High, sweet rapture caught him. Of course birds sang, where men only grunted and animals, still nearer to the ground, were inarticulate with unrhythmical noises.
All this flashed and vanished even while his eye lost its way in the canopy of smoky air immediately above him.
‘Listen!’ he heard in his ear, like the faint first opening whistle of some tiny songster. ‘They’re waking now all over England. You felt it in your sleep! That’s what brought you up. It’s the moment just before the dawn!’
A million, ten, twenty million birds were waking out of sleep. In field and wood, in copse and hedge and barn, in tall rushes by the lakes, in willows upon river banks, in glens and parks and gardens, on gaunt cliffs above the sea, and on lonely dim salt marshes—everywhere over England the birds were coming back to consciousness.
It was this vast collective consciousness that had awakened him. He had somehow or other taken on, through Joan, certain conditions of the great Bird-mind. It was marvellous, yet at the time seemed natural. He recalled the strange sentences: all descriptive of a bird’s mentality, put into words, of course, by his own brain. The movement of objects was merely their new appearance, seen from above in rapid passage, all speaking, telling something, reporting to the rushing bird the conditions of the surface where they lay. And those at the point of lowest approach in the curve of flight appeared to ‘jump.’ The sense of rhythm, moreover, was the outstanding characteristic of feathered life—in song, in movement, in beat of wing, in swinging habits of the larger kind when migration regularly sets in and there is known that ‘mighty breath which, in a powerful language, felt not heard, instructs the fowls of heaven.’ He had responded somehow to the world of greater rhythms in which all airy life existed, and compared with which human existence seemed disjointed, disconnected, incomplete in rhythm.
‘Air,’ he remembered from one of the ridiculous Primers, ‘is the highest perception we have, yet we need not be in the air to get this view. We have placed the Heaven within us up there, because it was, physically, our highest place to set it in.’
‘Listen! and you’ll feel it all over you,’ Joan’s voice reached him. ‘I often come here in the dawn. I know things here.’
By ‘listen’ she meant apparently ‘receive,’ for no sound was audible except the hum of London town still sleeping heavily.
‘So this is how you learn things! From the air?’
‘I don’t learn anything—in that sense,’ she murmured quickly. ‘It’s in me. It just flies out—I see it.’
‘Ah!’ He caught a feather and understood.
‘Especially when I go like this! Look, Daddy!’ And she darted from his side and began on tiptoe a movement, half dance, half flight, between the crowding chimney-stacks. She vanished and reappeared. He heard no sound. The shadows clothed her, now close, now spread out, like wings whose motion just escaped the measuring eye. And the dance was revealing in someway he could not analyse. She seemed to bring the dawn up. The ugly roof turned garden, the chimneys shaded off into trees, as though her little dance flashed aspiration into rigid bricks. She interpreted the flight of darkness, the awakening of wings, the silent rush of dawn. No modern dancer, interpreting Chopin, Schumann, could have given a deeper, truer revelation. She uttered in her movements a language that she read, but a language for the majority at present undecipherable. Action and gesture interpreted the inarticulate.
She expressed, he was aware, the return to consciousness of the birds; but at the same time she expressed a new air-born consciousness that was stealing out of the skies upon a yet sleeping world.
‘By doing it, I understand it,’ she laughed softly, but no whit breathless, as she floated back to his side. ‘But I can’t tell it in words till long afterwards.’
The east grew lighter. The tips of the flying clouds turned red. A beauty, as of dawn in the mountains, crept slowly over the towered London world. It seemed the spires and soaring chimneys steadied down, as though precipitating a pattern from some intricate movement of the universe. Speech failed him for the moment. For the language of words is but an invention of civilisation, and he had just heard the runic speech that is universal and has no grammar but in natural signs of sky and earth. And then the words he vainly sought dropped into him suddenly from the air. Above him on a chimney crest a group of starlings fell to chattering gaily; hidden in the leaves of trees far below he heard the common sparrow chirrup; the earliest swallows, just awake, flashed overhead, telling the joy of morning in their curves of joy. In the distance trilled a rising lark.
