Leaves in the Wind Part 16

yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.

But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting. It is probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit immensely. He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous mind. I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child and as fondly as a parent. For among his mult.i.tudinous activities he experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish. Why, asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things?

What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons? And Benjamin made the immortal reply, "What is the use of a new-born baby?" If he is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his "new-born baby"

has grown to. He will be astonished at other things. He will recall the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the great--was it not in Downing Street?--and was spat upon by the n.o.ble lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the Atlantic was undecipherable. He will recall how he put his outraged garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the Declaration of Independence. And now, what miracle is this? England and America reconciled at last. England, no less than France, straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago....

Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin, who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody. But the n.o.ble lords who spat on him!...

And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, "How now, gentlemen? What do you say to the steamboat now?" Poor wretches, how humiliated they will be. For when Napoleon asked the Academie des Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented steamboat, their verdict was, "Idee folle, erreur grossiere, absurdite." They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas of the world to-day.

But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before the revelations that await them. They will look on with the complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing.

Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of his wit at their foolish experiments. They will have lost the very human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so well-directed and piercing. Perhaps they will read this to him:

Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable. There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colourless liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two cold bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.

Admirable old boy! What wit you had! We can still enjoy it even though time has turned it to foolishness and planted its barb in your own breast. All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out. All your genius for argument will not prevail against the witness you see of the mighty fruits of those little experiments that filled your Olympian mind with scorn. But you will have your compensations. Even you will be astonished at the place you fill in our thoughts so long after your queer figure and brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street.

You will find that the very age in which you lived is remembered as the Age of Johnson, and that the thunders of your voice, transmitted by the faithful Bozzy, are among the immortal reverberations from the past.

Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back very well content with your visit.

And it may be that the victory of the scientists will a.s.suage the disappointment of Jeremy himself. It is possible that when, back once more in whatever region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will recover his spirits.

This moral catastrophe of man, he will say, must be seen in relation to his astonishing intellectual victory. I forgot that stage in the journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism. This century that has pa.s.sed has witnessed that stage. It has been a period of inconceivable triumph over matter. Man has discovered all the wonders of the earth and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of things. His moral and social sense has not been able to keep pace with this breathless material development. He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned. He has become the slave of his own creation, the victim of the monster of his invention, and this calamity into which he has fallen is his blind effort to readjust his life to the new scheme of things that the machine has imposed on him. The great parturition is upon him and he is shedding gouts of blood in his agony. But he will emerge from his pains. The material century is accomplished; the conquest of the machine is at hand, and with that conquest the moral sense of man will revive with a grandeur undreamed of in the past. The march is longer than I thought, but it will gain impetus and majesty from this immense overthrow. The road I built was only premature. Man was not ready to take it. But it is still there--a little gra.s.s-grown and neglected, but still beckoning him on to the earthly paradise. When he rises from his wrestle in the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take it.... Yes, I think I shall go back after all....

Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his side.

ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT

In the middle of last night I found myself suddenly and quite acutely awake. It is an unusual experience for me. I knew the disturbance had not come from without myself, but from within--from some low but persistent knocking at the remote door of consciousness. Who was the knocker? I ran over the possible visitors before opening the door just as one sometimes puzzles over the writing of an address before opening a letter. Ah, yes, the disquieting discovery I had made yesterday--that was the intruder. And, saying this, I opened the door and let the fellow in, to sit upon my pillow and lord it over me in the darkness. I had succeeded in suppressing him before I went to bed--burying him beneath talk about this and that, some variations of Rameau, a few of those Hungarian songs from Korbay's collection, so incomparable in their fierce energy and pa.s.sion, and so on; the mound nicely rounded off with Duruy's "History of France," and the headstone of sleep duly erected. Now, I thought, I shall hear nothing more of him until I face him squarely to-morrow. And here, up from the depths he had come and taken his seat upon the headstone itself.

It is with sleep as with affairs. One cracked bell will shatter a whole ring; one scheming, predatory power will set the whole world in flames. And one disorderly imp of the mind will upset the whole comity of sleep. He will neither slumber forgetfully nor play with the others in dreams, turning the realities and solemnities of the day into a wild travesty of fun or agony, in which everything that is incredible seems as natural as sneezing, and you stand on your head on the cross of St.

