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THE PROMISE OF AIR

by

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Author of 'The Education of Uncle Paul,' 'A Prisoner in Fairyland,'
'The Centaur,' Etc.







Macmillan and Co., Limited
St Martin's Street, London
1918




TO M. S.=K. (1913)



CHAPTER I


Joseph Wimble was the only son of an analytical chemist, who, having made
considerable profits out of an Invisible Sticking Plaster, sent the boy to
Charterhouse and Cambridge in the hope that he would turn out a gentleman.
When Joseph left Cambridge his father left business, referred to himself
as Expert, used a couple of letters after his name, and suggested making
the Grand Tour of Europe together as a finishing touch.  'To talk
familiarly of Rome and Vienna and Constantinople as though you knew them,'
he explained, 'is a useful thing.  It helps one with the women, and to be
helped by women in life is half the battle.'  His ambitions for his son
were considerable, including above all a suitable marriage.  The abrupt
destruction of these ambitions, accordingly, was so bitter a
disappointment that he felt justified in giving the lad a nominal sum and
mentioning that he had better shift for himself.  For Joseph married
secretly the daughter of a Norfolk corn-chandler, announcing the news to
his father upon the very eve of starting for the Grand Tour.
Joseph found himself with 500 pounds and a wife.

Joseph himself was of that placid temperament to which things in life just
came and went apparently without making very deep impressions.  He was a
careless, indifferent sort of fellow even as a boy, careless of
consequences, indifferent to results: not irresponsible, yet very
easy-going.  There was no intensity in him; he did not realise things.
'Oh, it's much the same to me,' would be his reply to most proposals.
'I'd as soon as not.'  There was something fluid in his nature that
accepted life nonchalantly, as if all things were one to him; yet, again,
not that he was devoid of feeling or desires, but that he did not realise
life in the solid way of the majority.  At school he did not realise that
he was what the world calls 'not quite a gentleman,' although the boys
made a point of proving it to him.  At Cambridge he did not realise that
to pass his Little-go, or acquire the letters B.Sc., was of any
importance, although various learned and older men received good pay in
order to convince him of the fact.  He just went along in a loose,
careless, big-hearted way of living, and took whatever came--exactly as it
came.  He had a delightful smile and put on fat; shared his money with one
and all; existed in a methodical way as most other fellows of his age
existed, and grew older much as they did.  So ordinary was he in fact, so
little distinguished from the rest of his kind, that men who knew him well
would stop and think when questioned if they numbered Joseph Wimble among
their acquaintances.  'Wimble, lemme see--oh yes, of course!  Why, I've
known him for a couple of years!'  That was Joseph Wimble.  Only it made
no difference to him whether they remembered him or not.  He behaved
rather as if everything was one to him in a very literal sense; as if the
whole bewildering kaleidoscope of life conveyed a single vast impression;
there was no reason to get excited over particular details; in the end it
was literally all one.  His smattering of physics taught him that all
things could be expressed, more or less, in terms of one another.
That was his attitude, at any rate.  'Take it as a whole,' he would say
vaguely, 'and it's all right.  It's all the same.'

Yet his indifference to things was not so colourless as it appeared; but
was due, perhaps, to the transference of his interests elsewhere.
His centre of gravity hardly seemed on earth is one way of expressing it.
Behind the apparent stolidity hid something that danced and sang;
something almost flighty.  It was laborious explanation that he dreaded
and despised, as though things capable of being 'explained' were of small
importance to him.  He was eager to know things he wanted to know, yet in
a way he was too intensely curious, too impatient certainly, to put
himself to much trouble to find out.  He refused to work, to 'grind' he
knew not how; yet he absorbed a good deal of knowledge; information came
to him, as it were.  He figured to himself vaguely that there was another
surer way of learning than by memorising detail,--a flashing, darting,
sudden way, like the way of a bird.  To follow a line of information to
its bitter end was a wearisome, stultifying business, the reality he
sought was lost sight of in the process.  The main idea had interest for
him, but not the details, for the details blurred and obscured it.
Proof was a stupid word that blocked his faculties.  He did not despise or
reject it exactly, but he refused to recognise it.  In a sense he
overlooked it.  Of answers to the important questions millions have been
asking for thousands of years there was no proof obtainable.  Of survival,
for instance, or the existence of the soul, there was no 'proof,' yet for
that very reason he believed in both.  He could 'prove' a stone, a tree, a
dog.  He could name and weigh and describe it.  The senses of hearing,
sight, and touch reported upon it, yet these reports he knew to be but
vibrations of the respective nerves that brought them to his brain.
They were at best indirect reports, and at worst referred to a mere
collection of unverified appearances.  Logic, too, the backbone of
philosophy, affected him with weariness, just as his respect for reason
was shockingly undeveloped.  And argument could prove anything, hence
argument for him was also futile.  He jumped to the conclusion always.
Thus at school, and even more at Cambridge, he liked to know what other
fellows thought and believed, but as a whole and in outline only.
A general idea of 'what and why' was enough for him--just to catch the
drift.

This faculty of catching the drift of any knowledge that he cared about
came to him naturally, as it seemed.  They called him talented but lazy;
for he took the cream off; he swooped like a bird, caught it flying, and
was off upon another quest.  Since there was no real proof of any of the
important things, why toil to master the tedious arguments and facts of
either side?  There was somewhere a swifter, lighter way of knowing
things, a direct and instantaneous way.  He was sure of it.  Thus the
ordinary things of life he did not realise--quite as other people realised
them.  They passed him by.

One thing and one only, it seemed, he desired to realise, and that was
birds.  It was a passion in him, a mania.  He had a yearning desire to
understand the mystery of bird-life--not ornithology but _birds_.
Anything to do with birds changed the expression of his face at once; the
fat and placid indifference gave way to an emotion that, judging by his
expression, caused him a degree of wonder that was almost worship, of
happiness nearly painful.  Their intense vitality inspired him, their
equality stirred respect.  Anything to do with their flight, their songs,
their eggs, their habits fascinated him.  And this fascination he
realised.  He indulged it furiously, if of necessity secretly, since to
study bird-life fields and hedges must be visited without company.
But here again he took no particular pains, it seemed.  As is usual with
an overmastering tendency, his knowledge of his subject was instinctive.
Before he went to Charterhouse he knew the size and colouring of every egg
that ever lay in a British nest, and by the time he left that school he
could imitate with marvellous accuracy the singing notes and whistles of
any bird he had heard once.  He devoured books about them, studied their
differing ways of flight, knew every nest within a radius of miles about
his house in a given neighbourhood, and above all was moved to a kind of
ecstasy of wonder over the magic of their annual migration.  That in
particular touched him into poetry.  He thought dumbly about it, but his
imagination stirred.  Inarticulateness increased his accumulating store of
wonder.  The Grand Tour!  Rome, Vienna, Constantinople, indeed!  What were
the capitals of Europe compared to the Southern Tour _they_ made!
That deep instinct to hurry after the fading sun, to keep in touch with
their source of life, to follow colour, heat, light, and beauty.
That vast autumnal flight!  The marvel of the great return, entranced by
the southern sun, intoxicated with the music of the southern winds!
That such tiny bodies could dare four thousand miles of trackless space,
travelling for the most part in the darkness, carelessly carrying nothing
with them, and rush back in the spring to the very copse or hedgerow left
six months before--that was a source of endless wonder to his mind.
There was pathos and loneliness in their absence.  England seemed empty
once the birds had flown.  The sky was dead without the swallows.  Of
course the land was dark and silent when they left, and of course it burst
into colour, rhythm, movement, and singing when they showered back upon it
in the spring!

The sweet passion of woodland music caught his heart.  He realised that
birds had a secret and mysterious life of their very own, and that the
world they lived in was a happy and desirable world.  That strange
knowledge at a distance men called instinct, puzzled him.  A new method of
communication belonged to it too.  It had its laws and customs, its joys
and terrors, its habits, rules, and purposes; but these all were strangely
different from anything that solid earth-life knew.  Freedom, light, and
swiftness were the characteristics of that existence, and joy its
outstanding quality.  Its universal telepathy exhilarated.  No other
beings in the universe expressed themselves naturally by singing.

The Kingdom of the Air became for him a symbol of an existence higher than
anything on the earth; air stood for a condition that at present was
beyond the reach of humanity, but that humanity one day would achieve.
His imagination figured this glorious accomplishment as the next stage in
evolution.  A clever poet might have made Joseph Wimble the hero of an
original fairy tale, in which he lived and suffered heavily on solid
ground, eternal type of the exile, vainly yearning for his natural
element, the air.  For exile was in it; he claimed the knowledge of the
air as a familiar experience.  He felt that he knew and understood the air
instinctively; he belonged 'up there'; he had nested in the trees, perched
on some topmost twig, had balanced in the breeze, and sung his heart out
from sheer joy of living; he had even flown.

This was doubtless a mental exercise, an imaginative flight.  It all
seemed familiar to him, long, long ago, before this enormous physical
frame had walled him down to the ground and weight had handicapped
aspiration so distressingly.  He looked at his body in the glass and
sighed.  'There's something wrong,' he realised.  'Why should I need such
a mass of stuff to function through?  I'm supposed to be more intelligent
than animals or things.'  He thought of a swift--and sighed.  Size and
weight were so out of proportion to the role he played on earth.
The smaller forms of life were far less handicapped; a flea, a beetle were
a thousand times stronger relatively than a human being, whereas a little
bird----It all left him inarticulate.  He was always inarticulate.
Dumbly he yearned for air; desired, that is, the mental attitude of one to
whom free swift movement in the air was natural; and the intensity of the
yearning--the one thing he fully realised--_must_ some day produce a
result.  The beauty of an air-life hid in his blood.  It expressed the
ultimate yearning of his very soul.

'The next stage of the world is air,' he imagined with some part of his
intelligence that never could articulately clothe the dream in language.
'We shall never be happy and right until we know the air as birds do.
We've learned all the earth has got to teach us.  There's a new age
coming--a new element its key:  Air!'

Earth, ever sweet and beautiful, was in the main, however, chiefly useful
only.  Somehow he no longer felt the need of it.

The unreality of objective knowledge, the limitations of the human
intellect afflicted him.  He thought of the barren sterility of learned
minds, sacked tight with this objective information about the clothes of
the universe, yet uninformed concerning the living personality that wears
them.  The scholars and collectors had no joy; they never sang.

He thought hard about it.  He tried to state to himself what he meant in
clear words.  It was difficult.  Already he thought in terms of air--
transparent, everywhere at once, radiant and flashing.  He experienced a
completeness and a buoyancy that denied the accepted rule that two and two
make four.  Two and two, of course, did make four on earth and in the
nursery or the nest.  But somehow in the air--they just didn't.  There was
no two and two at all.  They didn't exist.  It was some kind of
synthetical air-knowledge that he sought.

'Earth is divisible--divided,' he said to himself.  'It has details,
separate objects, definite divisions into stones and things.  But in the
air there is no division.  Air is homogeneous--not as the physicist's gas,
but as an expression of space.'  In the air, or rather of the air, two and
two make four became not false exactly, but impossible.  It could not be
said.  Earth is not continuous, but broken up; it belongs to time and
time's divisions of the nursery.  Earth is an expression of separateness.
Even water has drops, fluid and cohering though it is.  Air has no drops.
There are no drops of air.  There are currents, streams and surfaces, all
undetailed.  Earth, he felt, belonged to time and time's divisions where
two and two made four.  But air was of another category altogether, and
not of time at all.  Air was one.

It explained his indifference to earth.  Though fastened physically like
every one else to the ground, his inmost being lived in the air already,
and some day he would meet a person who would explain and justify this
extraordinary yearning.  He was aware of this expectancy in him, for the
craving to become articulate produced it.  He needed a mate, of course.
Together, somehow, their deep desire would find expression.  He would
become articulate through her.  And suddenly, with a kind of abrupt
surprise that belongs to birds, he found her.

The surprising way he found her, too, was characteristic.  They floated,
if not flew, into each other's arms.



CHAPTER II


It was a glad May morning, the air soft-flowing and cool, the sunshine
warm and brilliant, when the youth cut his lectures and went out into the
fields, drawn irresistibly by the electric rush and sparkle of the spring.
The swallows were home from the Southern Tour, and the sky was singing.
He could not sit and listen to chemical formulae in a lecture-room; it was
not possible.  He wandered out carelessly into the world of buttercups,
following the stream where the feathered willows bent in a wave of falling
green.  It was a true bird-day, and his heart, uprising like the larks,
was shrilling.  He felt exactly like a bird himself, and it made him laugh
as naturally as a bird might sing.  He fell to copying their various
cries.  They came up close and saw him.  They were aware of him.
'Birds of the sweet spring skies!' he thought, and yearned to share their
strange collective life, individual still, yet part of their magical
community.

He soon found himself out of the scholastic town and among the flat
expanse of yellow fields beyond.  The stream was blue, the grass an
emerald green, the willows laughed, showing their under leaves, the dew
still sparkled.  Buttercups by the million nodded in the breeze; wings
were everywhere, the surface of the earth was dancing, and the whole air
fluttered.  The earth was dressed in blue and gold.

The singing was so general that he had to pause in order to pick out the
separate melodies; the song of the birds was, indeed, so much a part of
their surroundings that an act of definite listening was necessary to hear
it.  It linked him on to Nature; it made Nature articulate.  He heard the
hearty whistle of the blackcap among the swaying tree-tops, shrill with
joy; a whitethroat tossed itself exultantly into the air beside him; he
heard the warblers trilling, the little calling cry of the chiff-chaff,
the tiny poem of the willow-warbler, the merry laughter of the dainty
wren.  The tits shot everywhere, pecking in seed, pricking the sunshine
with their tiny beaks, darting, flashing.  He passed a farm and saw the
vigorous outline of a blackbird, perched upon an oak bough still bare,
fluting as Pan fluted upon many-fountained Ida long ago; a chaffinch
dipped at him over the wall from wet shrubberies beyond, hopped to a twig
in the sunlight above the blackbird, and let loose a shower of notes like
silvery drops of water.  Singing shook itself out of the atmosphere
everywhere, as though the whole of Nature moved and trembled into her
strange scale-less music.  There was the joy of air upon the stirring
world.

The life of air was dominant, ruling the heavy earth--bird-life.
What delicious names they had, Whitethroat, Gold-oriel, Wheat-ear, Dipper,
Bunting, Redpoll, Osprey, Snowy-owl, Snow-bunting, Martin; what lyrical
names with fun and laughter in them, a childlike beauty of air and sunny
woodland-space.  The magic of Spring captured him by its suggestion:
nothing was fully out, it was suggested only--eternal promise, ethereal
glamour: prophecy, hope, expectancy--fulfilment.

On all sides he felt the tremendous lift of the year that comes in May
with song and colour and movement.  The world was rhythmical.  It caught
him into joy, as though it would sweep him like a harp into passionate
response.  Yet he remained dumb and inarticulate.  He drank it in: but he
could not sing, he could not soar, he could not fly.  This piping,
fluting, thrilling, this showering stream of sweet elemental song and
dance was not of the earth, but of the air.  The strange yearning in him
grew and gathered into a dangerous accumulation.  It must find expression
somehow or he would--burst.

He threw himself down in the long grass beside the blue-throated stream,
and became at once all eyes and ears.  There was no other way.  The cool
touch of the luxuriant herbage brought a slight relief, as did the
itemising of the songs he heard and imitated, the colours he gazed upon
and named: the shimmering sheen of the rooks in the elm trees yonder;
the deep, unpolished ebony of the blackbird with its beak of gleaming
yellow; the bright and roving eye of the little whitethroat picking food
along the bank; the shearing speed of the swifts cutting the air with
tapering, scythe-like wings; the piping sweetness of a thrush, invisible
in a thicket behind the farm buildings--all these combined to put the true
bird-ecstasy upon him as he lay and watched and listened.  The amazing
outburst of spring music lifted him almost into the air to join the ropes
of starlings twisting and untwisting as if they reproduced the wild soft
tangle of his unsatisfied yearnings.  And their tiny flickering shadows
fell upon the ground in ever-shifting patterns that he could never catch
or seize.  Upon his mind fell similarly rushing thoughts he was unable to
express . . . the rhythm of some mighty promise that uplifted.  He was
aware of love and beauty.  The soul in him rose and twittered like a
lark. . . .

