THE AIR-MOTHERS

 
“Die Natur ist die Bewegung.”
 

Who are these who follow us softly over the moor in the autumn eve?  Their wings brush and rustle in the fir-boughs, and they whisper before us and behind, as if they called gently to each other, like birds flocking homeward to their nests.

The woodpecker on the pine-stems knows them, and laughs aloud for joy as they pass.  The rooks above the pasture know them, and wheel round and tumble in their play.  The brown leaves on the oak trees know them, and flutter faintly, and beckon as they pass.  And in the chattering of the dry leaves there is a meaning, and a cry of weary things which long for rest.

“Take us home, take us home, you soft air-mothers, now our fathers the sunbeams are grown dull.  Our green summer beauty is all draggled, and our faces are grown wan and wan; and the buds, the children whom we nourished, thrust us off, ungrateful, from our seats.  Waft us down, you soft air-mothers, upon your wings to the quiet earth, that we may go to our home, as all things go, and become air and sunlight once again.”

And the bold young fir-seeds know them, and rattle impatient in their cones.  “Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and shake us from our prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin away north-eastward, each on his horny wing.  Help us but to touch the moorland yonder, and we will take good care of ourselves henceforth; we will dive like arrows through the heather, and drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and rise again as green trees toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs.”

They never think, bold fools, of what is coming, to bring them low in the midst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell them, and the saw which will shape them into logs; and the trains which will roar and rattle over them, as they lie buried in the gravel of the way, till they are ground and rotted into powder, and dug up and flung upon the fire, that they too may return home, like all things, and become air and sunlight once again.

And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: but faintly; for they themselves are tired and sad.

Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their garments rent and wan.  Look at them as they stream over the black forest, before the dim south-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey, stained with dull yellow or dead dun.  They have come far across the seas, and done many a wild deed upon their way; and now that they have reached the land, like shipwrecked sailors, they will lie down and weep till they can weep no more.

Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to mortal eyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand miles across the sea!  Out of the blazing caldron which lies between the two New Worlds, they leapt up when the great sun called them, in whirls and spouts of clear hot steam; and rushed of their own passion to the northward, while the whirling earth-ball whirled them east.  So north-eastward they rushed aloft, across the gay West Indian isles, leaving below the glitter of the flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruel sharks; above the cane-fields and the plaintain-gardens, and the cocoa-groves which fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed with earthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while, far beneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon the north-east breeze.

Wild deeds they did as they rushed onward, and struggled and fought among themselves, up and down, and round and backward, in the fury of their blind hot youth.  They heeded not the tree as they snapped it, nor the ship as they whelmed it in the waves; nor the cry of the sinking sailor, nor the need of his little ones on shore; hasty and selfish even as children, and, like children, tamed by their own rage.  For they tired themselves by struggling with each other, and by tearing the heavy water into waves; and their wings grew clogged with sea-spray, and soaked more and more with steam.  But at last the sea grew cold beneath them, and their clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each other wrapped in dull rain-laden clouds.  They then drew their white cloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame; and said, “We have been wild and wayward: and, alas! our pure bright youth is gone.  But we will do one good deed yet ere we die, and so we shall not have lived in vain.  We will glide onward to the land, and weep there; and refresh all things with soft warm rain; and make the grass grow, the buds burst; quench the thirst of man and beast, and wash the soiled world clean.”

So they are wandering past us, the air-mothers, to weep the leaves into their graves; to weep the seeds into their seed-beds, and weep the soil into the plains; to get the rich earth ready for the winter, and then creep northward to the ice-world, and there die.

Weary, and still more weary, slowly, and more slowly still, they will journey on far northward, across fast-chilling seas.  For a doom is laid upon them, never to be still again, till they rest at the North Pole itself, the still axle of the spinning world; and sink in death around it, and become white snow-clad ghosts.

But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers?  Yes, they must live again.  For all things move for ever; and not even ghosts can rest.  So the corpses of their sisters, piling on them from above, press them outward, press them southward toward the sun once more; across the floes and round the icebergs, weeping tears of snow and sleet, while men hate their wild harsh voices, and shrink before their bitter breath.  They know not that the cold bleak snow-storms, as they hurtle from the black north-east, bear back the ghosts of the soft air-mothers, as penitents, to their father, the great sun.

