'Careless as a bird! Bird-happy and bird-wise,' he murmured to himself as they moved in a month later. For he had found a cottage as by instinct. It was not on the agents' list of modern, ugly and comfortless cages, but was an old-world little place that had caught his eye by the corner of the lane as he returned to the country station, weary and almost faith-less, after a vain inspection. A white board suddenly peered at him through the branches of a yew, there were roses up the walls, a tiny fountain played on the lawn, and beyond he caught a glimpse of a neglected orchard, sloping fields of yellow ragwort, and a stream. The stream, moreover, ran under the road just there, so that he could look down into it from the old stone bridge. The water ran swiftly, but deep enough to grow long weeds of green and gold that swung with the current like thick fairy hair. Two or three silver birches shone and rustled by the wicket-gate. He went in. A robin hopped up, inspected him, and hopped away into the shadow of the yew.
The interior seemed to him like a bit of forest—the beams, the panelling, the dark, stained settles. Yet there was a bathroom, too, the kitchen was large and light, the bedrooms airy, the living-rooms just right in size and number. The front windows looked out across the rose-plot to the little green where the geese were gabbling, while the back ones opened straight into the orchard, where fruit and walnut trees stood ankle deep in uncut grass. The windows, too, were wide and high, letting in big stretches of the sky. Also, there were a mulberry-bush and several heavy quince trees. And the stream ran singing and bubbling between the orchard and the farther fields, where, amid the sprinkled gold of the ragwort, scuttled countless rabbits.
Moreover, it was cheap, the drains were safe, the church was as picturesque as an old-fashioned Christmas card, and the vicar was brother to a peer. Thus there was something for everybody. The nest was found. Mother inspected it in due course and gave her modified approval; Tom said it 'sounded ripping,' he would 'run down for week-ends' whenever he could; and Joan, catching her breath when she saw it first on the afternoon of a golden-brown October day, felt a lump in her throat and moisture in her eyes, such happiness rose in her breast. She stood with her father in the sandy lane,—Mother had gone inside at once,—the larches rustling and the excited geese examining their stiff town clothing from behind. On the topmost branch of an apple tree a big brown thrush was singing its heart out over the garden, its small packed outline silhouetted against the pale blue sky. Joan caught her father's hand.
'Look!' she whispered, pointing. 'Listen!'
He did so. He felt the strange excitement in the child. Her lips were parted and her shining eyes turned heavenwards a moment. The thrush poured forth its liquid song deliciously; and the sound sank into his heart as though it expressed the full happiness of the air that welcomed them to the cottage and the garden. He experienced surely something of the soft air-magic as he stood there watching, listening. The natural joy and sweetness of it touched him deeply. And his daughter sang a strange thing then, murmuring it to herself. He only just caught the curious words:
'There's a bird for meOn the apple tree!It's explaining all the garden!'
'There's a bird for meOn the apple tree!It's explaining all the garden!'
'There's a bird for meOn the apple tree!It's explaining all the garden!'
Up the scaffolding of the quaint phrases he passed, as it were, with her into the clear air beside the singing bird: that scrap of nonsense 'explaining all the garden' did the trick. A sack of meanings seemed emptied before him out of the sweet October sky. The interesting, valuable ideas in life began, he realised, just where language stops— intelligible, sensible language, that is. Then came either poetry, legend, nonsense, or else mere silence. Joan used a combination of the former.
'Words are parvenu people,' he recalled a Primer sentence, 'as compared with thought and action. Communications between God and man must always be either above or below them; for with words come in translations.'
'Explaining all the garden!' The touch of nonsense brought a thousand 'translations' into his mind. The air was full of fluttering meanings that showered about him. He balanced aloft on the twig beside the singing thrush, his sight darting, as with the bird's-eye view, upon recent happenings. He read various translations instantaneously.
In front of him stood the cottage and garden, the fields and trees and stream he had dreamed about with his daughter—an accomplished, solid fact. It had come as by magic, materialised by thought and desire, and yet, as Mother said, 'by chance.' But the chance included method, because Fate obeyed a confident Belief. And circumstances were moulded or modified by faith. He and Joan somehow held the sure sweetness of fulfilment in their minds from the beginning; they had always believed, indeed had known, the cottage would be found. And it had been found. He had not fussed nor worried; there had been no friction due to the grit of doubt. Like his queer, spontaneous daughter, he had believed in his dream—and at the same time kept his eyes wide open like a hawk.
