Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

More goes on in us than we know. At this moment I am conscious of at least six strata of thought. I am attending to this writing, the shaping of the letters, the spelling of the words; I am thinking what I shall write; I am sensible that a thrush is singing outside, and that the sun is shining; this pervades my mind with the glow of the thought that in a few days I shall be in the beechwoods; through this happy glow the ugly imp who sat on my pillow last night forces himself on my attention; down below there is the boom of the great misery of the world that goes on ceaselessly like the deep strum of the double bass in the orchestra. And out of sight and consciousness there are, I suspect, deeper and more obscure functions shaping all sorts of things in the unfathomed caves of the mind. The results will come to the surface in due course, and I shall wonder where they came from. It is a mistake to suppose that we can only think of one thing at a time. The mind can keep as many balls circulating as Cinquevalli. It can keep some of them circulating even without knowing that they exist.

But these profound functions of the mind that know no sleep, and yet do not disturb our sleep, are not to be confused with that imp of the pillow. He is a brawler of the day. He brings the noisy world of fact into the cloistered calm or the playground of sleep. He is known to all of us, but most of all to the criminal who has still got a conscience. Macbeth knew him—"Macbeth hath murdered sleep, the innocent sleep." Eugene Aram knew him:

And a mighty wind had swept the leaves
And still the corpse was bare.

I know him ... And that reminds me. It is time I went and had it out with my imp of the pillow in the daylight.

ON MOWING

I have hung the scythe up in the barn and now I am going to sing its praises. And if you doubt my competence to sing on so noble a theme, come with me into the orchard, smell the new-mown hay, mark the swathes where they lie and note the workmanship. Yes, I admit that over there by the damson trees and down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt, dishevelled appearance about the grass as though it had been stabbed and tortured by some insane animal armed with an axe. It is true. It has been stabbed and tortured by an insane animal. It was there that I began. It was there that I hacked and hewed, perspired and suffered. It was there that I said things of which in my calmer moments I should disapprove. It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the scythe. But let your eye scan gently that stricken pasture and pause here where the orchard slopes to the paddock. I do not care who looks at this bit. I am prepared to stand or fall by it. It speaks for itself. The signature of the master hand is here. It is my signature.

And having written that signature I feel like the wounded soldier spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the Nation. He was returning to England, and as he looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish landscape and saw the hay-makers in the fields he said, "I feel as though I should like to cut grass all the rest of my life." I do not know whether it was the craftsman in him that spoke. Perhaps it was only the beautiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the words from him. But they were words that anyone who has used a scythe would echo. I echo them. I feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity of sunny days and illimitable fields of waving grass and just go on mowing and mowing and mowing for ever. I am chilled by the thought that you can only play the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year. I look back over the summers of the past, and lament my wasted opportunities. What meadows I might have mown had I only known the joy of it!

For mowing is the most delightful disguise that work can wear. When once you have got the trick of it, it goes with a rhythm that is intoxicating. The scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable a tool, gradually changes its character. It becomes an instrument of infinite flexibility and delicacy. The lines that seemed so uncouth and clownish are discovered to be the refinement of time. What centuries of accumulated experience under the suns of what diverse lands have gone to the perfecting of this most ancient tool of the fields, shaping the blade so cunningly, adjusting it to the handle at so artful an angle, disposing the nebs with such true relationship to the action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instrument loses the sense of weight and seems to carry you forward by its own smooth, almost instinctive motion. It is like an extension of yourself, with a touch as fine as the brush of a butterfly's wing and a stroke as bold and resistless as the sweep of a cataract. It is no longer a clumsy, blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as your hand and as conscious as your touch. You seem to have developed a new member, far-reaching, with the edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell a forest of stalwart grasses.

And as the intimacy grows you note how the action simplifies itself. The violent stabbings and discords are resolved into a harmony as serene as a pastoral symphony. You feel the rhythm taking shape, and as it develops the body becomes captive to its own task. You are no longer manipulating a tool. You and the tool have become magically one, fused in a common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward on its own strong, swimming stroke. The mind, released, stands aloof in a sort of delighted calm, rejoicing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have a conscious part, noting the bold swing of the body backwards for the stroke (the blade lightly skimming the ground, as the oar gently flatters the water in its return), the delicate play of the wrist as the scythe comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke is true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards that carries it clear, the dip of the blade that leaves the swathe behind, the moderate, timely, exact movement of the feet preparatory to the next stroke, the low, musical hum of the vibrating steel. A frog hops out in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among the deep grasses. You hope he won't get in the way of that terrible finger, but you are drunk with the rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its imperious current. You are no longer a man, but a motion. The frog must take his chance. Swish—swish—swish——