David Blaize and the Blue Door

‘But it might be pretty farther on,’ said David.

‘Please yourself, dearie,’ said the cow. ‘Here’s a beautiful carriage now. That’ll make a sweet home for you for five or six years.’

David followed the cow, when she had finished sticking in the door into the carriage. It was a large bare room with a quantity of hooks on the walls, and a small three-legged stool standing in the middle of it.

‘Now I’ll get rid of your luggage,’ said the cow.

She began tossing the pieces on her horns in the neatest manner on to the hooks. Then she switched her tail, and the portmanteaux and dress baskets and wine-cases and all the heavier things flew this way and that on to their hooks, or piled themselves in the corners.

David looked round his sweet little house with some dismay.

‘But if I get very sleepy, can’t I go to bed?’ he asked.

‘Why, of course you can,’ said the cow. ‘You can go to bed anywhere you like all over the floor, or you can hang yourself up to a hook, or get inside a portmanteau. And the motion will never disturb you, as it’s an empty-speed express.’

‘What’s that?’ asked David.

‘Why, a full-speed express goes as fast as it can, doesn’t it? And an empty-speed express goes as slow as it can. Hullo! It’s stopped whistling.’

The cow jumped out of the door, which immediately slammed to after her, and disappeared among the crowd on the platform. The train started at a great speed, so it seemed to David, but as it got going, it went slower and slower, until he could scarcely believe that it was moving at all. He felt rather lonely at the idea of spending five or six years in the train, but after all, if it moved so slowly, it would not be difficult to jump out. Unless he found another cow-porter, which didn’t seem likely, he would have to leave his luggage behind, but he would not really miss it much, since he had never had it before, and had not the slightest idea what it contained.

A pecking noise at the window attracted his attention, and he saw a crow sitting on the ledge outside.

‘Let me in,’ it said. ‘It’s time to rest. I shall stop flying for the present.’

David let down the window, and the crow fluttered on to the floor.

‘But if you stop flying, shall I become invisible?’ he asked.

‘Yes, of course. You’re getting dim now. Pop! Now you’ve gone.’

David held up his hand in front of him, but he could see nothing at all of it. It must have been there, because when he touched the end of his nose with it, it felt quite solid. But he had certainly vanished for the present, for there was nothing whatever of him to be seen.

‘I wish you wouldn’t interfere with me like that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t like it if I made you invisible.’

The crow had put its head under its wing, and tucked up one leg, and its voice sounded muffled.

‘You seem to think,’ it said, ‘that everything is to be managed as you want it. But if you imagine I’m going to go on flying all night, without a rest, just in order to keep you visible, you make a mistake. You aren’t so pretty as all that, my young fellah.’

‘But you’ll fly again before long, won’t you?’ asked David.

All the answer he got was:

‘Haugh! Rumph, haugh! Rumph! Rumph!’ for the crow had gone fast asleep, and was snoring.

David poked it with the place where his fingers usually were, to wake it, but it only snored louder and louder. Then he picked it up and shook it, but the only result was that its snoring became perfectly deafening.

‘I’ll drop it out of the window,’ he said to himself,’ and then it must fly.’

But this was no good, for the crow didn’t even take its head from under its wing, or put its leg down, but fell quietly on to the ground below the window, without waking. Just then there came a bend in the line, and though the train was scarcely moving at all, it was soon out of sight.

‘Well, there’s no help for it,’ thought David, ‘and so I may as well go to sleep too. It seems to make one sleepy to be invisible.’

Then, so he supposed, he must have gone completely to sleep, for when the next thing happened, it was quite light. As he had been travelling since 11.29 P.M., it was perfectly obvious that it was now morning. For some reason he felt inclined to lick his hand and rub it behind his ears, but he remembered that only cats did that, and instead he drew his three-legged stool to the window and looked out. He found he was visible again, and supposed the crow must have begun flying.

The train seemed to be running very slowly round and round a field. Occasionally it stopped dead, and began to whistle, but usually it splashed quietly along, into puddles and out of puddles, without any lines in front of it. Sometimes they curved a little to avoid a tree, but they crushed their way through an ordinary hedge, and birds flew out scolding them and saying, ‘I wish you would look where you are going.’ Then a voice from the engine said, ‘Sorry you have been troubled,’ just like a young lady in the telephone exchange.

