Part 16 (2/2)

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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.h.i.+ning; 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 workmans.h.i.+p. 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 apprentices.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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

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