AN AIR RAID SEEN FROM ABOVE
The moonlight lay like cream upon the pavement when the witch and
Harold her broomstick left the Higgins' doorstep. London was a still
Switzerland in silver and star-grey, unblotted by people. There was a
hint of pale green about the moonlight, and the lamps with their dim
light downcast were like daffodils in faery fields.
The witch mounted. Harold, who was every inch a thoroughbred and very
highly strung, trembled beneath her, but not with fear. They reached
Piccadilly Circus with supernatural speed, and flashed across it. The
sound of people singing desultorily while taking shelter in the Tube
floated up to them. Here the witch said "Yoop" to Harold, and he reared
and shot upwards, narrowly missing the statue of One In A Bus-catching
Attitude, which marks the middle of the Circus.
As soon as the witch had out-distanced the noise of expectant London,
she heard quite distinctly the approach of London's guests. They came
with a chorus of many notes, all deep and dangerous.
There were a few clouds wandering about among the stars, and to one of
these the witch and her faithful Harold repaired. A cloud gives quite
reasonable support to magic people, and most witches and wizards have
discovered the delight of paddling knee-deep about those quicksilver
continents. They wander along shining and changing valleys under a most
ardent sky; they climb the purple thunderclouds, or launch the first
snowflake of a blizzard; they spring from pink stepping-stone to pink
stepping-stone of clouds each no bigger than a baby's hand, across great
sunsets. Often when in London I am battling with a barrage of rain, or
falling over unseen strangers into gutters during fogs, I think happily
of the sunlit roof of cloud above my head, and of the witches and
wizards, lying on their backs with their coats off, among cloud-meadows
in a glory of perfect summer and sun.
The witch, with one soothing hand on the bristling mane of her Harold,
lay on her front on the cloud she had chosen, and looked down through a
little hole in it. It was practically the only cloud present that would
have afforded reasonable cover; the others were mere wisps of sky-weed
floating in the moonlight.
There was a greater chorus of aeroplanes below her now; the whole sky
was ringing with it. The witch could hear a deep bass-voiced machine, a
baritone, a quavering tenor, and--thin and sharp as a pin--a little
treble sound that made Harold rear and struggle to be free.
"Another witch," said the witch. "I was wondering why the Huns hadn't
got their magic organised by now." She mounted her Harold and slipped
off the cloud.
The guns were shouting now, and the shells wailed and burst not so very
far below them, but Harold trembled no longer. More quickly than a
falling star he swooped, and in a second the alien witch was in sight,
an unwieldy figure whose broomstick sounded rather broken-winded,
probably owing to the long-distance flight and to the fourteen stone of
Teutonic magic on its back. There was a wicked-looking apparatus
attached to the collar of the German broomstick, obviously designed to
squirt unpleasant enchantments downward. This contrivance was apparently
giving some trouble, for the German was so busy attending to it that at
first she did not see or hear the approach of Harold and his rider. She
was aroused to her danger by a heavy chunk of magic which struck and
nearly unseated her. In a second, however, she was ready with a parrying
enchantment, and the fight began. The two broomsticks reared and circled
round each other, and over and under each other. From their riders'
finger-tips magic of the most explosive kind crackled, and incantations
of such potency were exchanged that, I am told, the tiles and
chimney-pots of the streets below suffered a good deal. Round and round
and over and under whirled the broomsticks, till the very spaces went
mad, and London seemed to rush down nightmare slopes into a stormy sky,
while its lights swung from pole to pole and were entangled with the
stars.
Both broomsticks were by now so uproariously excited that neither witch
was able to aim her magic missiles very carefully, and indeed it was not
long before Harold passed entirely beyond control. After bucking
violently once or twice, he gave a wild high cry that was like the wind
howling through the fierce forest past of his race, and fell upon the
other broomstick, fixing his bristles into its throat. The shock of the
collision was too much for both witches. Our witch--if I may call her
so--was shot over Harold's head, and landed on the ample breast of her
adversary, who, in consequence, lost her balance. They fell together
into space.
"Oh, lost, lost, ..." cried our witch, and thoughts rushed through her
mind of green safe places, and old safe years, and the little hut in a
pale bluebell wood, where she was born. She had time to remember the
blue ground, dimpled and starred with sunlight, and the way the bees
pulled over the bluebells and swung on them to the tune of cuckoos in a
May mist; she had time to think of the green globe ghosts of the
bluebells that haunted the wood after the spring was dead. Bluebells and
being young were in all her thoughts, and it was some time before she
noticed how slowly she and her enemy were falling.
For they were locked together. And the enemy witch's cloak, an orthodox
witch cloak except for its colour, which was German field-grey instead
of red, was spread out like a parachute, and was supporting them upon
their peaceful and almost affectionate descent.
