Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘We shall build lighter,’ he half sang, half whispered to himself, squeezing between a lamp-post and a workman who came rolling unsteadily out of a tavern door; ‘birds’-nests, up among the swinging trees! We shall live more carelessly, and nearer to the stars! No cellars any more, no basements, but gardens on the roof! Winds, colours, sunshine, air! Oh! — —’ as the man bumped into him and sent him off the pavement with ‘Beg parding, sir!’ ‘No, I beg yours,’ he replied, and came down to earth with a crash, remembering that supper was at seven-thirty and he must be turning homewards.

  So he turned and retraced his steps, feeling somehow that he had come down from the mountain tops or from a skimming rush along high windy cliffs. The net result of all these strange half-thoughts was fairly simple. His imagination had been stirred by the sight of his daughter in the sunset making those suggestive gestures against the coloured sky. With her hands she had flung a shower of silver threads about him; along these, somehow, her own queer ideas flashed into him. A new point of view, a new attitude to life, something with the light, swift rhythm of a bird’s flight was coming into the minds of men. Most of those who felt it were hardly conscious, perhaps, that they did so, because carried along with it. The old were frightened, change being difficult for them; but the young, the more sensitive ones among them at any rate, stretched out their arms and legs to meet the flowing, flying invasion. ‘Flow, fly, flow; wherever I am — I go,’ was in the air to-day. Joan knew. New hope, new light, new language, all aspects of joy and confidence, seemed dawning. Air and birds were symbols of it. It was rhythmical, swift, spontaneous. It sang. It was bird-happy and bird-wise. It was a new kind of consciousness, yet more than a mere expansion of present consciousness. It was a new direction altogether, while its object, purpose, aim was the oldest dream known to this old-tired world — brotherhood and unity. A bird brotherhood! The wisdom of the Flock!

  ‘I declare,’ he murmured, laughing quietly to himself, ‘if any one could hear me — see inside my mind just now — they’d say I was —— !’

  And that reminded him of his wife. He remembered that he was thinking of moving into the country with his family before very long. He came back to a definite thought again. He pondered facts and ways and means. He was very practical really at heart, no mere dreamer by any means. He weighed the difficulties. Mother was one of them. Sad, sad, the bird had left her; she was a badger now. He felt uneasy, troubled in his mind. But he smiled. He was fond of her.

  ‘How ever shall we manage?’ he asked himself. ‘There are so many incongruous things to reconcile. Gently, kindly, softly, airily is the way.’

  Then, suddenly, a bird-thought came to help him. Ah, it was practically useful, this inspiration from the air. It was not merely nonsense, then!

  ‘If I just hope and believe, and do my best, and don’t think — too much — it will all come right. I must be spontaneous and instinctive, not overweighted by worrying and detailed reason. I must believe and trust. That’s the way to get what’s called good judgment. See it whole from the air!’

  For the details that perplexed him were, after all, merely different aspects of one and the same thing — the several points of view of Mother, Joan, Tom, himself. Hold in the mind the details in solution, and the problem must solve itself. If he understood each one — that was necessary — while viewing the problem as a whole, the solution must come spontaneously of itself. The bird’s-eye view would show the way, while he remained nominally leader, like the bird that heads the triangular wedge of wild geese across a hundred miles of sky. This flashed upon him like a song.

  And as he realised this, his trouble vanished; joy took its place; with it came a sense of confidence, power, even wisdom. Though the matter was trivial enough, it was the triumph of instinct: Reason laid out the details, instinct pieced them together, then Intuition led. It was seeing all-over, knowing all-at-once. Already he had begun to live like a bird, and Joan, though he knew not how exactly, had taught him.

  ‘Wherever I am, I go,’ went darting through his head. He smiled, felt light and happy — and strangely wise. Perhaps he could help. Perhaps he was going to be a teacher even. A Teacher, he realised, must first of all find out the point of view of the person to be taught, and then discover a new point of view which will make the wrong or foolish attitude harmonise with reality. Everybody is right where he is, however wrong he may be. Only he must not stay there. The Teacher is a priest who supplies the new point of view. New teaching, however, was not necessary; the world was choked to the brim with teaching already. A new airy understanding of old teaching was the thing. . . .

