The Hive

by Will Levington Comfort

The child is but seven—that is, her body and brain are but seven. Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheat bread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning—a last jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray—all miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking sombre and wrathful in the distance.

Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a grove of white beeches—lingering gold on the vines at the window, the murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle begins to sing, and the mother hovers over—a kind of sacred rite, all this—then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and France are in the room. Tearoses—some daughter of poetry must have named them.

... Still I am telling you about things—not about them. I thought I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ... sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the hushes between.... I must get down to earth again. I must begin with the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned up to me from the frowning clay....

I should like to report them moment by moment—to make you see, but there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that first night, I contemplated the North America of the future—a kind of dream that nestles within a dream—the Great Companions, superb men and women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made cigarette—not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned drowsy—opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and sweet as a new-woven basket.

... I awoke to low singing. The room was grey and seemed to lift with me, and the walls to widen. It was as if I had caught the old house just waking from a sleep of its own. The phenomenon of the singing lived in my mind. I don't know the song—a rapid bird-like improvisation possibly—two voices hushed, but a vibration of clear liquid joy. I went to the window. The earth was still asleep—a pearl-grey world of dripping trees in a kind of listening ecstasy—two beings below on the lawn—a lawn that was grey with dew. It was like looking down upon a cloud from the Matterhorn. These two beings—one in a veil of rose, one in a veil of gold—were dancing upon the cloud, dancing bare-armed and limbed, their voices interpreting some soft harmony that seemed to come from the break of day upon the sphere.

It was not for me—yet I could not draw back from the vines. I brought only thankfulness to it—sharing the joy in the dim of a room, in the dim of a mere man's heart. Yet all I could contain came to me from the mother and child. They knelt in the grass, the song more hushed, bringing up to their faces and shoulders hands that dripped with the holy distillations of the night—a wash in dew and day, their song a prayer, their dance a sacred rite.... I should have thought it the gift of dreams, but there was a starry track of deep green across the lawn, where their bare feet had broken the sheen of dew.

... I dwelt with souls—that was the truth. I sat at breakfast with souls, dew-washed, speaking to each other and to me from that long road of life which we lose for a squalid by-way when we put on the garments of the world.... They talked again about what the birds hear in the morning. They said that what the birds sing is their interpretation of the great song of daybreak—that the earth does not meet her Lord Sun in silence.... And then I knew that the song I heard was their interpretation—think of it—a child of seven eating buttered toast.

And I knew that power is a song—that the singing of the kettle is the song of steam, that the inimitable t'sing of an electric burner when the current first charges through, is the awakening song of steel and carbon to their native capacity and direction. The same is in the heart of a boy when he finds his task—the same is in the order of a master and in the making of his poem.... These two hear it—the song of Mother Earth as the floods of light pour out and over her from the East.

Here was a mother who knew how to play. She had launched somehow into a sphere of her own making—doubtless having found life of the world insupportable. I had thought much about bringing up children, about unfolding the child, and here it was being worked out with brimming joy.... It was all too natural to be called education. It was nature—it was liberation, rather—a new and higher meaning of naturalness.

I was almost afraid to speak. The life here seemed so delicate and delightful that comments would bruise the fine form of it.... They played together—that was the point. Play is a liberation of force—great play is ecstasy. In it one rises to the stillness of production, wherein one bathes in mystery and potency and all commonness is cleansed away. Those who reach this stillness are the great beings of the world.