Remembering his promise, though made only to himself, he proposed going to the cinema. Tom, who was present during the discussion that followed, wanted a Revue, but was overruled.
'You can't smoke,' he objected, but what he really meant was that he wanted to have his physical sensations stimulated by suggestive reminders that he was a breeding rabbit that had never left earth—earth which a single shower could turn into mud.
'That won't hurt you for one night, Tom,' observed Mother, aware vaguely of his difficulty.
They chose the best the advertisements supplied and went off after an early dinner. In a sort of bundle they started, Mother in her finery forgetting the performance was in the dark, Joan, smiling, neat and bright, her little ankles tripping, and Mr. Wimble important, holder of the purse-strings and full of anticipatory wonder. Tom, smoking cheap gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes, was superior and sulky. Like an untidy bundle the family made the journey towards Piccadilly Circus, a bundle with loose ends, patched corners, one end hardly belonging to the other, yet obviously coherent for all that, and with a spot of brilliant colour— Joan's bright, glancing eyes and eagerly pretty face.
Tom, having bought a halfpenny evening paper, read the sporting and financial news; his racing tips had proved false; his mood was ill-humoured; he eyed the girls on the pavement below, flicking his cigarette ash over the edge of the motor-bus from time to time.
'What's on?' enquired a chance acquaintance across the gangway, with an eye on pretty Joan. 'Music hall or high-brow legitimate?'
'Cinema,' returned Tom in a scratchy voice, 'with the family. I'm beat to the wide.'
'Who's put the wind up you this time?' enquired his friend.
'Family. They put it across me sometimes. Can't be helped.'
'Good egg!' was the reply, as the youth looked past him admiringly at Joan.
'Oh!—my sister,' mentioned Tom, proudly, and with a flash of self-satisfaction; 'Joan, a friend of mine—Mr. Spindle,' adding under his breath something about Rolls Royce and Limousines, as though Mr. Spindle, who was actually merely an employé in some motor works, owned several expensive cars.
Joan, ignorant of the strange modern slang they used, nodded sweetly, then turned to watch the surging throng of energetic humanity on the pavement below. She was in the corner seat. Father and Mother sat below—inside. The sea of human beings rolled past like waves of water.
'Everybody going somewhere,' she said half to herself with a thrill of wonder. It struck her that, though hardly any one looked up, some must surely want to fly, and one or two, at least, must know they could. She wondered there were no collisions. All dodged and slid past and side-stepped so cleverly. The energy, skill, and subconscious calculation they used were considerable. In each brain was a distinct and separate purpose, a mental picture of the spot each busily made for, while yet all seemed governed by one common denial: that nothing off the earth was conceivable even. Like crowding ants, they stuck to the ground, shuffling laboriously along the world-worn routes. Their minds, she was persuaded, knew heavy ways, unaware that horizons are made to lift. She watched the herd in search for amusement after the drudgery of the day, engaged upon a common search. What they really sought, she felt, was air. Only they knew it not. In ignorance they toiled to find artificial excitement— pleasure.
She longed to lift them up and swing them loose into undivided space, let them know freedom, lightness, spontaneous carelessness. If they would only dance—it would be something.
'And all going to the same place,' she added aloud. She sighed.
'I hope to God they're not,' said Tom in his scratchy voice, thinking of the cinema.
'Eh?' remarked Mr. Spindle, with a thrust forward of his head.
The motor-bus lumbered into the Circus and drew up, leaning over to one side.
'So long,' said Tom to his friend, 'we push off here.'
Mr. Spindle offered his hand to Joan, who shook it, but looked past him, refusing the gleaming eye he offered her at the same time. They clambered down to their parents on the pavement, and joined the throng that swept heavily into the pretentious doorways of the cinema building. As they went in Joan glanced at her mother and realised that she loved her. She looked so worried and so helpless. It was pathetic how heavily she moved. Age! The age of the body, of course. But why should she be old? She was barely forty. She was out, seeking with a good expenditure of energy, for pleasure. It struck the girl suddenly that her mother's ignorance was singular. She knew so little. Somewhere about her—at the corners of her mouth, flickering in her opaque eyes, in the tilt of her ears—was still a vestige of youth and fun and joy. But Mother ignored it, crawling willingly with the herd. Yet the bird lurked in her surely. In spite of this heavy crawling, there were wings tucked away in her somewhere.
'Mother, we're out on a spree,' whispered Joan. 'Wherever we are, we go! Let me carry your bag?'
'Eh, Joan? What d'you say? Don't shove, my love. We shall get nowherethatway.' It was the Is-my-hat-on-straight tone of voice—self the centre. She yielded the tiresome bag gratefully.
'Everywhere, mother,' Joan whispered gaily. 'We'll get everywhere because we belong everywhere. Besides I'm not shoving.'
She glanced round at the other people, all pressing thickly towards the booking-office. All of them had troubles, joys, hopes, fears, and vague desires. All were out to enjoy themselves. Only their faces were so anxious, lined, and care-worn. They wore an enormous quantity of manufactured clothing, and each article of clothing represented similar joys, hopes, fears, and vague desires, complicated toil of those who had made and sold them.