Then, presently, he raised his head above the screen of grass.  There was
a sound of footsteps.  His hearing was abnormally acute when this
bird-mood took him, for the tapping tread of a wagtail on the bank had
made itself distinctly heard.  He saw the frisky creature, dainty as a
sprite, tripping nimbly among the rushes just below him.  It balanced very
cleverly, neatly dressed in its tailor-made of feathers.  He saw its fairy
ankles.  It seemed to hold its skirts up.  He caught its bright eye
peeping.  It was gone.

'Soft, slip of a bird!' he thought to himself with a sharp sensation of
regret; 'why did it leave me in such a hurry?'  He felt something tender
and earnest in him, something true and thorough, yet careless and light
with joy, a true bird-quality.  He felt, too, the pathos of the sudden
disappearance: a moment ago it had been there in all its gracious beauty,
and now the spot was empty.

'Where, in what new haunted corner of these fields----' he began,
half-singing, when a new and startling flash of loveliness caught his eye
and took his breath away.  Another wagtail, but this time yellow,
marvellous as a dream, came pricking into view.

Somehow, beyond all understanding, the sweet apparition focussed his
tangle of inarticulate yearning into a blaze of delight that was a climax.
The advent of the exquisite little creature, with its delicate carriage,
its bosom of pure yellow, seemed symbolical almost.  The idea of something
sylph-like from the heart of the air flashed into him.  The whole singing,
dancing, coloured element produced this living emblem from its central
heart of the flooding Spring.  There was true air-magic in it.
The passion of Spring and the mystery of birds focussed together in the
tiny symbol.  Imagination touched the pitch of ecstasy.  He turned
abruptly.  There was a whirr, a streak of burning yellow that lost itself
against the sea of buttercups, and lo! He was--alone again.

But this time the loneliness was more than he could bear.

He sprang to his feet, and at full speed took the direction in which it
disappeared.  Some wisdom of the birds was in him possibly, though alas,
not their light rapidity, for while guided wisely along the windings of
the willow-guarded stream, across the fields, past hedges, copses, farms,
over ditches innumerable, he could not overtake his prize--and so at last
came into a lonely spot that lay far away upon the surface of the
countryside.  The occasional flash of yellow had led him onwards in this
way, as though the bird enticed him of set purpose; it would land, then
shoot away again just as he came up with it.  It left a trail of gold
across the sunlit fields.  It was a will-o'-the-wisp--in sunlight.
It behaved like some spiritual decoy.

Afterwards, when he thought about it, his chase took on this aspect of
curious allurement, for he knew he could never catch the bird for actual
handling, even had he so desired.  Nor did he wish to; he had no desire to
'prove' this symbol that summed up his imaginative passion.  He only
wanted to come up with it; to meet its peeping eye, to watch it at close
quarters: its sylph-like beauty had seduced him.  Twice he dashed through
the water, where the stream made a tiresome bend, and his track across the
fields of early hay would have warranted a farmer in putting dust-shot
into him.  Yet he kept just within sight of it--of the flashing yellow
which made him oblivious of all else; and the brimstone butterflies, the
yellow-hammers, the orange-tinted kingfishers that obviously tried to
confuse the trail by shooting across his path, failed wholly to divert him
from the chase.  He knew which gold to follow.  It was in his heart.

The wagtail at last shot headlong past a clump of bramble-bushes, and
Wimble, arriving also headlong, saw to his amazement that the yellow of
its breast remained on the branches as though caught and fixed.  To his
astonishment the gold lay in a shining stream across the prickles without
moving.  It held fast.  He saw the gleaming line of it.  He thought he was
dreaming for an instant--then discovered that the stream of gold was a
yellow scarf that had been netted by the hedge.  It belonged to a human
being.  The same second he saw a sun-bonnet and a book lying on the other
side by a pond below some willows.  And the being was a blue-eyed girl.
His sylph of the air had come to earth.  Two black stockings hung on a
branch to dry.  She was bare-footed.  He certainly met her eye, and it
was a surprised, reproachful eye.  He looked down at her, and she looked
up at him.  His heart came up into his throat and then into his eyes.

'I suppose you know you're trespassing,' said a voice that was both cross
and sweet at once.  'These fields are father's.'

'Yes,' replied young Wimble of Trinity, staring at her in amazement.
'I'm awfully sorry.' He was lost in admiration and unable to conceal it.
She was more than a farmer's daughter, he was thinking, as instinctively
he transferred to her all the yearning, airy passion he had put into his
search for the yellow wagtail.

'Father complained last week again, and there are new boards up
everywhere.'  He remembered vaguely there had been complaints about
trespassing; he had blundered into the very spot where the offences had
been committed.  'So you've no excuse!' she added, watching him.

'I'm awfully sorry,' he repeated, as he disentangled the yellow scarf and
passed the end into her outstretched hand.  The sunburned skin just
matched the landscape, he noted the tiny bleached hairs upon her arm.
'I saw a yellow wagtail and went after it.  They're rather uncommon.'
And then he added, 'I suppose it--you--got caught, scrambling through the
hedge.  I'm frightfully sorry.  Really, I'm ashamed.  I saw the bird--and
forgot everything.  I believe it flew back--flew into you!'

They stood looking at each other.  If he cut a comical figure, she
certainly did not; for whereas his face was hot, his tie flown over one
shoulder, his grey trousers splashed with mud; she seemed in her natural
setting between the willows and the hedge, the untidy hair falling loose
about the neck, her arms akimbo and her sunburned face suiting her to
perfection.  She looked cool and extraordinarily radiant.  He thought she
was absurdly beautiful; his heart began to beat deliciously; and when she
lost the cross expression and smiled at him the next moment he blurted out
a confused, impetuous something before he could possibly prevent it.

'You're awfully becoming,' he stammered.  'I say--I'm jolly glad I saw
that yellow wagtail and followed it.  I believe it flew back into your
heart.'

Her smile broadened into a laugh at once.  It was impossible to be angry
with such a youth.  'You undergraduates,' she said, 'are the most
ridiculous people I've ever known.  But I shan't let you go now I've got
you.  You're fairly caught.'

'Rather,' said Wimble with unfeigned delight.

'Then you'd better come with me and see father at once,' she went on.
'You can explain yourself to him--about the wagtail.'

'Rather,' he repeated, though with less enthusiasm.  It was the only word
that he could think of; and he added, 'presently.'

She looked him up and down.  'It's best, I think.' And her laughter was
now friendly.

'I will,' he repeated, 'I'll go anywhere with you.  I admit I'm caught.
Do you think he'll be very nasty to me?'

But he scarcely knew what he was saying all the time, for his one desire
was not to lose sight of her now that he had found her.  Her face, her
laughter, her singing voice, her attitude, everything about her made him
gasp.  He already thought of her in bird-terms.  He remembered the
redwing, delicate thrush, that comes to England from the North and is off
again too soon--of countless birds that haunt our fields with transient
beauty, then vanish suddenly, afraid to stay and rest.  An anxious pang
transfixed his heart.  Any moment she might spread big yellow wings and
leave him fluttering on the ground.  'If I've done any damage,' he added,
'I'll put it right.  It was worth it, anyhow.'  But he saw that she
laughed with him now, not at him, and he began to smile himself.
She was adorable.  'I'll swear she's a birdy girl,' the thought flashed
through him.

'If you'll turn your back a moment, please,' he heard her saying,
'I'll put my shoes and stockings on again.  There's no good paddling any
more with _you_ here.'

'Rather not,' he said, and ran down to fetch them for her.

And so it began and ended in the brief ten minutes of this intoxicating
May morning beside the willow pond where the birds of the countryside came
down to bathe at dawn and drink at sunset.  It was an ideal opening.
She put her stockings on, but not before he had complained that she was
slow about it because a thorn had run into her toe, blaming him so that he
had to extract it with trembling fingers and a penknife.  They were
laughing together like two children by the time he finished; and by the
time they reached the house he had dipped into her being and found, as in
a book of poetry, that all his favourite passages were marked.  Moreover,
she had led him by so round a way that they had been obliged to rest under
the hedges more than once, and had discovered also that they were very
hungry.  The sudden intimacy was the sudden falling in love of two young
persons who were obviously made for one another.  It was the mating of two
birds.  They had met by the pond, exchanged glances, and then flown off
together across the lawn.  For it was spring and nesting time. . . .  The
dust of blue and bronze was on the dragon-flies, the bloom and promise of
deep-bosomed summer in the air. . . .

'Father, this is my friend, Mr. Wimble,' she introduced him.
'You remember, I told you.  He's at Trinity.'

'You'll stay and have a bite with us, won't you then?  It's just time,'
was the genial invitation, given to hide his excusable lack of
recognition.  There was no mention of the damaged fields nor of the
trespassing.  'Come, Joan, let's get at it, for I'm starving.'

The name sounded wonderful, but Joseph knew it already and had already
used it, his face close against her red lips and shining eyes.  He also
knew his fate was sealed, and he wished to heaven his own father was as
nice as hers.

'I'm a chandler,' he was told in the course of the talk across the
luncheon table by the window while the birds hushed their song outside,
well knowing it was noon, 'a corn-chandler down in Norfolk.  But I've got
two farms up here in Cambridgeshire, and I'm just up to look over 'em for
a chap as wants to buy 'em off me.'  He was a rough-and-ready type, free
in his drink and language, using meaningless oaths more frequently as
intimacy grew, and betraying a somewhat irascible temperament as well.
Yet he was kindly enough.  And before Joseph left to go back to his
forgotten lectures there had been an invitation too: 'You must come down
and see us there some time if you don't mind a bit of roughing it.
We live very simple.'

From all of which it was clear that the corn-chandler was favourably
impressed by the visit of an Undergraduate of Cambridge University, and
would not be at all averse to marrying his daughter to the first available
young man with reasonable credentials.  It was all so easy, instinctive,
natural.  It ran so smoothly.  It flowed, it flew.  No obstacles appeared.
There was flight and rapture in it from the very start.  The couple
managed to see one another once a day at least for the next three weeks,
but before the first week ended they were engaged.  Young Wimble said
nothing at home because he knew his father would object to the daughter of
a corn-chandler who lived in Norfolk.  By September they were married.
But by the end of September Joseph realised that they were married--quite
another thing.  For his father meant what he said, and beyond a modest
allowance from the chandler to his daughter, they started life with
nothing but the small lump sum by means of which Mr. Wimble senior eased
his conscience and set himself right with the outside world.  The capitals
of Europe were not visited.

Joseph and Joan, however, took the situation like a pair of birds, lightly
and carelessly.  They were as thoughtless as two finches on the lawn, and
as faithful as red linnets.  The game of the yellow wagtail chase was kept
up between them.  He pretended that it was her flying scarf he had seen
shining two miles across the buttercup fields, and she declared that she
had gone to the willow pond on purpose, knowing in her bones--she called
them feathers--that one day some one would find her there and capture her.
The actual wagtail was a real decoy.  It was his yearning and her own
materialised.

They laughed and played with the idea till it grew very real.  And the
future did not frighten them a bit.  They took their money and spent it on
their honeymoon, leaving for the south in October with the birds.
They started on the great Southern Tour, building their first nest far
away in a sun-drenched Algerian garden where the air, soft with the bloom
of an eternal summer, mastered the earth and made it seem of small
account.  Nothing could weigh them down, nor cage them in.  They led a
true air-life together, the winds were softly scented, stars shone nightly
above their cosy tent, they sang in the golden sunsets and washed their
young bodies in the morning dew.

It was the paradise of a realised dream, a sparkling ecstasy they thought
could never end.  Her beauty seemed to him the one thing necessary.
The autumn migration of the birds, mysterious with grandeur, had always
suggested to him a passing-away from earth, a procession to another life,
and a returning to sing of it with rapture in the spring.  Their honeymoon
was this dream come true.  They mated and married as birds do, on the
wing, and singing.  And their first-born, a girl, was the offspring of a
passion as intense and radiant as any passion can be in this world.
Their imaginative ecstasy, prolonged wondrously through golden months,
lifted them from the earth towards the very stars.  In it was singing,
flight, and rapture, the freedom of wild free spaces and the glory of
flashing, coloured wings.

It was of the air.  They fluted to one another beneath the moon; they
soared above the noonday heat, they warbled in the scented dusk.
Their child, conceived of sun and wind, in a transport of bliss akin to
that careless passionate happiness that makes bird-life a ceaseless
running song, was born where the missel-thrush sings in the moonlight, and
the nightingales in February.  She was a veritable child of air.  A bird
on the wing dropped her to earth in passing, and was gone. . . .



But something else was gone about that time as well.  There came the
collapse of inevitable reaction--tragedy.  It was as pitiful as anything
well could be.  Having accomplished her chief end in life, the wife's
strange beauty faded: her lightness, brilliance waned, her rapture sank
and died; she became a heavy, rather stupid mother; she returned to type
whence youth and imagination had temporarily rescued her.  Her underlying
traits of ordinary texture dulled the colour of her yellow wings.
She bequeathed her all to this radiant, sparkling firstborn, and herself
went out.  The thing he loved in her vanished or became obliterated.
He had caught her main drift; he tired.  She tired too.  In him patient
affection replaced ecstatic adoration; in her there was tolerance,
misunderstanding, then disappointment.  To live longer on the heights they
had first climbed became impossible.  All that had fascinated him, caught
him into the air, departed from her.  The bird flew from her--into the
little girl with yellow hair and big blue eyes.

She wearied of the life in tents and spoke of 'artistic furniture' at
home, of comfort, and began to wonder how their 'living' could be
'earned.'  The practical outlook developed, the carelessness of air
decreased.  Tom, the second-born, was the culminating proof of the
saddening descent.  He was just a jolly little dirty animal.  'He's like a
rabbit,' thought his father, looking with disappointment on him, thus
introducing the big, bitter quarrel that ended in their coming back to the
heavy skies of England, settling in a flat in Maida Vale, and led
eventually to his taking up work in connection with a modern publishing
house to provide the necessary food and rent and clothing.  They landed
with a distinctly heavy thud--on earth.

It was, on the mother's part, a great tragedy of sacrifice.  Having given
all her best qualities to the first-born, she kept none over for herself--
not even enough to appreciate her loss.  Her radiance, sparkle, lightness,
all her airy wonder, joy and singing, passed from her into yellow-haired
little Joan.  She stared at it with dull misunderstanding in her heart.
She had not retained enough even to understand herself.  She did not even
discover that she had changed, for only when a fragment remains is the
loss of the rest recognised, much less regretted.

By expressing herself in reproduction, she had not grown richer, but had
somehow merely emptied herself.  Her husband, moreover, was not heartless.
He was not even to blame.  He remained tender, kind, and true, but he did
not love.  For the thing he loved had gone--into another form.

Like the shifting shadows of the wings upon the Cambridge flats that gay
spring morning, there fell upon his mind a shower of vague and
indescribable thoughts, only one of which he pounced upon before it fled
away.

'What has been so long unconscious in me, little Joan may perhaps make
conscious.  I wonder . . .!'  He wondered till he died.  He kept his
wings, that is.



CHAPTER III


The return to London was a return to the demands of earth; from the bright
and fiery aether of the southern climate they landed with something of a
jar among sooty bricks and black-edged mortar.  The sunshine dimmed, the
very air seemed solid.  Regular hours of work made it difficult for him to
lift his wings, much less to fly; he knew the London air was good, but he
never noticed that it was air at all; he almost forgot they had ever lived
in the air and flown at all.  Grocers, butchers, and bakers taught Mrs.
Wimble to become very practical, and the halfpenny newspapers stirred her
social ambitions for her children.  Wimble worked hard and capably, and
they made both ends meet.  He proved a patient husband and a devoted
father, if perhaps a rather vague one.  His moment of realisation was
over.  He accepted the routine of the majority, living methodically,
almost automatically, yet always a little absent-mindedly as though much
of his intelligence was unconsciously at work elsewhere.