Paul's or walk up the Strand carrying your head under your arm without any sense of surprise or impropriety. Nor is he one of those obliging subjects of the mind who obey their orders like a sensible house-dog, sleeping with one eye open and ready to bark, as it were, if anything goes wrong. You know that sort of decent fellow. You say to him overnight, "Now, remember, I have that train to catch in the morning, and I must be awake without fail at seven." Or it may be six, or four.

And whatever the hour you name, sure enough the good dog barks in time.

If he has a failing, it is barking too soon and leaving you to discuss the nice question whether you dare go to sleep again or whether you had better remain awake. In the midst of which you probably go to sleep again and miss your train.

This control of the kingdom of sleep by the apparently dormant consciousness can be carried far. A friend of mine tells me that he has even learned to put his dreams under the check of conscious or sub-conscious thought. He had one persistent dream which took the form of missing the train. Sometimes his wife was on board, and he rushed on to the platform just in time to see the train in motion and her head out of the window with agony written on her face. Sometimes he was in the train and his wife just missed it. Sometimes they were both inside, but saw their luggage being brought up too late. Sometimes the luggage got in and they didn't. Always something went wrong. He determined to have that dream regularised. And so before going to bed he thought hard of catching the train. He saturated himself with the idea of catching the train. And the thing worked like a charm. He never misses a train now, nor his wife, nor his luggage. They all steam away on their dream journeys together without a hitch. So he tells me, and I believe him, for he is a truthful man.

You and I, and I suppose everybody, have had evidences of this sub-conscious operation in sleep. That it is common enough is shown by the familiar saying, "I will sleep on it." I have gone to bed more than once with problems that have seemed insoluble, have fallen to sleep, and have wakened in the morning with the course so clear that I have wondered how I could have been in doubt. And Sir Edward Clarke in his reminiscences of the Bar tells how, after a night over his briefs he would go to bed with his way through the tangle obscure and perplexing, and would wake from sleep with the path plain as a pikestaff. The phenomenon is doubtless due in some measure to rest.

The mind clears in sleeping as muddy waters clear in standing. But this is not the whole explanation. Some process has taken place in the interval far down in the hinterlands of thought. You may observe this even in your waking hours. Lord Leverhulme, who I suppose has one of the biggest letter-bags in the country, once told me that his habit in dealing with his correspondence is to answer at once those letters he can reply to off-hand, and to put aside those that need consideration.

When he turns to the latter he finds the answers have fashioned themselves without any conscious act of thought. This experience is not uncommon, and as it occurs when the mind is at the maximum of activity it disposes of the idea that rest is the complete explanation.

More goes on in us than we know. At this moment I am conscious of at least six strata of thought. I am attending to this writing, the shaping of the letters, the spelling of the words; I am thinking what I shall write; I am sensible that a thrush is singing outside, and that the sun is shining; this pervades my mind with the glow of the thought that in a few days I shall be in the beechwoods; through this happy glow the ugly imp who sat on my pillow last night forces himself on my attention; down below there is the boom of the great misery of the world that goes on ceaselessly like the deep strum of the double ba.s.s in the orchestra. And out of sight and consciousness there are, I suspect, deeper and more obscure functions shaping all sorts of things in the unfathomed caves of the mind. The results will come to the surface in due course, and I shall wonder where they came from. It is a mistake to suppose that we can only think of one thing at a time.

The mind can keep as many b.a.l.l.s circulating as Cinquevalli. It can keep some of them circulating even without knowing that they exist.

But these profound functions of the mind that know no sleep, and yet do not disturb our sleep, are not to be confused with that imp of the pillow. He is a brawler of the day. He brings the noisy world of fact into the cloistered calm or the playground of sleep. He is known to all of us, but most of all to the criminal who has still got a conscience. Macbeth knew him--"Macbeth hath murdered sleep, the innocent sleep." Eugene Aram knew him:

And a mighty wind had swept the leaves And still the corpse was bare.

I know him ... And that reminds me. It is time I went and had it out with my imp of the pillow in the daylight.

ON MOWING

I have hung the scythe up in the barn and now I am going to sing its praises. And if you doubt my competence to sing on so n.o.ble a theme, come with me into the orchard, smell the new-mown hay, mark the swathes where they lie and note the workmanship. Yes, I admit that over there by the damson trees and down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt, dishevelled appearance about the gra.s.s as though it had been stabbed and tortured by some insane animal armed with an axe. It is true. It has been stabbed and tortured by an insane animal. It was there that I began. It was there that I hacked and hewed, perspired and suffered.

