Joan, catching him in the act of destroying it, had said, ‘I know why you’re doing that, father.’
‘Why?’ he asked, half ashamed and half surprised.
‘Because you don’t want to stop them,’ was her answer, ‘and because it wasn’t fair of mother to catch them in the act like that. It wasn’t all.’
And as he stared at her curious peeping face, she came quickly up to him, saying passionately, imploringly:
‘Oh, do let’s get into the country soon, and live along with it, and grow and know things. I feel so stuck still here, and always caught-in-the-act like that photo. It’s so dead. It’s a toad of a place! The streets are all nailed down on to the ground. In the country they run about——’
He interrupted her on purpose:
‘But in a city life is supposed to be much richer than in the country,’ he said. ‘You know that?’
‘It goes round and round like a circle, though; it doesn’t go on. I’m living other people’s lives here. I want to live my own. Everybody here lives the same thing over and over again till they get so hot they get ill. I want to be cool and naked like a fern. Here I’m being photographed all day long. Every man who looks at me takes a photograph. Oh, father, I’m so tired of it. Do let’s go soon and live hoppily like the birds.’
‘You mean happily?’ he asked, laughing with her.
‘It’s the same thing,’ she laughed back, ‘it’s like wings or running water—always going wherever they are——
And was dancing to and fro over the carpet, when the door opened and in came her brother Tom, followed by another youth.
He looked surprised, ashamed, then vexed. It was Saturday afternoon. He had been six months now in the office.
‘I’ve brought Mr. Halliday with me,’ he said pompously, ‘to have tea. We’ve just been to a matinée at the Coliseum. Joan, this is Mr. Halliday, our junior clerk. My sister, Harold.’
Joan instantly looked gauche and ugly. She shook hands with a speckled youth, whose shy want of manners did not prevent his eyeing her all over. He sat down beside his friend, talking of the singing, dancing, juggling and so on that they had witnessed. All the time he talked at something else in her. But she hid it away as cleverly as a bird hides its nest. The callow youth, without realising it, was hunting for a nest. In the country he might have found it. He would have been sunburned, for one thing, instead of speckled. The wind, the rain, the starlight would have guided him. His natural instinct would have flowed out in a dance of spontaneous running movement, easy, graceful, clean. Here, however, it seemed rigid, ugly, diseased. He was living the life of others.
‘You were dancing just as we came in,’ observed Mr. Halliday. ‘Does that line of things attract you? You are going on the stage, perhaps?’
Joan looked past him out of the window, and saw the swallows flashing about the sky.
‘I can dance,’ she replied, ‘but not on a stage.’
‘But you’d be a great success, I think, from what I saw,’ opined the junior clerk. And somehow he said it unpleasantly. His tone half undressed her.
She didn’t flush, she didn’t stammer, at first she didn’t answer even. She watched the swallows a moment, as though she had not heard him.
‘You only stare, you don’t watch and enjoy,’ she said suddenly, turning upon him. ‘And an audience like that. . .!’ She stopped, got up from her chair, put her head out of the open window and gazed into the air above. When she turned back, she saw that her mother had come in and was leading the others into the dining-room for tea. Her father’s face wore a singular expression—it seemed, of exultation. Tom, black as a thunder-cloud, waited for her.
‘You’re nothing but a little barbarian,’ he said angrily under his breath. The life of others he led had been sorely wounded. ‘I can never bring Mr. Halliday here again. You’re simply not a lady.’
‘I’m a bird,’ she laughed in his face. ‘And you men can never understand that, because no man has a bird in him, but only a creepy, crawly animal. We go on two legs, you on four.’
‘I’m ashamed of you, Joan. You’re nothing but a savage.’ He snapped at her. He could have smacked her. His face was flushed, but his neck thin, scraggy, white. He looked starved and twisted. ‘In the City we——’ he began with a clown’s dignity.
