:: greatness is a life well-lived ::

A Manalive Day!

"A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent
of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea.  In a million holes
and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him
like a blow.  In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered
houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with
some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive,
or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island"
and wrapping him in roaring dark.  But everywhere it bore drama into
undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world.
Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five
dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy;
it was as if she had hanged her five children.  The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far
down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself
into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent
the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon,
and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures
of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat.
Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars,
thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes
of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed
them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind
that blows nobody harm.

The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh.  It was round
about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished
at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers
and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has
never been able to shake off.  At some stage of those heights a terrace
of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians,
curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding
establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the sunset its high,
narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship.

The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.  The proprietor
of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless
persons against whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both
before and after all her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt.
But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece
she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young
but listless folks.  And there were actually five inmates
standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale
broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea
bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.

All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with
cold cloud.  Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray
and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior.
When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left
and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold.  The burst of light
released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously;
and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling violence.
The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair.
Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar,
and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element.
Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist.
The three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against
a wall.  The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly,
they were blown into the house.  Their two frocks, blue and white,
looked like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale.
Nor is such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something
oddly romantic about this inrush of air and light after a long,
leaden and unlifting day.  Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland.
It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day."

From the Book Manalive, by GK Chesterton. Read more online.

posted by FaithChristine @ 12:32