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THE PROMISE OF AIR
by
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
Author of 'The Education of Uncle Paul,' 'A Prisoner in Fairyland,'
'The Centaur,' Etc.
Macmillan and Co., Limited
St Martin's Street, London
1918
TO M. S.=K. (1913)
CHAPTER I
Joseph Wimble was the only son of an analytical chemist, who, having made
considerable profits out of an Invisible Sticking Plaster, sent the boy to
Charterhouse and Cambridge in the hope that he would turn out a gentleman.
When Joseph left Cambridge his father left business, referred to himself
as Expert, used a couple of letters after his name, and suggested making
the Grand Tour of Europe together as a finishing touch. 'To talk
familiarly of Rome and Vienna and Constantinople as though you knew them,'
he explained, 'is a useful thing. It helps one with the women, and to be
helped by women in life is half the battle.' His ambitions for his son
were considerable, including above all a suitable marriage. The abrupt
destruction of these ambitions, accordingly, was so bitter a
disappointment that he felt justified in giving the lad a nominal sum and
mentioning that he had better shift for himself. For Joseph married
secretly the daughter of a Norfolk corn-chandler, announcing the news to
his father upon the very eve of starting for the Grand Tour.
Joseph found himself with 500 pounds and a wife.
Joseph himself was of that placid temperament to which things in life just
came and went apparently without making very deep impressions. He was a
careless, indifferent sort of fellow even as a boy, careless of
consequences, indifferent to results: not irresponsible, yet very
easy-going. There was no intensity in him; he did not realise things.
'Oh, it's much the same to me,' would be his reply to most proposals.
'I'd as soon as not.' There was something fluid in his nature that
accepted life nonchalantly, as if all things were one to him; yet, again,
not that he was devoid of feeling or desires, but that he did not realise
life in the solid way of the majority. At school he did not realise that
he was what the world calls 'not quite a gentleman,' although the boys
made a point of proving it to him. At Cambridge he did not realise that
to pass his Little-go, or acquire the letters B.Sc., was of any
importance, although various learned and older men received good pay in
order to convince him of the fact. He just went along in a loose,
careless, big-hearted way of living, and took whatever came--exactly as it
came. He had a delightful smile and put on fat; shared his money with one
and all; existed in a methodical way as most other fellows of his age
existed, and grew older much as they did. So ordinary was he in fact, so
little distinguished from the rest of his kind, that men who knew him well
would stop and think when questioned if they numbered Joseph Wimble among
their acquaintances. 'Wimble, lemme see--oh yes, of course! Why, I've
known him for a couple of years!' That was Joseph Wimble. Only it made
no difference to him whether they remembered him or not. He behaved
rather as if everything was one to him in a very literal sense; as if the
whole bewildering kaleidoscope of life conveyed a single vast impression;
there was no reason to get excited over particular details; in the end it
was literally all one. His smattering of physics taught him that all
things could be expressed, more or less, in terms of one another.
That was his attitude, at any rate. 'Take it as a whole,' he would say
vaguely, 'and it's all right. It's all the same.'
Yet his indifference to things was not so colourless as it appeared; but
was due, perhaps, to the transference of his interests elsewhere.
His centre of gravity hardly seemed on earth is one way of expressing it.
Behind the apparent stolidity hid something that danced and sang;
something almost flighty. It was laborious explanation that he dreaded
and despised, as though things capable of being 'explained' were of small
importance to him. He was eager to know things he wanted to know, yet in
a way he was too intensely curious, too impatient certainly, to put
himself to much trouble to find out. He refused to work, to 'grind' he
knew not how; yet he absorbed a good deal of knowledge; information came
to him, as it were. He figured to himself vaguely that there was another
surer way of learning than by memorising detail,--a flashing, darting,
sudden way, like the way of a bird. To follow a line of information to
its bitter end was a wearisome, stultifying business, the reality he
sought was lost sight of in the process. The main idea had interest for
him, but not the details, for the details blurred and obscured it.
