Frank Baker Read online

Some evenings Ivor, the boy, would drive me round the country­side in an old-fashioned car that the family possessed. I remember it well, and had cause to, as you will see. It was pale blue, with seats for five or six, and a threadbare black hood. Ivor studied at Aberystwyth during the day, so that he never found time to explore the country with me, on foot, as I did. He had lived there all his life and now he longed to see other places. And although I used to say that only in walking could you discover the heart of a country, I so enjoyed those evening drives that I induced him to teach me also how to handle a car. He would let me drive along the country roads and then, when we came to a town, take the steering-wheel himself. Once or twice we went thus to Aberystwyth, and he showed me the buildings where he studied. He was to be a schoolmaster like his father; but he had higher ambitions than a village school. In a soft, rich voice he used to talk and ask me questions about London which I never wanted to answer; I preferred to hear him talk about his own country. They were happy evenings. In his presence, intent upon learning to drive the car, I forgot London and the birds entirely.

  The weather remained cloudless and I would go out with my flower-book learning the names of flowers and seeing them all as new and mysterious things. I remember with what ingenuous delight I came upon a bank of meadowsweet; how I found heartsease on the lofty hills. It was all new to me. The black, distant mountains; the sheep, driven by their lean, grey dogs; the dark lakes; the dense ranks of larches and firs; all the grave countenance of this beautiful country stirred me deeply.

  “You should climb Cader Idris,” the schoolmaster would urge me every evening when I returned to give an account of my walks. And even his wife said once, “Look, you cannot go back to London with­out having been up a mountain.”

  I laughed and said yes, I would climb it eventually. But there were so many other places to see, that it was not until two or three days before the end of my visit that I decided to make the climb. I started off early one morning with elaborate instructions from the family as to the best path to take, and with some food in a haver­sack.

  A little more than half-way to the summit I stopped by a lake. The sunlight was soft and grave with an autumnal remoteness about it. The lake frightened me, it was so silent and deep, as though its waters covered a whole dead world unknown to me. Not a flicker of wind touched the hard surface; it lay perfectly still, like a closed eye, reflecting nothing. I felt as though I had shrivelled to the size of a pebble on its shores.

  Then, as I looked, I saw that slowly the whole apparently unmoving surface rocked like a metal disc sus­pended in the air, from one side of its shore to the other. I heard the laboured washing of its waters drawn slowly over the stones.

  It was alive, moving.

  I drew away from the lake, un­easily quick in my movements, and began to climb higher, gaining zest from the cold mountain air. I forced my way to the summit, driving thoughts out of my mind and attempting to con­centrate upon the scene that grew around me as I ascended.

  At the top I stopped by a little travellers’ shelter, a stone shed where a man brewed pots of tea for climbers. Then I surveyed the scene I had come so far to view.

  The splendour of the hills, valleys, rivers, lakes, trees, and fields, all assembled below me and spreading away as far as the eye could reach to the mouth of the open sea, moved me so that I felt tears of joy come into my eyes. I have told you how I had been moved by the sight of the distant City from the ridge above Stroud Green. Now the City seemed like a child’s toy model in my mind. One blow of man’s breath, I said, could have crumbled it to dust. But here was something man could not easily displace.

  Suddenly I saw—and the realization was overwhelming—all that man had inherited and all that he had striven to distort. I saw that art, which struggled to reproduce those things which man had lost, gave but a pennyworth of the sum-total. I had been moved by great music, by a beautiful building, by a poem or a play. But I saw now that all these emotions had been borrowed; that they were never mine in the fullest sense; that ultimately they had to be returned to the artist who had but lent me, for a passing moment, eyes with which to see.

  The wind whistled around me, flattening my stupid trousers against my thin legs. I opened my mouth; I did what that old Hebrew poet had done, “I opened my mouth and drew in my breath.” Consciously, I breathed.