She felt a curious longing—to collect them all together on the roof one morning so that they might dance and hear the birds sing at dawn. If only they could realise the bird-life and what it meant—care-less, happy, singing, dancing; deep purpose underneath it all, but that purpose not clogged with the stupefying detail of unimportant items. The trouble all had taken to clothe themselves suitably for this particular enjoyment was alone enough to kill any spontaneity. She smelt the fields, the keen, fresh air, the dew. She heard a lark rise whistling through the silver air. . . .
And she glanced back at her mother. Her mother was obviously adorned— with effort and difficulty. She looked as if she had walked through a Liberty curtain and parts of the curtain had stuck to her in patches. This complexity of cloth and silk and beads was wrong—funny at any rate. She sighed.
'It's all right,' said her father, catching the sigh behind him. 'We must take our turn, you know. But I'm out for the best seats—no matter what it costs.' It was like a breath of air to hear him say it.
'Extravagance,' put in Mother under her breath, overhearing. 'But itisan exception, isn't it?' Her mind fixed upon the difficult side of existence, the cost in labour and in pain.
'Eh?' said Wimble. He put his gaudy tie straight with a free half-finger.
'It isn't every night, I mean,' whispered Mother. 'It's an exception.' She looked challengingly at the listening crowd. It was very warm. The air smelt of people, clothes, and cheap scent. She was aware of scullery-maids, boot-polish, stable-boys, and wages. The ham in the larder—had they put the fly-cover over it? Oh dear, how sordid even enjoyment was!
'Move on, please,' boomed the deep voice of a policeman, and everybody moved on a step or half a step, casting looks of admiration, respect, and exasperation at the Great Bobby who represented rigidity, law, order, and that vague, distant power—the Government. To be spontaneous meant to be arrested, evidently.
'Wot've you got left?' asked Wimble mildly, facing at last the booking-clerk, then added quickly, 'Good. I'll take the three,' and put the money down. 'No—four, I mean; four, of course. How stupid of me! Thanks, thanks very much.' He had forgottenhimself. Also, he had felt for a second that he couldn't afford the price, but yet somehow it didn't matter. It was stupid, it was extravagant, it was un-practical; no one in their senses could have approved his conduct. The clerk had explained briefly that no cheap seats were left; there was nothing under four shillings—and Wimble, without an instant's hesitation, had snapped up the expensive seats.
Joan witnessed it with a rush of joy. She saw her father slip several silver discs across the counter and take pink slips of paper in exchange. But it was not his extravagance, nor the prospect of greater comfort, that caused her joy; it was the unhesitating spontaneity. Daddy had not haggled; without hesitation he had taken the risk. He had flown. . . . In reality he could not afford it, yet only a stingy convention might have urged him to be careful. And he had not been care-full.
'Take no thought . . .' whispered a voice—was it Joan's?—in his ear, as they pressed forward. And, as a consequence, he immediately bought several programmes where one would have been sufficient. Ah! They were in full flight. Their wings were spread. The earth lay mapped beneath them. In the silver, dewy dawn they flew. How keen the sweet, fresh air. . . .!
He looked at her. 'Youdon't earn the family income, my dear,' he observed drily, half-ashamed, half-proud. He fingered the pink tickets nervously, clumsily.
'But I will,' she replied. 'Besides, there's heaps for everybody really.'
'You're an unpractical absurdity,' he murmured—then gasped.
It was the child's reply that made him gasp:
'We're alive! So we deserve it.'
They swept the meadows and the pine copse in their flight. There was a crimson dawn. They smelt the sea, the wide salt marshes. Freedom of space was theirs.
Perhaps he didn't quite understand what she meant, yet it made him feel happy and careless. In a sense it made him feel—spiritual. She had said something that was beyond the reach of language, of accurate language. But it was true, true as a turnip. It satisfied him as a mouthful of mashed potatoes, and was as easy to eat and swallow. What a simile! He laughed to himself.
'Be more accurate in your language,' he said slyly.
'And stick in grammar all your life!' she replied. They moved on. Tom looked superior and aloof. He did not belong to this ridiculous party.
'Hurry up, Daddy,' and Joan poked him in the ribs. 'Mother's waiting. You're thinking of your old Primers.' It was true. Hehadpaused a moment. A sentence had flashed into his mind and made him stop, while Mother and Tom were waiting in the corridor beyond, something about the 'courage of a fly.'
A fly, the most fearless of attack of all creatures, an insect incapable of fear. He remembered that Athena gave Menelaus, in order that he might resist Hector—what? Not weapons or money or skill or strength. No. Athena gave him—'the courage of a fly.'
It struck him suddenly that the reckless courage of a fly—a fly that settles on the nose, the lips, the hand of a being enormously more powerful and terrible than itself—was unequalled among all living creatures. No lion or tiger dared the half, no man the quarter. But a fly, depending solely on its swift, unconquerable wings and power of darting flight, risked these amazing odds. He—in paying this high price for the tickets recklessly—had shown the courage of the fly: the sneers of Tom, the abuse of Mother, the scorn of cautious and careful convention. He had the money in his pocket, then why not spend it? His labour had deserved it; he had earned it; he was indeed 'alive.' Like an audacious fly he had settled on the nose of Fate. And all this Joan had snapped into a sentence:
'We deserve it. We'realive!'
