The Loom of Destiny/Not in Utter Nakedness
Ages ago it seems to us,
O April, ere our birth,—
Ages ago it must have been,
Upon some other earth
We knew Thee, when without regret
Those happier hills we trod
When by a star or two thy feet
And ours walked nearer God.
NOT IN UTTER NAKEDNESS
IT was a warm, showery April day, with little patches of sunlight every now and then.
The Home faced the Square, and in the Square were many trees, and in the trees were many sparrows—thousands of them, it seemed, and all of them trying to say that Spring had come. There was also a robin or two fluting away in their mellower contralto among the tall elms.
The air was so soft, and it smelt so much like Spring, that the Doctor, as he turned to go out, told the Nurse that there was no reason why the windows might not be opened and the boy let sit up for a while.
So the Nurse wheeled the little white bed over beside the window and opened the sash. Then she made a sort of nest of the pillows and blanket, and lifted the boy up into it. This she did with a quiet alacrity, for she was used to such things.
"I tell you, young man, those are pretty thin legs of yours!" she said, not unkindly, as she tucked him in for she liked the child.
The boy smiled weakly, but did not answer. Then the nurse gave him his milk, with lime-water in it, and brushed his scant yellow hair while he drank it. When he had finished she took the glass, gave a little touch to one of the pillows, and hurried away, for she had thirty other sick children to attend that morning.
Bliss—from the day he was born they had called him Bliss—sat quite still, watching the sun slip on and on through soft grey clouds with mother-of-pearl edges. Then, all of a sudden, it came out full and dazzling and golden, and lay in a patch of glaring yellow across his bed. He could feel it soaking in through the blankets. The feeling was new to him, and it ran up through his thin legs like wine.
On the maple outside two or three sparrows were twittering and chirping away as if they could never say all the good things they had to talk about. Further up the Square a hurdygurdy began to play. The strong sunlight had made Bliss' eyes droop, but at the sound of the hurdygurdy he suddenly opened them. He could not hear very much of the music, though he strained his ears painfully to catch the sounds. He, indeed, had never thought hurdygurdies could make such beautiful music. While he sat listening the Nurse softly opened the door and glanced in. She saw the quiet smile on the child's lips, and closed the door again, without speaking.
Then the hurdygurdy moved closer down the Square and began to play once more. This time he could hear it quite plainly. It mixed with the twittering of the sparrows and the calls of the robins in the elms. The smell of the buds came with it, too, and the dust that danced up and down so busily in the square of golden sunlight falling across the bed seemed a part of it.
How funny it all seemed, thought Bliss; how funny and familiar and old.
He said to himself that he felt as if he had sat there for years and years and years, and watched the same trees, and listened to the same birds, and heard the same hurdygurdy. No; it had not been years, but thousands and thousands of years. It sounded so old, and familiar, and reminiscent.
And the sunlight on the bed—he wondered where it could have been that he used to sit and watch the dust going up and down just the same as it was doing here. He sniffed the air lazily. It smelt very nice, with the perfume of the trees and some sort of blossoms that he could not see.
The breeze that blew in at the window in little gusts swayed the white curtain and made the warm patch of sunlight on the bed shrink up, and then grow bigger again. The hurdygurdy went away, and the birds seemed to stop for a while, and only a street cry or two came up from the Square. Bliss believed that he liked the quiet the best. It seemed as if the World had turned over, and then gone to sleep again. Something within him, some voice he had never felt before, seemed to be groping its way blindly up from his heart, and trying to express itself. He wanted to say something—to sing it—but he could find no words that would fit. He felt suddenly as if he had wings, and that he could drift airily up and down in blue ether far above the earth. He was so happy he felt that he must sing as nobody had ever sung in all the world before. But he could find no lines for the song, and only stretched his thin arms out helplessly into the warm patch of yellow sunlight.
Then a sudden terrible, mysterious loneliness stole over him. It seemed as if he had been alone all his life, and that everything was grey around him, and that the silence was so beautiful that he dare not speak to break it. He wondered if he could tell it all to the Nurse, and if she would understand. Then he knew she would n't, because he would not know how to begin, and it was one of those things Other People never understood. But the birds were singing again outside, and away up the Square another hurdygurdy had begun to play, and the blind was flapping lazily to and fro and letting the warm sunlight stream over him. It was all so poignantly lovely! The world was so strangely beautiful! Life was so unspeakably sweet!
The Nurse came in on tiptoe, for she had expected he would be asleep.
She slipped a clinic thermometer under his tongue, and sat on the bed looking into his eyes.
"How's temperature?" asked the Doctor, showing his head at the door.
"It's up two points," said the nurse, impassively.
"H'm! Then tell Simpson not to mind about the operating table. Friday will be soon enough."
The nurse looked at the child and sighed. Bliss was gazing far out over the tree tops at the blue sky. He reached out his hand to take the Nurse's.
Without a moment's warning a torrent of sudden tears burst from his eyes, and his body shook with a passionate sob.
"Why, Bliss, what is it, dear?" asked the Nurse, for never before had the boy been known to do such a thing.
"I—I—don't know what it is! I—I am so happy, and it is all so funny—but you can't understand, Nurse. It's inside here," said the boy, putting his gaunt little hand over his heart and letting the tears rain down his cheeks unchecked, "an' if I tried all my life I could never tell you, Nurse. No, never!"
••••••
The Great Man looked up at the tall old trees. The smell of Spring was very sweet in the air.
"It has not been much," he said. "And it is such a simple old story. A great deal of loneliness; a great deal of hard work; a little luck, perhaps; much misery; a little love; a few enemies, and a friend or two! But after all, it has not been much. As you grow older you will find that the work you want to do is the work you can never do. It is the elusive, the fugitive, the intangible idea that you will grope after so blindly, and yet so passionately. And yet you will never quite capture it. The spirit of it will steal over you at times, at rare moments, but it will be more a pain than a pleasure to you. You will feel it within you, and the greater you are the more you will feel it, and though you try and try all your life long to utter it, you cannot and you could not do it. No, never!"