David Blaize and the Blue Door

by E. F. Benson

The birds carry up David
to get his flying certificate

David saw he was not wanted any more; besides he belonged to them now, and understood how busy they were. So he put his precious certificate in his pocket and flew off, like a swift, without moving arms or legs and only balancing and turning in the air. You just had to move your head first, and all the rest followed. You thought what you wanted to do, and you were doing it. . . .

He spent an hour or two in the air, and then, as his arms were getting a little stiff with the new sort of exercise, and he was thirsty, he swooped down to the edge of the lake to get a drink and have a rest. As he touched ground a moorhen came out from under the bank, in an awful fright at a boy being there whom he hadn’t seen coming. But then he opened his red mouth, laughed, and came splashing and flying back again.

‘It’s only the new bird-boy, my dear,’ he said to his wife. ‘I didn’t recognise him at first. Tired of flying, David?’

David laughed.

‘Only just for the minute,’ he said. ‘Oh, I’m having the nicest time I ever had since I came through the blue door. I am so thirsty, too!’

He lay down on the bank, with his head over the edge, and was scarcely surprised to find that the lake tasted like the most delicious lemonade, with ice and plenty of sugar. Then he lay back in the long grass, and listened to the birds talking, and the sap humming in the growing herbs. Just in front of him was the lake, and beyond that the garden of his own home and the house. But he was no longer afraid that he was back in the ordinary world again, though he was in the ordinary places. He had gone through the blue door, and his eyes and ears were opened to thousands of things he had never seen before in those familiar places. All the colours were infinitely brighter than they had ever been, and there were new sounds in the air, and new scents.

It was puzzling to know what time of the year it was (not that it mattered). Birds were building, so it should be spring, and yet the sun was as hot as any summer sun he had ever known, and some of the trees had turned red, as happened in the autumn, and the steep hill beyond the house was covered with dazzling white snow, so that he could toboggan if he liked. It seemed as if all the nicest things of all the seasons were gathered together into this one morning, and he wanted to look at them all, and explore the places he knew so well, which looked so much more lovely than he had ever known them. So presently, when he had rested, he flew across the lake in the manner of the moorhen, with his feet dabbling in the water, and landed on the lawn at the other side.

The flower-beds were absolutely covered with blossoms; not a trace of the dull brown earth was to be seen. Then a breeze came up from the lake, and set the flowers swinging on their stalks. But they did not swing quite in the ordinary way, for the stalks stopped still, and only the flowers themselves swung. Farther and farther they swung, this way and that, and then the sound of bells began to come out of them. The Canterbury bells and the campanulas began, because they were professional bells, but by degrees everything else joined in, lilies and roses and hollyhocks and lupins, and love-lies-a-bleeding, and every other flower that you can imagine, for they were all in blossom together this morning. Little tiny chimes, like the note of musical boxes, came from the violets, so soft that David had to put his ear among their leaves to hear them, and the loudest notes of all seemed to come from the sunflowers, but they were more like the clashing of big golden cymbals.

David listened a long time in a sort of ecstasy of pleasure, and then this pealing got somehow into his bones, and he had to do something joyful too. But as he could not make a bell of himself, he must throw himself into the air, and poise like a hawk hovering, flapping his arms all the time, and stopping in the same place, and then he skimmed away with arms quite still and stretched taut, and flew over the roof of his house so close that, the tips of his fingers touched one of the chimney-stacks. Then for a long while he made an eagle-flight, going in wide circles, without moving his arms, and mounting higher and higher till the earth grew small and dim below him, and the sound of the bell-flowers died away, and he seemed to be the only thing that existed in this great blue desert of air. Of all his adventures since he came through the blue door, this was the most delightful.