As he stood there, listening to the song of the thrush and aware of its poise on the swaying twig balanced so steadily, yet alert for spontaneous flight in any direction, these fluttering translations of the child's nonsense words shot through him. The joy of the happy thrush shone in his heart, explaining the garden that was life.
The bird, at that moment, flew off with a whirr of wings, still singing as it vanished with an undulating swoop over the roof towards the orchard. Across the patch of watery blue sky he had been watching shot half a dozen swallows, then intent only upon darting insects, although on the eve of their huge journey of ten thousand miles. Beyond them two plover tumbled like blown leaves towards the ground, yet rising again instantly before they touched it . . . and into his hand he felt Joan's fingers creep softly. He looked down into her eyes, moist with excitement, joy, and wonder. The magic of the air seemed all about them, in their minds and hearts and very bodies even.
'You've found a real nest, Daddy, but we can travel everywhere from here.' It was said simply, as though a bird had learned to speak. 'Think of the journeys we shall make—just by staying here!'
'The cottage seems swung in the branches, doesn't it?' he replied. 'Come on, now; let's go inside.' And he walked across the lawn, lifting his feet quickly, lightly, as though he feared his weight might hurt the earth, yet still more as though he might any instant spring into the air and follow the thrush, the plover, or the swallows.
Upon the threshold of the open door, at that minute, Mother faced them. Having made her inspection of the arrangements and the furniture, all that the workmen had done in the last few days, she came out to report. She stood there very solidly, her feet in goloshes, planted tenaciously upon the damp October earth. She was smiling contentedly; behind her gleamed the white apron of the parlourmaid. Tea obviously was ready and she was waiting for them to come in. A fire burned pleasantly in the dining-room, glinting on a clean white table-cloth. There were buttered toast and a jug of cream—solid realities both. This atmosphere of wholesome, earthly comfort glowed about her. Her very smile conveyed it.
'Mother's settled down already,' Joan whispered. 'She likes it! That means Tom'll like it too. But she'll live indoors.'
In his own mind, however, rose another thought, although he agreed with what she said. He was thinking how odd it was that Mother always appeared to be settled in the mouth of a hole. She stood, framed by the dark doorway, as though a deep burrow stretched behind her and below. The simile of the nervous badger, peering forth upon a dangerous upper world, passed through him. A great tenderness rose in his heart. Mother, he knew, though she had done no actual work, had felt the move a heavy strain. To dig a new hole, of course, was a dusty and laborious job, whereas to flutter across a few fields to another tree was but a careless joy.
'I've been through all the rooms,' she said cautiously, as they went down the passage, 'and everything seems very nice indeed, Joe. The wood makes it seem a bit dark, perhaps, but it's all very respectable. And the parlour looks really quite distinguished. Tea's laid for us in the dining-room.'
They went in; the fire shone brightly; the lamp was lit. Mother moved towards the great silver tea-pot, letting herself down with a sigh into the black horsehair arm-chair. It was as though she went down into the earth. He sat with his cup of tea in the wide settle of the ingle-nook, and Joan, having first seen to her parents' wants, then took the corner facing him.
They settled in. Yet this settling was characteristic of the family, for whereas Mother settled down, Mr. Wimble and his daughter became unsettled. That is, they felt restless. Mother, with the security of a comfortable home and comfortable income at her back, cropped her food safely, yet wondered why she felt dull and bored and lonely. There is no call to describe the actions and reactions of her familiar type to the conditions of the quiet country life, and her chief tragedy that winter was perhaps that when 'his lordship, the vicar,' called, he surprised her in old garden clothes, the fire in the 'distinguished parlour' (kept unused against just this particular event) unlighted, so that she was obliged to receive him in the dark dining-room with the ungentlemanly settles.
Joan and her father were unsettled for the very reason that made her settled. Mother felt her feet. They felt their wings.
