Frank Baker Read online

  As we watched, they rose higher, smaller still, till there was no more that the eye could follow. They did not just fly away; they seemed slowly to dissolve like smoke till the sky was blue again.

  I found myself talking excitedly to two or three people near me.

  “There’ll have to be a new clause in insurance policies,” chuckled a shabby-looking old gentleman who held a long black wallet under his arm.

  The crowd had quickly broken up, people were already hurrying back to their offices and shops, the released traffic sped along Cornhill as though to make up for lost time. Everybody seemed to have forgotten the old woman with the seed.

  “What happened to her?” I asked somebody.

  I was told that she had last been seen running down the steps of the underground railway. Curious about her, I ran quickly down to the cool labyrinth of passages that twined in and out of the Bank station.

  That was a bewildering world. There were long passages, artificially lit and decorated by advertisements, (we will talk of advertisements later.) There were wash-houses and lavatories where the student of human abnormalities could observe the strayed twistings of the sexually-possessed mind, scrawled furtively on the marble walls of each little private stool. There were mechanically controlled stairs which conveyed the passenger to his train without his having to exert the muscles of his legs; and rows of telephone boxes where a man could talk with his friend miles away. I remember those small, close boxes with peculiar detestation. Many a time I had been penned inside them, sick with heat and the rancid fumes of sweat and tobacco smoke left by the previous occupant of the box. Yes, they are very vivid in my mind, those little boxes with their black breath-spangled speaking-tubes. Perhaps because of what I saw that after­noon. For when I drew near them, I saw a small group of people clustered outside one of the doors. A policeman dominated the scene.

  The object of the crowd’s attention was our old woman. I asked somebody what had happened. He was a small ragged boy who told me that the old woman, running in terror from the bird, had shut herself into one of the boxes.

  But not before the bird had flown in too.

  There followed, apparently, a furious conflict. The old woman had slashed right and left with her umbrella. I saw evidence of that in the broken glass; the gashed umbrella with its spokes caught in the wire of the telephone; the mouthpiece hanging and swaying from the coin-box; the torn and trampled directory.

  “They got her out then,” I said to the boy.

  Yes, he said, they got her out. But she was in a faint now.

  “What happened to the bird?” I asked.

  He disregarded my question. There was a sudden hush over the people. Two men pushed their way through with a stretcher. Presently they emerged again, carrying her, with a cloth over her body.

  Somebody whispered, “Poor old thing. . . .”

  Again I asked, almost impatiently, for nobody seemed to realize the importance of my question, “What happened to the bird?”

  Nobody knew anything about the bird. In the general disturbance it had been forgotten. Not a feather was left as evidence of its presence.

  The old woman died that night in a hospital where they took her. There followed the customary inquiry into the cause of her death, and it was given that she had died of heart failure, following upon intense shock and alarm. It was also disclosed that she had been a procuress—that is, one who traded in the bodies of young girls for the sexual gratification of others.

  *

  I must interrupt this account of the birds over our City, in order to set before you, with more clearness, the scene in which I moved.

  Chiefly, I would like to tell you something about my mother—to re-create for you a character so full of whimsical charm, of erratic judgment, of instinctive wisdom, of great sweetness and bitterness combined—that no record of myself could ever be com­plete without reference to her from whom I inherited so much. She was a small frail woman at that time, with long, slender hands, graceful and expressive. I remember her long, pointed forefinger, with the rounded curve of a well-arched nail, always most beauti­fully manicured, the nail never protruding beyond the tip of the finger. I remember that finger, the shape of it laid over a keyboard as she played and sung, or bent round a needle as she sewed. Most do I remember it, forked inside the pages of a book she was reading; it recalls to my mind most vividly the characteristic habit she had of reading books backwards and forwards, from here to there, as her spirit dictated.

  Although she was small, her head, with its greying mass of often unruly hair, made her appear larger than she really was. It was a massive face, stronger than the body which supported it. Her hair seemed to fly about her like some downy sub­stance having a purely adventitious relation to her head and trans­forming the harshness of her features into a radiance—indefinably soft, warm, and shadowy. Her nose tyrannized over this tropical scene like a palm tree reared above soft ferns. My dear mother—how she would laugh could she hear me say that! Many were the jokes we had about her nose. It was large, crooked in the middle with a bridge—what was termed a Roman nose. In truth it was Jewish. There was something far away and vagabond in her appearance which suggested Hebraic ancestry. Her eyes were grey, with that quickening spirit of sensitivity which often distinguishes grey eyes. Her mouth was rather tight. She had, I remember, a determined jaw; one that could snap if necessary—and indeed, often when not necessary. She had high cheek-bones and, at times, a florid com­plexion which could agitate the tranquillity of that far away ex­pression. It was not always a serene face. Sometimes it was quick with potential movement; alive with an odd, secretive humour, purely her own. It was strong; it was weak. It was generous; it was self-centred. It was soft; it was hard.