But as they fly southwards, warm life thrills them, and they drop their loads of sleet and snow; and meet their young live sisters from the south, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal.  And, please God, before many weeks are over, as we run Westward Ho, we shall overtake the ghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back toward their father, the great sun.  Fresh and bright under the fresh bright heaven, they will race with us toward our home, to gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forth about their work once more.  Men call them the south-west wind, those air-mothers; and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, and rightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the sea.  But wise men, and little children, should look on them with more seeing eyes; and say, “May not these winds be living creatures?  They, too, are thoughts of God, to whom all live.”

For is not our life like their life?  Do we not come and go as they?  Out of God’s boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish, stormy youth, and contrite tears—just not too late; through manhood not altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return from Whence we came; to the Bosom of God once more—to go forth again, it may be, with fresh knowledge, and fresh powers, to nobler work.  Amen.

* * * * *

Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the south-western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable evening.  And it was fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-mothers could fulfil it, for foolish man.

 
“There was a roaring in the woods all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright,
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters”
 

But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as that, I stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and watched the water run, with something of a sigh?  Or if, when the schoolboy beside me lamented that the floods would surely be out, and his day’s fishing spoiled, I said to him—“Ah, my boy, that is a little matter.  Look at what you are seeing now, and understand what barbarism and waste mean.  Look at all that beautiful water which God has sent us hither off the Atlantic, without trouble or expense to us.  Thousands, and tens of thousands, of gallons will run under this bridge to-day; and what shall we do with it?  Nothing.  And yet: think only of the mills which that water would have turned.  Think how it might have kept up health and cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of the nearest town, or even in London itself.  Think even how country folk, in many parts of England, in three months’ time, may be crying out for rain, and afraid of short crops, and fever, and scarlatina, and cattle-plague, for want of the very water which we are now letting run back, wasted, into the sea from whence it came.  And yet we call ourselves a civilised people.”

It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys.  And yet, sometimes, a man must speak his heart; even, like Midas’ slave, to the reeds by the river side.  And I had so often, fishing up and down full many a stream, whispered my story to those same river-reeds; and told them that my Lord the Sovereign Demos had, like old Midas, asses’ ears in spite of all his gold, that I thought I might for once tell it the boy likewise, in hope that he might help his generation to mend that which my own generation does not seem like to mend.

I might have said more to him: but did not.  For it is not well to destroy too early the child’s illusion, that people must be wise because they are grown up, and have votes, and rule—or think they rule—the world.  The child will find out how true that is soon enough for himself.  If the truth be forced on him by the hot words of those with whom he lives, it is apt to breed in him that contempt, stormful and therefore barren, which makes revolutions; and not that pity, calm and therefore helpful, which makes reforms.

So I might have said to him, but did not—

And then men pray for rain:

My boy, did you ever hear the old Eastern legend about the Gipsies?  How they were such good musicians, that some great Indian Sultan sent for the whole tribe, and planted them near his palace, and gave them land, and ploughs to break it up, and seed to sow it, that they might dwell there, and play and sing to him.

But when the winter arrived, the Gipsies all came to the Sultan, and cried that they were starving.  “But what have you done with the seed-corn which I gave you?”  “O Light of the Age, we ate it in the summer.”  “And what have you done with the ploughs which I gave you?”  “O Glory of the Universe, we burnt them to bake the corn withal.”

Then said that great Sultan—“Like the butterflies you have lived; and like the butterflies you shall wander.”  So he drove them out.  And that is how the Gipsies came hither from the East.

Now suppose that the Sultan of all Sultans, who sends the rain, should make a like answer to us foolish human beings, when we prayed for rain: “But what have you done with the rain which I gave you six months since?”  “We have let it run into the sea.”  “Then, ere you ask for more rain, make places wherein you can keep it when you have it.”  “But that would be, in most cases, too expensive.  We can employ our capital more profitably in other directions.”

It is not for me to say what answer might be made to such an excuse.  I think a child’s still unsophisticated sense of right and wrong would soon supply one; and probably one—considering the complexity, and difficulty, and novelty, of the whole question—somewhat too harsh; as children’s judgments are wont to be.