Both parents altered; but, whereas his change was on the surface only, his
wife's seemed fundamental and permanent.  He was aware that he had
altered, she was not aware.  They differed radically, for instance, about
the prolonged and golden honeymoon in the south.

'The money lasted uncommonly well,' said Mrs. Wimble when they spoke of
it; 'it was a pity we didn't keep over a little, wasn't it?'  There was a
hint of asperity in the droop of her lips.

'We should have it now if we had,' he answered vaguely but with patience.
'But for me it's a memory that will always live.'  He spoke with longing
tenderness.

'What?' said Mrs. Wimble, who, like all slow thinkers, liked sentences
repeated, thus giving time to find an intelligent reply.

'We had a lovely time out there,' she admitted with a sigh, and went on to
mention by way of complaint that she feared she was getting rather stout
in London.  There was no idea in her that she had changed in any other
way; she looked back upon Algeria as a kind of youthful madness, half
regretting it.  That the bird had flown from her heart did not occur to
her.  Not alone her body, but her mind was getting stout.  She had grown
so artificial that she was no longer real.  The manners, moods, the words
and gestures she adopted in order to please or in order to appear as
others are, had ended by effectually screening her own natural self, that
which is every one's possession of unique value.  It was not so much that
she was false as that she was not herself.  She was unreal.

In Wimble, however, those two years remained as something bewilderingly
beautiful.  Just out of sight in his heart he wore still the steady glow
of it.  He never could recall quite what he had felt in those deliriously
happy days, yet the knowledge that they had been deliriously happy
remained and warmed his blood.  It was a big, brave, heartening memory
beneath his coloured waistcoat.  He dreamed his dream, only he did not
tell it to any one--yet.  He remained a kind, untidy husband and father.
But that was the outer portion of him.  The inner portion flew and soared
and even sang.  He no longer quite understood the meaning of this inner
portion, but some day, he felt, it would be drawn out of him again and
recognised.  He would be taught to realise it, and what this bird-thing in
him meant would be made clear.  Already he looked to little Joan with
something more than an infatuated father's adoration for her yellow hair,
her bright blue eyes, her light and dancing ways.  Tom he just loved in
the way his mother loved.  He remained a rabbit with distinctive
tendencies of the animal.  But with Joan it was different.  In Joan there
was something he looked forward to.  Even at the age of five there was a
glint about her that increased the glow in him; at ten it was still more
marked.  She puzzled her mother considerably, just as later she alarmed
her.  'I'm nervous about the child; she doesn't seem like other girls of
her age.  I don't see her getting on much,' was her opinion, expressed
again and again in the same or similar language.  'Joan seems to me
backward.'

'Well,' admitted her husband, 'she's certainly not in a hurry about it.
She's maturing slowly.  Lots of them do--when there's a good deal to
mature.'

'I hope you're right, Joe.'  And then she added with pride by way of
compensation--'Tom's coming along nicely, anyhow,'--as though she spoke of
a growing vegetable or, as he thought, of a rabbit in a cage with lettuces
in front of it, and the idea of mating the chief end in life.

Once past the age of sixteen, however, Joan too came along nicely, and
with a sudden rush that reminded her father of a young bird consciously
leaving the nest.  She seemed to mature so abruptly.  There came a
wondrous bloom upon her, as though the South poured up and blossomed in
her body, mind, and soul.  It took her father deliciously by surprise.
The glowing thing in him spread too, rose to the surface, caught fire.
He watched her with amazement, joy, and pride.  He felt wings inside him.
Thought danced--flashed against a background of blue and gold again.

'She'll do something in the world before she's done,' he said confusedly
to himself, feeling a prophecy he had always made without realising it.
'There's wings in the girl.  She'll teach them how to fly!'

He was beginning to realise himself--through her.  His early ideal had
taken flesh again, but this time with a difference.  He had not merely
found it.  He had created it.

For, more and more lately, the influence of Joan upon him had been
growing.  It was not merely that she made him feel young again, nor that
her queer ways made him aware that he wanted to sing and dance.  It was,
in a word, that he recognised in her the remarkable thing he had known
first in her mother years ago--but released in all its golden fullness.
He recovered in her sparkling presence the imaginative dream that had
caught him up into the air in youth, and it was both in her general
attitude to life as well as in the odd things she now began to say and do.
Her general attitude expressed it better than her words and acts.
She _was_ it--lived it naturally.  She had the Air in her.  In her
presence the old magic rose over him again.  He remembered the strange
boyhood's point of view about it--that a new thing was stealing down into
the world of men, a new point of view, a new way of looking at old, dull,
heavy things, that Air was catching at the heart of humanity here and
there, trying to lift it somehow into freedom.  He thought of the
collective wisdom and brotherhood of birds.  He forgot that he was growing
old.

The old longing for carelessness, lightness, speed in life--these snatched
at him with passionate yearning once again.  Joan was the air-idea
personified.  And she had begun to find herself.

But so long now had he lived the mole-existence in London that at first
this delicious revival baffled and bewildered him.  He could not suddenly
acquire speed without the risk of losing balance.

He became aware of a maddening desire to escape.  He wanted air.  Joan, he
felt positive, knew the way.  But the majority of people about him--his
wife, Tom, their visitors, their neighbours--had not the least idea what
it was he meant.  And this lack of comprehension gave him a feeling of
insecurity.  He was out of touch with his environment.  He was above,
beyond, in advance of it.  He was in the air a little.

He looked down on them--in one sense.

There were times when he did not know whether he was standing on his head
or his feet.  'Everything looks different suddenly,' as he expressed it.
He saw things upside down, or inside out, or backwards forwards.
And the condition first betrayed itself one afternoon when he returned
unexpectedly from work--he was still traveller to a publishing house--and
found his wife talking over the tea-cups with a caller.  He burst into the
room before he knew that any one was there, and did not know how to escape
without appearing rude. He sat down and fingered a cup of tea.  They were
talking of many things, the sins of their neighbours in Maida Vale,
chiefly, and after the pause and interruption caused by his unwelcome
entrance, the caller, searching for a suitable subject, asked:

'You've heard about Captain Fox, I suppose?'

'What?' asked Mrs. Wimble, opening her eyes as though anxious to read the
other's thoughts.  Evidently she had not heard about Captain Fox.

'I don't think I have,' she said cautiously.  'What--in particular?'

'He's going to marry her,' was the reply.  'I know it for a fact.
But don't say anything about it _yet_, because I heard it from Lady
Spears, who . . .'

She dragged a good deal of Burke into the complicated explanation, making
it as impressive as she could.  Captain Fox, who was no better than he
should be, according to the speakers, paid rather frequent visits upon the
young widow of the ground-floor flat, who should have been better than she
was.  To find that honest courtship explained the friendship was something
of a disappointment.  Mrs. Marks wished to be the first to announce the
innocent interpretation, to claim authorship, indeed--having persistently
advocated the darker view.

'Who'd ever have guessed that?' exclaimed Mrs. Wimble, off her guard a
moment.  'You always told me----'

The face of her caller betrayed a passing flush.

'Oh, one always hoped,' she began primly, when Mrs. Wimble interrupted her
with a firm, clear question:

'By the bye, who _was_ she?' she asked.

And hearing it, Wimble felt his world turn upside down a moment.
He realised, that is, that his wife saw it upside down.  For his wife to
ask such a question was as if he had asked it himself.  He felt ashamed.
His world turned inside out.  He looked down on them.  He rose abruptly,
finding the energy to invent a true-escaping sentence:

'You ask who she _was_,' he said, not with intentional rudeness, yet
firmly, 'when you ought to ask----'

Both ladies stared at him with surprise, waiting for him to finish.
He was picking up the cup his sudden gesture had overturned.

'Who she _is_,' concluded Wimble, with the astonishment of positive rebuke
in his tone.  'What can it matter who she was?  It's what she is that's of
importance.  The Captain's got to live with _that_.'  And then the
escaping-sentence: 'If you'll excuse me, Mrs. Marks, I have to go upstairs
to see a book'--he hesitated, stammered, and ended in confusion--'about a
book.'  And off he went, making a formal little bow at the door.
He went into the dining-room down the passage, vaguely aware that he had
not behaved very nicely.  'But, of course, I'm not a gentleman exactly,'
he said to himself; 'what's called a gentleman, that is.  Father was only
an analytical chemist.'

He stood still a moment, then dropped into a chair beside the table with
the red and black check cloth.  His mind worked on by itself, as it were.

'What I said was true, anyhow.  People always ask, "Who was she?" about
everything.  What the devil does that matter?  It's what you are that
counts.  Father was a chemist, but I--I----'

He got up and walked over to the clock, because the clock stood on the
mantelpiece, and there was a mirror behind it.  He wanted to see his own
face.  He stared at himself a moment without speaking, thinking, or
feeling anything.  He put his tie straight and picked a bit of cotton from
his shoulder.

'I am Joseph Wimble, not a gentleman quite, not of much account anywhere
perhaps, but a true workman, earning 250 pounds a year, knowing all about
the outside, and something about the inside of books; thirty-seven years
old, with a boy at the Grammar School, a girl of sixteen in the house, and
married to--to----'  He paused, turned from the mirror, and sat down.
It cost him an effort to remember--'to Joan Lumley, daughter of a
corn-chandler in Norfolk, who might die any moment and leave us enough to
live on,' he went on, 'in a more comfortable position,' passing his hand
over his forehead; 'and my life is insured, and I've put a bit by, and
Tom's to be a solicitor's clerk, and everything's going smoothly except
that taxes----'

The sound of an opening door disturbed him.  He felt confused in his mind.
He heard Mrs. Marks saying loudly, 'And please say good-bye for me to your
_h_usband,' the aspirate so emphasised that it was obviously an
insecurity.  She intended he should hear and understand she bore him no
ill-will for his bad manners, yet despised him.  The steps went
downstairs, and the two questions came back upon him like pistol-shots:

'Who _was_ she?  Who _am_ I?

He realised he had been wandering from the point.

'I'm a centre of life, independent and unafraid,' thought flashed an
answer.  'I'm what I make myself, what I think myself.  I'm not seeing
things upside down; I'm beginning to think for myself, and that's what it
is.  No one, nor nothing, nor anything anywhere in the world,' he went on,
mixed in speech, but clear in mind, 'can prevent me from being anything I
feel myself, will myself, say I am.  I've never read nor thought nor
bothered my head about things before.  By heavens!  I'll begin!  I _have_
begun----'

'What's the matter, Joe?  Have you got a headache, or is it the books
bothering you, dear?'  His wife had come in upon him.

She put her hand upon his forehead, and he got up from his chair and faced
her.

'I've made a discovery,' he said, with exhilaration in his manner,
'a great discovery.'  He looked triumphantly at her.  'I am.'

'What are you?' she asked, thinking he was joking, and his sentence left
unfinished on purpose.

'I _am_,' he repeated with emphasis.  'I have discovered that I am, that I
exist.  Your question to that woman made me suddenly see it.'

His wife looked flustered, and said vaguely, 'What?'  Wimble continued:

'As yet, I don't know exactly what I am, but I mean to find out.  Up till
now I've been automatic, just doing things because other people do 'em.
But I've discovered that's not necessary.  I'm going to do things in
future because I want to.  But first I must find out _why_ I am what I am.
Then the explanation'll come--of everything.  Do you see what I mean?
It's a case of "Enquire within upon everything."'  And he smiled.
His heart fluttered.  He felt wings in it--again.

'Do you mean you're going to start in the writing or publishing line,
Joe?'  It had always been her secret ambition.

'That may come later,' he told her, 'when I've something to say.  For it's
really big, this discovery of mine.  Most people never find it out at all.
She'--indicating with his thumb the direction Mrs. Marks had taken--
'hasn't, for instance.  She simply isn't aware that she exists.
She isn't.'

'Isn't what, dear?'

'She is _not_, I mean, because she doesn't know she is,' he said loudly.

'Oh, that way.  I see.'  Mrs. Wimble looked a wee bit frightened.  He had
seen an animal, a rabbit for instance, look like that before it decided to
plunge back into its hole for safety.

'There are strange, big things about these days, I know,' she said after a
pause, thinking of the books with queer titles his employers published.
'You have been reading too much, dear, thinking and----'

'Mother,' he interrupted, instinctively omitting her name, and in a tone
that convinced her his head was momentarily turned, 'that's the whole
trouble.  I've never thought in my life.'

'But why should you, dear?' she soothed him, wondering if people who lost
their memory and wandered off exhibited such symptoms first.  'You always
do your work splendidly.  Don't think too much, is what I say.  It always
leads to worrying----'

'Hardly ever--till this moment,' he was saying in the grave, emphatic way
that so alarmed her.  'Not even when I asked you to marry me, when Tom was
born, or Joan, or when we took this flat, or anything.'

'You've made quite a success of your life without it anyhow, Joe dear.
And no woman could ask more than that.  D'you feel poorly?  Joan can fetch
Dr. Monson in a moment.'  It was a variant of 'What?'

'I feel better and bigger and stronger,' he replied, 'more real than ever
in my life before.  I have never been really alive till this moment.
I _am_--and for the first time I know it.  I'm experiencing.' He stopped
short, as Joan went down the passage singing, pausing a moment to look in,
then tactfully going on her way again.  The fluttering in his heart became
more marked.  Something was trying to escape.  There was a whirr of wings
again.  'Mother,' he said to his wife, as their heads turned back from the
door together, 'do you know what "experiencing" is?  D'you realise what
the word means?'

She sat down, resting her arms upon the table.  She looked quietly into
his eyes, as at one who is about to speak out of greater knowledge.

'Joe dear, I _have_ had experiences--experiences of my very own, you
know.'

'Yes, yes, I know, I know.  But what I mean is--do you get the meaning,
the real meaning of the word?'

She sighed audibly.  'Not your meaning, perhaps,' she meant.  But she did
not say it.

'It means,' he said, delighted with her exquisite silence, 'it means--
er----'  He thought hard a moment.  'Experience,' he went on, 'is that
"something" which changes potatoes into nourishment, and so into emotion.
That's it.  Until you eat potatoes, you don't exist.  Until you have
experiences, you don't exist.  When you have experiences and know that you
have them, you--_per_sist.'

She gasped aloud.  She took his hand--very quietly.

'Joe dear,' she said, softly as in their courtship days, 'such ideas don't
come into your head from nowhere.  Has some one been talking to you?
Have you been reading these books?'

His pulse was very quiet.

'Have you been reading the firm's books, dear?' she repeated.

She asked it gently, forgivingly, as a mother might ask her boy,
'Have you been tasting father's whisky?'  The books were meant to sell to
booksellers, to the public, to people who needed that particular kind of
excitement.  Her husband was to be trusted.  He was not supposed to know
what they contained.  His 'line' of trade was chiefly medical,
psychological, religious, philosophical.  Fiction was another 'line'--for
the apprentice.  Joe was an 'expert' traveller.  He was expected to talk
about his wares, but not as one who read them.  Merely their selling value
was his strong point.

By the expression of his face she knew the answer.

He leaned back in his chair, just as he did sometimes when he asked what
there was for dinner--the same real interest in his eyes--and he answered
very calmly:

'My dear, I have--a bit.  _Cogito ergo sum_.  For the first time I
understood, in theory, that I existed.  My reading taught me that.
But I never knew it in practice until just now, when I heard you ask that
question about the future Mrs. Fox:  "Who _was_ she?"  And then I knew
also that you----'

'You what?' enquired Mrs. Wimble, bridling.

'Were unaware that you existed,' he replied point blank.