Proof was a stupid word that blocked his faculties. He did not despise or
reject it exactly, but he refused to recognise it. In a sense he
overlooked it. Of answers to the important questions millions have been
asking for thousands of years there was no proof obtainable. Of survival,
for instance, or the existence of the soul, there was no 'proof,' yet for
that very reason he believed in both. He could 'prove' a stone, a tree, a
dog. He could name and weigh and describe it. The senses of hearing,
sight, and touch reported upon it, yet these reports he knew to be but
vibrations of the respective nerves that brought them to his brain.
They were at best indirect reports, and at worst referred to a mere
collection of unverified appearances. Logic, too, the backbone of
philosophy, affected him with weariness, just as his respect for reason
was shockingly undeveloped. And argument could prove anything, hence
argument for him was also futile. He jumped to the conclusion always.
Thus at school, and even more at Cambridge, he liked to know what other
fellows thought and believed, but as a whole and in outline only.
A general idea of 'what and why' was enough for him--just to catch the
drift.
This faculty of catching the drift of any knowledge that he cared about
came to him naturally, as it seemed. They called him talented but lazy;
for he took the cream off; he swooped like a bird, caught it flying, and
was off upon another quest. Since there was no real proof of any of the
important things, why toil to master the tedious arguments and facts of
either side? There was somewhere a swifter, lighter way of knowing
things, a direct and instantaneous way. He was sure of it. Thus the
ordinary things of life he did not realise--quite as other people realised
them. They passed him by.
One thing and one only, it seemed, he desired to realise, and that was
birds. It was a passion in him, a mania. He had a yearning desire to
understand the mystery of bird-life--not ornithology but _birds_.
Anything to do with birds changed the expression of his face at once; the
fat and placid indifference gave way to an emotion that, judging by his
expression, caused him a degree of wonder that was almost worship, of
happiness nearly painful. Their intense vitality inspired him, their
equality stirred respect. Anything to do with their flight, their songs,
their eggs, their habits fascinated him. And this fascination he
realised. He indulged it furiously, if of necessity secretly, since to
study bird-life fields and hedges must be visited without company.
But here again he took no particular pains, it seemed. As is usual with
an overmastering tendency, his knowledge of his subject was instinctive.
Before he went to Charterhouse he knew the size and colouring of every egg
that ever lay in a British nest, and by the time he left that school he
could imitate with marvellous accuracy the singing notes and whistles of
any bird he had heard once. He devoured books about them, studied their
differing ways of flight, knew every nest within a radius of miles about
his house in a given neighbourhood, and above all was moved to a kind of
ecstasy of wonder over the magic of their annual migration. That in
particular touched him into poetry. He thought dumbly about it, but his
imagination stirred. Inarticulateness increased his accumulating store of
wonder. The Grand Tour! Rome, Vienna, Constantinople, indeed! What were
the capitals of Europe compared to the Southern Tour _they_ made!
That deep instinct to hurry after the fading sun, to keep in touch with
their source of life, to follow colour, heat, light, and beauty.
That vast autumnal flight! The marvel of the great return, entranced by
the southern sun, intoxicated with the music of the southern winds!
That such tiny bodies could dare four thousand miles of trackless space,
travelling for the most part in the darkness, carelessly carrying nothing
with them, and rush back in the spring to the very copse or hedgerow left
six months before--that was a source of endless wonder to his mind.
There was pathos and loneliness in their absence. England seemed empty
once the birds had flown. The sky was dead without the swallows. Of
course the land was dark and silent when they left, and of course it burst
into colour, rhythm, movement, and singing when they showered back upon it
in the spring!
The sweet passion of woodland music caught his heart. He realised that
birds had a secret and mysterious life of their very own, and that the
world they lived in was a happy and desirable world. That strange
knowledge at a distance men called instinct, puzzled him. A new method of
communication belonged to it too. It had its laws and customs, its joys
and terrors, its habits, rules, and purposes; but these all were strangely
different from anything that solid earth-life knew. Freedom, light, and
swiftness were the characteristics of that existence, and joy its
outstanding quality. Its universal telepathy exhilarated. No other
beings in the universe expressed themselves naturally by singing.