The wonder and glory of that breaking dawn lay for him, indeed, beyond all telling; not that he had been insensible to loveliness in Nature hitherto, but that he saw new meaning in it now. In himself he saw it. The point of view was new. To Joan, however, it was merely familiar and natural. But more—he was aware that in him lay the germ, at least, of a new airy consciousness that included it all, and that he longed to share it with the still sleeping world below. A mighty spiritual emotion swept him.
‘Mother would feel cold, and notice the blacks,’ she laughed, but there was love and pity in her laughter.
For her it was all in the ordinary run and flow of habitual life. She was aware of no exalted state of emotion. She said it as normally as a swallow dares to take an insect from the heart of an amazing sunset. That sunset and that insect both belong to it. There was no need to be hysterical about either one or other.
CHAPTER XII.
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HE WOKE IN THE MORNING and decided that his experience of the night had been a vivid dream-experience, although that was not to deny a deep reality to it. A sense of uplifting joy was in his heart that was the rhythm of some larger life. A new lightness pervaded his very flesh and bones; it sent him along the narrow passage to the bathroom—dancing, much to the astonishment of the cook who caught a glimpse of the phenomenon as she stirred the porridge; it made him sing while he sponged himself, waking Mrs. Wimble earlier than usual and stirring in her an unwelcome reminder that she was older, stouter than she had been. For the singing brought back to her a fugitive memory of a sunny Algerian garden, where life sang to a measure of blue and gold Romance, now vanished beyond recall. ‘Joe’s odd this morning,’ she thought, turning over to sleep upon her other side.
But Joe, meanwhile, splashed in his bath and went on singing just because he couldn’t help himself; his voice was meagre, yet it would come out. He dried himself, standing in a hot sunbeam on the oil-cloth that made him feel he caught the entire sun. Such a deluge of happiness, confidence, natural bliss seemed in him, seemed everywhere about him too. He could not understand it, but he felt it, and therefore it was real. In the rise and fall of some larger rhythm than he had ever known he swung above a world that could no longer cage him in. He saw the bars below him. Alarm, anxiety, worry, even death were but little obstacles that tried to trip him up and make him stumble, stop, and give up existence as too difficult to face. They lay below him now. He saw them from above. He was in the air. It made him laugh and sing to think that such tricks could ever have frightened or discouraged him. Actually they were but of use to stand on for a leap into the air—taking-off-things, spots to jump from into space.
‘I can’t explain it,’ occurred to him, ‘so it must be true.’ It was a thing his daughter might have said. He shared her point of view, it seemed, completely now. They were in the air together.
And, though later and by degrees, the airy exhilaration left him, so that he came down to earth and settled, the descent was gradual and without a thud. Something of lightness and of wonder stayed. The memory of some loftier point of view guided him all day long amid the tangle of little difficulties that usually seemed mountainous. He rose lightly above all obstacles that opposed and hindered. He saw them from above, that is, he saw them in proportion. Stepping on each in turn, he flew easily over every one; they served their purpose as jumping-off spots for taking flight. It was the Bird’s-eye point of view.
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But each time he flew thus, he left his mind behind, using it as a cushion for landing later, easily, without a jarring bump. And thus, before the day was over, he realised somewhat this: that the instantaneous, spontaneous attitude Joan stole from the air and taught him meant simply that the subconscious became convincingly, superbly, conscious. The personality operated as a whole without friction or delay from separate portions that held back and hesitated. All these lesser, separate rhythms merged in one. It mobilised, as with a lightning instinct, the entire available forces of the being. He reacted to every stimulus as a whole, instead of in separate parts. Action and decision came in a single flash; to reason, judgment, the weighing of pros and cons, and so forth, he appealed afterwards. That is, intuitive knowledge became instantaneous action.