  Sometimes, when she was reading, I studied her face and saw in it the power of an empress—cold, impersonal, aloof. Then it was a grand face. But best I like to remember it when she was listening to some trouble that oppressed me. Then it was so warm, so quick to grasp my meaning, so intuitive in under­standing—I felt my trouble was dispelled without her saying a word.

  We were much alike, in ill-humour and good. We used to quarrel at least once a week. She loved, as did I, the tense atmosphere that springs up around two people at odds with each other. It is significant that such explosions of temperament were termed “scenes.” Our scenes were always a great stimulus to the love we bore each other; they always concerned themselves with trivial differences. In effect, they were only the clash of wills so alike as often to resent that similarity.

  As a young woman my mother had been very beautiful, with a power to command which was never allowed to develop. Her mother had rigorously curbed in her every natural bud that should have flowered. Her education had been that of a young gentlewoman of those days. That is to say, she was taught to believe that she was incapable of any individual activity; that simple domestic tasks were not only beyond her, but beneath her dignity; and that her duty was to sit still in a chair, watching from behind the traditional aspidistra—always known as the Plant—with which such families would darken their windows, the passing to and fro of men and women in the workaday world. Had she been of a high intellectual capacity such a static pose might have been turned to good account. There had been other women before her, who from silent contemplation of a teacup were able to endow the world with incisive commentaries upon human behaviour. But my mother’s whole impetus to life lay in her body, her face, her hands. She was intended for movement and adventure. She could, I believe, have ridden the fastest horse, swum the heaviest sea, or braved the fiercest gale. But she could not stand aside from life and make a record of what she saw. Her whole nature wished to expand, to give—not to imbibe and digest. And this repression of her natural qualities resulted later in the strange quixotic medley which composed the unresolved drama of her life. It was the reason why she was indiscriminately generous and at the same time, self-centred;
why she loved youth and yet criticized it resent­fully; why she read book after book in a sad attempt to recover that Odyssey she had barely glimpsed as a young girl.

  My dear mother. . . .

  She had lost her husband many years previously. I remembered him with affection as a man who rarely punished or rebuked me, but gave me rides on his shoulders, taught me how to swim, and led me for long walks in the country when I had been a little boy. No whim of his wife had been too much for him to indulge.

  I was their only child, and she loved me as a mother does the one seed who has sprung from her. Loved me perhaps too much, yet who will dare question the extravagance of love in a world that saw so little of it? She gave her life over to me and lived in my development. She could not detach herself from me. I do not believe there was a single thing I did, a single emotion I felt, which she did not feel as acutely. And in return I gave, often, such casual treatment as sons are apt to give their mothers, accepting her as part of my life, but too seldom declaring my in­debtedness to her with my lips.

  We lived, my mother and I, in a long, long street in a northern suburb of the City, called Stroud Green. I do not know what Stroud meant and there was little enough green about it. On either side of that depressing street were houses—so many of them you would have said, had they been trees, this is a forest. They all looked exactly the same. The street rose up a high hill to a ridge from where on clear days you could see the distant spires and roofs of London. If you turned the other way you would see a colossal edifice composed of stunted towers, glass domes, and pinnacles, which was known as Alexandra Palace. This was, I believe, intended as a house of entertainment, though whom it entertained I could never discover. In my childhood I remember a menagerie of monkeys there; statues of slyly draped men and women with chipped breasts and noses; slot machines which never worked; painted effigies of the kings of England; and palm trees rearing out of shallow tubs to press themselves like stiff hands against the glass roof. In one great hall was a mighty instrument for making music, a machine called organ which my grandfather had often played many years ago. Now it was never used, and the whole place was like a gigantic mortuary.

  The house in which we lived had a number like all the others, but not a name as many had. Our number was Three-hundred-and-ninety-six. This number; the name of the road—which I cannot remember—and the name of the district—Stroud Green, con­stituted what was known as our address. Inside it was very much the same as any of the other houses, although we boasted one or two pieces of inherited furniture of good craftsmanship. But it was crowded, airless, and unhealthy, receiving little sunlight.

  One of our rooms was centred by a massive table with a red baize cloth on it. There were romantic pictures on the walls; one of Jesus, that good prophet you have heard me speak of, who constituted the foundation of our religion. Here he was shown praying in a garden at night, the super­natural light of God shining on his face. There were pictures of relatives who had died long ago—one of my mother’s mother in a heavy silver frame, wearing a spangled poke bonnet.

  There was another room, called drawing-room. It was used on Sunday afternoons, and occasionally when we had guests, rarely otherwise. The old walnut piano my mother loved to play to herself was in the warmer room. It is that room I remember. With all its lack of design and freedom, with all its close sealed-up atmosphere, its loud and ugly decorations, its entire inability to calm a mind as a room should, it is yet the one room I remember which changed Three-hundred-and-ninety-six from a house to a home.