  I breathed again, in and out, deeper. There was a taste of life on my tongue, a sweet, cleansing taste I had never known before. And the more I breathed, consciously receiving and giving out waves of life, the calmer became my spirit. An extraordinary certainty of my own being possessed me. It seemed to me that this enormous world was mine, given to me, and that it wanted me, wanted the union with me without which it was not complete.

  Oh, the arrogance of that moment when I saw that men could be gods if they would cease to remember that they had once been apes! Gods, because they possessed this great quality of awareness of Life.

  It seemed to me that with this awareness we had the power to detach ourselves; like a bird, to float in the air at our side and see ourselves. “Like a bird,” I said, “like a bird, for ever hovering about us and directing and feeling.” I felt then that I was no longer in my physical body, that I was in the cold air above, watching, prompting, and feeling. From this detached vantage-point it was my business to regulate my physical body, encouraging it to plunge into the ever-moving stream of life; eating, drinking, breathing, loving, and being.

  This was the power of the Soul, for ever to be aware of the activity and behaviour of the physical substance. For if this material frame lapsed into insensible activity, its perfect mechanism was abused. It would begin to hammer like an engine driven to action with no oil. Anything done without the awareness of the Soul was energy wasted. If I touched a stone with my finger, my Soul should know the sensation of contact with another body; if I drank cold water, my Soul should record the sacramental excellence of that experience.

  It then appeared to me that we in our time had accustomed ourselves to the habit of unconscious experience. We ate, drank, breathed in a semi-comatose condition. Half of our physical life was passed in a twilight state of unrealized activity. A word often on our lips was “subconscious.” “My subconscious mind,” we might say, “led me to do that.” We were very proud of this naïve discovery of our subconscious, because, we affirmed, it was an ungovernable force, a primitive urge; it was useful to possess a quality which might excuse certain of our meaner actions.

  Yet, indeed, the subconscious was merely the conscious Soul making utter­ances and curious signs like a man gone dumb. To talk of body, soul, and spirit was a confusion. There was only body and Soul, with a bridge existing between the two that made communion possible. This was the bridge termed by the Church, Holy Ghost. When a man looked through his physical eyes upon a tree and suddenly felt some extra­ordinary energy within himself to reach out and embrace the tree, he travelled along the path of the Holy Ghost to the timeless coun­try of his Soul which for ever mingled with the tree. The nature of existence was twofold, not threefold, as the doctrine of the Christian Trinity seemed to imply.

  On every side was there evidence of this truth. Here, on the mountain.

  I breathed in; I breathed out. And in that simple action I felt the twofold purpose of existence, the dual movement which turns life ceaselessly upon its course. In the very act of breathing, the pulse of the whole order of creation was shown to me. I took that breath; I gave it out. I could not give without taking, nor take without giving. In the same way the seed was given to the earth, and the earth gave the flower; the moisture was given to the clouds, and the clouds gave back rain; the man gave to the woman, and the woman gave man to the earth. There was not anything alone or unrelated in the universe. Even the lake that lay cupped below me moved in unbreakable communion with the wind that drew the water’s calm sheet from side to side of the mountain hollow. When I breathed out there was a quality to
my breath which the earth required; I could sustain the earth even as the earth sustained me. When I breathed, and knew I breathed, I created; I placed myself in the circumference of creation, was no longer a tangent touching creation then darting away from it. While I knew the Soul’s inexhaustible powers of creation I need never fear death, for death was a word invented by one whose body had lost its Soul. When this matter decayed it would make the final act of giving to the Soul, and the Soul, thus for ever strengthened, would become identified with the other-universe from which it sprung. To nourish the Soul against this final charge I must ever keep before me the truth of its powers of creation.

  Create—— Creation——

  The word pleased me as though I had never heard it before. And there suddenly, as I stopped short in my thinking, the word irri­tated me. Was it enough to create by breathing and similar acts? Was it permanent enough?