For all I know they might have alighted gently in the Strand, and the
authorities might by now be regretting the capture of a most
embarrassing and unaccountable prisoner. But something intervened. The
cloud, like a sheep suffering from the lack of other sheep to follow,
had not yet quitted the scene. The witches' battle had tended upward,
and it had ended several hundred feet above the level of the cloud,
which was apparently sinking. The downward course of the combatants'
fall was therefore arrested, and they found themselves still
interlocked, prostrate and embedded, with their eyes and mouths full of
woolly wisps of cloud.
Our witch was the first to recover herself. She stood up and brushed
herself, remarking: "By jove, that parachute cloak of yours is a great
dodge. I wish I'd thought of it. I always keep my full-dress togs put
away, like the ass that I am. A stitch or two, and a few lengths of
whalebone would have done the trick."
The German was an older woman, and less adaptable to the strange chances
of War. She was silent for a few minutes, seated in the small crater
made in the cloud by her fall. She was not exactly ugly. She had the
sort of face about which one could not help feeling that one could have
done it better oneself, or at least that one could have taken more
trouble. It seemed moulded--even kneaded--carelessly, in very soft
material. Beneath her open cloak her dress was of the ordinary German
_Reform-Kleid_ type, and her figure had the rather jelloid appearance of
those who affect this style. Her regulation witch's hat was by now,
probably, in the Serpentine, and her round head was therefore disclosed,
with two stout sand-coloured plaits pursuing each other round it.
The witches faced each other for some seconds. A long way away they
could hear the spitting and crackling sound of the two broomsticks
fighting. Looking up, they could see the combatants, like black comets
in collision. Our witch, who had good sight, saw that the enemy
broomstick was upper-most, and that the writhing Harold was being shaken
like a mouse. Their bristles were interlocked. One twig floated down
between the witches, and our witch recognised it as coming from her poor
Harold's mane. As, for this purpose, she brought her eyes to her
immediate surroundings, it seemed to her suddenly that the sky was
growing larger, and then she realised that this was because their refuge
was growing smaller. The edges of the cloud were dissolving. She saw at
last her peril and her disadvantage. If Harold should be killed or
disabled she could never reach the earth again, except by means of a
fatal fall of several thousand feet. The enemy witch, with her
ingenious cloak contrivance strapped securely about her, stood a
reasonable chance of escape. But our witch was an amateur in War, she
was without support, forlornly dressed in her faithful blue serge
three-year-old, and her little squirrel tippet.
Magic, as you know, has limitations. Fire is of course a plaything in
magic hands. Water has its docile moments, the earth herself may be
tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions
to attention. But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable
Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world. There is no
power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost
between us and the moon, and all magic people know--and tremble to
know--that in a breath, between one second and another, that Hand may
close, and the shell of time first crack and then be crushed, and magic
be one with nothingness and death and all other delusions. This is why
magic, which treats the other elements as its servants, bows before
space, and has to call such a purely independent contrivance as a
broomstick to its help in the matter of air-travel.
The witches faced each other on their little unstable sanctuary in the
kingdom of space. Our witch felt secretly sick, and at the same time she
tore fear from her mind, and knew that death was but an imperfectly kept
secret, and that not an evil one. After all, we have condemned it
unheard.
Both witches could talk a magic tongue, and make themselves mutually
understood. Neither knew the other's natural tongue. But when our witch
noticed several large ferocious tears rolling down her opponent's
cheeks, she was able, by means of magic, to say: "Great Scott, my good
person, what are you crying for?"
"I am not crying," replied the German witch. "I would not allow one tear
of mine to fall upon and water one possible grain of wheat in this
accursed country of yours. Certainly I am not crying."
"Accursed country?" echoed the astounded English witch. "How d'you
mean--accursed? This is England, you know. England hasn't done anything
accursed. Aren't you muddling it up with Germany?"
"England is the World Enemy," said the German, evidently pleased to meet
someone to whom this information was fresh. "Throughout the ages she has
been the Robber State, crushing the weaker nations, adding to her own
wealth by treachery, and now forcing this war of aggression upon her
peace-loving neighbours."
Our witch laughed. She was forgetting her danger. "This is really rather
funny," she said. "Do you know what's happened? You've been reading the
_Daily Mail_ and misunderstanding it. The whole of that quotation
applied to Germany, not England. It's Germany that's being naughty. You
made a mistake, but never mind, I won't repeat it."
The German took no notice of this. The past three years had made her an
adept in taking no notice.
"And now," she added. "After all these weary months of hoping, and
long-distance broomstick practice, and of parachute practice, and of
conflict with narrow officialdom, I have come--and this is the result. I
am separated from my broomstick, which has all the germ-bombs hanging
from its collar--the germs are those of dissension and riot--I am
marooned upon an English cloud, with no enemy at my mercy but a paltry
and treacherous non-combatant----"
"At your mercy," breathed our witch, remembering. She looked up. The
broomsticks were closer now, and through the breathless air, amidst the
dream-like firing of the guns below, she could hear the difficult
gasping of the hard-pressed Harold, still fighting bravely but with
hardly a twig on his head.