A week after the settling in, their restless feeling, wholly unanticipated, came to a head. The windy skies were already calling the swallows together swiftly, collecting their mobile squadrons in a few hours for the grand southern tour. And these amazing birds seemed nothing less than an incarnation of the air itself. There is nothing of earth about them anywhere; their feet are too weak to stand on the ground; every darting turn they make is a movement of the entire creature, rather than of the head first and then the body; they have no necks, their bullet heads turn simultaneously with the tail, and all at once. Joan and her father watched them daily going about their careless, windy life, gathering on the telegraph wires, giving the young ones hints, on the wing to the very last minute. They had no packing-up to do.
'They'll be off soon now,' said Joan. 'Wherever they are, they go—don't they?' There was a tinge of restless desire in her eyes as she followed their movements.
'A few days, yes,' said her father. 'About the middle of the month they leave.Theyknow right enough.'
And two days later—it was October 15th—Joan woke at dawn and looked out of her open window. The twittering of many thousand voices had called her out of sleep, but something in her heart had called her too. It was very early, the daylight of dawn, yet not the daylight quite, and everywhere, from fields and trees, the chorus of bird-life was audible. Birds sing their best and loudest always in that half-hour which precedes the actual dawn. The volume is astonishing. 'As the real daylight comes, it sinks and almost ceases, and never in the whole twenty-four hours is there such an hour again.' The entire air seemed calling 'good-bye and safe return' to those about to leave.
Joan ran and woke her father. 'They're off,' she whispered, as he crawled out of his warm bed, careful not to waken his wife. 'Come and say good-bye.'
The peculiar joy and mystery of early morning was in the quiet house and in the sharp tang of the fresh, cool autumn air. In nightgown and pyjamas, a single rug about their shoulders, they leaned out of the upper window. The ivy rustled just beneath them on the wall, there was a whisper among the yellow walnut leaves to their right, the orchard trees hung still and motionless, breathing out the perfume of earth and fruit and heavy dew.
The sky, however, was alive; it seemed all motion; even the streaky clouds tinged with pale colour looked like stretched wings mightily extended. And the vague murmur of a flock of birds rose everywhere. There was a hurricane of wings above the world, as the armies of the swallows came carelessly together. They left in scattered groups, but with every party that left, another instantly assembled, born out of empty space. Multitudes took the wing towards the sea, while other darting multitudes collected instantly behind them. The air, indeed, was alive and whirring into a symbol of lovely, rushing flight—swarming, settling, turning, wheeling in a turmoil of ascending and descending feathers that yet expressed a design of ordered beauty. Myriad clusters formed, then instantly dispersed again, threaded together upon one invisible pattern; now herded into a wedge, shaped like a wild black comet, now circling, streaming, dividing, melting away into a living cloud. The evolutions were bewildering.
As the eastern horizon began to burn with red and gold, the wings took colour faintly, brightening as an upward slant revealed their pallid under-sides, then darkening again as they tilted backwards. The swallows alternately focussed and dispersed. Separate hordes, turning at high velocity with one accord, shot forth and away to the south. They rose, they sank, they vanished. They went first to the coast; for their migration, led by the infallible sense of orientation which is subconscious knowledge, takes place chiefly in the night—in darkness. Within a brief half-hour the whole of the immense army disappeared. The sky was still and silent, motionless and empty. The swallows were gone.
'They've taken part of me with them,' whispered Joan, 'part of my warmth,' and she drew the rug closer about her shoulders as the October sun came up above the misty fields.
'They'll be in Algeria to-morrow,' sighed her father, 'and I'd like to be there too.' His thought went back to the sun-drenched garden where nightingales sang in the February moonlight. . . . The old romance stirred in him painfully. 'Mother, poor old Mother,' he murmured to himself, 'she seemed so wonderful then. How strange!' He felt himself old suddenly. He felt himself caught, caged—stuck.
'That's where I was born, wasn't it?' Joan asked, catching the sentence. She straightened herself suddenly, throwing the rug aside; the sun shone into her face and on her golden hair that fell rippling over her nightgown. The light gleamed, too, in her moistened eyes. He saw joy steal back upon her. 'But, Daddy,' she exclaimed with an odd touch of confident wonder in her voice and look, 'wecanbe there just the same, if we want to.' She raised herself on her toes a moment as though she were going to dance or fly. In the pale gold light of the sunrise she looked like some ethereal bird of fire rising into the air.