'Aren't you a little beside yourself, Joe--sort of excited, or something?
'she gasped, proud of her tact and self-control.  'What else could I have
said?  How could I have put it different?'

'Joan,' he answered gently, 'you should have said, "What _is_ she?"
For that would have meant you thought for yourself.  It would have meant
that you knew you _were_, and that you knew she _was_.'

'Original?' said Mrs. Wimble slowly, catching her husband's meaning
vaguely, but more than a little disturbed in her mind.

'No,' he answered, 'true.  Just as when, years ago--the sunshine lovely
and the fields full of buttercups--you wore a yellow scarf, and a wagtail
beside a willow pond came so near that----'

'Joe,' she said with a slight flush that was half displeasure yet half
flattered vanity,' you needn't bring up that again.  We were a bit above
ourselves, dear, when that happened.  We lost our heads----'

'Above ourselves!  Free and real and happy,' he interrupted her, 'that's
what we were then.  We had wings.  We've lost 'em.  We were in the air, I
tell you.'  His voice grew louder.  'And what's more, we knew it.'

He heard his daughter pass down the narrow passage again, singing.  He got
up and seemed to shake himself.  There was again a fluttering in him.

'We certainly were in the air,' murmured his astonished wife.

'You were a glorious yellow wagtail,' he went on, so that she didn't know
whether his laughter was in earnest or in play, 'and we were rising--into
flight.  We've come down to earth since.  We live in a hole, as it were.
I'm going to get out!'

Joan's little song went past the door and died away towards the kitchen:

     Flow, fly, flow,
     Wherever I _am_, I _go_.

'We've lost our wings.  We crawl about.  We never dance now, or sing,
or----'  He broke off abruptly.  He felt the other portion of himself, so
long hidden, coming to the surface; and he was aware that it went after
his daughter.  He was a little afraid of it--felt giddy.  Her voice in the
distance sounded like a lark's, the lilt of her curious little song had an
echo of the open air in it, her tread brought back the tripping of the
wagtail along the river's bank.  'We never get out now,' he finished the
sentence, 'we never get out.  Earth smothers us.  We want air!'

Mrs. Wimble watched him a moment with frightened eyes.  He was standing on
tiptoe, holding the tails of his coat in his hands as though he was about
to do something very unusual--something foolish and ridiculous, she
thought.  He seemed about to dance, to rise, almost to fly up to the
ceiling.  She felt uneasy, hot--a little ashamed.

'We can go out more, dear, if you think it wise,' she said cautiously,
moving a little further away.  'It's the expense--I always thought----'

Her husband stared at her a moment dumbly.  He seemed to be listening.
In his heart a little, forgotten song crept back, answering the singing of
the girl.  Then, dropping upon his heels again, he said patiently in a
soothing tone:

'There, there, Mother!  Forgive me if I frightened you.  I was only
pretending we were young again.  That old bird thing--bird-magic--came
over me for a moment.  The girl's singing did it, I suppose.  Something
ageless in me got the upper hand . . .'

He took her hand and comforted her.  'Steady, Joe,' she said, horribly
puzzled, 'she is a bit flighty, I know.'

'But we will go out more,' he went on more normally again, adopting her
meaning perfectly.  'Bother the expense!  We'll go out this very night and
take the child with us.  We'll dine out, my dear.  I'll take you to a West
End restaurant!'



CHAPTER IV


For Joan certainly was no ordinary girl; some called her backward, some
considered her deficient, but all agreed that she was singular.
Yet all liked her.  Tall, slim and fair, with plenty of golden hair and
eyes of merry brightness, she was out of the common in an attractive sort
of way.  Tom, her brother, with the mind of a solicitor's clerk, looked
down upon her; her mother, fond, conventional, socially ambitious,
despaired of her; her father alone held the opinion, 'There's something in
that girl.  She's always herself.  But town-life over-weights and hides
her; and in the end will suffocate.  It'll snuff her out.  She's meant for
country.'  He was aware of something unusually real in her.  They were
great friends.  'I want more air,' she had said once.  'In a field or
garden I'd grow enormous like a bean plant.  In these streets I'm just a
stone squashed down by crowds.  I'm in a hole and can't breathe.  I prefer
a fewity.'  Even her words were her own like this.  'I'd like room to
dance in.  Life is a dance.  I'd learn it in a field.  I'd be a bird
girl.'  Space was her need, for mind as well as body.

It was her father's secret ambition too: a cottage, a garden with things
that grew silently into beauty, flowers, vegetables, plants; sweet
laughing winds; the rush of living rain at midnight; water to drink from a
deep, cool spring instead of from metal pipes; a large, inviting horizon
in which a man might lose himself; and above all--birds.

'After a month in real private country--loose country, talking, dancing,
running country----'  She paused.

'Liquid, fluid, as it were,' he put in, delighted.

'Yes, deep and clear as a river,' she went on, 'in country like that, do
you know what'd happen to me, father, after a few months of waiting?'

'I know, but I can't quite say,' he answered.  'Tell me, child, for I'd
love to hear your own description.'

'I'd fly,' was her answer.  'Everything in me would fly about like a bird,
picking up things, and all over the place at once without a plan--a fixed,
heavy plan like a street or square in London here--and yet getting on all
the time--getting further.'

'And how would you learn, dear?'

'Birds,' she laughed.  'There's bird-teaching, I'm sure.'  She flitted
across to another chair as she said it.  She came closer to her father,
who was listening with both ears, watching, drinking in something he had
known long ago and then forgotten.  '_You_ know all about it, Daddy.
You needn't pretend.'

'You're rather like one, d'you know,' he smiled.  'Like a bird, I mean.'
He thought of a dabchick that hides so cleverly no one can put it up--
then, suddenly, is there, close at hand.

She was perched on his knee before he knew it.  Her small voice twittered
on into his ear.  Something about her sparkled, flashed and vanished, and
it reminded him of sunshine on swift-fluttering wings through the speckled
shade of an orchard.  She darted, whirred, and came to rest.  He stroked
her.

'Father, you know everything before I say it,' she went on, her face
shining with happiness that made her almost beautiful.  'If I could only
live like a bird, I could _live_.  Here it's all a big, stuffy cage.'
She flitted to the window, pointing to roofs and walls and chimney-pots,
black with grime.  The same instant she was back again upon his knees.
'To live like a bird is to be alive all over, I'm sure, I'm sure.
I know it.  It's all routing here.'

Whether she meant rotten, routine, or living in a rut, he did not ask.
He felt her meaning.

'There's a nest in a garden waiting for us somewhere,' he said, living the
dream with her in his heart.  'And it's got an orchard, high deep grass,
wild flowers, hills in the distance, with a tremendous sky where the winds
go tearing about like the flight of birds.  And a stream that ripples and
sings and shines.  All alive, I mean, and always moving.  They say the
country's stagnation.  It isn't.  It's a perfect rush----'

'Of course,' she put in.  'Oh, father, think hard about that place, and
we'll attract it nearer and nearer, till in the end we drop into it and
grow like----'

'Beans,' he laughed.

'Birds,' she rippled, and hopped from his knee across the room, and was
down the passage and out of sight before he could draw another breath.

There was something alert as lightning in the girl.  She woke a similar
thing in him, too.  It had nothing to do with brain as intellect, or with
reason, or with knowledge in the ordinary sense the world gives to these
words.  But it had to do, he dimly felt, with another bigger thing that
was everywhere and in everything.  Joan shared it, brought it nearer; it
was universal.  What that bigger thing might be perplexed him.  He was
aware that it drove past, alertness in so huge a thing conveying the
impression of vast power.  There was grandeur in it somewhere, poise,
dignity, beauty; yet this subtle alertness too, and this swift protean
sparkle.  It was towering as a night of stars, alluring as a peeping
wildflower, but prodigious also as though all the oceans flowed suddenly
between narrow banks in a flood of clearest water, very rapid,
terrifyingly deep.  For a robe it wore the lustrous colouring of untold
age.  His imagery, when he tried to visualise it, grew mixed.  He called
it Experience.  But sometimes he told himself he knew its Christian name--
its familiar, little, intimate nickname--and that was Wisdom.

And so he was rather glad that Joan, like himself, was but half educated;
that she was backward, and that he knew, relatively, only the outsides of
books.  For facts, he vaguely felt, might come between them and this
august yet precious thing they knew together.  Birds could teach it, but
Ornithology hid it.

Lately, however, as his wife divined, he had been dipping in between the
covers of the goods he travelled in.  Caught by the bait of several
drugging titles, he had nibbled--in the train, in waiting-rooms, in the
'parlours' of commercial hotels where he put up for the night.
He had found names and descriptions of various things, but they were the
names and descriptions given by others to their own sensations.
The ordered classification merely developed snapshots.  He recognised
photographs of dead things that he knew must be somewhere--alive.
The names made stationary what ought to dance along with incessant
movement.  Only he did not realise this until he saw the photographs.
The alleged accuracy of a photograph was an insolent falsehood, pretending
that what was alive was dead, that what rushed was stationary.  Dogs and
savages cannot recognise the photographs of their masters.
The resemblance has to be taught.  Everything flows, his shilling
_Heraclitus_ told him.  He had always known it.  Birds taught it.
Joan lived it.  To classify was to photograph--a prevarication.
To publish a snapshot of a jumping horse was to teach what is not true.
Definitions were trivial and absurd, for what was true to-day was false
to-morrow.  The sole value of names, of classification, of photographing
lay in stopping life for an instant so that its flow might be realised--as
a momentary stage in an incessant process.  And he looked at a group of
acquaintances his wife had 'Kodaked' ten days ago, and realised with
delight how they all had rushed away, torn on ahead, lived, since she had
told that insignificant lie in black and white about them.

Joan, catching him in the act of destroying it, had said, 'I know why
you're doing that, father.'

'Why?' he asked, half ashamed and half surprised.

'Because you don't want to stop them,' was her answer, 'and because it
wasn't fair of mother to catch them in the act like that.  It wasn't all.'

And as he stared at her curious peeping face, she came quickly up to him,
saying passionately, imploringly:

'Oh, do let's get into the country soon, and live along with it, and grow
and know things.  I feel so stuck still here, and always caught-in-the-act
like that photo.  It's so dead.  It's a toad of a place!  The streets are
all nailed down on to the ground.  In the country they run about----'

He interrupted her on purpose:

'But in a city life is supposed to be much richer than in the country,' he
said.  'You know that?'

'It goes round and round like a circle, though; it doesn't go _on_.
I'm living other people's lives here.  I want to live my own.  Everybody
here lives the same thing over and over again till they get so hot they
get ill.  I want to be cool and naked like a fern.  Here I'm being
photographed all day long.  Every man who looks at me takes a photograph.
Oh, father, I'm so tired of it.  Do let's go soon and live hoppily like
the birds.'

'You mean happily?' he asked, laughing with her.

'It's the same thing,' she laughed back, 'it's like wings or running
water--always going wherever they are----

[Transcriber's note: Here 8 bars of a musical score accompany 6 lines of
verse]

     Flow, fly, flow,
     Wher-ev-er I am I go
     I live on the run,
     Like a bird--that's fun!
     Flow, fly, flow . . .

And was dancing to and fro over the carpet, when the door opened and in
came her brother Tom, followed by another youth.

He looked surprised, ashamed, then vexed.  It was Saturday afternoon.
He had been six months now in the office.

'I've brought Mr. Halliday with me,' he said pompously, 'to have tea.
We've just been to a matinee at the Coliseum.  Joan, this is Mr. Halliday,
our junior clerk.  My sister, Harold.'

Joan instantly looked gauche and ugly.  She shook hands with a speckled
youth, whose shy want of manners did not prevent his eyeing her all over.
He sat down beside his friend, talking of the singing, dancing, juggling
and so on that they had witnessed.  All the time he talked at something
else in her.  But she hid it away as cleverly as a bird hides its nest.
The callow youth, without realising it, was hunting for a nest.  In the
country he might have found it.  He would have been sunburned, for one
thing, instead of speckled.  The wind, the rain, the starlight would have
guided him.  His natural instinct would have flowed out in a dance of
spontaneous running movement, easy, graceful, clean.  Here, however, it
seemed rigid, ugly, diseased.  He was living the life of others.

'You were dancing just as we came in,' observed Mr. Halliday.  'Does that
line of things attract you?  You are going on the stage, perhaps?'

Joan looked past him out of the window, and saw the swallows flashing
about the sky.

'I _can_ dance,' she replied, 'but not on a stage.'

'But you'd be a great success, I think, from what I saw,' opined the
junior clerk.  And somehow he said it unpleasantly.  His tone half
undressed her.

She didn't flush, she didn't stammer, at first she didn't answer even.
She watched the swallows a moment, as though she had not heard him.

'You only stare, you don't watch and enjoy,' she said suddenly, turning
upon him.  'And an audience like that. . .!'  She stopped, got up from her
chair, put her head out of the open window and gazed into the air above.
When she turned back, she saw that her mother had come in and was leading
the others into the dining-room for tea.  Her father's face wore a
singular expression--it seemed, of exultation.  Tom, black as a
thunder-cloud, waited for her.

'You're nothing but a little barbarian,' he said angrily under his breath.
The life of others he led had been sorely wounded.  'I can never bring Mr.
Halliday here again.  You're simply not a lady.'

'I'm a bird,' she laughed in his face.  'And you men can never understand
that, because no man has a bird in him, but only a creepy, crawly animal.
We go on two legs, you on four.'

'I'm ashamed of you, Joan.  You're nothing but a savage.'  He snapped at
her.  He could have smacked her.  His face was flushed, but his neck thin,
scraggy, white.  He looked starved and twisted.  'In the City we----' he
began with a clown's dignity.

'Live like rats in a drain,' she interrupted quickly, perched a moment on
her toes in front of his face.  'You don't breathe or dance.  Tom,' she
added with a gesture of her arms like flapping wings, 'if you were alive,
you'd be--a mole.  But you're not.  You're a lot of other people.
You're a herd--always enclosed and always feeding.'

She danced down the corridor and into her room, locked the door, slipped
out of some tight clothing, and began to sing her bird-song of incessant
movement:

     Flow!  Fly!  Flow!
     Wherever I _am_ I _go_;
     I live on the run
     Like the birds--it's fun!
     Flow, fly, flow. . . .

She sang it to a tiny, uneven, twittering melody that was made up of half
notes.  It went on and on, repeating itself without end.  It seemed to
have no real end at all.



CHAPTER V


To others she was doubtless an exasperating being.  To her father alone--
since he saw in her something he had lost but was now recovering,
something he therefore idealised, seeing in perfected form what was
actually but a germ still--to her father she expressed a little of that
higher carelessness, or wisdom, that he had touched in boyhood and now
yearningly desired again.

'Oh, she's all in the air,' people said.  And it was truer than they knew.
She had an affinity with all that flew.  This bird-idea was in her heart
and blood.  Whatever flew, whatever rose above the ground, whatever passed
swiftly, suddenly, from place to place, without deliberation, without
calculation, without weighing risk and profit--this appealed to her.
Yet there must be steadiness in it somewhere too, and it must get
somewhere.  A swallow or a butterfly she approved, but not a bat.
The latter, for all its darting swiftness, was a sham; it was an
earth-crawler really, frightened into ridiculous movement by finding
itself aloft like a blown leaf; like a flying fish, it was wrong and out
of place.  It merely flew round and round in stupid, broken circles
without rhythm.  But the former were perfect.  They were ideal.  They were
almost spirits.

And when her father said he was glad she was half educated, he only meant
glad that she had left school and teachers before her butterfly mind had
become a rigid, accurate, mechanical thing.  She might play with books as
he himself did, fluttering over the covers, smelling their perfume,
glancing at sentences and chapter headings, at indices even.  But she must
not build nests in them.  A book, like a photograph, was an evillish
attempt to nail a flowing idea into a fixed pattern.  In the author's mind
an idea was true, but when he had put it down in black and white he had
put down only a snapshot of it: the idea was already far away.