The tide of space was coming in. The edge of the cloud was barely six
inches from her hand. Our witch's mind overflowed with the thought of
invasions and the coming in of tides. It seemed that all her life she
had been living on a narrowing shore. She remembered all her dawns as
precarious footholds of peace on a threatened rock, and all her evenings
as golden sands sloping down into encroaching sleep. She realised
Everything as a little hopeless garrison against the army of Nothing.
She clutched a pinch of cloud nervously, and it broke off in her hand.
She recalled her senses with a devastating effort.
"Do you mean to say," she said, after a moment, "that poor dear Germany
really believes that she is right and we are wrong? I suppose, when you
come to think of it, a man-eating tiger feels the same way. It fights
with a high heart, and a hot reproach, just as we do----"
"We are Crusaders," said the German. "Crusaders at War with Evil."
"Why, how funny--so are we," said our witch. "But then how very peculiar
that two Crusaders should apparently be fighting each other. Where then
is the Evil? In No Man's Land?"
"We are fighting," recited the German glibly, "because England is the
World Enemy. Throughout the ages she has been the Rob----"
There was a violent explosion quite close to them, and the cloud reeled
and shook. About a foot of the German end of it broke off and was
dissolved.
"We're within range of our guns," said our witch, looking down. "This
cloud must be sinking."
"It will never sink enough to save you," said the German, trying to
conceal the nervousness with which she rearranged her rigid-looking
cloak round her. She seemed to be sinking herself to a certain extent;
perhaps the warmth of her emotions was melting the cloud beneath her.
Certainly she now sat, apparently squat as an idol, her figure submerged
in cloud to the waist.
The English witch looked down, singing a little to keep up her _morale_.
London looked exactly like the maps you buy for sixpence from
sad-looking gentlemen in the Strand, only it was sown with a thin crop
of lights, and was chiefly designed in grey and darker grey, and the
Tubes did not show so indecently. With surprising clearness the rhythmic
whispering of the trains and the scanty traffic could be heard, and once
even the shrill characteristic voice of an ambulance. Somehow space did
not seem disturbed by these sounds; its quietness pressed upon the
listeners' minds like a heavy dream, and there was no real believing in
anything but space. Our witch felt she could have smudged London off the
face of space with her finger, and the thought of seven million lives
involved in the fate of that sliding chart carried no conviction to her.
She forced into her mind the realisation of humanity, and of little
lives lived in little rooms.
"As one Crusader to another," she said, "do you find it does much good
in the war against Evil to drop bombs on people in their homes? After
all, every baby is good in bed, and even soldiers when on leave are
anti-militarist."
"It always does good to exterminate vermin in their lair," said the
German, trying restlessly to raise herself more to the level of her
lighter companion, who was still perched on the surface of the cloud.
"It is at home that Evil is originated, it is at home that English women
conceive and bear a new generation of enemies of the Right, it is at
home that English children are bred up in their marauding ways. It is
on the home, the vital place of Evil, that the scourge should fall."
"Oh, but surely not," said our witch eagerly. "It is at home that people
are kindly and think what they will have for supper, and bathe their
babies. Men come home when they are hurt or hungry, and women when they
are lonely or tired. Nobody is taught anything stupid or international
at home. You can bring death to a home, but never a righteous scourge.
Nobody feels scourged or instructed by a bomb in their parlour, they
just feel dead, and dead without a reason."
The cloud was very small now. The filmy edges of it were faintly rising
and falling like the seaweed frill of a rock in the sea. The witch kept
her eyes on her opponent's face, because to look anywhere else gave her
a white feeling in her head.
"Crusades of the high explosive kind," she said, "can work only on
battle-fields. Indeed, even on battle-fields--ah, what are we about,
what are we about? We are neither of us killing Evil, we are killing
youth...."
"I know, I know," wept the German witch. "My wizard fell at Vimy
Ridge...."
"You are talking magic at last," said our witch. "Dear witch, why don't
you go home and ask how it can be a good plan for one Crusader against
Evil to blow up another? How can two people be righteously scourging
each other at the same time? It is like the old problem of two serpents
eating each other, starting at the tail. There must be some
misunderstanding somewhere. Or else some real Evil somewhere."
"There is," said the German, recovering herself. "England is Evil.
England is the World Enemy. Throughout the ages she has been the Robber
State, crushing----"
But she had little luck. Once more she was interrupted by an explosion,
a much louder one, directly above them. Our witch hardly heard the
noise; she seemed suddenly to have found the climax of her life, and the
climax was pain. There was pain and a feeling of terrible change all
over her, smothering her, and a super-pain in her shoulder. After a
second or two as long as death, she realised dimly that she was all
tensely strung to an attitude, like a marionette. Her hands were up
trying to shield her head, her chin was pressed down to her drawn-up
knees. Her blue serge shoulder was extraordinarily wet and immovable.
