drift; he tired. She tired too. In him patient affection replaced ecstatic adoration; in her there was tolerance, misunderstanding, then disappointment. To live longer on the heights they had first climbed became impossible. All that had fascinated him, caught him into the air, departed from her. The bird flew from her—into the little girl with yellow hair and big blue eyes.
She wearied of the life in tents and spoke of ‘artistic furniture’ at home, of comfort, and began to wonder how their ‘living’ could be ‘earned.’ The practical outlook developed, the carelessness of air decreased. Tom, the second-born, was the culminating proof of the saddening descent. He was just a jolly little dirty animal. ‘He’s like a rabbit,’ thought his father, looking with disappointment on him, thus introducing the big, bitter quarrel that ended in their coming back to the heavy skies of England, settling in a flat in Maida Vale, and led eventually to his taking up work in connection with a modern publishing house to provide the necessary food and rent and clothing. They landed with a distinctly heavy thud—on earth.
It was, on the mother’s part, a great tragedy of sacrifice. Having given all her best qualities to the first-born, she kept none over for herself— not even enough to appreciate her loss. Her radiance, sparkle, lightness, all her airy wonder, joy and singing, passed from her into yellow-haired little Joan. She stared at it with dull misunderstanding in her heart. She had not retained enough even to understand herself. She did not even discover that she had changed, for only when a fragment remains is the loss of the rest recognised, much less regretted.
By expressing herself in reproduction, she had not grown richer, but had somehow merely emptied herself. Her husband, moreover, was not heartless. He was not even to blame. He remained tender, kind, and true, but he did not love. For the thing he loved had gone—into another form.
Like the shifting shadows of the wings upon the Cambridge flats that gay spring morning, there fell upon his mind a shower of vague and indescribable thoughts, only one of which he pounced upon before it fled away.
‘What has been so long unconscious in me, little Joan may perhaps make conscious. I wonder . . .!’ He wondered till he died. He kept his wings, that is.
CHAPTER III.
..................
THE RETURN TO LONDON WAS a return to the demands of earth; from the bright and fiery aether of the southern climate they landed with something of a jar among sooty bricks and black-edged mortar. The sunshine dimmed, the very air seemed solid. Regular hours of work made it difficult for him to lift his wings, much less to fly; he knew the London air was good, but he never noticed that it was air at all; he almost forgot they had ever lived in the air and flown at all. Grocers, butchers, and bakers taught Mrs. Wimble to become very practical, and the halfpenny newspapers stirred her social ambitions for her children. Wimble worked hard and capably, and they made both ends meet. He proved a patient h
usband and a devoted father, if perhaps a rather vague one. His moment of realisation was over. He accepted the routine of the majority, living methodically, almost automatically, yet always a little absent-mindedly as though much of his intelligence was unconsciously at work elsewhere.
Both parents altered; but, whereas his change was on the surface only, his wife’s seemed fundamental and permanent. He was aware that he had altered, she was not aware. They differed radically, for instance, about the prolonged and golden honeymoon in the south.
‘The money lasted uncommonly well,’ said Mrs. Wimble when they spoke of it; ‘it was a pity we didn’t keep over a little, wasn’t it?’ There was a hint of asperity in the droop of her lips.
‘We should have it now if we had,’ he answered vaguely but with patience. ‘But for me it’s a memory that will always live.’ He spoke with longing tenderness.
‘What?’ said Mrs. Wimble, who, like all slow thinkers, liked sentences repeated, thus giving time to find an intelligent reply.
‘We had a lovely time out there,’ she admitted with a sigh, and went on to mention by way of complaint that she feared she was getting rather stout in London. There was no idea in her that she had changed in any other way; she looked back upon Algeria as a kind of youthful madness, half regretting it. That the bird had flown from her heart did not occur to her. Not alone her body, but her mind was getting stout. She had grown so artificial that she was no longer real. The manners, moods, the words and gestures she adopted in order to please or in order to appear as others are, had ended by effectually screening her own natural self, that which is every one’s possession of unique value. It was not so much that she was false as that she was not herself. She was unreal.
In Wimble, however, those two years remained as something bewilderingly beautiful. Just out of sight in his heart he wore still the steady glow of it. He never could recall quite what he had felt in those deliriously happy days, yet the knowledge that they had been deliriously happy remained and warmed his blood. It was a big, brave, heartening memory beneath his coloured waistcoat. He dreamed his dream, only he did not tell it to any one—yet. He remained a kind, untidy husband and father. But that was the outer portion of him. The inner portion flew and soared and even sang. He no longer quite understood the meaning of this inner portion, but some day, he felt, it would be drawn out of him again and recognised. He would be taught to realise it, and what this bird-thing in him meant would be made clear. Already he looked to little Joan with something more than an infatuated father’s adoration for her yellow hair, her bright blue eyes, her light and dancing ways. Tom he just loved in the way his mother loved. He remained a rabbit with distinctive tendencies of the animal. But with Joan it was different. In Joan there was something he looked forward to. Even at the age of five there was a glint about her that increased the glow in him; at ten it was still more marked. She puzzled her mother considerably, just as later she alarmed her. ‘I’m nervous about the child; she doesn’t seem like other girls of her age. I don’t see her getting on much,’ was her opinion, expressed again and again in the same or similar language. ‘Joan seems to me backward.’
‘Well,’ admitted her husband, ‘she’s certainly not in a hurry about it. She’s maturing slowly. Lots of them do—when there’s a good deal to mature.’
‘I hope you’re right, Joe.’ And then she added with pride by way of compensation—’Tom’s coming along nicely, anyhow,’—as though she spoke of a growing vegetable or, as he thought, of a rabbit in a cage with lettuces in front of it, and the idea of mating the chief end in life.