‘Live like rats in a drain,’ she interrupted quickly, perched a moment on her toes in front of his face. ‘You don’t breathe or dance. Tom,’ she added with a gesture of her arms like flapping wings, ‘if you were alive, you’d be—a mole. But you’re not. You’re a lot of other people. You’re a herd—always enclosed and always feeding.’
She danced down the corridor and into her room, locked the door, slipped out of some tight clothing, and began to sing her bird-song of incessant movement:
Flow! Fly! Flow!
Wherever I am I go;
I live on the run
Like the birds—it’s fun!
Flow, fly, flow. . . .
She sang it to a tiny, uneven, twittering melody that was made up of half notes. It went on and on, repeating itself without end. It seemed to have no real end at all.
CHAPTER V.
..................
TO OTHERS SHE WAS DOUBTLESS an exasperating being. To her father alone— since he saw in her something he had lost but was now recovering, something he therefore idealised, seeing in perfected form what was actually but a germ still—to her father she expressed a little of that higher carelessness, or wisdom, that he had touched in boyhood and now yearningly desired again.
‘Oh, she’s all in the air,’ people said. And it was truer than they knew. She had an affinity with all that flew. This bird-idea was in her heart and blood. Whatever flew, whatever rose above the ground, whatever passed swiftly, suddenly, from place to place, without deliberation, without calculation, without weighing risk and profit—this appealed to her. Yet there must be steadiness in it somewhere too, and it must get somewhere. A swallow or a butterfly she approved, but not a bat. The latter, for all its darting swiftness, was a sham; it was an earth-crawler really, frightened into ridiculous movement by finding itself aloft like a blown leaf; like a flying fish, it was wrong and out of place. It merely flew round and round in stupid, broken circles without rhythm. But the former were perfect. They were ideal. They were almost spirits.
And when her father said he was glad she was half educated, he only meant glad that she had left school and teachers before her butterfly mind had become a rigid, accurate, mechanical thing. She might play with books as he himself did, fluttering over the covers, smelling their perfume, glancing at sentences and chapter headings, at indices even. But she must not build nests in them. A book, like a photograph, was an evillish attempt to nail a flowing idea into a fixed pattern. In the author’s mind an idea was true, but when he had put it down in black and white he had put down only a snapshot of it: the idea was already far away.
‘Not poetry-books,’ Joan qualified this, ‘because poetry runs clean off the page. It’s alive and wingy. It sings my bird-song—
Flow, fly, flow,
Wherever I am—I go!
She had this unerring instinct of the bird in everything, the quality that flashes, darts, is gone before it can be killed by capture. A bird is everywhere and nowhere. It’s all over the place at once. Look at it, and it’s no longer there; listen to it, and it’s gone; touch it, and you catch a sunbeam that warms the hand but loses half its beauty; catch it—and it’s dead. But no one ever caught a swallow or a skylark naturally on the wing. Even the eye, the mind, the following thought grows dizzy in the effort.
For the cow in the field she had no song. ‘Wherever I am, I stay,’ was without a tune of its own. A cow couldn’t leave the ground. She wanted something with incessant movement that could touch the earth, yet leave it at will. Wings and water could. Birds and rain both flew. Half the time a river (the only real water for her) flowed over the earth without stopping on it, and half the time it was a cloud in t
he sky, yet never lived there. ‘Flow, fly, flow; wherever I am, I go,’—this was the little song of life and change and movement that came out of her curious heart and mind. ‘Live on the run, like a bird, that’s fun!’ And by fun she meant life, and the soaring joy of life.
She applied her principle unconsciously to people, too. Few men had the bird in them except her father. Mother was a badger, half the time out of sight below the earth. She felt respect, but no genuine love, for mother.
‘A whale or a badger, I really don’t know which,’ she said. ‘That’s Mother.’
‘Joan, I cannot allow you to speak in that way of your parent and my wife.’ The sentence was unreal. He chose it deliberately, as it seemed, from some book or other. What she had said was sparklingly true, only it could not be said. ‘You were born out of mother, and so must think her holy.’