'Is it all right, dear?' asked Mother anxiously. She was stuck with her elaborate flounces in a corner of the corridor. The programme-seller was at her elbow, pressingly.
'All right,' he replied, waving the programmes like a flag of victory, and led the way towards the seats. 'Everything's paid.' He bowed, dismissingly, to the girl. He walked on his toes.
They went in. Mother flounced down proudly, as though the cost, the risk, were hers. Anyhow, they had paid for their seats and had a right to them. Now they could see the show in comfort and with easy consciences. There was a vague feeling that too much had been expended, but it was discreetly ignored. Vanity forbade. Economy might follow. Let it follow. They could enjoy themselves for a few hours. Theywouldenjoy themselves. Some one had paid good money and money well earned. Uneasiness was vulgar. Daddy's flying attitude influenced them all secretly, and the great human power of make-believe, so gingerly expended as a rule, asserted itself. They took the moment as birds take the air. They flew with him.
Settling themselves into their front-row seats, they fingered their programmes, and felt like Royalty.
Mother looked round her at the inferior human mass. 'We can see quite well,' she observed. 'You were lucky, Joe. You got good seats.' She was wholly unaware that she tried her wings.
'Not bad,' scratched Tom, equally unaware that he flew behind her, though parting from the sticky loamy soil with difficulty. Had his companion of the motor-bus been with him, he would doubtless have said 'Good egg!' instead.
'It's all right,' said Wimble. 'Like to see a programme? 'He passed over several—all he had. He felt uplifted, without knowing why. He felt reckless, extravagant, careless, happy. He had touched the element of air without knowing it. He had forgotten 'money,' toil, conventional rigid formality, the terror of the herd, everything that compressed life into a four-footed rut, like the rut trodden by cows and pigs and rabbits. He had, for a moment, left the earth. He had, however, no idea that he was hovering in mid-air. Having taken a risk with courage—the courage of the fly—he was not quite positive of his dizzy elevation. The strange, intuitive, natural certainty of Joan was not yet quite his. He caught his breath a little in this rarefied air, from this spiritual point of view— this bird's-eye aspect—he was by no means sure of himself.
The rush of the wonderful cinema then began, and he forgot himself.
They experienced the sense such a performance leaves behind of having been—as Mother put it—all over the place. Sitting in the dark the individual at first is conscious only of himself, neighbours ignored if not forgotten. The screen then flashes into light, and with the picture, consciousness flashes across the world. The lie of the stationary photograph is corrected, time is denied, partially at least, and space is unable to boast and swagger as it loves to do. The cinema frees and extends the consciousness, restores the past, and sets distance close beneath the eyes. Only the watching self remains—pregnant symbol!—in the darkness.
It was one of the best performances in London; within an hour or two the audience danced from the dingy streets of the metropolis into the sunlight of India, Africa, and of islands among far southern seas. The kaleidoscope of other lands and other ways of thinking, acting, living carried them away with understanding sympathy. From savage wild life drinking at water-holes in the sun-drenched Tropics, they darted across half-charted oceans and watched the penguin and the polar bear amid arctic ice. Over mountains, down craters, flying above cities and peering deep under water, the various experiences of strange distant life came into their ken. They flew about the planet. The leaders of the world gazed at them, so close and real that their emotions were legible on their magnified features. They smiled or frowned, then flashed away, and yet still were there, living, thinking, willing this and that. Widely separated portions of the vast human family presented themselves vigorously, registered a tie of kinship, and were gone again about their business, now become in some sense the business of the audience too. Fighting, toiling, loving, hating, meeting death and adventure by sea and land, creating and destroying, differing much in colour, custom, clothing, and the rest, yet human as Wimble and his family were human, possessed with the same griefs, hopes, and joys, the same passion to live, the same fear of death—one great family.
Joan slipped her arm into that of her father; they nestled closely, very much in sympathy as the world rushed past their eyes upon the screen.
'We're flying,' she whispered, with a squeeze, as the penguins on the polar ice gave place to a scene of negroes sweating in the sun and munching sugarcane while they lazily picked the fluffy cotton. 'We're everywhere all-at-once, don't you see?' A moment later, as though to point her words, they looked down upon a mapped-out county from an aeroplane. The unimportance of earth was visible in the distance.
'You can't fly under water anyhow,' mumbled Wimble, as they left the air and flashed with a submarine upon sponges, coral, and inquisitive, perfectly poised fish. A black man was trying to knife a shark.
'I can see what they feel though,' was the whispered answer. 'Inside their watery minds, I mean.'
'Wherever I am I go,' he thought, but didn't say it, because by the time he had reflected how foolish it was to remain stuck only upon the minute point of his own tiny personal experience, they were climbing with a scientific Italian of eminence down a crater full of smoke and steam, and could almost hear the thunder of the explosions. But while they went down, everything else went up. Smoke, steam, masses of rock all trying to rise. 'Gravity is the devil,' he remembered; 'it keeps us from flying into the sun.'