  He was now close to the iron gates of Sun Court Mansions, where he lived. In the diminutive, yet pretentious, plot of garden stood a tall, leafy tree. A gust of wind blew past him at that moment with a roaring sound that was like laughter, and he saw the tree shake and tremble. The countless branches tossed in a dozen directions, hopelessly in disorder, each branch, each twig obeying its own particular little rhythm. That they all belonged to a single, central object seemed incredible, so brave the show they made of being independent and apart.

  Then, as he stood and watched, seventy thousand leaves turned all one way, showing their delicate under-skins. The great tree suddenly blew open. He saw the trunk to which leaves and branches all belonged. And at the wind’s order the tree behaved as a single thing, even the most outlying portions answering to the one harmonious rhythm. At which moment, once again, a flock of birds rose from somewhere near with an effortless rush and swooped in among the leaves with one great gesture common to each one. They settled with the utmost ease. The myriad little busy details merged in one; they disappeared. But in settling thus, they made the solid green seem light as air, shiny, almost fluid.

  And Wimble, taking the odd hint, felt too that his own difficulties had similarly turned fluid, melted, disappeared. The details merged into a whole; they were referred, at any rate, to some central authority that hid deep within him. A wind of inspiration, as it were, had blown him wide open too. Details that tossed in different directions, apparently hostile to one another, betrayed their common trunk. They showed their under-sides. He was aware of an essential unity to which all belonged.

  Something in him shone. He had taught himself, at any rate. He went upstairs, confident and light-hearted, breathless a little too, as though he had enjoyed an exhilarating flight of leagues, instead of a two-mile trudge along the solid, crowded pavements of Maida Vale.

  And later, when he went to bed, he fell asleep upon a gorgeous, airy conviction: ‘The Golden Age lies in front of us, and not behind!’ It was a birdy thought. He flew into dreamland with it in his wings.

  CHAPTER IX.

  Mrs. Wimble felt the death in another manner. It disconnected her from life. It cut her off from a network of safe, accustomed grooves. Something solid she had clung to subsided under ground. A final link with childhood, youth, and beauty broke. Death has a way of making survivors older suddenly. Mrs. Wimble now admitted age to herself; wore unsightly and depressing black; felt sentimental about a big ‘p’ Past; and ruminated uneasily about other worlds. Black with her was an admission that an after-life was at best an open question. It was a lugubrious conventional act symbolical of selfish grief, a denial of true religious teaching which should have faith, and therefore joy, as its illuminating principle. She did not understand the question. She had no answer ready. She said, ‘What?’

  She referred to the ‘lost’ at intervals. It did not occur to her that what is lost is open to recovery. When she said ‘lost’ she really meant annihilated. For, though a Christian nominally, and a faithful church-goer, when she had clothes she considered fit for the Deity to see her in, her notions of a future state were mental conceptions merely that contained no real belief. She was not aware that she did not believe, but this was, of course, the fact. Her father, moreover, had long ago destroyed the reality of the two after-death places generally accepted, soon after he had taught her that they bot
h existed. Not wittingly for his part, nor for her part, consciously. But since ‘heavenly’ was a term he used to describe large sales of corn, and ‘Go to hell, you idiot’ was a phrase he applied frequently to underlings in yard and office, his daughter had grown up with less respect for the actuality of these localities than she might otherwise have had.

  And with regard to her love for him — it was not love at all, but a selfish dependence tempered with mild affection. He was now gone; she missed him. A prop had sunk, a tie with the distant nursery snapped, the sense of continuity with the fragrance of early days, of toys, of romance and Christmas presents was no longer there. Instead of looking backwards — still possible while a parent lives — she now looked forward into a muddled, shadowy future that brought depression and low spirits. It was a subterranean look. She went down under ground into her hole, yet backwards, still peering with pathetic eagerness into the sunshine of life that she must leave behind.