'We can be everywhere—everywhere at once—really! Don't you see? We always want to be somewhere else anyhow. That proves it.'
And as she said it, he remembered the cinema, and felt his wings again; he was free, uncaged; of course he could go anywhere, everywhere at once almost. He knew himself eternally young. He realised Air, that which is everywhere at once and cannot age. Earth obeys time, grows old, changes, and eventually dies; but air is ever changeless, free of time altogether, unageing. It cannot wear away, it is invisible, omnipresent. The wings of the spirit opened in him, rose into space and light, then flashed, darting after the amazing swallows. 'Wherever I am, I go,' he hummed, as he went softly back along the cold passage and crept cautiously into bed beside his wife, who, heavily breathing still, had not moved since he left her, and lay in ignorance of the sunrise, as also of the army of happy wings that by now were already out of England and far across the sea.
And, later in the day, as he stood with her near a gravel-pit beside the road, watching a colony of busy starlings, she objected: 'What a noise and fuss about nothing! What a nuisance they are, Joe.Docome on, dear. There's really nothing to watch, and I want to get in and change my things in case any callers come.'
He remembered a passage about starlings written by a strenuous big-game hunter, who yet had the air-magic in his blood. He quoted it to her, as best he could, and she said it was pretty:
'Happy birdies! What a bore all morality seems, as one watches them. How tiresome it is to be high in the scale (and human)! Those who would shake off the cobwebs—who are tired of teachings and preachings and heavy-high novellings, who would see things anew, and not mattering, rubbing their eyes and forgetting their dignities, missions, destinies, virtues, and the rest of it—let them come and watch a colony of starlings at work in a gravel-pit.'
'Yes,' he agreed, 'quite pretty. Selous got a glimpse there—didn't he? —but only a glimpse. The great thing is to see itall. He forgot the swallows.'
His thought ran on, fragments becoming audible sometimes. 'It's all one, you see. Stars and starlings are the same one thing, only differently expressed. . . . That's what genius does, of course. Genius has the bird's-eye point of view. . . . It sees analogies everywhere, the underlying unity of everything—sees the similar in the dissimilar. It reduces the Many to the One,' he added in a louder tone, as a Primer came opportunely to his support.
'I ask you, Mother,' he cried with enthusiasm, 'what else is genius but that? I ask you?'
'What?' said Mother, as they went indoors.
Wimble watched the year draw to its close and run into the past. Born slowly out of sullen skies, it had shaken off the glistening pearls of April and slipped, radiant and laughing, into May; at the end of June, full-bosomed still and stately, it had begun to hasten, lest the roses hold it prisoner for ever; pausing a moment in August, it looked out with perfect eyes upon the world as from a pinnacle; then, poised and confident, began the grand descent down the red slopes of Autumn into the peace of winter and the snow.
Thus, at least, its history described itself in Wimble's thoughts, because his little mind, standing on tiptoe, saw it whole and from above. 'You ought to publish it, dear,' said Mother, to whom he mentioned it one December evening round the fire. 'You really ought to write it.' He objected that everybody knew it just as well as he did. 'It's always happening to everybody, so why should I remind them?' 'Because they don't see it,' was her answer. 'Besides, they'd think you wonderful.' But Wimble was no writer. He shook his untidy head, yet secretly pleased with his wife's remark that people don't see the obvious. It was almost an air-remark. Mother was changing a little. . . . And he dozed in his chair, thinking how easily the world calls a man wonderful—he has but to startle it—and how easily, too, that man is destroyed if he believes its verdict.
With the rare exception of occasional signs like this, however, his wife had not mobilised her being radically for a big change. She retired into her prosaic background, against which, as with certain self-protecting, ultra-cautious animals and insects, she remained safely invisible. Back to the land proved rather literal for her; she wore her heavy garden-gloves with pride. At the same time her practical nature, streaked with affection, patience, and unselfishness, took on, somehow, a tiny glint of gold. Her eyes grew lighter, her movements less laborious. Fear lessened in her; joy often caught her by surprise. Sparks, though not yet flame, lit up her attitude to things, as if, close to her beloved element of earth, the country life both soothed and blessed her. She felt at home. She said 'what' far less frequently. This quiet, peaceful winter was perhaps for her a period of gestation. The family gathered about her more than in town.