The idea made him chuckle, and Joan pinched his arm, giggling too audibly in her excitement.
'Hush!' said Mother. They watched in silence then; a bird's-eye view of the planet was what they watched. With each picture they took part. Every corner of the globe, with its different activities, touched their hearts and minds with interest—busy, rushing life in various forms, and all going on simultaneously, at this very moment—now. Life obviously was one. The strange unity was convincing. Nothing they saw was alien to themselves, for they took part in it. In each picture they 'wondered what it felt like.' They took for an instant, longer or shorter, the point of view of a new aspect of life, of something as yet they had not actually experienced. They longed—or dreaded—to stand within that huge cavern of blue lonely ice and hear the waves of the Polar Sea lick up the snow; to taste that sugary cane with animal-white teeth, and feel the fluffy cotton between thick, lumpy fingers; to swim under water and look up instead of down; to crawl fearfully a little nearer to the molten centre of the planet through smoke and fire and awful thundering explosions. They longed or dreaded. Mentally, that is, they experienced a new relationship in each separate case, a relationship that stretched a suburban consciousness beyond its normal ken.
'It's very tiring,' mentioned Mother, during a brief interval of glaring light, 'and hurts my eyes. And I can't see why they want to show us those half-naked natives. I'm glad I'm English. Disgusting people, I call them.'
'They'll improve it, you know,' observed Tom; 'the flickering, I mean. It's a great invention. Somebody made a bit of cash there all right.'
One couple, at any rate, in the four-shilling seats felt the tie and knew their consciousness extended to include them all. They were engaged with all these various folk and multifarious activities. Humanity was one. The cinema shouted it aloud. The sense of collective consciousness was stirred.
'Well,' gasped Mother, blinking her eyes in the sudden light at the end, 'that was a show, wasn't it?' She seemed tired rather than exhilarated.
'Not half,' declared Tom, feeling for his cigarettes. He kept the programmes, putting both into his pocket.
'I'm glad I'm English anyhow,' repeated Mother, stationary at the mouth of her hole in the ground; but whether she despised the Hottentots, the Eskimo, or the penguins, she did not specify. It was her final verdict merely. The statement said simply that she was satisfied to be her little self, balanced safely on a clod of earth, in a spot of the universe called England. Extension of consciousness gave her no joy at all. She felt unsafe.
They left the theatre slowly, their minds shrinking back with a touch of disappointment, almost of pain, within the prescribed limits of normal, practical life again. Wimble felt he had been flying, and had just come back; he settled with difficulty. In the brief space between the vestibule and the door his thoughts continued flying. There was excitement and anticipation in him. 'The next stage,' he said to himself, 'will be hearing. We shall hear the people talk. After that—not so very far away either—we shall see 'emnow, and no interval of time at all. Machinery won't be used. Ourmindswill do the trick. We'll see everywhere with our thoughts!' He remembered his Telepathy Primer, giving individual instances, as authentic and well proven as any reasonable person could desire. He felt sure this vast, general development must follow—some faculty of air, swift and flashing as light—the bird's-eye view.
The murky street, with its damp and chilly air, struck him in the face as he stood with his family a moment, then walked down the steps. There was still a luminous glow in the western sky above the roofs. Mother took his arm to steady herself; Tom was behind, his eyes roving hungrily; Joan flitted just in front.
'Our 'bus is over there,' said Mother, pointing with a black-gloved hand.
'We'll take a taxi, my dear,' was his reply. He hailed one, bundled his astonished family inside, wished the driver 'Good-evening' with a smile, and slammed the door upon his own coat-tails.
'But you haven't told him the address,' said Mother.
'He ought to know,' exclaimed Wimble, 'but he's not a bird yet, so I'd better tell him.'
'It might be safer,' added his wife sarcastically, holding on to his coat-tails as he leaned out of the window to do so.
He watched the crowd as they whirled away; he felt happy, happy, happy. With the damp London air he felt as though a part of him still sweltered in the golden sunshine, diving under blue clear water where the sponges and the corals grew. Soft breezes touched his cheek one minute, the next he laid his hand on glittering ice. He heard the surf crashing upon a palm-clad reef. . . . These thronging people, policemen, costers, shop-folk, pale-faced workers, and over-dressed men and women of the big houses, all had some link with himself, that had been drawn closer; but so had the swarthy half-naked folk at the Antipodes who had just claimed his consciousness. They were all one really. Each nation seemed a mood. The sense of oneness leaped upon his heart and seized him.
'It all happened without our even moving,' as Joan had said on the way home. 'I suppose everything's in us then, really. We're everywhere.' And while Tom's superior 'Oh, cut it out' seemed more than usually ignorant and silly, Wimble's heart flamed within him. For it came to him, like a promise of wind-borne freedom, that there existed in his own being an immense and mighty under-side that was only waiting to be organised into fuller, even into all-embracing, consciousness. Man, he felt sure again, was a cosmic, not only a planetary, being. He could know the stars. The real self was of air. . . .