'Not poetry-books,' Joan qualified this, 'because poetry runs clean off
the page.  It's alive and wingy.  It sings my bird-song--

     Flow, fly, flow,
     Wherever I _am_--I _go_!

She had this unerring instinct of the bird in everything, the quality that
flashes, darts, is gone before it can be killed by capture.  A bird is
everywhere and nowhere.  It's all over the place at once.  Look at it, and
it's no longer there; listen to it, and it's gone; touch it, and you catch
a sunbeam that warms the hand but loses half its beauty; catch it--and
it's dead.  But no one ever caught a swallow or a skylark naturally on the
wing.  Even the eye, the mind, the following thought grows dizzy in the
effort.

For the cow in the field she had no song.  'Wherever I am, I stay,' was
without a tune of its own.  A cow couldn't leave the ground.  She wanted
something with incessant movement that could touch the earth, yet leave it
at will.  Wings and water could.  Birds and rain both flew.  Half the time
a river (the only real water for her) flowed over the earth without
stopping on it, and half the time it was a cloud in the sky, yet never
lived there.  'Flow, fly, flow; wherever I _am_, I _go_,'--this was the
little song of life and change and movement that came out of her curious
heart and mind.  'Live on the run, like a bird, _that's_ fun!'  And by fun
she meant life, and the soaring joy of life.

She applied her principle unconsciously to people, too.  Few men had the
bird in them except her father.  Mother was a badger, half the time out of
sight below the earth.  She felt respect, but no genuine love, for mother.

'A whale or a badger, I really don't know which,' she said.  'That's
Mother.'

'Joan, I cannot allow you to speak in that way of your parent and my
wife.'  The sentence was unreal.  He chose it deliberately, as it seemed,
from some book or other.  What she had said was sparklingly true, only it
could not be said.  'You were born out of mother, and so must think her
holy.'

'I only meant that she is not birdy,' was the answer, 'and that she likes
thick salt water, or sticky earth.  I mean that I never see her on the
surface much, and never for an instant _above_ it.  A fish is all right,
but not a half-and-half thing.'

'She built your nest for you.  She taught you how to fly.  Remember that.'
He lit his pipe to hide the laughter that would bubble up.

'But she never flew with me, father--as you do.  Besides, you know, I
_like_ whales and badgers.  I only say they're not birds.'

She paused, stared triumphantly at him a moment, and then with anxiety in
her tone, she added:  'And you said that as if some one had taught it you,
Daddy.  Some one's put bird-lime near you--some book, I suspect.'

'Grammar's all right enough in its way,' he told her finally, meaning
perhaps that there were correct and incorrect ways of saying a thing, and
so the little matter was nicely settled up, and they flew on to other
things as their way invariably was.  But, after that, whenever mother was
in the room, they thought of something under ground or under water that
emerged for a brief moment to stare at them and wonder, heavens!--how they
lived.  _They_ wondered how, on earth, she lived.  They were in different
worlds.

For a long time now Joseph Wimble, 'travelling' in tabloid knowledge, had
been absorbing what is called the Spirit of the Age.  On the paper
wrappers of his books--chiefly Knowledge Primers--were printed neat and
striking epitomes of the contents.  Written by expert minds, these
epitomes were admirable brief statements.  There was no room for argument.
They merely gave the entire book in a few short sentences that hit the
mind--and stayed in it.  They left the impression that the problem was
proved, though actually it was merely stated.  Hundreds of those
statements he had now read, until they flowed like a single sentence
through his consciousness, each _resume_ a word, as it were, in the phrase
describing the knowledge--or at least the tendencies--of the day.  Wimble
was thus a concise phrase-book, who taught the grammar of the twentieth
century.

For his Firm, alert and enterprising, had the gift of scenting a
given tendency before it was understood by the mass--still 'in the air,'
that is--yet while the mass still wanted to know about it;
then of choosing the writer who could crystallise it in simple language
that made the man in the street feel well informed and up to date.
The What's-in-the-Air-To-day Publishing Co. was well named; it had the
bird quality.  These Picturesque Knowledge Primers sold like wildfire.
They purveyed knowledge in tabloid form and advertised the hungry public
into nourishment.  The latest thing in politics, painting, flying, in
feminism or call-of-the-wild, in music, scouting, cubism, futurism,
feeding, dancing, clothing, ancient philosophy redressed, or modern pulpit
pretending to be neo--everything that thrills the public to-day, from
pageantry and Eurhythmics to higher thought and psychism, they touched
with clever condensing accuracy of aim, and grew fat upon the proceeds.
The stream of little books flowed forth, written by birds, distributed in
flocks, scattered broadcast like seed in a wind, each picked up eagerly
and discarded for the next--winged knowledge in sparrow doses.
The Managing Director, Fox Martin (_nee_ Max Levi), was a genius in his
way, sure as a hawk, clairvoyant as a raven.  His _Bergson_ sold as
successfully as his _Exercises for the Bedroom_--because he chose the
writer.  He hovered, swooped, struck--and the primer was caught and issued
in its thousands.  His advertising was consummate, for it convinced the
ordinary man he ought to know that particular Thing-in-the-Air-To-day,
just as he ought to wear a high collar with his evening clothes or a slit
in his coat behind with flannels.  He aimed at the men as the machine-made
novel aims at the women.

Wimble, _the_ traveller _facile princeps_, for this kind of goods, knew,
therefore, everything that was 'in-the-air-to-day,' without knowing in the
least why it was to be believed, or what the arguments were.  And yet he
knew that he was right.  He knew things as a bird does, gathering them on
every wind, and shaping his inner life swiftly, unburdened by reasoning
calculation built on facts.  Thus, useless in debate, his mind was packed
with knowledge.  He was a walking Index.

And the feeling in him that everything flowed and nothing was stationary
was strong.  He dealt in shooting ideas, not in dead, photographic detail.
He flashed from one subject to another; flowed through all categories,
ancient and modern; skimmed the cream off current tendencies, and swept
above the knowledge of the day with a bird's-eye view, unburdened by fact
or argument.

Of late, moreover, he had enjoyed these curious upside-down and inside-out
experiences, because he had filled himself to the saturation point, and
become, as it were, stationary.  He could hold no more without a change.
He stopped.  He took a snapshot photograph of himself, realised that he
existed as a separate, vital entity, and thenceforward watched himself
expectantly to see what the change was going to be, for he knew he would
not stay still.  Hitherto he had been mechanical, whereas now he was an
engine capable of self-direction--an engine stoked to the brim.  When the
air is at the saturation point, the tiniest additional percentage of
moisture causes rain to fall.  It's the final straw that makes the camel
pause.  So with Joseph Wimble.  He was ready to discharge.

And it was this chance remark of his under-ground wife asking who the
widow _was_ that took the photograph, and made him say, 'I am.'
All he had read was included in the affirmation.  The epitomes had become
part of his consciousness.  Like the weary camel, like the moisture tired
of balancing in the air, he wanted to sit down now and consider.
His daughter's longing for the country was his too.  And it was she who
now brought out all this.

At dinner that night in a West End restaurant near Piccadilly Circus he
broached the subject and listened patiently to his wife's objections.

'What's the good, even if we had the means, Joe?  Burying ourselves like
that.'

Joan hopped, as it were.  She recognised her mother's instinctive dread
that she would go under ground or under water and never come up again.

'None of the nice people, the county families, would call.  There'd only
be the vicar and the local doctor, or p'r'aps a gentleman-farmer or two.
We know much better class in town, and there's always chances of getting
to know better still.  Besides, who'd there be for Joan?  The girl
wouldn't have a look-in, simply.  And the winters are so sloppy in a
country cottage.  Think of the Sundays.  And the chickens and pigs I
really couldn't abide, and howling winds at night, and owls in the eaves,
and rats in the attics.  You see, we'd have no standing at all.'

'But just a week-end cottage, Mother,' Joan put in, 'just a place of
flowers and orchards and a little stream to flit down to overnight, so to
say--_that_ now you'd like, wouldn't you?'

'Oh, that's different,' she said more brightly, 'only that's not what
father means.  He means a place to live in altogether.  The week-end idea
is right enough.  That's what everybody does who can afford to--a bungalow
on the Thames.  But that means more money than we shall ever see, and even
for that you want to keep a motor or a horse and dog-cart, or a little
steam launch to get about in.  Then the handy places are very expensive,
and we couldn't go very far because of Tom.  Tom could come down and bring
his friends if it was near enough.'

'Grandfather might give us a little nest cheap,' suggested Joan.
She didn't 'see' Tom in the cottage.

But mother turned up her nose as she sipped her glass of Asti Spumante
that accompanied the west-end dinner by way of champagne.  She didn't
approve of Norfolk.

'There's no society,' she said.  'It's flat and chilly.  Your grandfather
only stays there because there's the business to keep going.  If we ever
did such a thing as to move to the country, it'd have to be the Surrey
pinewoods or the Thames.'

She looked across the table questioningly at her husband.  The music
played ragtime.  The waiters bustled.  There was movement and excitement
in the air about them.  Joe looked quite distinguished in his evening
dress, and she felt proud and distinguished herself.  She only wished he
were a publisher.  Still, no one need feel ashamed of being interested in
the book line.  Literature was not a trade.

'Some place, yes, where the country's really alive,' he agreed.  'I don't
want to vegetate any more than you do, dear, I can assure you.'

'Nor I, mother,' laughed Joan.  'I simply want to fly about all the time.'

'Joan,' was the reply, half reproachfully, 'you always talk as if we kept
you in a cage at home.  The more you fly the better we like it; I only say
choose places worth flying to----'

Her husband interrupted abruptly.

'It was nothing but a little dream of my own, really,' he said lightly.
'A castle in the air, a flash of country in the brain.'  He laughed and
called the waiter.

'Black, white, or Turkish?' he asked his wife.  'And what liqueur, dear?'

'Turkish and Grand Marnier,' was the prompt reply, and she would have said
'_fine champagne_' only felt uncertain how _fine_ should be pronounced.
They sipped their coffee and talked of other things.  It was no good, this
speculative talk, it was too much in the air.

The key of mother's mind was always: Who _was_ she?  What'll _they_ say?
She lived underground, using the worn old narrow routes.  Joan and her
father made their own pathways in the trackless air.  During the remainder
of the evening they kept to the earth beside mother.

That night in the poky flat, after the girl had gone to bed, Mrs. Wimble
observed to her husband:

'Do you know, Joe, I think a little change _would_ do her a lot of good.
She's getting restless here, and seems to take to nobody.  Why not take
her with you sometimes on your literary trips?'

This was her name for his journeys to provincial booksellers, or when sent
to interview one of the Primer writers upon some practical detail.

'If we could afford it,' he replied.

'Father might help,' she said, showing that she had considered the matter
already.  'It would be good for her--educational, I mean.'

Her husband agreed, and they fell asleep on that agreement.

A few days later a reply was received from Mrs. Wimble's father, the
corn-chandler in Norfolk, enclosing a cheque for 20 pounds 'as a starter.'
The parents were delighted.  Joan preened her wings and began at once her
short flying journeys about the country with her father.  He avoided the
Commercial Traveller Hotels and took her to little Inns, where they were
very cosy together.  They went from Norfolk to the edge of Wales.
She acquired a bird's-eye knowledge of the map of Southern England.
These short trips gave her somehow the general 'feel' of the various
counties, each with its different 'note,' in much the same way as the
Primers gave her father his surface impression of England's mental
condition.  She noticed and remembered the living arteries which are
rivers, he the streams of thought and theory which are tendencies.
The two maps were shown and explained, and each was wonderfully alert in
understanding the other's meaning.  The girl drank in her father's
knowledge, while he in his turn 'felt' the country as a dancing sheet
beneath them, flowing, liquid, alive.  A new language grew into existence
between them, a kind of shorthand, almost a symbol language.
They realised it first when talking of their journeys at the dinner-table,
and Mrs. Wimble looked puzzled.  Her face betrayed anxiety; she asked
perplexed questions, looking up at them as a badger might look up at
wheeling pigeons from the opening of its hole.  Mentally she turned tail
and dived out of sight below ground, where, with her feet on solid earth,
her back and sides touching material that did not yield, she felt more at
home, the darkness comforting and safe.  Her husband and Joan flew too
near the sun.  It dazzled her.  They could have talked for hours without
her catching the drift, only they were far too fond of her to do so.
They resented going underground with her, but they came down and settled
on earth, folded their wings, used words instead of unintelligible
chirrupings, and chatted with her through the opening of the hole.

One afternoon, then, in Chester, they received a telegram from her that,
for a moment, stopped the flow of things, though immediately afterwards
the rush went on with greater impetus than ever.

     Father passed away peacefully
     return at once
     funeral to-morrow Swaffham.

And the family found itself with a solid little income of its own, free to
fly and settle where it would.



CHAPTER VI


Nothing showed more vividly the peculiarity of Joan's unearthly airiness
than the way in which the death affected her.  It was the first time the
great thing all talk about but none realise until they touch it, had come
near her.  It gave her a feeling of insecurity.  She felt the solid
earth--so called--unreal.  Not that she had a feather of affection for her
mother's father.  She regarded him as a second-rate animal of prey, like a
jackal, and always shrank when he was near.  There was something 'sticky'
in him; she classed him with her father's father, earthy, but not
'clean-earthy'; muddy rather.  But that an earthy person could disappear
in such a way made her feel shaky.  If _he_ couldn't stay on the earth,
who could?

Outwardly, and according to the newspapers, he had died rather well,
leaving money to hospitals and waif Societies; but, inwardly, he had died
in deep disgrace, a bankrupt soul with a heavy overdraft at the bank.
He had been a self-seeker of that notorious kind that achieves worldly
success without much thought for others.  Now that he was gone, mother
declared he was a hero, father denounced him privately as ignoble,--and
their daughter divined secretly that he was a jackal.

His record, however, has nothing to do with this story, and is mentioned
only because his departure affected the members of his family.
Mother wept and pasted the obituary notices from the Norfolk papers in a
book; father soothed her with 'earth to earth, my dear, you know,' and
Joan remarked beneath her breath 'he belongs there, he never really left
it.'  And felt an entirely new sensation.

For death puzzled her.  She realised it as a fact in her own life--she,
too, would come to an end, stop, go out.  Yet that life could come to an
end astonished her; she simply didn't believe it.  In her own queer way
she looked into the odd occurrence.  The corn-chandler's death had raised
a dust; but it was an unjustifiable disappearance somehow; once the dust
settled she would surely see how and why it was unjustifiable.  He would
still be on the earth.  But the dust did not settle, the chandler did not
come back.  He was beneath the earth.  The feeling of insecurity remained
in her.  Earth, evidently, was not her element.

She envisaged then suddenly a delightful thing, and possibly being a mere
child still, in spite of her years, she actually believed it.  It was
wondrous enough anyhow to be worth believing.  For it occurred to her that
the body of earth went back merely to its own, earth to earth, sweetly,
naturally, while Something that had used that bit of earth, borrowing it,
was set free.  It--that marvellous Something--likewise returned to its own
element--air.  'The airy part--that's me--flies off, if it's there at
all.'  Only grandfather had made the mistake of identifying himself with
his borrowed earth, so he was finished and done with.  Mother had the same
downward tendency.  If she wasn't careful, she would be finished and done
with too.  It was a matter of choice.  But how could they?  How could any
one?  She and her father 'knew different'--it was mother's phrase--and
identified themselves with the airy part that was the reality.

She looked the thing in the face as well as she could, trying to hold it
steady for a photograph.  Death, to her mind, seemed to photograph the
life it put an end to.  The long series of acts and movements ceased.
There came an abrupt full stop.  Like a photograph this was somewhere,
somehow, false.  Wings folded for the last time; air failed for ever;
there was a sudden drop to earth.  Her grandfather, whom death had
photographed, had gone, yet surely only gone--elsewhere; his record in the
world of men and women was his attitude in the photograph; he was posing
elsewhere now, but even he had not really stopped.  Her little Song of
Being did not mention anything of the sort.  'Flow, fly--stop!  Wherever I
am--I drop!' was merely wrong.  A living thing could never end.  It could
neither drop nor stop.  Some one had made a big mistake about death.
She felt insecure.