  Therefore, for her father at any rate, she knew not love. For the one thing certain and positive about love is that those who feel it know, and to mention loss in the sense of annihilation is but childish ignorance. There is physical disappearance, separation, going elsewhere, but these are temporary, another direction, as Joan expressed it. Love shouts the fact, contemptuous of exact photographic proof. No mother worth her salt, at any rate, believes that death is final loss. She has known union; and Love brings, above all, the absolute consciousness of eternal union. ‘Loss,’ used of death, is a devil-word where love is, and as ignorant as ‘loss of appetite’ when food has become a portion of the eater. One’s self is not separable from its-self. Love, having absorbed the essentials of what it loves, remains because it is; for ever indivisible; there. The beloved dead step nearer when their bodies drop aside. ‘The dead know where they are, and what they’re doing,’ as Joan mentioned. ‘It’s not for us to worry — in that way. And they’re out of hours and minutes. They probably have no time to come back and tell us.’

  To which Mother’s whole attitude replied with an exasperated ‘What? I don’t think you know what you mean, child.’

  Joan answered in a flash, her face clouding slightly, then breaking into a happy smile again: ‘But, mother, what people think about a thing has nothing to do with the real meaning.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Mother.

  ‘Their opinion doesn’t matter.’

  Mrs. Wimble bridled a little. She was not yet ready to be taught to fly. In this airy element she felt unsafe, bewildered, and therefore irritable.

  ‘Then you’ll find out later, Joan, that it does matter,’ she replied emphatically with ruffled dignity. ‘One can’t play fast and loose with things like that, not in this world, my dear. One must be fixed to something — somewhere. Life isn’t nonsense. And you’ll remember later that I said so.’

  Joan peeped at her sideways, as a robin might peep at a barking dog. A tender and earnest expression lit upon her sparkling little face.

  ‘But life is a vision,’ she said with a glow in her voice; ‘it begins and goes on just like that,’ and she clicked her fingers in the air. ‘If you see it from above, from outside — like a swallow — you know it all at once like in a dream and vision, and it means everything there is to be meant. You put in the details afterwards.’ She was perched upon the window-sill again, her long legs dangling. She began to sing her bird-song.

  ‘There, there,’ expostulated Mr. Wimble, who was listening, ‘we’re not birds yet, Joan, whatever we’re going to be,’ but the last seven words dropped unconsciously into the rhythm of her singing tune. He felt a wind blow from her into his heart. Mrs. Wimble, however, remained concealed behind her World. She was not actually reading anything, because her eyes moved too quickly from paragraph to paragraph. But she said nothing for some moments, and presently she folded the paper with great deliberation, laying it beside her on the table, and patting it emphatically.

  ‘Visions are for those that like them,’ she announced, moving towards the door and casting a sideways look of surprise and contempt at her husband whose silence seemed to favour Joan. ‘To my way of thinking, they’re unsettling. What time does Tom come in to-night?’

  They discussed Tom for a few moments, and it was remembered that he had a latch-key and could let himself in, and that therefore they might go to bed without anxiety. But what Mrs. Wimble said upon this unnecessary topic meant really: ‘You’re both too much for me; my hopes are set on Tom.’ She continued her perusal of the World in her room, retiring shortly afterwards to sleep heavily for nine full hours without a break.

  CHAPTER X.

  Her father stood upside-down — mentally, of course, not physically. Certain of the Primer ‘Epitomes’ came in helter-skelter to support his daughter’s nonsense. At the same time he was aware that he ought to chide her. And probably he would have done so but for the fact that before he knew it, the girl was asking to be forgiven. He had not seen her move; his mental sight was still following Mother. There was a flutter of something white across the air — and there Joan was — upon his knee.

  And so he did not chide her. Nor did he rebuke her for singing under her breath what she called ‘Mother’s Song,’ beginning:

  O Disaster!

  You’re my Master!

  ‘Your mother’s tired to-night,’ he observed. ‘But all the same, you are a nasty little tease, you know.’ Her arms felt like warm, smooth feathers as he stroked them. He seemed floating lightly in mid-air above the roof. And he remembered vaguely the fairy tales of his youth when Princesses turned suddenly into swans. Oh, how beautiful it was, this bird idea, this seeing and feeling things in the terms of birds. Those girls in Greece the gods changed into a nightingale and a swallow — what a delightful, exhilarating experience! Easy — and how true! ‘The feathery change came o’er you,’ he murmured from the Treasury of Song, then, interrupting his own mood of curious enjoyment, turned to Joan abruptly.

  ‘Why did you talk like that?’ he inquired.