'Look here, Father,' said Joan next day, 'why is it——' then paused, unable apparently to express herself.
'Eh, child?' He gasped, thinking her question consisted of those three words alone, and wondering how in the world he was going to satisfy her.
'Why is it,' she went on the next moment, 'that wherever we are we want to be somewhere else, and whatever we know we want to know something else— more at any rate? And we never want it alone. We want to tell everything to some one else, I mean.'
Father almost preferred the first question—it left openings for vaguer answers. This definiteness increased his difficulty rather. He scratched his head and passed his fingers through his hair, which looked just then as if it would neither stay on nor down. He smoothed it deliberately, thinking as hard and quickly as he could. He knew what the girl meant, of course, more or less.
'The instinct tosharewhat we like is, I suppose, a proof that we——' he was going to say.
Before he could utter the words, however, she answered for him: 'Because we ought to be everywhere at once and know everything at once—like in that cinema. Isn't that it?'
Mother, it so chanced, just then went past the open door along the corridor; she went steadily, not to say heavily; she was obviously in one place at a time, doing one thing at a time, a worthy, practical, useful human being, and what the world considers a valuable unit of humanity— yet surely, oh, surely, wrong and a wing-less entity clogged with earth and the limits that earth-ignorance involved. She was on her way to scold the servant, to order dinner, or to fetch socks to mend. Good. But it was the way she went about her job—the un-birdy way—that proved the badger in her. Air and the careless joy of air was nowhere in her, not even in her most helpful actions. 'One should take life as a bird takes the air,' he was thinking again. It had become a motto.
And a flood of shadowy thoughts swept down upon his mind. Joan, when he turned to find her, had already gone from the room. He was alone. The half-read newspaper lay upon his knee; Tom had long since gone to the office; the sun shone in across the sea of roofs and chimney-pots; he saw a white, soft, fluffy cloud bedded in the blue. A swift shot gloriously across the narrow strip of sky. And this flood of shadow thoughts poured in and out of his mind like a hundred thousand swifts.
They would have filled an entire Primer if written out and printed; but in his mind, together with their host of suggestive correlations, they flashed and vanished with the speed and ease of the swift, a bird that seemed only wings, without body, legs, or head—powerful, graceful flight personified. The laborious absurdity of words made him feel helpless and rather stupid. He felt lonely, too, exiled from a finer, easier state of being to which something in him properly and rightfully belonged. The wings of the spirit stirred and fluttered in him. He sighed. Joan's sentence vibrated in him like a song, for nothing so much as music sets free the bird in human beings, enabling the soul to soar beyond all possible categories of time and space, beyond all confinements and limitations, even beyond death.
It was his daughter's remark that led in this rushing shower of thoughts that followed: 'Why is it that, wherever we are, we want to be elsewhere?'
People as a whole were always afflicted with this desire to be somewhere else. It was true. In London he longed for windy lanes, but in the windy lanes he thought how nice it would be to see the shops and people in the streets; at a party he would think with longing of the cosy room at home, the book and chair beside the fire-corner with his pipe, yet in that corner with pipe and book he would suddenly lay them down and remember with envy the gaiety of company, the talk, the laughter, and the bright companionship he was missing. It was often, if not always, so: the desire to be elsewhere and otherwise seemed inherent in human beings; they were never content or satisfied with the place they were in at a given moment.
'It's the restlessness of the race,' he decided, 'for whom movement is so laborious, slow, and costly. If they moved as a bird moves, swiftly, instantly, and without trouble or cost, this restlessness would not be felt.'
Then he paused. 'But it's not merely that,' flashed through him, 'far, far more. It's the expression of a strange and deep belief: the belief that we ought to be, and should be,canbe everywhere at once. This power lies in us somewhere, only as yet we haven't discovered how to use it. . . . But it's coming, and air and flight, wings and speed are already its beckoning symbols. We're being mysteriously quickened. We ought to be able to know everything, and to be everywhere, at once, in touch with all the universe, able to draw on all its powers. We have the right. This longing so to know and be, this uneasy yearning in us, what is it but an affirmation, a conviction that we can so be? Our wings go fluttering in our tiny cages. Wherever I am I go—and Iamwherever my thought and desire are.'
He sat back and thought about it. It seemed to him a great discovery. He felt sure that somewhere in himself lay the power to be everywhere at once, one with everybody and everything. To be aware of everybody everywhere was the first step at any rate, and the cinema had dropped a hint that it was coming.
'Well—but the practical meaning of it—what? The use that people like Mother should make of it—what? Bodies will never actually fly. Certainly not, but thought flies already, and it only remains for consciousness to accompany it. Bodies, of course, are earth; yet they will, they must, grow lighter, more responsive, both as receiving and transmitting instruments, consciousness no longer focussed only where the body is. We shall be human cinemas,' he thought, 'going where we will, instantaneously and easily as a bird, seeing all and knowing all. Universal consciousness, of course, is a spiritual condition; it is an Air quality, space and time denied. The Kingdom of Air is within us. We shall experience air with its collective instantaneity. . . .'