But the country seemed familiar to David, and presently he saw that the train was in a field just beyond the High Street of the village he had left at 11.29. It was slowly going back to it again, to a spot some fifty yards away from the place they had started from. Then it began to make a very sharp curve, in order to avoid a horse that was lying down in the field, and the engine came just opposite his window.

‘A rare good run, David,’ shouted the engine-driver. ‘We shall stop at the hairdresser’s in a minute now, if you want to have anything done.’

David had not had his hair cut lately, so this seemed rather a good opportunity.

‘How long do we stop there?’ he shouted.

‘Two or three weeks. You’ll just have time.’

In spite of the slowness with which they were moving, there was a tremendous rattle of wheels somewhere, and the noise seemed to come from overhead. Then looking up, he saw that there were hundreds of wheels all turning round. There were long bands hanging from them, and just then the engine began whistling to show it had stopped. Clouds of steam poured in through the carriage window and, as that cleared away, David saw that he was standing in the hairdresser’s shop, and that underneath the wheels was sitting a row of old gentlemen having their heads brushed with circular brushes. Others were being shampooed, others were apparently having their heads painted, others were having breakfast, but they were all, without exception, absolutely bald.

There was a looking-glass in front of each of them, and David saw the face of a kind old gentleman in it. The looking-glasses were of the sort that stood on his mother’s dressing-table, which showed your left-hand side where the bruise was, which came when you fell out of a tree, and your right-hand side, where a tooth had been taken out, and full face where both these things happened. And in each looking-glass was the reflection of a bald old gentleman, nodding and smiling at him.

After his solitary night in the train, David longed for a little conversation again, and he went to the nearest old gentleman, who was eating eggs and bacon, while the hairdresser scrubbed his head with the circular brush.

‘Good morning, David,’ said he. ‘Have you had a good journey? The hard brush, please,’ he added to the hairdresser. ‘That doesn’t do me any good. Aha, aha, that’s better. And now I’ll have a shampoo.’

David thought this rather an odd way of doing things, since you usually had your shampoo first, and your brushing afterwards, but the hairdresser didn’t seem to mind. The old gentleman bent over the basin, with his eggs and bacon on his knee, and continued breakfasting.

‘Boiling or freezing, sir?’ asked the hairdresser.

‘Boiling first and then freezing,’ said the old gentleman, with his mouth full. ‘No, freezing first and boiling afterwards. And where did you come from?’ he asked David.

‘From the house next the Bank, I think,’ said David. ‘I came by the 11.29.’

‘A fine train,’ said he, ‘a very fine train. There’s nothing slower anywhere.’

The hairdresser wrapped a towel round his head, and began drying it.

‘And what will you have on, sir?’ he asked.

The old gentleman considered a little.

‘I think a map of south-west London would be best,’ he said. ‘I’m going up there next week, and I don’t know my way about. It would be very tiresome to get lost. But if you give me a nice map of south-west London, with 25 Brompton Square marked in red, why, all I shall have to do, if I get lost, is to ring the nearest bell of the nearest house, and ask for a couple of looking-glasses.’

‘What for?’ asked David.

‘Why, I shall sit in front of one, and reflect the top of my head in the other. Then I shall see where I am, and where I want to go to. Send the geographer and the painter at once.’

This old gentleman got so interested in his map that he did not talk to David any more, and so he strolled on to the next one, who, so he learned, was going to Egypt, and was having a spider’s web painted on his head to keep the flies off. He, too, seemed to know David, which made it very pleasant.

‘And so you’ve come by the 11.29,’ he said. ‘A dangerous trip, because you go so slow that it’s almost impossible to stop in case of an accident. I leave for Egypt by the same train. I wonder if it would be wiser to have some fly papers as well. Or a picture of a mummy or two, to give me local colour.’

‘Whatever you please, sir,’ said the hairdresser.

‘Well, we can’t go wrong with a mummy. I think a mummy and a spider’s web, and leave out the fly-papers.’

The next old gentleman was having his own face painted in oils on the back of his head, and he put his finger on his lip, and beckoned with the other hand to David.

‘Is it like me?’ he whispered. ‘Give me your candid opinion. Don’t mind the artist.’

He nodded his head up and down, so that David should see his real face and his painted face.

‘Very like indeed,’ said David. ‘But what’s it for?’

He assumed an air of great secrecy.