‘I only meant that she is not birdy,’ was the answer, ‘and that she likes thick salt water, or sticky earth. I mean that I never see her on the surface much, and never for an instant above it. A fish is all right, but not a half-and-half thing.’
‘She built your nest for you. She taught you how to fly. Remember that.’ He lit his pipe to hide the laughter that would bubble up.
‘But she never flew with me, father—as you do. Besides, you know, I like whales and badgers. I only say they’re not birds.’
She paused, stared triumphantly at him a moment, and then with anxiety in her tone, she added: ‘And you said that as if some one had taught it you, Daddy. Some one’s put bird-lime near you—some book, I suspect.’
‘Grammar’s all right enough in its way,’ he told her finally, meaning perhaps that there were correct and incorrect ways of saying a thing, and so the little matter was nicely settled up, and they flew on to other things as their way invariably was. But, after that, whenever mother was in the room, they thought of something under ground or under water that emerged for a brief moment to stare at them and wonder, heavens!—how they lived. They wondered how, on earth, she lived. They were in different worlds.
For a long time now Joseph Wimble, ‘travelling’ in tabloid knowledge, had been absorbing what is called the Spirit of the Age. On the paper wrappers of his books—chiefly Knowledge Primers—were printed neat and striking epitomes of the contents. Written by expert minds, these epitomes were admirable brief statements. There was no room for argument. They merely gave the entire book in a few short sentences that hit the mind—and stayed in it. They left the impression that the problem was proved, though actually it was merely stated. Hundreds of those statements he had now read, until they flowed like a single sentence through his consciousness, each résumé a word, as it were, in the phrase describing the knowledge—or at least the tendencies—of the day. Wimble was thus a concise phrase-book, who taught the grammar of the twentieth century.
For his Firm, alert and enterprising, had the gift of scenting a given tendency before it was understood by the mass—still ‘in the air,’ that is—yet while the mass still wanted to know about it; then of choosing the writer who could crystallise it in simple language that made the man in the street feel well informed and up to date. The What’s-in-the-Air-To-day Publishing Co. was well named; it had the bird quality. These Picturesque Knowledge Primers sold like wildfire. They purveyed knowledge in tabloid form and advertised the hungry public into nourishment. The latest thing in politics, painting, flying, in feminism or call-of-the-wild, in music, scouting, cubism, futurism, feeding, dancing, clothing, ancient philosophy redressed, or modern pulpit pretending to be neo—everything that thrills the public to-day, from pageantry and Eurhythmics to higher thought and psychism, they touched with clever condensing accuracy of aim, and grew fat upon the proceeds. The stream of little books flowed forth, written by birds, distributed in flocks, scattered broadcast like seed in a wind, each picked up eagerly and discarded for the next—winged knowledge in sparrow doses. The Managing Director, Fox Martin (né Max Levi), was a genius in his way, sure as a hawk, clairvoyant as a raven. His Bergson sold as successfully as his Exercises for the Bedroom—because he chose the writer. He hovered, swooped, struck—and the primer was caught and issued in its thousands. His advertising was consummate, for it convinced the ordinary man he ought to know that particular Thing-in-the-Air-To-day, just as he ought to wear a high collar with his evening clothes or a slit in his coat behind with flannels. He aimed at the men as the machine-made novel aims at the women.
Wimble, the traveller facile princeps, for this kind of goods, knew, therefore, everything that was ‘in-the-air-to-day,’ without knowing in the least why it was to be believed, or what the arguments were. And yet he knew that he was right. He knew things as a bird does, gathering them on every wind, and shaping his inner life swiftly, unburdened by reasoning calculation built on facts. Thus, useless in debate, his mind was packed with knowledge. He was a walking Index.
And the feeling in him that everything flowed and nothing was stationary was strong. He dealt in shooting ideas, not in dead, photographic detail. He flashed from one subject to another; flowed through all categories, ancient and modern; skimmed the cream off current tendencies, and swept above the knowledge of the day with a bird’s-eye view, unburdened by fact or argument.