He folded his newspaper and went down the narrow corridor to his little private den. 'Oh, that I had the wings of a dove,' occurred to him and made him smile. 'A cry of the soul, of course,' he realised, as he took his twenty limited steps between the rigid walls. He stubbed his toe against the desk, and sat down in his revolving chair.
The ideas set in motion by Joan's remark continued flowing, flying through him. He seized what he could catch.
'Our bodies, responding to a swifter, happier, more careless attitude of mind, will gradually grow lighter, more sensitive; become less dense and earthy; until at last we shall feel with everybody everywhere. No longer separate and cut off from others, divided as earth is divided, we shall win this immense increase of sympathy and be everywhere we want to be, every-at-once, as Joan put it. We shall move with our thought—air! We shall have instantaneity—air again! Our bodies may not fly, but our consciousness will fly to one another, as light flies across the universe unerringly from sun to sun—bodies of light. Like the birds in England, we shall know when the Siberian ice has broken. We shall be off!'
The thrill of some mighty wisdom came very near.
He became strangely aware—it was like the lifting of great wings within his soul—that this collective, airy consciousness was already gathering the world into a flock; and it was the cinema, explained by Joan's brief sentence, that flashed the amazing and uplifting thought upon him.
Whirling round and round in his revolving chair, reason tried to grapple with the rush of ideas. The contents of a hundred Primers rose higgledy-piggledy, to congest his mind and memory. But his soul, rising like a lark, outdistanced everything he had ever read. The one clear dazzling certainty was this: 'We shall no longer be cut off and separate from others.' A variant, surely, of loving, and therefore knowing, all neighbours as ourselves. A thousand years as one day! To be everywhere at once and to know everybody was, after all, but to slip the cables of the tiny, separate self, and experience the Whole. Hence the desire to be always elsewhere and otherwise. Hence, too, the innate yearning toshareexperiences of all kinds with others. 'Nirvana' dropped from a forgotten Primer into him, and for the first time pages of laborious explanation utterly ignored, he grasped its gracious meaning fully. 'To meet the Lord in the air and be for ever with him,' came another cliché. They poured and rained upon him in their naked meanings, undisguised by words.
'Ah! To live in the Whole was not, then, to lose individuality, but to extend and share it!' He spun round and round happily in his chair. 'Grand bird idea, and air ideal!' He saw in his heart the nations taking wing at last, leaving earth below them, free of space and free of time, sharing this new and undivided consciousness. It was spiritual, of course; yet not an inaccessible nor a different state; it was a state growing naturally and truly out of the physical. Spontaneous living and the bird's-eye point of view were the first faint signs of its approach. . . .
The chair stopped turning, while he filled and lit his pipe, watching the clouds of blue smoke float here and there in wreaths and eddies. Joan's eyes peered across it at him like a phantom's. . . . 'It's immense, but very simple,' he was thinking, 'her funny little song puts it all in a nutshell . . . and the way she tries to live . . .' when a heavy tread disturbed him and something came into the room.
'Joe dear!' said his wife as she entered,—'but you've got no air here!' She opened a window, while he at once sprang up and opened another. Her manner gave him the impression that she had come in with a definite purpose; she had something important she wished to say. He decided to let it come out naturally. He would wait.
'Not both,' she said, 'it makes a draught,' and closed her own.
'Bless you, my dear,' he exclaimed, 'you do look after me splendidly.' He gave her a sudden hug and kiss that startled her. Looking at him in a puzzled, wistful way, she smiled, and something of long-forgotten days slipped in magically between them for an instant. He saw a yellow scarf across the smoke; she saw perhaps, a breathless boy with a field of golden buttercups behind him. . . .
'You catch cold so easily,' she mumbled, then added quickly, 'the country will suit us all better, won't it?'
'Yes,' he answered, 'yet, once we're there, we shall want to be somewhere else, I suppose——'
'Oh, I hope not, Joe,' with a Martha sigh. 'Whatever makes you think that?'
'We can be, anyhow; we must remember that.'
'Oh dear, Joe, you're very restless these days,' she exclaimed, and the way she said it made him realise her customary load of apprehension, her care-full, heavy way of taking life, seeing the difficulties first. Pessimism was a sure sign of waning life-forces. He felt pity and sympathy. And instantly an eddy of his recent whirlwind ideas swept down upon him and joy followed. He longed to communicate this joy to his wife, the joy she had known in her days of courtship long ago when the airy consciousness had touched her. And, as though to emphasise the contrast between their points of view, a wasp buzzed in through the open window just then, and Mother—shrank.
In a flash he understood her very clearly. Her attitude to life was fear. Unable to leave the ground, she was always afraid of being caught. If she met a cow, it would toss her; a goat, it meant to butt her; a dog, a cat only waited an opportunity to bite or scratch, a wasp came in on purpose to sting her and not merely because it had lost its way. She invariably locked the door of her room and looked under the bed; she was nervous about lamps—they would blow up if she tried to put them out. Probably all these disasterswouldhappen to her; her shrinking attitude of fear attracted the very thing she dreaded. People similarly would deceive her, since she expected, even demanded, it of them. In a word, the trouble she dreaded she attracted.