  I saw then why man created art, because there before him was something which he could leave behind as a record of his physical life. Was I then to make such things—poems, pictures, music? No, I cried; no. For what poem can ever sustain me as the breath of Life up here can sustain me?

  I was no artist, I told myself. There were some who were driven to record the life they knew so keenly; their art sustained them. Yet in the long-run, whom else could it sustain? I dared not belittle the great works of men. And yet, I thought how the form of death clung alone to man’s works of art. These beautiful things, perhaps a church spire seen through a network of dark winter trees; a great piece of music; the sculpture of a lovely body—what pathetic solemnity, what un­utterable sadness and longing hung around such things! Contemplation of a great work of art was also contemplation of an end from which there seemed no escape; contemplation of a tree in winter, or a bare field, filled one with the knowledge of unending life. No life was possible without communion with life. And who could have com­munion with a church spire or a sculpted frieze? You could only take from these things; you could give nothing.

  “You are virtually dead,” I muttered angrily, “until you can establish tactual relation with life. Your conscious Soul must know that you are breathing, eating, drinking, loving——”

  Loving. There was no escape. What a commonplace conclusion to approach from so tortuous a route!

  I came away then; walking quickly because of my burning thoughts, down the narrow stony path which led towards the lake. With all my being I longed to press against me the form of another human person, young, beautiful, and desirable, who found me also desirable, that we could derive from each other the twofold act of creation, taking and giving. And the thought of Olga’s face tor­mented me almost beyond endurance.

  I remember how quickly I walked, almost ran past the lake and thus homewards. There was a young shepherd herding sheep on the hills some way past the lake. He was beautiful, totally unconscious of me. I hurried past, muttering a greeting, hardly looking at him. For it was a body I wanted, some human body to hold close to mine. My feeling, my entire powers of sensation seemed then to have passed to the centre of my body; to my stomach, my bowels, my genitals. There seemed nothing now but this veritable pit of yearning to be at one with somebody.

  I came back to the schoolmaster’s black little house and there was Ivor waiting to show me a paragraph in the newspaper which told of some new activity of the birds in London. I cannot remem­ber what it was. For all the time, sitting over the table in the stuffy room with the paper outstretched before us, while he read aloud and commented, his head and mine nodded close, his fingers met mine as he turned the page.

  “Goodness to me,” he said, “Look at this——”

  “Yes,” I murmured, “yes”—never hearing a word he said.

  “I think I must come back to London with you and see those birds.” He turned and smiled at me, his lips half open, his white teeth gleaming. I saw him through a mist as though I was stupid with drink.

  “Would you like to?”

  “I should love to see those birds, goodness to gracious I should.”

  “You would hate London,” I told him. You’d much better stay here.”

  “Oh, but do you think so? I want to see life.”

  Suddenly I made a decision. I had two days yet to spend here.

  “I must leave you to-morrow,” I said.

  Then his father came, his mother summoned us to a meal, and I told them again that I must go the next day, making as my excuse that I wished to see a certain old town on my way back. They were sorry.

  “And you have not really learnt to drive properly,” said the schoolmaster. “It is a great shame you must go.”

  I thought of the evenings in the car.

  “Never mind,” said Ivor. “I shall come to London one day; then I can drive you round and you shall show me the sights.”

  They tried to induce me to stay, but I was firm. So they gave up urging me, and later I asked them to sing and play to me for the last time. I looked at Ivor as he drew that old sweetness from his violin, and I wondered what it was in him which prompted a desire to go to London and see life.

  We said good-bye. I pressed Ivor by the hand, for he would be up early in the morning to Aberystwyth.

  “I will see you in London one day,” he paused on the stairs with a lighted candle in his hand. He laughed softly and the light flickered round his face.

  “Yes,” I echoed, “in London.”

  The next morning I departed, with many messages of goodwill from the schoolmaster. Even his dour wife presented me with a packet of sandwiches and some cake. Perhaps she was impressed by the fact that I had paid her for a fortnight’s lodging and had only stayed eleven days.

