Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

It was a favourite fancy of Samuel Rogers that "perhaps in the next world the use of words may be dispensed with—that our thoughts may stream into each other's minds without any verbal communication." It is an idea which has its attractions. It would save time and effort, and would preserve us from the misunderstandings which the clumsy instrument of speech involves. I think, as I sit here in the orchard by the beehive and watch the bees carrying out their myriad functions with such disciplined certainty, that there must be the possibility of mutual understanding without speech—an understanding such as that which Coleridge believed humanity would have discovered and exploited if it had been created mute.

And yet I do not share Rogers's hope. I fancy the next world will be like this, only better. I think it will resound with the familiar speech of our earthly pilgrimage, and that in any shady walk or among any of the fields of asphodel over which we wander we may light upon the great talkers of history, and share in their eternal disputation. There, under some spreading oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle and Tennyson, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson laying down the law to Langton and Burke and Beauclerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or Ben Jonson and Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid Tavern described by Fuller—the one mighty and lumbering like a Spanish galleon, the other swift and supple of movement like an English frigate—or Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales on an eternal May morning. It is a comfortable thought, but I cannot conceive it without the odd, cheerful din of contending tongues. I fancy edging myself into those enchanted circles, and having a modest share in the glorious pow-wows of the masters. I hope they won't vote me a bore and scatter at my approach.

ON A VISION OF EDEN

I had a glimpse of Eden last night. It came, as visions should come, out of the misery of things. In all these tragic years no night spent in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its sense of impending peril, its disquieting communiqué, Wytschaate lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a sick and foreboding heart—and then out into the night with the burden of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul. And as I stood in the dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast furnaces on a dark hillside. It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the darkness with its jovial lamps. Heavens, thought I, what strangers we are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant, for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear. The bus stopped and I got inside, and inside it was radiant too—so brilliant that you could not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read the paper with luxurious ease.

But I did not read the paper. I didn't want to read the paper. I only wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit bus. It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told. One day, I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this. All the buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight through streets as bright as day. The gloom will have vanished from Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills. We shall look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be afraid. The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.

And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this intoxicating vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that was lost and that we yearn to regain. Yes, I think I should fall on my knees. I think we shall all want to fall on our knees. What other attitude will there be for us? Even my barber will fall on his knees. "If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other day, "I'd fall on my knees this very night." He spoke as though nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of thing. I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond me. It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and blew their temple down. But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.

But then—what then? Well I should want to get on to some high and solitary place—alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be silent and when to talk—there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of horror. I would take the midnight train and ho! for Keswick. And in the dawn of a golden day—it must be a golden day—I would see the sun

Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye

and set out by the lapping waves of Derwentwater for glorious Sty Head and hear the murmurs from Glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up Great Gable and over by Eskhause and Scafell and down into the green pastures of Langdale. And there in that sanctuary with its starry dome and its encompassing hills I should find the thing I sought.