‘You mustn’t tell anybody,’ he said. ‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘Well, if I have my own face at the back of my head, it will be such a puzzle. People in the street will see me looking at them, as if I was coming towards them, and all the time I shall be going away. What do you think of that?’

‘It’s – it’s certainly very puzzling,’ said David.

‘Isn’t it? And then when I’m tired of going that way, I shall begin to walk backwards, and all the people the other side of me will think the same thing. In quite a short time nobody will know where I am. I shall always be going away when they think I’m coming, and when they think I’m coming I shall always be going away!’

‘But that’s the same thing, isn’t it?’ asked David.

He took no notice of this, and called out to the painter, who had R.A. embroidered on his collar.

‘Mind you put a cigarette in my mouth. And then this side will smoke a pipe. That’ll puzzle them worse than ever. It will, it will – won’t it?’ he said to David triumphantly.

David could not understand what it was all about, but at that moment the door opened, and the cow looked in.

‘Passengers by the Bald Express to take their seats,’ she called. ‘All others to remain standing.’

Instantly there was a scene of the utmost confusion, and all the old gentlemen began running into each other. The worst of them was the one who had had his face painted on the back of his head, because nobody could possibly guess which way he was coming. But by degrees the room cleared, as the whistling of the engine, which had gone on all the time, grew fainter, and finally, when it stopped, David found himself quite alone. The sound of wheels going round overhead ceased, and its place was taken by a rumble that gradually got less. He ran out on to the platform, and there was the empty-speed express crawling out of the station, carrying the kind old gentlemen to Egypt and London S.W., and wherever the backward-forward one meant to puzzle people. He felt that it must be quite easy to catch it up, but the faster he ran the farther he got away from it. At last, perfectly breathless, he stopped, not quite certain whether he really wanted to catch it or not. He longed to know if the spider’s web would keep off the flies, or the map of London S.W. show the other old gentleman where he was, but, after all, there were so many different things to explore.

He began to run again, after he had got his breath, not after the train any more, but Anywhere. He felt that with every step he took he was getting lighter, and in a minute he was running on the very tips of his toes. Then his left foot didn’t touch the ground at all, and then his right foot. He simply found himself running in the air.

CHAPTER VI

David gave a great kick with his left foot to make sure it wasn’t touching anything. Certainly it touched nothing, but he felt the air stream swiftly by him. Then he kicked with his right foot, and the same thing happened.

‘I do believe I’m flying,’ said he aloud. ‘Now there’s a hedge coming. If I am really remembering how to fly, and if I kick downwards, I shall get over it.’

He made a sort of spring in the air, and bounded high over the hedge without even touching its topmost twigs.

‘It’s all quite easy,’ he shouted. ‘I must remember carefully how it’s done. You run, and then you get on the tips of your toes, and then you run a little more, and then you’re up. If you want to get higher you kick downwards. And I suppose if you want to go downwards, you just take a sort of little header.’

This answered perfectly. He had been learning to swim lately, and made a bob with his head, and spread his arms in front of him. Next moment he was within a foot or two of the ground, and kicked downwards again to bring himself up.

‘Now I’ll float,’ he said, ‘and see what happens.’

He spread his arms and legs out like a starfish, drew a long breath, and looked at the sky, as his father had taught him to do. This, too, succeeded, and he found himself motionless in the air, perhaps drifting a little in the morning wind.

‘I’ll go higher now,’ he said. ‘I’ll just wander up to the top of the elm trees, and see what’s going on there.’

He had calculated his distance pretty well for a beginner, and a few downward kicks in the air brought him brushing against the topmost boughs of the elm that stood on the far side of the lake beyond the garden. It seemed to be spring-time, for there was a great commotion among the rooks, as he pushed the young green leaves aside and looked in. A pair of them were quarrelling as to which way a particular stick ought to be laid, one wanting it laid crossways, the other straight. They had lived for years before they came here in a cathedral close, and were always known as Canon and Mrs. Rook. But when they saw him, they stopped arguing.

‘Why, bless me, you’ve remembered it at last,’ said Canon Rook. ‘And it doesn’t make you feel giddy, does it?’

‘Not a bit,’ said David. ‘It’s the loveliest thing that ever happened. Why didn’t you tell me before how to do it?’

‘Bless you, we were telling you all day long,’ said Mrs. Rook, ‘but you always pretended to forget.’

Suddenly it struck David that he had known how to fly all his life, but had merely forgotten.’