The Kingdom of the Air became for him a symbol of an existence higher than
anything on the earth; air stood for a condition that at present was
beyond the reach of humanity, but that humanity one day would achieve.
His imagination figured this glorious accomplishment as the next stage in
evolution. A clever poet might have made Joseph Wimble the hero of an
original fairy tale, in which he lived and suffered heavily on solid
ground, eternal type of the exile, vainly yearning for his natural
element, the air. For exile was in it; he claimed the knowledge of the
air as a familiar experience. He felt that he knew and understood the air
instinctively; he belonged 'up there'; he had nested in the trees, perched
on some topmost twig, had balanced in the breeze, and sung his heart out
from sheer joy of living; he had even flown.
This was doubtless a mental exercise, an imaginative flight. It all
seemed familiar to him, long, long ago, before this enormous physical
frame had walled him down to the ground and weight had handicapped
aspiration so distressingly. He looked at his body in the glass and
sighed. 'There's something wrong,' he realised. 'Why should I need such
a mass of stuff to function through? I'm supposed to be more intelligent
than animals or things.' He thought of a swift--and sighed. Size and
weight were so out of proportion to the role he played on earth.
The smaller forms of life were far less handicapped; a flea, a beetle were
a thousand times stronger relatively than a human being, whereas a little
bird----It all left him inarticulate. He was always inarticulate.
Dumbly he yearned for air; desired, that is, the mental attitude of one to
whom free swift movement in the air was natural; and the intensity of the
yearning--the one thing he fully realised--_must_ some day produce a
result. The beauty of an air-life hid in his blood. It expressed the
ultimate yearning of his very soul.
'The next stage of the world is air,' he imagined with some part of his
intelligence that never could articulately clothe the dream in language.
'We shall never be happy and right until we know the air as birds do.
We've learned all the earth has got to teach us. There's a new age
coming--a new element its key: Air!'
Earth, ever sweet and beautiful, was in the main, however, chiefly useful
only. Somehow he no longer felt the need of it.
The unreality of objective knowledge, the limitations of the human
intellect afflicted him. He thought of the barren sterility of learned
minds, sacked tight with this objective information about the clothes of
the universe, yet uninformed concerning the living personality that wears
them. The scholars and collectors had no joy; they never sang.
He thought hard about it. He tried to state to himself what he meant in
clear words. It was difficult. Already he thought in terms of air--
transparent, everywhere at once, radiant and flashing. He experienced a
completeness and a buoyancy that denied the accepted rule that two and two
make four. Two and two, of course, did make four on earth and in the
nursery or the nest. But somehow in the air--they just didn't. There was
no two and two at all. They didn't exist. It was some kind of
synthetical air-knowledge that he sought.
'Earth is divisible--divided,' he said to himself. 'It has details,
separate objects, definite divisions into stones and things. But in the
air there is no division. Air is homogeneous--not as the physicist's gas,
but as an expression of space.' In the air, or rather of the air, two and
two make four became not false exactly, but impossible. It could not be
said. Earth is not continuous, but broken up; it belongs to time and
time's divisions of the nursery. Earth is an expression of separateness.
Even water has drops, fluid and cohering though it is. Air has no drops.
There are no drops of air. There are currents, streams and surfaces, all
undetailed. Earth, he felt, belonged to time and time's divisions where
two and two made four. But air was of another category altogether, and
not of time at all. Air was one.
It explained his indifference to earth. Though fastened physically like
every one else to the ground, his inmost being lived in the air already,
and some day he would meet a person who would explain and justify this
extraordinary yearning. He was aware of this expectancy in him, for the
craving to become articulate produced it. He needed a mate, of course.
Together, somehow, their deep desire would find expression. He would
become articulate through her. And suddenly, with a kind of abrupt
surprise that belongs to birds, he found her.
The surprising way he found her, too, was characteristic. They floated,
if not flew, into each other's arms.