But would it not be well if our children, without being taught to blame anyone for what is past, were taught something about what ought to be done now, what must be done soon, with the rainfall of these islands; and about other and kindred health-questions, on the solution of which depends, and will depend more and more, the life of millions?  One would have thought that those public schools and colleges which desire to monopolise the education of the owners of the soil; of the great employers of labour; of the clergy; and of all, indeed, who ought to be acquainted with the duties of property, the conditions of public health, and, in a word, with the general laws of what is now called Social Science—one would have thought, I say, that these public schools and colleges would have taught their scholars somewhat at least about such matters, that they might go forth into life with at least some rough notions of the causes which make people healthy or unhealthy, rich or poor, comfortable or wretched, useful or dangerous to the State.  But as long as our great educational institutions, safe, or fancying themselves safe, in some enchanted castle, shut out by ancient magic from the living world, put a premium on Latin and Greek verses: a wise father will, during the holidays, talk now and then, I hope, somewhat after this fashion:—

You must understand, my boy, that all the water in the country comes out of the sky, and from nowhere else; and that, therefore, to save and store the water when it falls is a question of life and death to crops, and man, and beast; for with or without water is life or death.  If I took, for instance, the water from the moors above and turned it over yonder field, I could double, and more than double, the crops in that field henceforth.

Then why do I not do it?

Only because the field lies higher than the house; and if—now here is one thing which you and every civilised man should know—if you have water-meadows, or any “irrigated” land, as it is called, above a house, or even on a level with it, it is certain to breed not merely cold and damp, but fever or ague.  Our forefathers did not understand this; and they built their houses, as this is built, in the lowest places they could find: sometimes because they wished to be near ponds, from whence they could get fish in Lent; but more often, I think, because they wanted to be sheltered from the wind.  They had no glass, as we have, in their windows; or, at least, only latticed casements, which let in the wind and cold; and they shrank from high and exposed, and therefore really healthy, spots.  But now that we have good glass, and sash windows, and doors that will shut tight, we can build warm houses where we like.  And if you ever have to do with the building of cottages, remember that it is your duty to the people who will live in them, and therefore to the State, to see that they stand high and dry, where no water can drain down into their foundations, and where fog, and the poisonous gases which are given out by rotting vegetables, cannot drain down either.  You will learn more about all that when you learn, as every civilised lad should in these days, something about chemistry, and the laws of fluids and gases.  But you know already that flowers are cut off by frost in the low grounds sooner than in the high; and that the fog at night always lies along the brooks; and that the sour moor-smell which warns us to shut our windows at sunset, comes down from the hill, and not up from the valley.  Now all these things are caused by one and the same law; that cold air is heavier than warm; and, therefore, like so much water, must run down hill.

But what about the rainfall?

Well, I have wandered a little from the rainfall: though not as far as you fancy; for fever and ague and rheumatism usually mean—rain in the wrong place.  But if you knew how much illness, and torturing pain, and death, and sorrow arise, even to this very day, from ignorance of these simple laws, then you would bear them carefully in mind, and wish to know more about them.  But now for water being life to the beasts.  Do you remember—though you are hardly old enough—the cattle-plague?  How the beasts died, or had to be killed and buried, by tens of thousands; and how misery and ruin fell on hundreds of honest men and women over many of the richest counties of England: but how we in this vale had no cattle-plague; and how there was none—as far as I recollect—in the uplands of Devon and Cornwall, nor of Wales, nor of the Scotch Highlands?  Now, do you know why that was?  Simply because we here, like those other uplanders, are in such a country as Palestine was before the foolish Jews cut down all their timber, and so destroyed their own rainfall—a “land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.”  There is hardly a field here that has not, thank God, its running brook, or its sweet spring, from which our cattle were drinking their health and life, while in the clay-lands of Cheshire, and in the Cambridgeshire fens—which were drained utterly dry—the poor things drank no water, too often, save that of the very same putrid ponds in which they had been standing all day long, to cool themselves, and to keep off the flies.  I do not say, of course, that bad water caused the cattle-plague.  It came by infection from the East of Europe.  But I say that bad water made the cattle ready to take it, and made it spread over the country; and when you are old enough I will give you plenty of proof—some from the herds of your own kinsmen—that what I say is true.