Of late, moreover, he had enjoyed these curious upside-down and inside-out experiences, because he had filled himself to the saturation point, and become, as it were, stationary. He could hold no more without a change. He stopped. He took a snapshot photograph of himself, realised that he existed as a separate, vital entity, and thenceforward watched himself expectantly to see what the change was going to be, for he knew he would not stay still. Hitherto he had been mechanical, whereas now he was an engine capable of self-direction—an engine stoked to the brim. When the air is at the saturation point, the tiniest additional percentage of moisture causes rain to fall. It’s the final straw that makes the camel pause. So with Joseph Wimble. He was ready to discharge.
And it was this chance remark of his under-ground wife asking who the widow was that took the photograph, and made him say, ‘I am.’ All he had read was included in the affirmation. The epitomes had become part of his consciousness. Like the weary camel, like the moisture tired of balancing in the air, he wanted to sit down now and consider. His daughter’s longing for the country was his too. And it was she who now brought out all this.
At dinner that night in a West End restaurant near Piccadilly Circus he broached the subject and listened patiently to his wife’s objections.
‘What’s the good, even if we had the means, Joe? Burying ourselves like that.’
Joan hopped, as it were. She recognised her mother’s instinctive dread that she would go under ground or under water and never come up again.
‘None of the nice people, the county families, would call. There’d only be the vicar and the local doctor, or p’r’aps a gentleman-farmer or two. We know much better class in town, and there’s always chances of getting to know better still. Besides, who’d there be for Joan? The girl wouldn’t have a look-in, simply. And the winters are so sloppy in a country cottage. Think of the Sundays. And the chickens and pigs I really couldn’t abide, and howling winds at night, and owls in the eaves, and rats in the attics. You see, we’d have no standing at all.’
‘But just a week-end cottage, Mother,’ Joan put in, ‘just a place of flowers and orchards and a little stream to flit down to overnight, so to say—that now you’d like, wouldn’t you?’
‘Oh, that’s different,’ she said more brightly, ‘only that’s not what father means. He means a place to live in altogether. The week-end idea is right enough. That’s what everybody does who can afford to—a bungalow on the Thames. But that means more money than we shall ever see, and even for that you want to keep a motor or a horse and dog-cart, or a little steam launch to get about in. Then the handy places are very expensive, and we couldn’t go very far because of Tom. Tom could come down and bring his friends if it was near enough.’
‘Gra
ndfather might give us a little nest cheap,’ suggested Joan. She didn’t ‘see’ Tom in the cottage.
But mother turned up her nose as she sipped her glass of Asti Spumante that accompanied the west-end dinner by way of champagne. She didn’t approve of Norfolk.
‘There’s no society,’ she said. ‘It’s flat and chilly. Your grandfather only stays there because there’s the business to keep going. If we ever did such a thing as to move to the country, it’d have to be the Surrey pinewoods or the Thames.’
She looked across the table questioningly at her husband. The music played ragtime. The waiters bustled. There was movement and excitement in the air about them. Joe looked quite distinguished in his evening dress, and she felt proud and distinguished herself. She only wished he were a publisher. Still, no one need feel ashamed of being interested in the book line. Literature was not a trade.
‘Some place, yes, where the country’s really alive,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t want to vegetate any more than you do, dear, I can assure you.’
‘Nor I, mother,’ laughed Joan. ‘I simply want to fly about all the time.’
‘Joan,’ was the reply, half reproachfully, ‘you always talk as if we kept you in a cage at home. The more you fly the better we like it; I only say choose places worth flying to——’
Her husband interrupted abruptly.
‘It was nothing but a little dream of my own, really,’ he said lightly. ‘A castle in the air, a flash of country in the brain.’ He laughed and called the waiter.
‘Black, white, or Turkish?’ he asked his wife. ‘And what liqueur, dear?’
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 242