With a buoyancy hard to define and possibly not justified, Wimble watched her. He looked out upon life about him. His health was good, but this buoyancy was based on something deeper than that; his health was good because of it. Nothing mattered, a foolish phrase of those who shirked responsibilities, was far from him; everything mattered equally expressed it better. The New Thing coming, which he and Joan called Air, lay certainly in him, though very far yet from finding full expression. The germ of it at any rate lay in him, as in her. The fact that they recognised it was proof of that. A divine carelessness took charge of his whole life and being; Mother was aware of it; even Tom responded mildly: 'quite sets a fellow up,' as he expressed it after his rare week-end visits, the Sunday spent in killing rabbits; 'town's overrated after all.'
They merged pleasantly enough with their surroundings, melting without shock into the life of neighbours, sharing the community existence, narrow, conventional, uninspired though it was. And all through the dark and clouded months, the skies emptied of birds, weighted at the low horizons, afraid to shine, yet waiting for the marvellous coming dawn— all through these heavy weeks and days Joan's presence, flitting everywhere with careless singing and dancing, shot the wintry gloom with happy radiance. It was her spontaneous dancing that especially made Wimble stare and wonder. It conveyed meanings no words could compass, expressing better than anything else the new attitude he felt coming into life. He remembered the flood of shadowy ideas her graceful gestures had poured into him once before when he walked up Maida Vale; and that strange night in the flat when, seeing her dancing on the London roof, he was dimly aware of a new language which included even inanimate objects. The strange shudder that accompanied the vision he had forgotten. This magical rhythm was her secret. It stirred the heart, making it vulnerable to impulses from some brighter, happier statesheknew instinctively and in advance. Mother, he noticed, watched her too, peering above her knitting-needles, moving her head in sympathy, sometimes a faint, wondering smile lighting upon her bewildered, careworn face. A real smile, however, for it was in the eyes alone, and did not touch the lips. Even Tom admired. 'You ought to be taught,' he said guardedly. 'You'd touch 'em up a bit. If you did that in church the whole world would go.' He too, without knowing it, realised that something sacred, inspired, regenerating was being whispered.
Yet Joan herself, though growing older, hardly developed in the ordinary way. She did not grow up. She remained backward somehow. She lived subconsciously, perhaps. Some new knowledge, gathering below the surface, found expression in this spontaneous dancing. With the dawn, now slowly coming, it would burst full-fledged upon the world, and the world itself would dance with joy. Meanwhile, a new bloom, a new beauty settled on the girl, and Mother proudly insisted that she 'must go to a good photographer and have her picture taken.' But the result was commonplace, for in the rigid black and white outline all the subtlety escaped, and, regretting the money wasted, Mother wondered why it had failed. Like the audience at the Vicarage charities when Joan danced, she watched the performance, felt a hint of strange beauty, clapped her hands and wondered 'what it meant.'
'It's her life, you see,' Wimble comforted her. 'And you can't photograph life. To get her real meaning, we ought to do it with her— dance it.'
'She's light, rather, for her age,' replied Mother ambiguously. 'But everybody seems to love her somehow,' she added proudly. 'She seems to make people happy. P'r'aps later she'll develop and get sensible.' She sighed, and resumed her knitting. Presently she got up to light the lamps. 'The days are drawing out, Joe,' she mentioned, smiling. 'Spring will be here before we know it.' He lifted the chimney to help her, turned up the wick, struck a match, and kissed her fondly.