And, realising this, he also grasped what Joan meant by describing a room as ‘happening all at once,’ and found meaning also in her nonsense-dream of feeling for the one-ness of all life everywhere. The details of the room could be inserted later according to judgment and desire, and four-footed animals on the ground might also discover later the point of view of birds who, from a high altitude in the air, saw everything at once. Instantaneous action, immediate conduct, spontaneous behaviour enlisted the supporting drive of the entire universe behind them. Properly accepted, absolutely obeyed, such a way of living ensured inevitable success. It was irresistible; for since everything was one, each detail was the whole, and no whole could be disobedient or hostile to itself. And this was why he had danced along the passage-way and sung into his sponge.
Yet this attitude of mind, this point of view, was easily lost again; it was difficult to hold permanently; to practise, still more difficult. How to translate it into daily action was the problem. At breakfast this new language of action seemed mere phantasy. He certainly had enjoyed a dream of a three-dimensional language in which objects and things helped to interpret his own wishes; he remembered that distinctly; and surely it was not all imagination? Imagination, he felt sure, included prophecy as well as memory.
‘It’s time we found our country cottage,’ he remarked, tasting his crisp Cambridge sausage and bacon. ‘I must get to work at once.’
Mother glanced up over the morning newspaper she had crumpled till it looked like a bundle for lighting the fire. She had ignored the news and been deep in the advertisements. ‘It’s best to go to the agents,’ she observed, folding the paper with the creases uneven and the pages mixed, then patting it into flatness. ‘And if they’re no good, we might insert an advertisement stating our exact requirements.’ She mopped up a remnant of fried egg with a thick wedge of brown bread at the end of her fork. ‘A nice neighbourhood’s the chief thing, isn’t it?’
Her husband straightened the paper so that the creases fitted evenly and the pages lay in sequence. It hurt him acutely to see it twisted; he felt something out of place inside himself, as though the feathers of a wing were tangled. ‘It’ll turn up,’ he said airily, ‘we shall come across it suddenly. I’ll go and see some agents all the same, though,’ he added. He had the feeling that the right place would hardly come through agents, but would just ‘turn up.’ Somehow he would be attracted to it: it would be there before his eyes; it would jump at him. He had already seen so many agents. Newspaper advertisements never mentioned it. This strange belief and faith was in him. ‘I’ll have a look,’ he added, as his wife put the plates together, swept some crumbs carefully from the cloth, then tapped the marmalade spoon on the rim of the jar before she sucked it clean.
‘There’s no good just hoping and trusting to chance,’ she said in a practical voice. ‘Nothing comes that way.’ She clicked her tongue, tasting the marmalade reflectively.
‘On the contrary—everything comes that way.’ To believe, he grasped, was to act with the Whole in which all that was required lay contained. ‘Enquire within upon everything.’ He laughed happily. But his wife had not followed his thought—nor heard him.
‘That’s turnip rind, not oranges,’ she added. ‘They sell you anything nowadays, and everything’s adulterated——’ and laid the spoon aside.
‘In the country we’ll make our own,’ her husband interrupted. ‘Delicious stuff!’
‘If we ever get there,’ she replied, ‘and if sugar ever goes down again, and we can get servants who’ll condescend to stay. There’s no good being too remote, remember, or we won’t keep a single one. Servants won’t stand being dull.’ She sighed. Life to her spelt apprehension.
‘Well, we’ve agreed on Sussex, haven’t we?’ he answered cheerfully, hunting for his lost new attitude again. ‘A nice bit of wayward Sussex, where there are trees and fields and perhaps a snap of running water so that the birds’ll come—’ he saw the cloud on Mother’s face—’ Oh, but in a nice neighbourhood with decent neighbours,’ he added, ‘and a town not too far away, with a cinema and shops, and so on. Oh, it will come all right, Mother, don’t you worry. We’ll find it sure enough—probably this very day. I feel it coming; it’s close already; I can almost see it at this moment.’