It was there that I said things of which in my calmer moments I should disapprove. It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the scythe. But let your eye scan gently that stricken pasture and pause here where the orchard slopes to the paddock. I do not care who looks at this bit. I am prepared to stand or fall by it. It speaks for itself. The signature of the master hand is here. It is my signature.

And having written that signature I feel like the wounded soldier spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the _Nation_. He was returning to England, and as he looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish landscape and saw the hay-makers in the fields he said, "I feel as though I should like to cut gra.s.s all the rest of my life." I do not know whether it was the craftsman in him that spoke. Perhaps it was only the beautiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the words from him.

But they were words that anyone who has used a scythe would echo. I echo them. I feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity of sunny days and illimitable fields of waving gra.s.s and just go on mowing and mowing and mowing for ever. I am chilled by the thought that you can only play the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year. I look back over the summers of the past, and lament my wasted opportunities. What meadows I might have mown had I only known the joy of it!

For mowing is the most delightful disguise that work can wear. When once you have got the trick of it, it goes with a rhythm that is intoxicating. The scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable a tool, gradually changes its character. It becomes an instrument of infinite flexibility and delicacy. The lines that seemed so uncouth and clownish are discovered to be the refinement of time. What centuries of acc.u.mulated experience under the suns of what diverse lands have gone to the perfecting of this most ancient tool of the fields, shaping the blade so cunningly, adjusting it to the handle at so artful an angle, disposing the nebs with such true relationship to the action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instrument loses the sense of weight and seems to carry you forward by its own smooth, almost instinctive motion. It is like an extension of yourself, with a touch as fine as the brush of a b.u.t.terfly's wing and a stroke as bold and resistless as the sweep of a cataract. It is no longer a clumsy, blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as your hand and as conscious as your touch. You seem to have developed a new member, far-reaching, with the edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell a forest of stalwart gra.s.ses.

And as the intimacy grows you note how the action simplifies itself.

The violent stabbings and discords are resolved into a harmony as serene as a pastoral symphony. You feel the rhythm taking shape, and as it develops the body becomes captive to its own task. You are no longer manipulating a tool. You and the tool have become magically one, fused in a common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward on its own strong, swimming stroke. The mind, released, stands aloof in a sort of delighted calm, rejoicing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have a conscious part, noting the bold swing of the body backwards for the stroke (the blade lightly skimming the ground, as the oar gently flatters the water in its return), the delicate play of the wrist as the scythe comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke is true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards that carries it clear, the dip of the blade that leaves the swathe behind, the moderate, timely, exact movement of the feet preparatory to the next stroke, the low, musical hum of the vibrating steel. A frog hops out in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among the deep gra.s.ses.

You hope he won't get in the way of that terrible finger, but you are drunk with the rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its imperious current. You are no longer a man, but a motion. The frog must take his chance. Swish--swish--swish----

Not that the rhythm is unrelieved. It has its "accidentals." You repeat a stroke that has not pleased you, with a curious sense of pleasure at the interrupted movement which has yet not changed the theme; you nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a stray flourish to garland the measure; you trim round the trees with the pleasant feeling that you can make this big thing do a little thing so deftly; you pause to whet the blade with the hone. But all the time the song of the scythe goes on. It fills your mind and courses through your blood. Your pulse beats to the rhythmic swish--swish--swish, and to that measure you pa.s.s into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a dream world through which you are floating, bound to a magic oar.

The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain. You mark the shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal round the trees. A thrush sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree on the other side of the lane, falls silent during the heat of the afternoon and begins again as the shadows lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the west. Overhead the swifts are hawking in the high air for their evening meal. Presently they descend and chase each other over the orchard with the curious sound of an indrawn whistle that belongs to the symphony of late summer evenings. You are pleasantly conscious of these pleasant things as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe, and your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, s.n.a.t.c.hes of old song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and Horace on his Sabine farm, the sonorous imagery of Israel linking up the waving gra.s.ses with the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a more august harvest.... The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of cattle in the valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush settling for the night in the nest, the drone of a winged beetle blundering through the dusk, one final note of the white-throat.... There is still light for this last slope to the paddock. Swish--swish--swish....

The Temple Press, Letchworth

ENGLAND