She looked along the cloud. Her enemy was not there. There was a round
hole in the cloud, and as she leaned painfully towards it, she could see
a few of the lights of London, and something falling spasmodically
towards them.
The cloud had been shaken to its foundations by the two explosions, and
the German witch, who had been seated perhaps on a seam in the material,
or at any rate on one of the less stable parts of the fabric, had fallen
through. Her parachute cloak, in passing through the hole in the cloud,
had been turned inside out above her head, and rendered useless. Over
and about her falling figure her broomstick darted helplessly, uttering
curious sad cries, like a seagull's.
Even as the English witch watched her enemy's disaster, the larger part
of the cloud, weakened by all the shock and movement, broke away with a
hissing sound. The witch's feet hung now over space, she dared not move;
she had difficulty in steadying herself with her unwounded arm, for her
hand could find only a quicksand of dissolving cloud to lean on. She had
no thoughts left but thoughts of danger and of pain.
But Harold the Broomstick came back. The witch heard a rustling sound
close to her, and it startled her more than all the noise of the guns,
which had come, as it seemed, from the forgotten other side of eternity.
The rough head of Harold appeared over the cloud's edge, and insinuated
itself pathetically under her arm. Very carefully and very painfully the
witch reached a kneeling position, damaging her refuge with every
movement in spite of her care. She gasped with pain, and Harold tried to
look very strong and hopeful to comfort her. He straightened his back,
and she crawled into the saddle. The tremor of their launching split the
cloud into several parts, which disintegrated. There was no more
foot-hold on it; the tide had come up and submerged it.
Harold the Broomstick was crippled, he stumbled as he flew, sometimes he
dropped a score of feet, and span. He did stunts by mistake.
They had not strength enough between them to get home. They made a
forced landing in the silver loneliness of Kensington Gardens. It was a
fortunate place, for there is much magic there. Wherever there are
children who pretend, there grows a little magic in the air, and
therefore the wind of Kensington Gardens thrills with enchantment, and
the Round Pond, full of much pretence of great Armadas, crossed and
re-crossed with the abiding wakes of ships full of treasure and romance,
is a blessed lake to magic people.
The witch bathed Harold, her broomstick, in the Round Pond. He evidently
felt its healing quality at once, for after the first minute of
immersion, he swam about exultantly, and shook drops full of moonlight
out of his mane.
The bugles sounded All-clear in many keys all round the ear's horizon;
their sound matched the waning moonlight.
The witch bathed her shoulder, and then she found her way to a little
quiet place she knew of, where no park-keeper ever looks, a place where
secret and ungardened daffodils grow in springtime, a place where all
the mice and birds play unafraid, because no cat can find the way
thither. You can see the Serpentine from that place, and the bronze
shadows under its bridge, but no houses, and no railways, and no signs
of London.
Here the witch made a little fire, and leaned three sticks together over
it; she lighted the fire with her finger-tip and hung over it the little
patent folding cauldron, which she always carried on a chatelaine
swinging from her belt. And she made a charm of daisy-heads, and
spring-smelling grasses, and the roots of unappreciated weeds, and the
mosses that cover the tiny faery cliffs of the Serpentine. Over the
mixture she shook out the contents of one of her little paper packets of
magic. All this she boiled over her fire for many hours, sitting beside
it in the silver darkness, with her knees drawn up and her hands clasped
in front of them. The trees sprang up into the moonlight like dark
fountains from the pools of their own shadows. Little shreds of cloud
flowed wonderfully across the sky. There was no sound except the sound
of the water, like an uncertain player upon a little instrument. The
charm was still unfinished when the dawn passed over London, and the sun
came up, the seed of another day, sown in a rich red soil. The trees of
the Gardens remembered their daylight shadows again, and forgot their
mystery. The water-birds, after examining their shoulder-blades with
minute care for some moments, launched themselves upon a lake of
diamonds. There seemed a veil of mist and bird-song over the world. The
sudden song of the birds was like finding the hearing of one's heart
restored, after long deafness.
The witch anointed her shoulder with the charm, after having first made
a drop of potion out of the bubbles in it. This potion she drank, and
was healed of her wound and her weariness, and of all desires except a
desire to sleep with her face among the daffodils. She was the most
beautifully alone person in the world that morning; nobody could have
found her. A thin string of very blue smoke went up from her faint fire
and was tangled among the boughs of a flowering tree, but the coarse eye
of a park-keeper could never have seen it. She had escaped from the net
of the cruel hours; for her the stained world was washed clean; for her
all horror held its breath; for her there was absolute spring, and an
innocent sun, and the shadows of daffodils upon closed eyes....