‘Why, of course, I knew all along,’ he said. ‘And shall I always be able to fly now?’

‘Until the next time that you forget. But boys are forgetful creatures, you know,’ said Mrs. Rook.

‘So are girls,’ said David. ‘But I won’t forget this time. And may I try to pass my flying certificate at once?’

‘Why, certainly,’ said Canon Rook, ‘if we can get a committee together. Birds are a bit busy now that it’s building time, but it’s not every day that a boy comes up for his flying certificate, and I shouldn’t wonder if they came. I’ll go and call them.’

He flew up to the very topmost twig of the elm, and balanced himself there.

‘Urgent call – caw, caw,’ he shouted. ‘A young gentleman has just come up here to try for his flying certificate, if the committee will kindly attend. Urgent – caw, caw, caw,’ he repeated.

Instantly there was a chirping and calling of birds on all sides, from the other elms, and from the fields below, and the bushes and the lake. A pair of brown owls were the first to arrive from the ivy in the church tower, with their spectacles, without which they cannot see by day. Then came a cloud of finches: bull-finches, green-finches, haw-finches, and chaf-finches; and wood pigeons came cooing in, and a couple of jackdaws, who tried to talk to David in his own tongue, and thought they could do it very well indeed, though all they could say was ‘Jack’! Jays came screaming out of the wood, with nice fresh paint on the blue streaks on their wings, and woodpeckers tapped to know if they had come to the right elm, and there were nightingales learning the new tunes for the year, and blackbirds, already getting a little hoarse, singing the February tunes. Herons came clattering up from the lake, and teal and wild duck, and moorhens tried to join them, but they couldn’t fly as high as this, and only flapped about the lake, saying ‘Hear, hear! Hear, hear!’ A pheasant with burnished copper plates on his back, rocketed up, and a woodcock or two, flying ‘flip-flap, flip-flap,’ and swifts and martens cut circles and loops in the air. There was a nightjar who opened his mouth very wide, and made a sort of gargling noise instead of singing, and linnets, and robins which hadn’t finished dressing, and were still buttoning their red waistcoats, and, like a jewel flung through the early morning sunlight, a kingfisher came and perched on David’s shoulder. Larks left the tussocks of grass in the meadow below, and carolled their way upwards, and wild-eyed hawks sat a little apart, for fear they should be too much tempted at the sight of so many plump birds all assembled together. So they sat on another branch, and shut their mouths very tight, as if they were eating caramels, remembering that when a flying-committee is assembled it is considered very bad form to eat your fellow-members. There were freshly varnished starlings, and speckled thrushes, and hundreds of rude noisy sparrows, and, long before all the committee were assembled, half the elms in the rookery were crowded with birds, for the passing of a human candidate was a very unusual event indeed, and nobody wanted to miss it.

David felt rather frightened when the test for the birds’ flying certificate was explained to him, for, of course, that is a much stiffer examination than anything that happens to the young gentlemen in the flying corps. Not only had he got to do all the clumsy man-tricks which they perform with their aeroplanes, in which they don’t really fly, and are only flown with, but some bird-tricks as well, and to get his certificate he had to satisfy every single one of the committee, which now consisted of several thousand people. But Canon Rook, who, as he had summoned the committee, was chairman of it, told him not to be afraid.

‘You can remember all right,’ he said, ‘and besides, each bird who sets a question will show you first what you’ve got to do. Caw! Silence, please.’

But it took a long time to get silence this morning, for nesting was going on, and all the ladies were talking about the different linings for nests, and the best way of stitching and hemming them. Some said ‘mud,’ and some said ‘feathers,’ and some said ‘bits of things,’ and the kingfisher said, ‘Give me fish-bones.’ However, the birds round Canon Rook began calling ‘Silence’ too, and by degrees this spread until the whole committee was calling ‘Silence’ at the tops of their voices, and making far more noise than ever. But this was a step in the right direction, and soon the hubbub died down, and Canon Rook spoke again.

‘The candidate is David Blaize, a boy still quite unfledged, except on the top of his head,’ he said, ‘and his age is six.’

‘Rather old!’ cooed a wood pigeon.

‘Yes, but it’s better late than never,’ said Canon Rook, ‘and I’m sure we’re all very pleased that he has remembered how to fly at last. He’ll probably be a bit stiff from age, and you mustn’t expect too much. He will now please jump off, loop the loop twice, and return to his seat. Caw!’