And then she saw the matter differently, as though her mind made a sudden
swerving turn into bright sunlight.  And the sense of insecurity began to
pass.  This act of death revealed another meaning, connecting her with a
vaster centre somehow, joining her up with a main central power.
Death was returning to the main.  She recovered the immense sense of unity
she had momentarily lost.  It made her realise that this tremendous
centre, this main, was elsewhere than on the earth.  Her conception of
this unity deepened.  To join the majority was more than a neat phrase.
The photograph analogy came back of its own accord.  Life here on the
earth was indeed but a photograph, taken almost instantaneously though it
seemed quite long, of a--moment's pose.  The shutter snapped, the sitter
flashed elsewhere, flashed away to resume big interrupted activities,
behind space, behind time, where no hurry was--into a universal, mothering
state she felt as air.  Man's life was a suburb of this state, a furnished
house in that suburb, a Maida Vale tenancy, as it were; but there was this
vast metropolis of air, the main, the centre, where the 'majority' lived,
and whither all lines of flight converged.  A thought of Everlasting Wings
came to her with amazing comfort.  And she realised that the insecurity
she felt belonged to the suburb earth, rather than to herself.
Others looked upon it as the one secure and solid permanency; for air was
unsafe but earth did not change; air meant giddiness, absence of support,
bewilderment, and terror of being lost, while earth stood for the reverse
of all these dangers--permanent security.  Her mother, for instance,
simply dared not leave it for an instant.  Whereas, it came to Joan
suddenly now, that it was earth that crumbled, melted, got easily broken
and dispersed, while air, though it moved, could never be destroyed.
'You can photograph earth,' she said, 'but no one has ever photographed
the air.'

'A person just goes out--like that?' she asked her father, snapping her
fingers.  'How can it be, exactly?  Time ends for him: is that it?'
Her face was distressed and puckered.  She had no language to express the
ugly thing that blocked her running, flowing mind.  'Once you're in among
minutes, hours, years,' she went on, 'how can you ever get out of them?
_They_ don't stop.'

It seemed to her, apparently, that once a living thing exists it should
not cease to exist unless Time, which bore it, ceased as well.  And then
another notion flashed upon her.

'Or perhaps they're just a trick,' she exclaimed, referring to days and
minutes, 'and you've been alive somewhere else all the time too--and when
you die you go back to _that_!'

Her father glanced up from the ordnance map he was studying and smiled
with a sort of bewildered happy amusement on his face.  Mother, however,
turned with an uncomfortable sigh.  'That reminds me,' she stated
inconsequently, 'I must go and sit in the Park.'  She turned as a cow that
prefers the rain upon its tail instead of in its eyes.  'I'll take a taxi,
dear,' she added from the door.  'Do,' said her husband, suppressing with
difficulty an intense desire to laugh out loud.  'Ask the porter in the
hall.  Or shall I call one for you?'  'The porter'll do,' she said.
'I'll go and get ready.'  He said good-bye kindly, and she went.

'Time doesn't stop, of course,' he went on to Joan.  '_You_ don't stop
either, I suppose, if the whole truth were known.'  He eyed her
quizzically, for he delighted in her wild, nonsensical questioning.
Behind it he divined that she knew something he didn't know, but only
guessed.  Or perhaps he had known it in his youth and since forgotten it.
He remembered the ecstasy which had produced her.

'But why do we know a _bit_ of the truth and not the whole?  It's all one
piece.  It must be, father.  What hides the rest, then?'

But he ignored the new questions.  'At death,' he said, 'you just go into
another category perhaps.  I suspect that's it.  You continue, sure
enough, but in another direction, as it were.'

Joan brushed the map aside and lit with a hop upon the table as though she
fluttered down from above his head.  Her hands rested on his shoulders,
and her eyes stared hard into his own.  They were very bright and
twinkling.  'That's just throwing words at me,' she told him earnestly.
'That catty-thing, as you call it, isn't in _our_ language and you know
it.  You nipped it out of a book.'  She shook her finger at him solemnly.
'What _I_ mean is'--thrusting her keen face with its London pallor and
shining eyes closer to him--'how in the world can any one get out of Time,
once they're in it?'  She drew back as though to focus him better and
command a true reply.  'Tell me that, please, father, will you?'

'That's a question, isn't it?' he said laughingly, yet not really trying
to evade her.  He wanted to hear her own answer, her own explanation.
He knew quite well--had not the Primer on Expression said so?--that the
things they discussed in this way lay just beyond known words.  Only by
apparent nonsense-talk could they be brought within sight at all.

'It's a thing we ought to know,' Joan went on gravely.  'I do know it
somewhere--only I haven't found it out quite.'  Then, with another flash
of her blue eyes, she stated: 'If a person goes from here--from now, I
mean--they must go _to_ somewhere else.  I suppose they go back to the
bigger thing.  They go all over the place at once, perhaps.'  And again
she drew back a moment, staring at him as if judging height and distance
before taking a breathless swoop down into a lower branch.

'Something like that, I imagine,' her father began.  'Time, you see, is
only a point, a single point--the present.  And if----'

But Joan was already following her own wild swoop, and hardly listening.

'_That_ I can understand,' she said rapidly.  'You escape at death from a
point where you've been stuck--like in a photograph.  You go all over
then.'  Her mind tried to say a hundred things.  'I understand.
That's easy.  I'm an all-over person myself; I do several things at once--
like a flock of birds or a great high wind.  And when I do things like
that they're always right, but if I wait and think about one of them, they
go wrong and I'm in an awful muddle----'

'Your intuition being stronger than your reason,' he put in with a gasp.

She did not notice the interruption; she had reached her tree; she saw a
thousand things below her simultaneously, grouped, as it were, into one.

'But what I don't see plainly,' she returned to her original puzzle,
'is how a person--by dying--can get out of all this.'  She flung her arms
out wide to include the room.  'Out of all this air and stuff.'

'Space?'

'Yes, Space!'  She darted upon the word with a twitter of satisfaction.
'I feel much more free among yards and miles, up and down, across and
round and through--than I do just in minutes and days and years.
Oh, I've got it,' she cried so suddenly that it startled him; 'Space is
several things, and Time is only one.  Space has _throughth_--you go
through it in several directions at once.  Time hasn't!'

He caught his breath and stared obliquely at her, for the fact was she was
taking these ideas out of his own head.  He had found them in his Primers,
of course; now, she was taking them from his mind, sharing his knowledge
by some strange, instinctive method of her own.  In some such way,
perhaps, birds shared and communicated ideas with one another.  He felt
dizzy; there was confusion in him as though he flew at fifty miles an hour
through the air and was without support, seeing many things at once below.
One of those moments was near when he stood upon his head.  He was up a
tree with the girl; he felt the wind; he, too, saw a thousand things
at-once; he swayed.

'Space,' he mentioned, as soon as he had recovered breath, and drawing
upon his inexhaustible reserve of Primers, 'has three dimensions, height,
breadth, and length.  But Time has only one--length.  In Time you go
forwards only, never back, or to the left or right.  Time is a line.
Don't pinch--it hurts!' he cried, for in her excitement she leaned forward
and seized his coat-sleeve, taking up the flesh.  'So, possibly, at
death,' he continued as soon as she released him, 'a person----'

'Goes off sideways,' she laughed, clapping her hands; 'disappears off
sideways----'

'In a new direction,' he suggested.  'That's what I said long ago--another
category, where a body isn't necessary.'

'It's not a full stop, anyhow,' she cried; 'it's a flight.'

'Provided you've been already moving,' he said; 'some people don't move.
They haven't started.  And for them, I suppose, it's a biggish change--
difficult, uncomfortable, painful too, possibly,' he added reflectively.

'They start for the first time--at death.'  She ran to the window, but the
same second was back again beside him.

'They get off the ground--off the map altogether.  But they go into the
air.  They get alive,' and she picked the ordnance maps from the floor
where her impetuous movements had tossed them.  'Death is just a change of
direction then, really; that's all.'  And the door slammed after her
flying figure, though it seemed to her father that she might equally have
gone by the window or the chimney, so swift and sudden was her way of
vanishing.  'Bless me, Joan, how you do fly about, to be sure!' he heard
his wife complaining in the passage.  'You bang about like a squirrel in a
cage.  Whatever will the neighbours say?'

She had taken all this time to clothe herself suitably for the Park.
Mr. Wimble saw her to the lift.

'That's it,' he reflected a moment, before returning to search the map for
a suitable country place to settle down in; 'that's it exactly.
Mother says "Who was she?" and "What'll people say?"  Joan says "Where,
why, who am I?"  Mother is past and Joan is future.  That's it exactly.
And I--well, what do I say?'  He rose and looked at himself in the mirror
with the artistic frame his wife had 'selected' at Liberty's Bazaar.

'I just say "I am,"' he concluded. 'So I'm present.  That's it exactly.'
He chuckled inwardly.  'Past, present, future, that's what we are!
Yet somehow Joan's all three at once, a sort of universal point of view.
Ah!'  He paused.  'Ah! she's not future.  She's _now_!'  He caught dimly
at the idea she tried to convey.  To think of many subjects simultaneously
was to escape time, avoiding sequence of events and minutes,
obliterating--or, rather, seeing through--perspective which pretends that
a tree ten yards away is nearer to one than the forest just beyond it.
The centre, for her, was everywhere.  To see things lengthwise only, in
time or space, was a slow addition sum achieved laboriously by the mind,
whereas, subconsciously, the bird's-eye view (as with the prodigy)
perceived everything at once, making separate addition, or two and two
make four, absurd.  He was aware of a power in her, an attitude, a point
of view, higher than this precious intellect which knows things lengthwise
only, concentrating upon separate points, one at a time, consecutively.
Joan knew everything at once.  Her conception of perceiving things was
all-embracing--as air.  She flew; wherever she was, she went.  'Throughth'
was the word she coined to express it.

He felt very happy, there was a peculiar sense of joy and lightness in
him, and yet he sighed.  It was his mind that sighed.  He was completely
muddled.  Yet another part of him, something he shared rather, was bright
and clear and lucid.  And, putting on his hat, he went after his wife and
sat with her in the Park for half an hour, feeling the need of a little
wholesome earth to counteract the dose of air Joan had administered to
him.

They watched the people pass, the distinguished people as his wife called
them, but actually the people who were dressed in the fashion merely,
ordinary as sheep, shocked by the slightest evidence of originality,--
un-distinguished in their very essence.  Mr. Wimble knew this, but Mrs.
Wimble remained uninformed.  The review of rich, commonplace types passed
to and fro before their penny chairs, while they eyed them, Mrs. Wimble
thinking, 'This is the great London world, the people whose names and
dresses the newspapers refer to in Society columns.  Oh dear!'  Park Lane
was the background; none of them dined till half-past eight; they kept
numerous servants and were carelessly immoral, carelessly in debt,
intimate with 'foreign diplomats,' reserved and unemotional--the aileet,
as Mrs. Wimble called them.  But, according to Mr. Wimble, they were
animals, a herd of animals.  They couldn't escape from the line of Time.
They knew 'through' in Space, but not in Time.  The bird-thing was not in
them.

'Joan's coming on a bit,' ventured the father presently, trying to keep
himself down upon the earth.

'If you call it coming on,' replied his wife, with a touch of acid
superiority she caught momentarily from her overdressed surroundings.
'It's a pity, it seems to me.  She's not English, Joan isn't, whatever
else she is.'

'Oh, come now,' said Mr. Wimble cautiously, adding, a moment afterwards,
'perhaps.'

'It'll be the ruin of her, if we don't stop it in time,' came presently in
what he recognised as her 'Park' voice.  'She don't get it from _me_,
Joe.'  Her words became inaudible a moment as she turned her head to
follow a vision she imagined was at least a duchess, though her husband
could have told her it had emerged, like themselves, from a suburban flat.
'I sometimes think the girl's got a soupsong of the East in her,'
continued Mrs. Wimble, glancing with what she meant to be an aristocratic
hint of wickedness and suspicion at her untidy husband.

'She may have,' he replied innocently, 'for all I know.  Something very
old and very new.  It's not silly now, but it might become silly.
She's too careless somehow for this world--and too wise at the same time.
I can't make it out quite.'  He looked up at the trees as the wind passed
rustling among the dull green leaves.  How blue the sky was!  How sweet
and fresh the taste of the air!  There was room up there to move in.
He saw a swallow wheeling.  And the old yearning burned in him.
He thought of the phrase 'bird-happy'--happy as a singing-bird.

'It's a pity she's so peculiar.  She'll make a mess of her life unless
you're careful, dear.'  Mrs. Wimble said it out of a full heart really,
but she used the careless accent her surroundings prompted.  She said it
with an air.  And, to her keen annoyance, the County Council man came up
just then and asked for tickets, Mr. Wimble producing two plebeian coppers
out of a dirty leather purse to settle the account.  The pennies spoilt
her dream.  Money--but a lot of money--was what counted in life.

'Tom's doing exceptionally, I'm glad to say,' she resumed, by way of
relieving an emotion that exasperated her.  'He'll make money.  He'll be
somebody--some day.'

'Tom's a good boy.  He's safe and normal,' agreed her husband.

When the taxi had rushed them back to Maida Vale, and Mrs. Wimble had
gone up in the lift, Mr. Wimble decided that he would like to go for a
little walk before coming in.  It was towards sunset as he ambled off.
Joan, from the roof, watching the birds as they dashed racing through the
air at play, caught sight of him below and waved her hand.  But he did not
see her; he did not look up; his eyes were on the ground.  Yet he had a
springy walk as if he might rise any moment.  Joan watched him for some
time, signalling as it were, making a series of slight movements and
gestures that seemed a method of communication almost.  Had he glanced up
and seen her he must have noticed and understood what she was trying to
say, as a bird on the lawn would understand what its companion, perched in
the cedars overhead, was saying, distance no bar at all.



CHAPTER VII


And then, suddenly, he did look up.  Feeling his attention drawn,
he turned and raised his eyes to her.  The rays of the setting sun fell on
her dress of white and yellow.  She looked like a bird showing its
under-plumage.  He waved his hand in return, instinctively making gestures
similar to her own, and as he did so, a Flock of Ideas flew down upon him
like a shower of leaves--nothing very distinct and sharp, but just loose,
flying ideas that were in-the-air-to-day.

They seemed to result from the signalling; they interpreted something he
could not frame in words.  They fluttered about his mind, trying to get in
and lodge.  It was wireless communication--the kind used by animals, fish,
moths, insects, above all, birds.  He remembered the female Emperor-moth
that, hidden in a closed box during the short breeding season, summoned
the males across twenty miles of country until her antennae were cut off,
when no male came near her.  He felt as if Joan transmitted ideas to him,
shaking them through the air from invisible antennae.  He received the
currents, but could not properly de-code them.  He waved back to her
again, then was lost to view round the corner.

'It's a queer thing,' ran through his mind, as though catching the drift
of something she had flashed towards him, 'but Joan's got something no one
else has got--yet.  It's coming into the world.  Telepathy and wireless
are signs, only she's got it naturally, she's born with it.  She's in
touch with everything and everybody everywhere, as though Time and Space
don't trick her as they trick the rest.  It's life, but a new kind of
life.  It's air life.  That's what she means by saying she's an
all-at-once and an all-over person.  I understand it, but I haven't got it
myself--and, as if to prove it, he ran into another pedestrian who cursed
him, and, before he could recover himself, collided the next minute with a
lamp-post.

The current that had been pouring through him was interrupted; it switched
elsewhere.

'When more of us get like that,' it went on brokenly, 'when the whole
world feels it'--he snatched at an immense and brilliant certainty that
was gone before he could switch it completely into his mind--'it will be
brotherhood!  The world will _feel_ together,--one!  It's beginning
already.  Only people can't quite manage it yet.'