The country life, it seemed, had brought them all together more, made them aware of their underlying unity, as it were. They flocked. Wimble, dressed now in wide brown knickerbockers, wearing bright stockings and brogue shoes with feathered tongues that flapped when he walked, noticed the change with pleasure. The new attitude was only in his brain as yet, but it was already stealing down into his heart. This increased sense of a harmonious manifold unity in the family impressed him, and it was Joan, he felt, who made him see it, if she was not also the cause of its coming to pass. Only some spiritual actuary could make it quite clear, but he discerned the oneness behind the different members of his family, uniting them. In this subconscious, completer self lay full understanding. There was no need to pay annual subscriptions to an Aquarian Society to realise that! Moreover, if a small family with such divergent interests and ambitions could flock and realise unity, the larger family of a village, country, nation could do the same—once the underlying unity were realised. That was the difficulty. The whole world was, after all, but a single family, humanity. . . . In his quiet country nook Wimble dreamed his great dream. He saw the nations with but a single flag, a single drum, a single anthem, true to a larger single patriotism that could never again be split up into lesser divisional patriotisms. The universal fraternity of indivisible Air was coming; the subconscious where individuals pooled their surface differences would become conscious; that was the truth, he felt, the one great thing the Aquarian lecturer had said. . . . He remembered the cinema, with its mechanical suggestion of a unification of world-experience faintly offered; he remembered the free, happy, collective life of the inhabitants of air, the natural singers of the world. The deep underlying sense of unity buried in the subconscious once realised, full understanding must follow, and with complete understanding the way was cleared for love. And it was Joan's dancing, somehow, that set the dream within his heart. The new attitude to life he imagined dawning on the world was the first hint of a coming spiritual consciousness, and for spiritual consciousness the totality of things is present. 'All at once and everywhere at once,' as she had put it. His heart swelled big within him as he dreamed. . . .
'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.
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 black 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 wasnow. 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 beinghere. 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 expression 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.
This undetailed space about him inspired him oddly, it symbolised his dream, the dream that had haunted him since earliest youth. He lookeddownupon the world beneath him, upon the stretch of years he had flown over, upon the congested streets and houses where men lived, upon the iron conventions and traditions imprisoning their minds from escape into freedom that yet lay so close. The element of earth weighed still heavily upon them; earth builds forms; air, being form-less, offered liberty. He saw these million forms already crumbling; he saw the masses at the upper windows, on the roofs, all looking—up. With the coming of air, the day of forms was passing. The ferment, the unrest, the universal questing shone in these upturned eyes. They would not look down again. The vital force had drained out of a thousand forms which have served their day; no past tradition was absolute; they had found it out. Everywhere he saw the emergence of this new spirit, leaving behind it the empty, unsatisfying forms, yearning for fuller self-expression that the unifying ethereal element of air now promised. The roofs were strangely crowded. He saw the myriad figures. He saw that some of them already sang and danced!
Already the new mighty rhythm caught them whirling into space, each soul more and moreen rapportwith the universal world-soul. Into their hearts, with the lift of wings and a happy bird-like song, it stole subconsciously; the formulae of doctrine which change and shift were giving place to inner experience, and inner experience cannot be destroyed, since it is formless, acknowledging no boundaries, obedient to no creed. Form was dying, life was being born. . . .
He watched the tumbling plover, the sea-gulls grandly sailing, the soaring lark; the floating thistledown went past along the careless wind; he saw his un-thinking daughter's natural, happy dancing, one and all interpreting this message of the air, this promise of liberty that brimmed his deep heart and his uneducated mind. The huge simplicity of the naked Downs made him see existence singularly as a whole; across the open sweep before him the air came sweetly, blowing the tangle of artificial living into easy rhythm and dancing everywhere.
He saw the accidental barriers between creed and sect and nation blown away. A new spiritual unity took their place, a synthetic life, the parts highly specialised, as with birds, yet the whole in perfect harmony. The day of special, exclusive dispensations had disappeared, and this organic spiritual unity, with its new religion of service, lifted the people as with mighty wings.
'Dance on, my child! dance on!' he cried, 'it makes me see things whole!' He watched her light, flying movements against the sea of yellow gorse, the hair like a saffron scarf upon the wind, her radiant face shining and laughing with the blue of endless space behind it. She did not heed his words; she danced away again; she seemed one with the tumbling plover, the sailing sea-birds, and the drifting thistle-down. She danced with the Spring, and the air was in her heart.
The spirit quickened in him as he saw her. His consciousness, he knew, was but a fragment of an immense and deeper consciousness, of limitless scope and powers; this greater self made affirmations to which no mere intellect would dare to set the boundaries. With the air there was a return of joy, belief and wonder into a world that has too long denied all three. Intellect might stand aside a little longer, watching cautiously, like Mother, the flights of intuition, that flashing bird of fire that strikes and vanishes; but science, hitherto destructive chiefly, must enter a new field or be discredited. It must become constructive, it must examine spiritual states. The barrier between the organic and the inorganic was already breached.