  “Come again,” they said, “you must come again.”

  I said I would, but I did not mean it.

  Blow up the fire, light the candles. This dark afternoon assaults my spirit. To-morrow I will take this youth of ours, this romantic metaphysician back to London.

  III

  THE COLLAPSE

  On my return to London, all those thoughts which had so refreshed me on the mountain were swept away. On Cader it had been possible to forget the distressed condition of the world; in London it was not.

  In a fortnight it seemed to me that people’s faces had grown haggard, their eyes thin with suspicion and fear. The City was foul with the stench of dried ordure, for the shortage of water was now so serious that the streets could not be washed at night. A lurking stillness had settled over everything; the pavements were like shallow lids made tender by a furnace that raged beneath. Trees were dead, flowers withered long before their time.

  Newsboys vied with each other shouting such phrases as “France leaves the League!” “Villagers dying of thirst!” and—perhaps the smallest voice—“Birds interrupt Welfare Society!” I snatched a paper and read angrily, not wanting to learn anything of the confusion which was beginning to shake mankind, yet knowing I could not avoid it. The usual “features” in the evening paper were absent, crowded out by a spate of sensational reports which poured over the pages.

  But the affairs of the world are outside the scope of my story, and I do not intend to deal with them. It will be your business to augment from my personal history, so that you have some picture of what, so far as I know, happened to the entire machinery of civilization. Certain dreadful things I witnessed; certain terrors I, in common with millions, endured. But of what went on in other parts of the world I can tell you no more than what I gathered from a study of the newspapers, from listening to wireless reports, or from hurrying to and from Lloyd’s, where a chain of casualties and the anxiety of merchants and shipowners to insure their properties against perils of war, and “Pests of the Air,” kept my colleagues and myself in a fever of excite­ment.

  “Pests of the Air.” This was now the official designation of the birds. People spoke of them contemptuously and declared that the Government
was soon to take the matter in hand. Exactly how they were to take it in hand was not known. But while there was still a Government and a King, how could any loyal Englishman worry himself about such trifles as “Pests of the Air”?

  The prestige of the Royal House, at all times well maintained, was strengthened by the calm and semi-humorous behaviour of King Edward, who was one day followed by a bird of particularly extravagant plumage. The King was driving to an exhibition of Empire products in which he always took great interest. As he alighted from his car a large bird swooped down from above and followed him into the hall where the exhibits were being shown. Its brilliant feathers and shrill voice contrasted strangely with the severe, dark clothes of King Edward and his gentlemen, several of whom made vague attempts to beat the creature away. They were unsuccessful, however, for the bird still hovered about the group when they were inside the hall. Police­men were summoned to deal with this uninvited retainer, and a silent scuffle took place behind the King’s back, in the course of which a statesman called Baldwin was bitten on the nose and cried out in pain and rage. This disturbance apparently annoyed the King, who so far had made no remark. He turned irri­tably, “I am sorry you should have been bitten, but really, I imagine we came here to study more important things than birds.” Then he smiled and added, “Besides, it is probably from the Colonies and should not be attacked.” It was felt that the King had set a fashion in his attitude to the birds. They were pests, and must not be allowed to interrupt ordinary business. The King had clearly shown his people how to behave. In acknowledgment of this lead, a considerable demonstration took place outside his large house that night. Great crowds gathered, and many people even went so far as to swarm irreverently half-way up a sprawling statue of King Edward’s great-grandmother which stood before the Palace. The crowd would not leave until, late at night, the King appeared on the balcony and bowed to the public amidst great shouts and cheers. It was observed that the bird still circled around him; but he took no notice. His calm behaviour, his apparent determination to dismiss the birds as unimportant nuisances, was commented upon in all the papers. If the King cared so little for these disgusting and unorthodox denizens of the air, these impertinent mis­takes of the Almighty—then so would his people. The Royal House had stood firm; England would stand firm. It is a curious fact, however, that from that day, the King was not seen again in public.