Wings and Numbers

There is a season, I am told, when the young of certain birds will stand at the lip of the nest and beat their unfledged wings against nothing at all — not yet to fly, but because the idea of flight has lodged in them before the means. I think of this now, in a room kept dark for my eyes, where the physicians have left me their silence and the pen is the one thing still obedient to my hand; and I think I was once such a creature, beating at the air of a Sussex morning with a scheme I had christened, in all the gravity of thirteen, Flyology.

I was perhaps twelve or thirteen — it was, I believe, the year eight-and-twenty — when the notion took me whole. I did not wish merely to imagine flying, as a poet's daughter might be supposed to wish; that would have been the cheap half of the matter. I wished to build the wings. And so I went about it as I have gone about every passion since — by reconnaissance. I dissected the question of the bird: the proportion the pinion must bear to the body it would lift, the articulation of the joint, the weight of a feather set against the breadth it spread. I weighed whether the apparatus ought to be wrought in oiled silk drawn upon wires, or in something stiffer; I weighed steam, even, as the labouring heart of the contrivance — for I had a child's faith that whatever drove the mills of the north might be coaxed to carry a girl over a hedge. I meant to compose a book of it, plates and all: a map of the air, with the routes a flying person might take across the country laid down as a mariner lays down his soundings.

I set it here, and I hear already how it must sound — a delicate, motherless girl, half her days flat upon her back, drawing wings she would never wear. The headaches had begun by then, the ones that made knives of the light; the measles that would lay me down and steal the use of my limbs for a long captivity was not far off. And yet I do not remember Flyology as a sickroom's consolation. I remember it as work — the first work in which I felt the two halves of myself, kept so carefully apart by those who reared me, reach across the partition and clasp hands. For here was fancy, the sheer audacity of wishing to leave the ground; and here, in the very same breath, was measurement, ratio, the patient interrogation of how. The dream did not despise the arithmetic; the arithmetic did not extinguish the dream. They were — I see it now — not two faculties at war, but one faculty wearing two faces; and the whole remainder of my life has been an argument, conducted chiefly against myself and my upbringing, that this is so.

My mother, of course, would have approved the arithmetic and watched the dream with that cool vigilance I have described elsewhere. She had laid out my education as one lays out a fortification — every line of approach to my temperament covered by its discipline. There were the music masters, for the fingers and the patience; the languages, French chiefly, which would one day prove no idle accomplishment but the very door through which my great work entered; the drawing, the geography, the long sums set and corrected. And beneath all of it, like a watermark held to the light, the conviction that if she crowded my hours with reason there would remain no room in me for the other inheritance — for the wildness men still whispered of when they named my father. She need not have dreaded it as she did. The wildness and the reason were never at war in me; they wanted only a field broad enough to be married upon.

It was mathematics that proved the field. I cannot give the day it came, as one gives a birthday — the love crept up as the dawn does, grey first and then irresistible. But somewhere in those years of tutoring I discovered that the calculus was not the dry catechism my mother's friends — those watchful elder ladies I privately named the Furies — supposed it when they pressed it on me as a corrective. It was, on the contrary, the wildest country into which I had yet been let: an unknown and unexplored analytical world, its horizons receding as one rode toward them, its laws as strange and as beautiful as any in poetry. To follow a chain of operations to a conclusion one could not have foreseen at the outset — to feel the symbols carry one somewhere unaided fancy could never have gone — that was flight after all. I had wanted wings for my body; I was being given them, instead, for the mind, and the air they opened was without limit.

But a passion requires an exemplar — some living proof that the road one means to take does not end against a wall — and mine I owe, beyond almost every other debt, to Mrs. Somerville.

I came to know Mary Somerville in the early thirties, and I have never since been able to think of her without a settling of the spirit, as of one come in out of weather. Consider what she was. A woman — not in a closet, not in secret, not apologising — who did science in the open: who read the great analysts of France, who wrote of the heavens and the physical world in books that men of learning bought and praised, and who did all this without ceasing for one moment to be entirely herself, kind, unaffected, pouring the tea. I had been reared to believe, whatever was said aloud, that a mind such as I suspected in myself was a kind of deformity in a woman — a thing to be drilled toward usefulness and otherwise concealed. And here was Mrs. Somerville, contradicting that belief by the mere fact of being, going about her studies as naturally as another lady goes about her household.

What she gave me was not chiefly instruction, though she guided my reading and bore my pestering questions with a generosity I did not deserve. What she gave me was permission — though she never spoke the word, and would, I think, have been astonished to hear it named. From the first she treated me not as a charge to be improved, nor as a poet's curious daughter to be exhibited, but as a mind: one mind speaking to another across the table, taking my notions seriously enough to correct them. To a creature reared under perpetual suspicion, to be taken seriously is an emancipation those born to it can scarcely measure. I had spent my girlhood being managed; with her I was, perhaps for the first time, simply met.

It was in her drawing-room, too, among the philosophical company she kept, that the world I had glimpsed in my sums began to take on faces and voices — for she moved easily among the men who were remaking the knowledge of the age, and she suffered me to move there at her side. The door she opened was not only the door to better books. It was the door to a society of intellect; and I, who had so long pressed my face to the glass of that society, was led within and given a chair.

And the world claimed me from the other side in the same season. In the year thirty-three I was presented at Court — gowned and trembling and seventeen, made over for an afternoon into precisely the ornamental article my mother's training was meant to refine. I will not pretend I despised it; there is a vanity in me I have never wholly subdued, and the spectacle was a glittering one. But I remember standing in that press of rank and ceremony with the curious double sight that has dogged me all my days — performing the débutante with one half of myself while the other stood a little apart, watching, calculating, asking what the whole brilliant machinery of it was for. I had crossed a threshold; everyone said so. What no one at Court could have told me was that the threshold of consequence lay elsewhere — not in the throne-room but in a drawing-room where the cards and the wheels of a wholly new kind of engine waited to be shown to a girl who would understand them better, it may be, than the man who made them.

That, however, belongs to the next part of my story, and I must not run toward it; the dying have a vice of haste, snatching at the climax as though the chapters between were already spent. Let me linger a moment longer in the joy of it — for joy it was, the first true joy of which this account can honestly speak. Before the engine there was flight; before the cards, the wings; before the great labour of my one important year, a girl on her back drawing the anatomy of birds and refusing, against all the instruction of her keepers, to believe that to dream a thing and to reckon it were two different and quarrelling acts. They were never two. I knew it at thirteen with the certainty children have and cannot prove; I would spend the rest of my short life proving it — the dreaming and the reckoning never two acts but one, as the child at the nest already knew before ever she could fly.