David had often seen the airmen doing that, and he jumped off the bough and made two very neat loops without any difficulty, and returned again, brushing the hair out of his eyes.

‘Right, O!’ screamed the whole of the committee.

‘Spinning nose-dive!’ said Canon Rook.

David remembered that too. You had to put your head down, and spin like a dead leaf on a windless day. It made him a little giddy, but the committee were pleased with him, and only the owl said that his conscience would not allow him to pass that, since he did not call it flying at all, but falling. So all the rest chattered and screamed and sang at him till his spectacles fell off, which made his conscience get quite confused and forget what it wouldn’t allow him to do. Then followed the tail-slip, in which David stretched out his legs in front of him and held his toes in his fingers, so that he sat down in the air and slid backwards, just as if there wasn’t a chair there when he had expected one.

That finished the first part, and then all the committee began talking at once in order to settle what bird-tricks he should have to do. They were inclined to let him off rather easily, because it was considered a sporting thing for a boy to attempt the bird-test at all, and they made up their three thousand minds that, if he did one bird-trick perfectly, that would be enough. Then, when all the birds had shouted ‘Silence’ until they were quite hoarse, Canon Rook cleared his throat and spoke.

‘The bird-test is as follows – caw,’ he said. ‘The candidate will attempt to do the lark-trick, starting from the ground and returning to it again. Show him what he’s got to do, one of you larks.’

A lark dropped from the tree and crouched in a tussock of grass. Then it jumped off the ground and began mounting in a perpendicular line, rising very slowly and singing as it went.

When it had got to the top of its flight it hovered there, and slowly descended, still singing. About ten feet from the ground it stopped singing, and dropped plump into the tussock from which it had risen.

‘Candidate, please,’ said Canon Rook.

‘Must I sing too?’ asked David.

‘Of course that’s part of it,’ said the lark, still rather breathless. ‘Any one could do it without singing.’

‘Strictly speaking, it’s not a singing competition,’ said Canon Rook. ‘Can you sing?’ he asked David.

David remembered how Noah had offered him a post to sing in opera in the ark, evenings and matinées, and, though no doubt birds were a more musical audience, he felt that it would be untrue, after that, to say he couldn’t sing.

‘Yes, I can sing,’ he said. ‘At least Noah thought so.’

‘I think he’d better have a try first,’ said the nightingale. ‘It would be awful if he sang very badly all the time, and we had to bear it till he got down again, as the committee mayn’t interrupt a candidate in the middle of a test.’

‘Sing a few bars, David,’ said Canon Rook.

It had been the tune of ‘Rule Britannia’ sung to the words,

‘Never do, never do,Never, never, never do,’

that had pleased Noah so much, and David began to sing them again. But he had hardly sung the first line before the nightingale and the blackbirds and the thrushes and the other professional musicians all turned quite pale and swooned. They were gradually restored by being fanned with their friends’ wings, but they still trembled, and were floppity. Other birds were merely in shrieks of laughter, and David felt very much confused, till a corncrake perched on his knee and said:

‘You sang excellently, quite excellently: don’t mind them.’

But it was unanimously decided that David should not sing while he did the lark-flight, and he jumped off the bough, and stood in a privet-bush, which was to do duty for a tussock of grass, as he was too big for a tussock. In order to make his performance more life-like, it was settled that all the larks should sing together as he mounted and descended, stopping when he was three feet from the ground, for he was too heavy to drop from ten feet.

‘One, two, caw, three, off,’ said Canon Rook.

David gave a little spring in the air as he had seen the lark do, and began treading air with his feet, and beating gently downwards with his outspread fingers, and as he took flight it sounded in that still bright air as if all the larks in the world had begun to sing. He found he mounted rather too quickly at first, and so ceased treading air, using his hands alone. Slowly he mounted and the music of the larks entered his heart and made him feel happier than he had known it was possible to be. He gasped with pleasure as he rose, like when you sit in your bath on a cold evening, and pour the first spongeful of hot water down your back, only now it was spring and singing and flying that tingled all over him. He hung high above the tree-tops in the blue, and the earth was like one flower beneath him. Long he hovered there, and then with a sigh began slowly to descend. There was dead silence in the tree-tops where the committee sat, except for the singing of the larks, but he knew that hundreds of bright eyes were watching him, to see if he was really flying as larks fly.