'Fly at anything you're afraid of,' he said suddenly. 'That paralyses it. It can't happen then. Or, better still, fly over it.' But she looked so bewildered, puzzled, even unhappy, that he got up and took her hand. 'Don't mind me, Mother dear,' he said soothingly; 'I've got an idea, that's all.' His heart brimmed full with comfort; her face said so plainly 'I don't understand, I feel out of it, I'm a little frightened! Only I can't express it quite.' 'It's immense but very simple,' he went on; 'Joan put it into me, I believe, first, and Joan was born out of us both, out of you and me, in those brilliant happy days when we were afraid of nothing. So it belongs to you, too, you see.' He paused, giving her an opportunity to state her mission.
'It's all a bit beyond me, I'm afraid,' said Mother patiently, an anxious expression in her eyes. But there was admiration as well. It occurred to her perhaps that she might have married a genius after all. She did not yet make her special and particular announcement, however. She would do so in her own way presently, no doubt.
'Mother,' he said abruptly, 'there's nothing in the universe beyond you.' He dropped her hand and stood erect, opening his short arms to the sky outside the window. The wasp buzzed out at that moment, and left him her undivided attention. His eyes were fixed upon the clouds where the swallows darted. 'Mother,' he went on, 'I'm illogical, unscientific, ignorant rather, and very confused in mind—inmind,' he emphasised 'but this immense idea beyond all books and learning has come to me, and I'm sure it's wisdom, though I call it Air.'
'Air,' she repeated slowly. 'Yes, dear.'
'Air, dear, yes, and that means living like the birds, more carelessly, more lightly, taking no thought for the morrow—notshirking work and duties and so on, but——'
'But we know all that,' she interrupted. 'I mean, we've read it. It's this sort of having-faith business. It's all right for people with money.'
'The very people,' he corrected her, 'for whom it's most difficult.'
'Oh dear,' and she heaved another Martha sigh. There was a pause. 'Couldn't you put it in a book, Joe—write it?' she asked, pride in one eye and ambition in the other. He looked very much of a man, standing there so erect with his eyes fixed on space above her head. 'We could do with a bit extra, too.'
'And might help other people,' he added, 'eh?'
She said nothing to that. 'It might sell; you never know.'
He shook his head. He realised, once again, the pathos in her, and at the same time that she vampired him. It's the pathetic people that ever vampire and exhaust those who are more vital.
'I'm not literary,' he replied, 'not literary in that way. Only the few with air in them would catch my idea, and the others, the commonplace Press in particular which decides the sale of a book, would find a joke theycouldunderstand and call it air. And air is gas, you know.' He chuckled. 'Whereas whatImean is Air—instantaneous unifier of thought and action, the L.C.D. of a new order of existence, a new point of view born of collective sympathy, as with a flock of birds, community involving something akin to the strange bird-wisdom and bird-knowledge—' he took a deep breath—'the solvent of all philosophic and religious problems——'
She caught a word and clutched it. 'Religious people,' she put it hurriedly, 'might buy it—a book like that.'
He came back from his flight with a thud, landing beside her. 'Their imagination is too sluggish, dear. As a rule, too, they have not intellect enough to detect the comic element in life. They can't laugh at themselves. They exclude joy and fun and play. They never really sing.'
'They do, yes,' said Mother—'I mean they don't. That's quite true.'
She settled herself more comfortably in her chair. Evidently she appreciated his talking to her of his intimate thought; she felt herself taken into his confidence and liked it. It made it easier for her to say what she had come to say. Noticing her gesture his own sympathy and pity deepened. 'Ah, Mother dear,' he exclaimed, touched by a sudden pathos,' it's wonderful to be alive, isn't it? And to be able to think and feel ideas tearing about inside you? It's worth everything—just to be able to say "I am," and still more wonderful if you can add "I go." That's the secret. Live in the interest of the actual moment, but never imagine that it ties you there, eh? Life lies at your feet in a map; you can take what direction you please. Choice is your own, you can take or leave—as literally as when you stand above a jeweller's counter. One person chooses the bright stones, another the dark. It's all a matter of selection. On a picnic you may select the midge that stings you, the few drops of rain that fell, or the midges that didnotsting you. . . . You can choose gloom or joy, I mean, just as you——'
'Joe dear,' she interrupted, sitting forward in her chair, 'there's something I wanted to say to you—seriously.'
He took her hand again. He had noticed the growing pucker between her eyes and knew the difficulty she experienced in unburdening herself of something. He had chattered in this way to give her confidence and show his sympathy. But she had not followed, had not understood. She had remained safe in the mouth of her hole.
'Talking of religion, as you were just now,' she went on with an effort rather, 'I—I wanted to talk to you about it.' There was a hint, but a very tiny hint, of challenge in her voice.
'Of course, of course,' he said encouragingly, patting the hand he held.