'Dance on! My heart flies dancing with you!'
With you! Rather with everything and every one! For he had this curious inspiration, as though all his past condensed now into a single moment— that a new attitude, due to the subliminal consciousness becoming consciously organised with its myriad and mighty powers, was stealing down into the hearts of men from the air. Since its outstanding characteristic was a fuller understanding, a natural sharing, a deep, instinctive sympathy, it involved an actual realisation of spiritual unity that intellect alone has never yet achieved, and never can. It was no flabby, Utopian, idealistic brotherhood he saw, but a practical, co-operative life based upon those greater powers, and upon that completer understanding lying, hid with God, in the subliminal regions of humanity. Experienced hitherto sporadically, only, he saw in what his heart called the promise of the air, their universal acceptance and development. . . . In a second of time, this all flashed into him as he watched the dancing little human figure on the gigantic landscape. And after it, if not actually with it, rose that unaccountable, uneasy, half-terrible emotion of deep-seated pain he had known before—the shudder . . . He trembled, tried to sing. Then the gorse pricked him where he lay. He turned to make himself more comfortable. He wriggled. The attempt to sing tickled his throat and he coughed.
He sat up, feeling in his pockets for a pencil and paper. For the first time in his life he felt he must write. 'I must give it out,' he mumbled to himself. 'It's so wonderful, so simple. I must share it. I must tell it to others—to everybody.' He actually made some notes. 'Ah,' he thought, as he read them over a few days later, 'they're no good. I don'tquiteunderstand them now, to tell the truth.' He sighed. 'I'm only muddled,' he decided, 'just a Man in the Street bewildered by a touch of inspiration that blew into me!'
He lay watching Joan for a little longer, dancing in the middle distance still. The zest of a bird was in her, the toss, the scamper. Lithe, spinning, sure, her movements interpreted the air far more clearly than his thoughts could compass it in words. Her song came to him with the breeze. He watched her, then waved the packet of sandwiches above his head. He was hungry. They ate their lunch, and spent the rest of the day exploring the great spaces round them.
It was evening when they got home; they heard the random sweetness of the thrush's song among the laurels on the lawn; a nightjar was churning in the dusk beyond; there was a subdued and tiny chattering of the swallows in the eaves. They found Mother among the flower-beds, wearing her big garden-gloves. Wimble took her in his arms and kissed her.
'It's come, Mother, it's come,' he whispered against her cheek. 'And, d'you know?—you've been with us all day long.'
She looked up, peaceful and happy, a smell of garden earth about her, and the glow of the sunset in her eyes. 'Have I really, Joe dear?' she said. 'How lovely!' And then she added: 'I believe it is; yes, I believe it is.'
Next morning Wimble woke very, very early—close upon three o'clock. He peered out of the window a moment. The dawn, he saw with a happy sigh of wonder, was just beginning to break. The gleam of light fell upon Mother's face; and the singing of a lark high up in the clearing air came to him. At the same moment Mother moved in her bed close by; her heavy breathing was interrupted. He listened. She was talking in her sleep, though the words were indistinguishable. He waited, thinking she might get up and walk. Her eyes, however, did not open; she lay still again. He slipped over to tuck the blankets more securely round her. 'Bless her!' he thought. 'She's asleep! Her surface consciousness is merged with her deep, safe, wise subconsciousness——' And his thought broke off abruptly. It had suddenly occurred to him that the sleep-walker and the migrating bird both found their way unerringly in the darkness, both obedient to inner guidance. He stood still an instant, looking down upon her face in the pale morning light.
'Who, what guides the redwing over hills, and vales, and seas?' he whispered. 'Who, what guides the sleep-walker amid the intricacies of Maple furniture?' He chuckled to himself. It was odd how the comic Aquarian lecture cropped up in his memory like this once more.
He bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek, then went back to bed. Mother still mumbled in her sleep—' Flow, fly, flow,' he seemed to catch, 'it's coming, coming . . . '
'It's the bird returning to her heart,' he whispered to himself. Deep down inside her being something sang; outside, the carolling of the lark continued, blithe and joyous in the breaking dawn. As he fell asleep, the two sounds were so curiously mingled that they seemed almost indistinguishable. . . .