Once past the age of sixteen, however, Joan too came along nicely, and with a sudden rush that reminded her father of a young bird consciously leaving the nest. She seemed to mature so abruptly. There came a wondrous bloom upon her, as though the South poured up and blossomed in her body, mind, and soul. It took her father deliciously by surprise. The glowing thing in him spread too, rose to the surface, caught fire. He watched her with amazement, joy, and pride. He felt wings inside him. Thought danced—flashed against a background of blue and gold again.
‘She’ll do something in the world before she’s done,’ he said confusedly to himself, feeling a prophecy he had always made without realising it. ‘There’s wings in the girl. She’ll teach them how to fly!’
He was beginning to realise himself—through her. His early ideal had taken flesh again, but this time with a difference. He had not merely found it. He had created it.
For, more and more lately, the influence of Joan upon him had been growing. It was not merely that she made him feel young again, nor that her queer ways made him aware that he wanted to sing and dance. It was, in a word, that he recognised in her the remarkable thing he had known first in her mother years ago—but released in all its golden fullness. He recovered in her sparkling presence the imaginative dream that had caught him up into the air in youth, and it was both in her general attitude to life as well as in the odd things she now began to say and do. Her general attitude expressed it better than her words and acts. She was it—lived it naturally. She had the Air in her. In her presence the old magic rose over him again. He remembered the strange boyhood’s point of view about it—that a new thing was stealing down into the world of men, a new point of view, a new way of looking at old, dull, heavy things, that Air was catching at the heart of humanity here and there, trying to lift it somehow into freedom. He thought of the collective wisdom and brotherhood of birds. He forgot that he was growing old.
The old longing for carelessness, lightness, speed in life—these snatched at him with passionate yearning once again. Joan was the air-idea personified. And she had begun to find herself.
But so long now had he lived the mole-existence in London that at first this delicious revival baffled and bewildered him. He could not suddenly acquire speed without the risk of losing balance.
He became aware of a maddening desire to escape. He wanted air. Joan, he felt positive, knew the way. But the majority of people about him—his wife, Tom, their visitors, their neighbours—had not the least idea what it was he meant. And this lack of comprehension gave him a feeling of insecurity. He was out of touch with his environment. He was above, beyond, in advance of it. He was in the air a little.
He looked down on them—in one sense.
There were times when he did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet. ‘Everything looks different suddenly,’ as he expressed it. He saw things upside down, or inside out, or backwards forwards. And the condition first betrayed itself one afternoon when he returned unexpectedly from work—he was still traveller to a publishing house—and found his wife talking over the tea-cups with a caller. He burst into the room before he knew that any one was there, and did not know how to escape without appearing rude. He sat down and fingered a cup of tea. They were talking of many things, the sins of their neighbours in Maida Vale, chiefly, and after the pause and interruption caused by his unwelcome entrance, the caller, searching for a suitable subject, asked:
‘You’ve heard about Captain Fox, I suppose?’
‘What?’ asked Mrs. Wimble, opening her eyes as though anxious to read the other’s thoughts. Evidently she had not heard about Captain Fox.
‘I don’t think I have,’ she said cautiously. ‘What—in particular?’
‘He’s going to marry her,’ was the reply. ‘I know it for a fact. But don’t say anything about it yet, because I heard it from Lady Spears, who . . .’
She dragged a good deal of Burke into the complicated explanation, making it as impressive as she could. Captain Fox, who was no better than he should be, according to the speakers, paid rather frequent visits upon the young widow of the ground-floor flat, who should have been better than she was. To find that honest courtship explained the friendship was something of a disappointment. Mrs. Marks wished to be the first to announce the innocent interpretation, to claim authorship, indeed—having persistently advocated the darker view.
&n
bsp; ‘Who’d ever have guessed that?’ exclaimed Mrs. Wimble, off her guard a moment. ‘You always told me——’
The face of her caller betrayed a passing flush.
‘Oh, one always hoped,’ she began primly, when Mrs. Wimble interrupted her with a firm, clear question:
‘By the bye, who was she?’ she asked.
And hearing it, Wimble felt his world turn upside down a moment. He realised, that is, that his wife saw it upside down. For his wife to ask such a question was as if he had asked it himself. He felt ashamed. His world turned inside out. He looked down on them. He rose abruptly, finding the energy to invent a true-escaping sentence:
‘You ask who she was,’ he said, not with intentional rudeness, yet firmly, ‘when you ought to ask——’
Both ladies stared at him with surprise, waiting for him to finish. He was picking up the cup his sudden gesture had overturned.
‘Who she is,’ concluded Wimble, with the astonishment of positive rebuke in his tone. ‘What can it matter who she was? It’s what she is that’s of importance. The Captain’s got to live with that.’ And then the escaping-sentence: ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Marks, I have to go upstairs to see a book’—he hesitated, stammered, and ended in confusion—’about a book.’ And off he went, making a formal little bow at the door. He went into the dining-room down the passage, vaguely aware that he had not behaved very nicely. ‘But, of course, I’m not a gentleman exactly,’ he said to himself; ‘what’s called a gentleman, that is. Father was only an analytical chemist.’
He stood still a moment, then dropped into a chair beside the table with the red and black check cloth. His mind worked on by itself, as it were.
‘What I said was true, anyhow. People always ask, “Who was she?” about everything. What the devil does that matter? It’s what you are that counts. Father was a chemist, but I—I——’
He got up and walked over to the clock, because the clock stood on the mantelpiece, and there was a mirror behind it. He wanted to see his own face. He stared at himself a moment without speaking, thinking, or feeling anything. He put his tie straight and picked a bit of cotton from his shoulder.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 240