  And that is only because here my mother sat, day in, day out, working her needles, reading her books, eating her frugal meals, playing her old songs, and for ever thinking, dreaming, and praying for that one child with whom she had laboured twenty years earlier.

  I must cease for to-day. The sun has tired me; my mind cannot unwind the threads of this tale until I have dropped from me the burden of an old lullaby my mother, Lillian, used to sing.

  *

  The evening of the day the birds had come, I stood in a long carriage, travelling underground towards my home. There were seats, two long lines of them facing each other, but they were already full of people when I boarded the train. Those of us who could, held on to straps that depended from the roof, in order to keep our balance in the jolting, swaying car.

  At every station on the way, more and more people crammed their way in. They had literally to use force to get into the car at all. Thus, on the hottest summer evening, one stood, attired in dark tight clothes, sweating all over one’s body and breathing upon the neck or nose of a man or woman pressed tight against one. It is strange that this close proximity never caused people the smallest embarrassment, though had you taken two of them, male and female, and placed them in a large double bed, they would probably have been overwhelmed with shame.

  Let us not stay long in this car. It is too hot to try to remember something a thousand times hotter and more airless. But before I leave it I should like to describe to you the advertisements which were framed above the seats of the carriage.

  An advertisement was a fanciful and often highly artistic lauda­tion—whether in words or pictures—of various commodities which manufacturers wished to sell to the public. Every possible article was advertised so cunningly, that very often people were induced to buy things which they did not really require. Nothing escaped advertisement—no, I am wrong. Two articles of universal interest, armaments and contraceptives, were, so far as I remember, never given the publicity of the advertisement.

  That evening there was, naturally, a great deal of lively conversation about the birds. Speculation as to the origin of the birds ran wildly in various quarters. Some had it that they were emigrants from North Africa, where at that time a war was supposed to be in progress. Some affirmed that they had escaped from a private aviary. My paper announced that an eminent ornithologist would give his views on the subject the following day. As I came out of the train, gasping with relief to feel the evening air, I remember how the coming of the birds seemed to have cast an unreal shade over every familiar thing that I saw. I had to wait in a long train of people in order to mount an omnibus at a place called Finsbury Park. As always, there was a beggar-man. He was playing very sweetly on a violin, long drawn-out tunes of other years. I fumbled in my pocket for a coin, could not find one, and blushed because he had looked at me searchingly as my hand went to my pocket. I gave him nothing. The bus moved away.

  As we passed away from the man, I identified his starved music with a message, a prophecy, a warning, though I knew not of what. For the rest of the journey home I could feel nothing but heaviness upon my spirit, even though the prospect of bearing to my mother the tale of the birds filled me with excitement.

  I was oppressed, oppressed by something nameless. Even the deep-sinking blue of the evening sky where a half-moon lay like a trimmed cloud, seemed to me lifeless with a passive apprehension of change.

  *

  My mother was sitting beneath a sunshade in an easy-chair in the small strip of garden at the back of the house. Annie, the little creature known as the “maid,” who waited upon us and did most of the housework, greeted me with her customary grin. Though this expression of hers generally warmed me, it irritated me that evening. I took little notice of her, but went out through the kitchen door and into the garden.

  “What would you do, Mother,” I asked, “if the sky was suddenly darkened by a great mass of strange birds like you had never seen before?”

  I lay down on the grass beside her chair. Scrumpled up near her feet was her daily paper, and next to it the book she had been reading, its place marked by her spectacle case.

  She threw down the other book she was reading—she often read from two at the same time—and smiling a little irritably, said she would love to see the sky full of birds.

  “There are never enough in this place for my liking,” she said.

  A
flying machine rumbled high up in the soft sky as she spoke, and I seized upon it as a continuation of my theme.

  “Suppose the sky was thick with those things?” I suggested.

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t bear them. They always remind me of the war.”

  My mother then asked me what made me talk of birds and aero­planes, why I looked so worried, and why I had not kissed her as was my habit? I kissed her then, and showed her the evening paper. Presently I was deep in a description of the event of the day, telling her everything, from my first view of the birds over the Thames, to the carrying-away of the old woman from the telephone box.

  “I was thinking,” I added at the end, “what will happen to London when all these birds start casting their loads over us.”

  My mother asserted that it was a good thing they weren’t cows, at which there was a raucous laugh from Annie, who had been standing in the doorway listening to us all the while.

  “Go away, Annie,” said my mother, with a slight frown. And as the girl went inside she turned to me and told me what she told me every evening: that she was sick of the habit the girl had, of hanging on the edge of our conversations.

  “Of course she’s in love with you,” grumbled my mother. “They all are, silly things.”

  I assured her she was mistaken, though secretly I hoped they were.

  Lillian complained of the heat, said we were going to have a thunderstorm, and that her stomach was all wrong again. Some­thing she had eaten at lunch had disagreed with her.

  “Like varnish it tasted,” she murmured petulantly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with food. Like varnish.”