And the strange lost mood of his youth poured through him, the point of
view that made everybody seem one to him, when air and birds offered the
dream of some inexpressible ideal. . . .  He lost himself among the
buttercup fields of spring . . . wandered through Algerian gardens where
the missel-thrush sang in the moonlight and the radiant air was perfumed
with a thousand scents . . . then pulled himself up just in time to avoid
collision with a policeman who came heavily along the solid earth against
him.

'Look where you're a-going,' growled the policeman.

'Go where you're looking,' he answered silently in his mind.  'That's the
important thing--to look and to go!'

He steadied himself then.  His mind scurried through the Primers, but
found nothing that helped him much.  Joan had asked him about Time and
Space, and he had replied almost as though she had put the words into him
first.  Never before had he actually thought in such a way.  Time and
Space, as a Primer reminded him, were merely 'Modes under which physical
phenomena are presented to our consciousness, under which our senses act
and by which our thoughts are limited.'  Both were illusory, figments of
our finite minds; both could be subdivided or extended infinitely; both,
therefore, were unrealities.  They were false, as a picture is false that
makes a pebble in the foreground as large as a cathedral in the background
in order to convey so-called perspective.

And Joan, somehow or other, was aware of this, for she saw things
all-at-once and all-over.  He thought of her word 'throughth'; it wasn't
bad.  For she applied it to time as well as space.  Time was more than a
line to her, it had several directions, like space.  He smiled and felt
light and airy.  Joan knew a landscape all at once, as though she had
another sense almost.  Every man believes he sees a landscape all at once,
but in reality each spot is past by the time he sees it; it happened
several seconds ago; he sees it as it was when the light left it to travel
to his eye.  Each spot has its separate _now_; there is no absolute Now.
He had been wrong to tell her there was only the present; he saw it; she
had flashed this into him somehow.  To think the future is not there until
it is reached was as false as to think his flat was not there until he
stepped into it.  He laughed happily, aware of a strange, light-hearted
carelessness known in childhood first, then known again when he fell in
love and so shared everything in the world.  An immensely exalted point of
view seemed almost within his reach from which he could know, see and _be_
everything at once.  Joan would know and understand what it meant; yet he
had created Joan . . . and had forgotten . . .  He thought of light.

By overtaking the rays of light thrown off from the battle of Waterloo he
could see it happening _now_; if he moved forward at the same pace as the
rays he could see Waterloo stationary; if he moved faster he could see the
battle going backwards, of course.  But Waterloo remained always--there.
Time and space were mere tricks.  The unit of perception decided the
childish dream of measurement.  'Ha, ha!' he chuckled.  'Real perception
is for the inner self, then, omnipresent, omniscient--at-once and
all-over.'  To realise 'I am' was to identify oneself with all, and
everywhere.  'Wherever I am, I--_go_!'

'That's it,' he concluded abruptly, dropping upon a bench in a little Park
he had reached, 'Joan doesn't think or reason.  She just knows.  She's an
all-over and all-at-once person!'  And he put the Primers, with their
neat, clever explanations, out of his head forthwith.

'Cleverness,' he reflected, leaning back in the soft smothering dusk,
'is the hall-mark of To-day.  It is worthless.  It is the devil.
It separates, shuts off, confines and crystallises what should flow and
fly.  Birds ain't clever.  They just know.  There's no cleverness in that
Southern Tour, there's knowledge--all shared together.'  The Primer
writers, men who had made their names, were clever merely.
By concentrating on a single thing they could describe it, but they didn't
know it, because the whole was out of sight.  They explained the bit of
truth.  Joan, ignorant of the photographic details they described and
explained, yet knew the whole--somehow.  But how?  Wherever she was, she
went!

He drew a long breath as if he had flown ten miles.

'She's something new perhaps,' he felt run through him, 'something new and
brilliant flashing down into the old, tired world.'  He lit his pipe with
difficulty in the wind, fascinated by the marvel of the little flaming
match.  'She's off the earth--a new type of consciousness altogether--sees
old things in another way--from above and all at once.  She's got the bird
in her--'Half-angel and half-bird,' he remembered with a sigh.  Only that
morning an essay on Rhythm in his newspaper, _The Times_, had mentioned:
'Angels have been called the Birds of God, and an angel, as we imagine
him, is a being that can do all good things as easily as a bird flies.
When we represent him with bodily wings we are thinking of the wings of
his spirit, and of a soaring power of action and thought for which we have
no analogy in this world except in the physical beauty of flight.'
'By Jove!' he cried aloud.

A flock of sparrows, startled by a cat, rose like a fountain of grey
feathers past him, whirring through the air.  There were fifty of them,
but they moved like one.

'Got a whole flock in her!' he added.

He watched the fluttering mass of busy wings as they shot into a leafy
plane tree overhead and vanished.  A touch of awe stole over him.
'There's a whole flight of birds in her.  She's a lot, yet one,' he went
on under his breath, thinking that the fifty sparrows went out of sight
like one person who turns a corner and is gone.  How did they manage it?
By what magical sympathy, as though one single consciousness actuated them
all, did they swerve instantly together?

There was something uncanny about it.  He felt a little creepy even. . . .
The shadows were stealing over the deserted Park.  A low wind shivered
through the iron fence.  A vast nameless power came close. . . .  He got
up slowly, heavily, and went out into the crowded street, glad a moment to
feel himself surrounded by men and women, all following routine, thick,
solid, reasoning folk, unable to fly.  A swallow, flashing like visible
wind across the paling sky of pink and gold, went past him.  He looked up.
He sighed.  He wondered.  Something marvellously sweet and lofty stirred
in him.  With intense yearning he thought of his little, strange, birdy
daughter, Joan, again.  His absorbing love for her spread softly to
include the world.  'If she should teach them . . .!' came the bewildering
idea, as though the swallow dropped it into him.  'Drag them out of their
holes, show them air and wings, make them bird-happy . . . teach them
that!'

A tremendous freedom, lofty and careless, beckoned to him,--release,
escape at full speed into the infinite air; all cages opened, all bars
destroyed, doors wide and ceilings gone; that was what he felt.

But lack of words blocked the completion of the wild, big thought in him,
for he had never felt quite like this since early youth, and had no means
of describing the swift yet deep emotion that was in him.  He could not
express it--unless he sang.  And he was afraid to sing.  The County
Council would misinterpret Joy.  There was an attendant in the Park, a
policeman in the road; he would be locked up merely.



CHAPTER VIII


He plunged into the stream of pedestrians and it struck him how thickly,
heavily clothed they were; the street resembled a sluggish river of dark
liquid; he struggled through it, immersed to his shoulders.

And the flock of curious, elusive thoughts, half-formed, fluttered above
his mind just near enough to drop their shadows before they scattered and
passed on.  Much as a kitten pounces on the shadow of shifting foliage on
a lawn his brain pursued and pounced upon them, bringing up the best words
available, yet that did not suit because the necessary words do not exist.
It was only the shadow of the ideas he captured.

'A new language is wanted,' he decided, 'a flying language, with a rapid
air vocabulary, condensed, intense.  Everything else is speeding up
nowadays, but language lags behind.  It's old-fashioned, slow.
All these ideas I've got, for instance, ought to go into a word or two by
rights.  Joan put 'em into me just now from the roof by a couple of
gestures--enough to fill a dozen Primers with words.  Ah, that's it!
What comes to me in a single thought--and in a second--takes thousands of
words to get itself told in language.  Words are too detailed and clever:
they miss the whole.  Aha!  There's a new language floating into the world
from the air--a new way, a bird-way, of communicating.  We shall share as
the birds do.  We shall all understand each other by gesture--thought--
feeling!  Instant understanding means a new sympathy; that, again, means a
divine carelessness, based on a common trust and faith.'  And the
immensely lofty point of view--as from a dizzy height in space--once more
floated past him.

He steadied himself by pausing to look in at the shop windows.  On a
chemist's shelves he saw various things to stimulate, coax and feed people
into keener life.  The Invisible Sticking Plaster was there, too, to patch
them up.  Next door was a book-shop, where he remained glued to the window
like a fly to treacle-paper.  'Success and how to attain It,' he read,
'in twelve lessons, one shilling'; 'Train your Will and earn more Money,
fourpence halfpenny'; 'The Mysteries of Life, Here and Hereafter, all
explained, sixpence net.'  And second-hand copies of various books, marked
'All in this row tuppence only,' including several of the
'What's-in-the-Air-To-day' Primers.

Beyond was a window full of clothing, woollen garments guaranteed not to
shrink; electric or magnetic belts, to store energy, 'special line--a
bargain,' and various goods for keeping warmth in various parts of the
body.  All these shops, he reflected, sold things intended to increase or
preserve life, artificial things, cheaply made, and sold to the public as
dearly as possible, things intended to increase life and prevent its
going.  In other shops he saw mechanical means for stimulating,
intensifying, driving life along.  Life had come to this: All these
artificial tricks were necessary to keep it going.  Food, knowledge,
clothes, speed that a bird possessed naturally in abundance.  A robin's
temperature in the snow was 110 degrees.  Yet human beings required
thousands of shops that sold the conditions for keeping alive,--at a
profit.  He passed an undertaker's shop--to die was a costly artificial
business too. There was too much earth in the whole affair.  He remembered
that no one ever saw a bird dead, when its death was a natural death.
It slipped away and hid itself--ashamed of being caught dead!

A crowd collected round him, thinking he had discovered something
exciting, and it jostled him until he elbowed his way out.  He swerved
dizzily amid the booming, thundering traffic, as he crossed the road and
brought up against a toy-shop, where the sight of balls and butterfly
nets, ships and trains and coloured masks restored his equilibrium.
'Real things are still to be had,' the fluttering shadows danced across
his mind, 'And there are folk who like them!' he added in his own words,
as two tousled-headed children came up and stood beside him, staring
hungrily.  He gave sixpence to each, told them to go in and buy something,
and then continued his evening walk along the crowded pavement.
'Life is a great grand thing,' he realised, 'if we could all get together
somehow.  It's coming, I think.  A change is coming, something light and
airy penetrating all this--this sluggish mass----' he broke off, again
unable to express the idea that fluttered round him--' ah! it's good to be
alive!' he went on, 'but to know it is better still.  But you have no
right to live unless you can be grateful to life, and create your own
reason for existing.  It means dancing, singing, flying!'  He felt new
life everywhere near him; a new supply of a lighter, more vivid kind was
descending from the air.  'It's a new thing coming down into the world;
it's beginning to burst through everywhere:  a change, a change of
direction----'

He repeated this to himself as he moved slowly through the surging crowd.
Joan, he remembered, had called death a change of direction only.  But as
he reached the word 'change,' it seemed to jump up at him and hang blazing
with fire before his eyes.  He had caught it flying; he held it fast and
looked at it.  The other shadows careered away, but this one stayed.
He had caught the thing that cast it.  The flock of shadows, he realised,
were not cast by actual thoughts; they were the faint passage through his
mind of mysterious premonitions that Joan's gestures had tossed carelessly
towards him through the air.  Coming ideas cast their shadow before.
This one, at least, he had captured in a word, a figure of speech.  He had
pounced and caught it by the tail.  It fluttered, but could not wholly get
away.

Change was the keyword.  A gigantic change was coming, but coming gently,
stealing along almost like a thief in the night, emerging into view
wherever a channel offered itself.  Life was being geared up everywhere.
Human activities, physical, mental, spiritual, too, were increasing speed.
Humanity was being quickened.  They were passing from earth to air.

Signs were plentiful, though mysterious.  His mind roamed through the
Epitomes of his Primers, skimming off the cream.  Thinkers, artists,
preachers, although they hardly realised it, were beginning to look up
instead of down; from pulpit, press, and platform the little signs peeped
out and flashed about the mass of expectant men and women.  The entire
world seemed standing on tip-toe, ready for a tentative flight at last.
There was a universal expectation abroad that was almost anticipation.

But change involved dislocation here and there, and this dislocation was
apparent in the general confusion that reigned in the affairs of the
world.  Stupendous hope was felt, though not yet realised and fulfilled.
No one as yet could justify it.  Pessimism and confidence, both strangely
fundamental, were violently active.  So long accustomed to terra firma,
the world asked questions of its little coming wings, and the new element
of air frightened even while it attracted--nervous, timid, wild, uneasy
questions were asked on every side.  Deprived of the old, comfortable
ideas of Heaven and Hell, and suspicious of the newly hinted promise of
survival, hearts trembled while they listened to so sweet whispers of
escape into the air.  The old shibboleths, distrusted, were slinking one
by one into their holes.  Science could, perhaps, go usefully no further;
Reason, still proud upon her pinnacle, yet hesitated, unable to advance;
Theology looked round her with dim, tired eyes.  The whole starving earth
paused upon a mighty change that should usher in a new and single thing--a
new direction.  Alone the few who knew, felt glad and confident--joy.
But they _felt_ it only, for as yet they could not tell it in language
usefully.

They might live it, though!

'Live it--ah!' he exclaimed, and his thoughts came back again to his
queer, birdy daughter.  For Joan, he told himself, brimmed over with it.
She had in her the lightness, speed, and shining of the new element; she
was glad and confident, full of joy, bird-happy, aware of principles
rather than of details.  She sang.  Of all creatures this spontaneous
expression of joy in life was known to birds alone.  No other creatures
sang.  The essential ecstasy that dwells in air, making its inhabitants
soar, fly, sing, was liberated in her human heart.

True. . . .  The weary world stood everywhere on tiptoe, craning its neck
into the air for some new expected prophet who should take it by the--
wing.

It was a marvellous, delightful thought, and it sent his imagination
whirring into space.  The wings of his mind went shivering.  He gave
expression to it by a sudden gesture of his arms and head, making, it
seemed, a spontaneous effort to rise and fly--and, luckily, no one
observed him making it.  It was similar, however, to the movement Joan had
made upon the roof as she stood outlined against the red and yellow sky;
similar, also, to the flashing curve the swallow had shown him not long
afterwards.  It conveyed a thousand laborious sentences in a small
spontaneous gesture that was rhythmical.  Ah! there was a change of rhythm
coming!  And in rhythm lay a new means of instantaneous communication.
Two persons in the same rhythm knew and understood each other completely--
felt together.  Then why not all?

The flock of shifting shadows fell more thickly down upon the floor of his
receptive mind.  He pounced upon them eagerly.

'Yes, it's an air-thing somehow,' he felt, watching the amazing pattern,
'a bird-thing coming.  And she knows it.  She's born with it.'  He again
remembered the buttercup meadows of Cambridge and the singing gardens of
Algeria, the ecstasy, the light and heat of that exalted passion.
'Her mother had the germ of it, but in Joan it's blossomed out.
People would call her primitive, backward, even a little crazy,
'hysterical' is the word they'd use to-day, I suppose--but in reality
she's--er--awfully advanced.  To be behind the race is the same as to be
ahead of it, for life is circular and to run fast ahead is to overtake
your tail.  Signs of going back are equally signs of going forward.
The same place is passed again and again until all it can teach has been
caught from it; so the brain may be justifying scientifically To-day what
was known instinctively to ancient times.  The subconscious becomes the
conscious.'

'No, no,' the shadows painted somewhere behind his thought, 'it's not
circular, it's spiral.  We come round to the same place again, only higher
up, above--in the air.  And with the bird's-eye view from above comes
understanding.'

Joan, he remembered, had said a few days before, speaking of his
button-hole: 'A flower is a stone put up several octaves.'  That was
flight in itself--all she said had flight in it.  Her statement was true,
literally, scientifically, spiritually, yet evolution was a word certainly
unknown to her, and the spiral movement equally beyond her mental
vocabulary.

The shadows danced and grouped themselves anew.

