Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and
unencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple house
is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs of
shadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to be
offered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in a
vase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is better
than a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop.
The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into line
and intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to the
mind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single;
it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seen
again, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shifts
the interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing of
time, though all the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon its
importunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, that
do not pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure,
while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours wheel.
Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing
southward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in the
sudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shed
by a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betrays
the flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes the
midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and is
about to alight on an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, with
which you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room,
play the stealthy game of the year.
You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs but
four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyant
jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetrical
countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with one
another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greys
darkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a
"repeating pattern."
It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the
walls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a plaque or a
picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room once
for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the
days.
Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows
which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see little
except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--be the day bright
enough--compose the very air through which you see the light. The trees
show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the
shining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness of
every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine
have been entangled as though by some wild wind through their million
molecules.
The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded
sun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and are
themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.
To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks
still and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for so many
hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished.
Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long
sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow. Although there may
be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no
noonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and
their life will be carried across by a brilliant bird.
To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see
its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but darken
his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it
pluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. What
flash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash of
darkness?
It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. If
he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's shadow
was a message from the sun.
There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of
the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This goes
across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while
in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs,
quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and dry
grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and
clings.
In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, about
Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are the
movement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to make
a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white
sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs is
always a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go all
ways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern
fields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high that
though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the
light of the earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them,
and they fly between lights.
Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift as
dreams," at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, and
ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside by
degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until
there comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadows
close, complete.
The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have traced
wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have
fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement
of her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earth
that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.