CHAPTER XVII.
'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 me
On the apple tree!
It's explaining all the garden!'
'There's a bird for me
On 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. They know 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, 'we can be 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. Do come 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 it all. 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.