  ‘To make Mother move — —’

  ‘To bed, you mean?’ he asked, almost severely.

  ‘Yes, no,’ said Joan.

  ‘Answer me properly, girl,’ he observed.

  ‘Of course not. Move nearer to you — and me — even to grandpa. We ought to be a flock somehow, I felt. But we looked so separate and apart, you two on chairs, reading, him out of sight, and me on the window-sill.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We ought to be one thing more. The whole world ought to be. Not crowded — oh, there’d be heaps of room to move in — but all together somehow like birds. It’s only bad birds that are apart — ravens, hawks, and birds of prey. All the others flock.’ She darted from his knee and stood upon her toes a second before him, staring down into his eyes. ‘It’s coming, you know, Daddy. It’s coming, anyhow!’ She said it brightly, eagerly, yet with a singular conviction in her tone. ‘The whole world’s flocking somehow — somewhere — for I feel it. We shall all be happy together once we get into the country.’

  A shiver of beauty passed through him as he heard her. He remembered his walk up Maida Vale, and the rushing, shadowy presentiment in his mind that something new was on the way.

  ‘Like a single big family, you mean? All after one high big thing together?’ He asked it, greatly wondering at her. But her reply made him gasp. Where had she learned such things, unless from the air?

  ‘Your language is so draughty, Daddy. I mean a bird-world. Birds aren’t unselfish, they’re just — together.’

  He rubbed his forehead, saying nothing, while she fluttered down upon his knees again.

  ‘Like my body,’ she said. ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘Yes, no,’ he laughed, using her method unconsciously.

  ‘I can’t lace my boot with one hand, but the other isn’t unselfish when it comes to help. My head is no farther from me than my boot, is it?’ And she sang softly her bird-song of movement and delight, until he felt the quality of her volatile, aerial mind flash down i
nto his own and lighten it amazingly.

  ‘My precious little daughter,’ he cried, ‘you are a bird, and you shall teach me all your flying secrets. But, tell me,’ he whispered, ‘how in the world did you find out all this?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t tell that,’ she replied almost impatiently, ‘for once I begin to think it all goes, and I feel like an animal in a hole. But I’ll tell you soon — when the right moment comes — in the fields. I just go about and it all shoots into me.’

  It was the true bird-quality, always singing, always on the alert, swift to notice and be glad.

  ‘Yet I said it without thinking,’ she went on, ‘and the meaning came in afterwards at the end — all of its own accord. And that’s really the way to live together. At least, it’s coming — —’

  ‘The next stage, the next move!’

  ‘Flight!’ she cried, half singing it.

  ‘You live and talk,’ he laughed, ‘like a German sentence that carries all in the head and suddenly puts the verb down at the end.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he realised after she had gone to bed, while he sat there, pondering her fluid statements, ‘there is this new thing coming into life, and it is in some sense indeed a bird-thing. It’s a new outlook!’

  He caught at her feathery meanings none the less. A great aerial movement had begun, an etherialisation, a spiritualisation of life. And in true spirituality there was nothing vague; its expression was terrifically definite, stupendously alive, swift, sure, and steady as a mighty bird. Spirit was a bird of fire. Joan left him in that dreary sitting-room with a feeling that life was glorious and that the entire population of the globe must presently take flight and wing its way to some less ponderous star — migration. Joan’s language was absurd, yet she left winged ideas rushing like imperial eagles through his mind. Humanity was really one, but on earth alone it would never, never find it out. In the air it would. Its upward struggles were not mere figures of speech. Routine oppressed and deadened life, prisoning it within a network of rigid, fixed ideas, and behind barriers of concentrated effort which turned the fluid stagnant — hard. Routine was dulling, anti-spiritual. To live like a quicksand before you get fixed and sank, this was the way. To be ready for a fire that should burn up all you had. Life flows, flies, flows; it has rhythm and abandon; self, by means of boundaries and casting limits, resists this universal flow towards expansion characteristic of all Nature. A bird was poised. True! But it was ready to go in any direction instantly, for it was more various and less intense, by no means purposeless, and never bound. It was spontaneous, instantaneous, for ever on the run. That was living, that was ‘fun.’ People, like animals, were congested. But life was growing quicker, lighter, with rhythm, movement everywhere.