There was a moment's silence, while their eyes met and he smiled into her troubled face. What she was about to say meant much to her, and she feared opposition. She took a deeper breath.
'I'm thinking of becoming High Church,' she announced.
'Admirable!' he exclaimed. 'I'm delighted!'
'What! You don't mind, dear?'
'It's just exactly what'll suit you,' he replied happily. 'Just what you need.'
'ButveryHigh Church—it means confession, you know,' she went on quickly, relieving herself of ideas evidently long pent up, 'and it must be very helpful, I think, knowing one's sins forgiven.'
'Helpful, and very pleasant,' he agreed, lowering his eyes from hers. The sudden sense of his own failure towards her pained him. She needed some one to lean on, to confide in, to unburden herself upon, and she turned to a paid official instead of to himself. She didn't know yet that she could confess to herself and so forgive herself, which meant understanding her sins and deciding not to repeat them. She needed some one who could do this for her. It was the stage she was at. 'Splendid,' he reflected, 'there were creeds for every stage. What a mercy!' And while she explained herself now without shyness, but with a confusion as great as his own, athisstage, he listened to her as vaguely as, doubtless, she had listened to him. He glanced down at his newspaper, not to read it exactly, but in the way a man who wants to think—to think subconsciously perhaps—takes up the object nearest to his hand and regards it attentively. His eye ran along the print, while his thought was: 'She wants something, some one to lean upon, of course, poor soul. I'm not sufficient, I don't give her sympathy enough. I'll do better in future. Her wings are on the flutter.'
' . . . Something to guide and help one a bit,' he heard her saying.
'The very thing, Mother, the very thing,' he put in. 'I'm so glad. It'll speed you up. Quickening—that's it, isn't it? Quickening of the spirit, and of the body too,' he added. 'You'll be flying with us next!'
And while she poured into his ears the confused but genuine story of her need, his own mind continued its own wordless thoughts. He saw the millions of history wading through the creeds, and, thank heaven, there were creeds enough to satisfy every type. For himself, a creed seemed to play the rôle of a porter in a mountain climb—carrying the weight from the climber's shoulders, but never guiding. Nevertheless, he blessed them all, and the Creed Primers in a long series with red covers and black lettering flashed across his memory. 'All true,' he realised, 'every blessed one of them. And no wonder each man swears by his own that it alone is true. For it is true; it's exactly whatheneeds.'
' . . . I was sure you wouldn't mind, Joe dear. I knew you'd understand,' came from Mother at last.
'And so you shall, dear. It'll help you along magnificently. We'll start the moment we get into the country—start it up, eh?'
'I have begun already,' she said, more sure of herself.
'Better still,' was his reply.
She got up, patted his shoulder awkwardly, kissed him, and stood a moment by his chair; a second later the door closed behind her. But hardly had her step died away along the corridor than the words his eye had rested upon absent-mindedly in the newspaper, rose and offered themselves. It was a coincidence, of course, but coincidences do occur. The sentence lay in the middle of a paragraph concerned with some new book or other, a book on Russia, he discovered, by glancing higher: '. . . She has a far-reaching vision, and her Church at least has for long been preoccupied with the idea of the union of humanity. . . . The idea of brotherhood and even universal brotherhood, permeates all classes of society . . .'; while opposite, and level with it in the adjoining column, oddly enough, was a notice of an article in some important Review or other with the title 'The New Religion.' The sentence quoted that caught his eye referred to the Church of England: 'A pitifully forlorn body, bankrupt in valour and policy, resource and prestige.' No one To-day with spiritual needs could, apparently, rely upon it; the new spirit regarded it as prehistoric. The people were far ahead of it already. . . .
He laid the paper down and wondered; the two statements capped his flying ideas so appositely.
'Yes, there's a new thing coming into life,' he exclaimed aloud. 'It's in the air, even in this vulgar halfpenny paper.' He relit his pipe and smoked a moment hard. 'Of course it's not generally realised yet,' he went on to himself between the puffs; 'but that's not odd after all: it's taken the world two thousand years to realise Christ, and only a few realised Him when He was there. When—how—will this new spirit touch usall. . .? What's got to happen first, I wonder?'
He sighed and a curious shiver ran down his spine. Nothing, he remembered, was born, nothing big and deep ever came to birth, without travail and upheaval. He was conscious of this strange shiver in his being. He almost shuddered. His pipe went out. Through the open window he looked down upon the crowded pavements, but the next instant looked up to where the swallows danced and twittered happily in the summer light and air.
The vision in Maida Vale came back to him when the masses, clothed in black, had seemed to rise and open a million mighty wings. He remembered the singular idea of blood that had accompanied it. And again a shudder touched him.
'Something's got to happen first,' he sighed, 'beforeallcan take the air. Something's got to happen.' And then, as a burst of sunshine and cool wind entered the room together by the window, a sudden conviction swept him off his feet. The world blew open; the nations rose in a stupendous flock before his eyes; humanity as a unit spread its wings. 'something'sgoing to happen,' he exclaimed, 'but out of it will grow the new birth of happy air!' There was both joy and shuddering in his heart, but the joy was uppermost.