Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

Word-magic belongs to poetry. In prose it is an intrusion. That was the view of Coleridge. It was because, among its other qualities, Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose. The modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a brilliant writer this fellow is." And that is the true triumph of the art. It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.

ODIN GROWN OLD

I had a strange dream last night. Like most dreams, it was a sort of wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours. We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless as the guesses of the foolish. Ah, if we could only get behind this grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give? What a strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging, blood-stained Europe. With what a shock we should discover the meaning of the terror. But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable secrecy. We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot tell a syllable that it will write....

You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this....

When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless centuries. It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and now stood far beyond the confines of Time. I was alone in the world. I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay rotting in garments of seaweed and slime. I seemed, with the magic of dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map. I traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to continent, from desolation to desolation. Again and again I cried out in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a solitude that was infinite. Time seemed to have no meaning in this appalling vacancy. I did not live hours or days, but centuries, æons, eternities. Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable backward of time. Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man. He seemed stricken with unthinkable years. His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity. He sat at the foot of the Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in an infantile treble. As I approached he peered at me through his dim eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy voice:

"I am Odin—hee! hee! I possess the earth, the whole earth ... I and my sword ... we own it all ... we and the Sphinx ... we own it all.... All ... hee! hee!..." And he turned and began to fondle his sword again.

"But where are the others? What happened to them?"

"Gone ... hee! hee! .... All gone.... It took thousands of years to do it, but they've all gone. It never would have been done if man hadn't become civilised. For centuries and centuries men tried to kill themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they couldn't do it. Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better. The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered modern science. He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water, and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms of heat and power. And all the time he went on saying what a good world he was making ... hee! hee! Such a wonderful Machine.... Such a peaceful Machine ... hee! hee! ... Age of Reason, he said.... Age of universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said.... hee! hee! ... We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we have found Him. We have made Him ourselves—out of our own heads. We got tired of looking for Him in the soul. Now we have found Him in the laboratory. We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth. Great is our God of the Machine. Honour, blessing, glory, power—power of things. Power! Power! Power!"