‘It’s there, waiting for us all the time. The very place,’ said Joan suddenly, clapping her hands softly, and meeting her father’s eye. ‘Only we’ve got to want it enough and——’
‘Tidy up your place, child,’ said Mother sharply, ‘and fold your serviette. It’s time you were at your scales.’ She sighed as Joan obeyed and left the room, and two minutes later, while Mother made notes on a squeaky slate for dinner, the sound of C major came to them through the wall, going rapidly up and down again with both hands. Only it was accompanied by a clear and happy voice that sang the notes, or rather sang a running melody to them that turned even the technical routine into music. The drudgery, though faithfully done, brought its fulfilment almost within reach. Like a bird, she leaped upon the promise and enjoyed it. Scales and music, toil and its results, prophecy and its accomplishment—even in this tiny detail—seemed present in her simultaneously. Carelessness and faithful plodding method went side by side. This came to her father as he lit his pipe and listened to the pure childish voice that unconsciously sang meaning, even beauty, into formal rigid outline.
‘An all-at-once and all-over little creature,’ he heard something whisper to him. ‘Care-less and happy as a bird. The true air quality! That’s the way, of course. I see it—a sort of bird’s-eye view of beginning and end in one. The joy of fulfilment shining through the actual work. I’ll find the cottage that way too!’
He puffed thick clouds of smoke between himself and his wife, who stood watching him, a touch of apprehension about her somewhere, impatience as well. She too was listening. He recalled the smile of the badger at the mouth of its hole. But, at any rate, it was a faithful, practical, and affectionate badger. Moreover, once—strange memory—it had known wings, it had been a bird! Wrong methods had brought it down to earth. It puzzled him dreadfully, yet rather sweetly. The bird, he fancied, must still lie hidden in her somewhere.
‘Joan never can do one thing properly at a time—not even her scales,’ she was saying. ‘There she is, trying to sing before she’s learnt her notes. I wish you’d speak to her about it. But, if you ask me, I think it’s good money wasted—those music lessons.’
How right she was, he thought, from her point of view. At the same time, how entirely that point of view lacked vision. A badger criticised a bird for flying uselessly when there were eggs to be laid and worms to be pulled up and twigs for a nest to look at instead of rushing landscapes.
‘I will, dear. I’ll speak to her at once, before I go to see the agents. I’ll bring back good news at dinner-time. Now good-bye, bless you.’ He kissed her. She looked so helpless and pathetic that he kissed her again, adding ‘Good-bye, old thing, don’t worry. Take everything lightly like a bird and remember—Wherever we are, we go!’
‘Good-bye, Joe dear. Do your best. You know our limit as to rent.’ He noticed that for once she had not asked him to repeat.
He left the room and walk
ed down the passage to admonish Joan, yet knowing that there was nothing he could honestly chide her for. She sang at her scales for the same reason he sang in his bath. In both of them, father and daughter, was the carelessness and joy of air, the certainty that, whatever they did on earth with effort, toil, and purpose, had in it— behind it and sustaining it—the glad sweet element of air. Air had no divisions, it was whole—a universal radiant element containing end and beginning, everything. To act with it instantaneously was to be confident that fulfilment lay already in the smallest germ of every action. ‘The cottage lies there waiting for us now. Just look for it with faith and careless happiness. . . . The perfect music lies within these boring scales. Just sing to them. It brings accomplishment more swiftly near!’
But on opening the door and poking his head inside, he found that she had ceased singing and was diligently practising.
‘That’s right,’ he said, smiling; ‘it’s rather dull, but stick to it. It’ll please your mother, and before long you’ll be able to play all my favourite pieces.’
She stopped, swung round on the stool and looked at him. Her little face in its wreath of shining hair was very earnest, the eyes big with wonder as though she had made a great discovery. He had seen a robin thus, perched on a window-sill, its head cocked sideways at a crumb of bread— poise, alertness, happiness in the attitude and gesture.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 248