He reviewed strange signs that were-in-the-air-to-day, seeing them all as
aspects of one single thing.  They were not really disconnected; their
apparent separation was caused by the various angles of survey, just as a
floor seen from below became a ceiling.  All that he was thinking now was,
similarly, one big thing caught from various points of view.  Some power
swifter, surer than thought in him surveyed it all at once; the tiresome
descriptions his mind laboured over took in the details separately--the
shifting shadows; yet the pattern as a whole was in him, captured by some
kind of instantaneous knowledge such as birds possess.  Like Joan, he
caught the bird's-eye view, in principle.  Yet she refused to be blinded
and smothered by the details, whereas they certainly muddled _him_.
It was necessary to select the details one thought about evidently.
He tried to stand outside himself and see the single something that
included all the details, and in proportion as he did so he seemed to rise
into the air.

He reviewed these details flashily, and, so doing, got a glimpse, an
inkling, of the entirety whence they arose.  All seemed to him significant
evidence of one and the same vast thing; this new, queer, rushing supply
of air-life flowing through everything everywhere, forcing a swift and
rhythmical way in the most unlikely places, modifying human activities in
all directions unaccountably.  He saw a hundred of his Primer-Writers
sitting in a studious group about it, each describing certain specific
details, while the general outline of the whole escaped them individually.
Each called his scrap by different names, little aware that all sat
regarding the same one thing.  It came up bubbling, dancing, pouring forth
with rhythm, bringing lightness into solid details, unsettling the
old-fashioned, and carrying many off their feet into the air.  It was so
brimming that it overflowed; to resist it brought confusion, insecurity,
distress; to go with it was the only way to understand it--accepting the
huge new rhythm.  Yet it had so many guises, so many protean forms.
Proteus was, indeed, a deathless truth, things changing into one another
because they all are one.

He felt this new thing as synthesis, unity.  The signs he reviewed
combined in a single gesture that conveyed it.  Earth, with its reason,
logic, facts, could teach no more; Science was blocked from sheer
accumulation of undigested detail; the new knowledge was not there; a new
element was needed.  And it was coming:  Air.

Already there was a change even in sight itself, and artists saw things in
a new direction.  Mere foolishness to the majority, the cubists, futurists
and the like presented objects to others--others quite as intelligent as
the majority, quite as competent to judge--with an authentic fiat of truth
and beauty.  They conveyed an essentially new view of objects, warning the
man in the street that the objective world is illusory and that concepts
built upon the reports of the senses are radically deceptive.  A city seen
from an aeroplane resembled a cubist picture.  This new sight seemed a
bird's-eye view, again, though using--going back to--the primitive, naked,
savage sight, yet a stage above it, higher, a tumultuous rhythm in it.
The spiral again!

Side by side with it ran a strange new hearing too.  The musicians--he
recalled the names that showered through the Primer pages--called
attention to this new hearing-from-another-angle.  And, here again, it was
a going back apparently.  Debussy used the old, primitive tone scale,
while Strauss and Scriabin, to say nothing of a hundred lesser ears,
extended the rhythm of music to include the world of sounds as none have
dared before.  In literature, more swiftly assimilative and interpretative
of the airy inrush, the signs were thickly bewildering.  Only, for the
majority, Pan being still misunderstood, the God of Air came more slowly
to his own.  But the signs were everywhere, like birds and buttercups in
spring.  The bird's-eye view, flashing marvellously, imperishably lovely,
was on the way into the hearts of men, the fairy touch, the protean
aspect, the light, electric rhythm running from the air upon the creaking
ground, urging the mass upwards with singing, dancing, into a synthesis, a
unity like a flock of birds.

The nonsense of unintelligible words and decapitated sentences tried to
catch hold of what he felt, only failed to express it because it was too
big for used-up, pedestrian language.  He felt this coming change and
swept along with it.  He was aware of it all over.

It came, he realised, flushing the most sensitive, receptive channels
first--the artists chiefly--and the apparent ugliness here and there was
due to distortion and exaggeration, to that violence necessary to overcome
the inertia of habit in a narrow groove, the tyranny of Mode.
The accumulated momentum of habit flowing so long in one direction called
for a prodigious rhythm to stop it first, then turn it back--into the new
direction.  Mode was the devil--_der Geist der stets verneint_--forbidding
change, destroying innovators, worshipping that formal, dull routine which
is ever anti-spiritual because it photographs a moment and fixes it to
earth for always. . . .  It was, of course, attacked, as all new movements
are attacked, with contempt, with ridicule, with anger; but the attacks
were negligible, and could not stay its gathering flow.  The bright little
minds of the day charged against it, stuck their clever shafts, and
scuttled back again into the obscurity of their safe, accustomed groove.
Mistaking stagnation for balance, they clung to the solid earth of years
ago, but knew it not.

Of all this his mind did not frame, much less utter, a single word.
But the pattern of its coming fell glowingly across his feelings.
Life too long had been a single photograph; it seemed now a rushing
cinematograph, revolving, advancing, mounting spirally into the air.
He felt it thus.  Something new was pushing up the map from underneath to
meet the air; it was sprouting everywhere, going back to deep Pagan joy
and wonder, yet with Reason added to it.  Reason looked back breathless to
Instinct long despised and cried, 'Come!  Help me out!'  And into his
mind leaped the symbolic image of a Centaur combining both these
faculties.  He added wings to it.

'Reason--oh, of course!  Without reason who could know that at a certain
station there must be a change of carriage?'  The train and station once
there, that method of roving once accepted, Reason was as necessary as a
railway ticket.  Only--well, he thought of the great Southern Tour and the
perfect motion and perfect knowledge that led those tiny travellers to
their distant destination and brought them home again to the identical
hedge and bush and twig six months later.  There was another way of
communication.  Birds knew it.  The female Emperor-moth used it.
Our wireless poles and instruments followed laboriously to achieve it.
Yet the power itself lay in ourselves too, somewhere, waiting to be
recognised without costly mechanism.

Yes, there surely was another way of travelling, of motion, coming, a
bird-way, yet even swifter, surer still, because independent of the earthy
body.  The real, airy part of men and women were acquiring it already,
their real selves, thought and consciousness, learning the new mighty
rhythm by degrees.  The transference of thought and consciousness was
close upon them--from the air; wireless communication with all parts of
space; the mysterious, unconscious wisdom of the bird, organised and
directed consciously by men and women.

An immense thrill passed over him.  He began to sing softly to himself,
but so softly, luckily, that no one overheard him: 'Flow, fly, flow;
Wherever I am, I _go_!'  Joan knew it all unconsciously.  She just sang
it.

And bits of a bird-primer flew across his mind, casting the same delicate,
protean shadows against the wall where thought stopped helplessly.
The precocious intelligence of feathered life was still a mystery no
primer-writer could explain.  The curlew, he recalled, after wintering in
New Zealand, paused to mate and nest in the South of England on his way to
Northern Siberia, while awaiting the summons to complete its journey when
the ice is gone.  'It is a fact, proved and attested beyond dispute, that
the evening the curlew leaves the South of England is invariably the day
on which the ice breaks in the north, at least two thousand miles
distant.'  How does the curlew know it?

He thought of the plover with five drums in his ear, able to hear the
'slow, sinuous movement of the worm in the soil, eight inches below the
hard-crusted surface'; of the lapwing who imitates the sound of rain by
drumming with his feet to bring the worms up; of the cuckoo matching her
egg with those of the foster-mother selected for her baby--hundreds of
variations; of the swallow, mating like the nightingale for life, and of a
certain pair of swallows, in particular, who 'for fifteen consecutive
years returned to the same spot, after wintering in Cape Colony, to build
their nest, arriving invariably on the same day of the year--the 11th of
April'; of the nightingales who winter separately, but return faithfully
together to England in the spring, the female, perhaps, from India, the
male from Persia.

A hundred marvels of air-life came back to him; all 'instinct'--only
'mere instinct'!  Birds, birds, birds!  The wisdom of the birds!
Their communications, their flocking together, their swift rhythmical
movements, their singing language, their unity, their--brotherhood!

From the air the new thing was rushing down upon the world, yes.  Yet not
alone the sensitive artist-temperament perceived it; it came overflowing
into far less delicate channels as well, breaking up the old with
difficulty, but producing first a tumult of disturbance that would later
fall into harmonious rhythm too.  There were everywhere new men, new
women; behind the Woman Movement, for all its first excess, was a
colossal, necessary, inevitable thing.  Once rhythmical, the disorder and
extravagance would become order, balance.  The neuter woman was a passing
moment in it, not to endure.  The new woman was but another sign of the
airy invasion which the painters and musicians, the writers and the
preachers, felt.  And the air-man, with new nerves, new courage, new
outlook upon energy, even new bird-like face and strange lightning eyes,
was another obvious, physical, yet only half-physical, expression.
His audacious courage seemed somehow to focus the new consciousness
preparing.  The birds were coming everywhere.  A new element, a new
direction!

In advance of the invasion, making way for it, old solid obstacles were
everywhere breaking down.  He seemed to recognise a crumbling of
religions, of religious forms.  The rigid creeds and dogmas, made by man,
and imprisoning him so long, were turning fluid before the stress of the
new arrival, melting down like sand-castles when the tide comes in.
They must hurry to adapt themselves, or else cease to exist.
Formal, elaborate, dead-letter theology must go, to let in--Religion.
The churches seemed to have become unreal already, continuing,
parrot-like, to teach traditional doctrines the people have long ago
abandoned.  He heard another Primer whisper in his ear.  'Every one is
aware of the failure of the churches to touch modern life; to escape from
their grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations
of old-fashioned formulae, instead of finding vital, human, developing
expressions of the spiritual craving in man.  They do not teach _that the
Kingdom of Heaven is on earth_.  They have isolated religion from
practical life.  Religion must evolve with the evolution of human
culture'--or disappear.  Its teaching must take wings and rise to lead
into the air, or remain stagnant on the ground in ruins, stony,
motionless, dead, a photograph.

The 'wireless imagination' of the futurist was not so meaningless as it
sounded.  The exaggeration that preceded the new arrival would soon pass.
Only, the first flight took the breath away a little, as when a man, from
walking, breaks into a run to leap into an unknown element.  Through the
scientific world the quiver was running too.  What's coming next?  What in
the world is going to happen? seemed the universal cry.  The composite
face of the world already assumed the eager lineaments of the great
bird-visage.  The air was coming.

The rhythm of life was everywhere being accelerated, and side by side with
the mechanical expression in telephones and wireless communications, a
quickening transformation of human sensibility was taking place as well.
It was the running start for a leap into the air.  Facilities for
increasing the spontaneity of living existed at every street corner, but
it was air that first produced them.  Air made them possible.  There was
even approach towards the unification of the senses, one man hearing
through his teeth and skull, another seeing through his temples.
The localisation of sensibility was merging into a unified perception
whereby people would presently know all-over and at-once.  They would
realise the eternal principle and ignore the obscuring details.  Once they
all felt together as the bird did, brotherhood, which is sharing all in
natural sympathy, would be close. . . .

The shadow-patterns flashed and rustled on across his mind.  In a couple
of minutes all these wild ideas occurred to him.  They were
extraordinarily elusive, yet extraordinarily real.  In an interval as
brief as that between saying 'Quite well, thank you,' to some one who asks
'How are you?' this flock of suggestions swept over him and went their
way.  They never grew clear enough to be actual thoughts; they were just
passing hints of what was in-the-air-to-day.  All telescoped together in a
rapid rush, marked him, vanished, yet left behind them something that was
real.  They came through his skin, he fancied, rather than through his
brain.  They came all over.

The pedestrians, meanwhile, shuffled past him heavily; he made his way
with difficulty, the thick stream opening to let him through, then closing
in again behind him.  He felt closely in touch with them all, in more ways
than one; but the majority were still groping on the ground, hunting for
luxurious holes to shelter in.  Only a few were looking up.  He saw, here
and there, an eager face turned skywards, tipped with the beauty of a
flushing dawn.  These, perhaps, felt it coming.  But few as yet--one in a
million, say--would dare to fly.

He watched them as he passed along, feeling them gathering him in.
He saw the endless, seething crowd as a unit.  He felt their strength,
their beauty.  He was aware of democracy, virile, proud, inevitable.
He felt the hovering bird above it somewhere, immense, inspiring.
The advancing tide was rising, undermining caste and class distinctions
steadily, breaking down conventions, the feeblest sand-castles children
ever built.  He heard an awful thunder too.  It revealed a storming
majesty, shattering, cataclysmic, making most hearts afraid--the opening
and stirring of multitudinous huge wings.  Yet it was merely the new
element coming, the great invasion with its irresistible rhythm.
Democracy wore striped wings beneath its Sunday black, powerful,
magnificent eagle-wings.  Birds flying in their thousands, he recalled,
convey sublimity.  But yet he shuddered.  The rising of such tremendous
wings involved somewhere--blood.

He saw, with his bird's-eye view, the general levelling up, or levelling
down, in progress.  No big outstanding figure led the world to-day.
There were no giants anywhere.  Much of a muchness ruled in art and
business, as in statesmanship.  No towering figures showed the way into
the air.  On the other hand there was degeneracy that could not be denied.
He saw it, however, like the dirty flotsam seaweed pushed in front of a
great high-tide.  Degeneracy precedes new growth when that growth is of a
different kind.  Out of decaying wood springs a tree of fairer type, and
from the ashes of a burnt hemlock forest emerge maple, birch and oak,
while the flaming Fireweed lights the way with beauty.  When a Canadian
forest is destroyed by fire, the growth next spring is of a totally new
kind, and no one has yet told whence came the seed of this new, different
growth.  After a prairie fire, similarly, new flowers spring up that were
not there before.  The subsoil possibly has concealed them; they are
discovered by the fiery heat.  The decay of old, true grandeur he saw
everywhere, the democratic vulgarisation of beauty, the universal
levelling up and levelling down, but he saw these as evidence of that
crumbling of too in-bred forms which announced the new coming harvest from
the air.  It was but the decay of old foundations which have served their
time.

'We shall build lighter,' he half sang, half whispered to himself,
squeezing between a lamp-post and a workman who came rolling unsteadily
out of a tavern door; 'birds'-nests, up among the swinging trees!
We shall live more carelessly, and nearer to the stars!  No cellars any
more, no basements, but gardens on the roof!  Winds, colours, sunshine,
air!  Oh!----' as the man bumped into him and sent him off the pavement
with 'Beg parding, sir!'  'No, I beg yours,' he replied, and came down to
earth with a crash, remembering that supper was at seven-thirty and he
must be turning homewards.

So he turned and retraced his steps, feeling somehow that he had come down
from the mountain tops or from a skimming rush along high windy cliffs.
The net result of all these strange half-thoughts was fairly simple.
His imagination had been stirred by the sight of his daughter in the
sunset making those suggestive gestures against the coloured sky.
With her hands she had flung a shower of silver threads about him; along
these, somehow, her own queer ideas flashed into him.  A new point of
view, a new attitude to life, something with the light, swift rhythm of a
bird's flight was coming into the minds of men.  Most of those who felt it
were hardly conscious, perhaps, that they did so, because carried along
with it.  The old were frightened, change being difficult for them; but
the young, the more sensitive ones among them at any rate, stretched out
their arms and legs to meet the flowing, flying invasion.  'Flow, fly,
flow; wherever I am--I _go_,' was in the air to-day.  Joan knew.
New hope, new light, new language, all aspects of joy and confidence,
seemed dawning.  Air and birds were symbols of it.  It was rhythmical,
swift, spontaneous.  It sang.  It was bird-happy and bird-wise.  It was a
new kind of consciousness, yet more than a mere expansion of present
consciousness.  It was a new direction altogether, while its object,
purpose, aim was the oldest dream known to this old-tired world--
brotherhood and unity.  A bird brotherhood!  The wisdom of the Flock!

'I declare,' he murmured, laughing quietly to himself, 'if any one could
hear me--see inside my mind just now--they'd say I was----!'

And that reminded him of his wife.  He remembered that he was thinking of
moving into the country with his family before very long.  He came back to
a definite thought again.  He pondered facts and ways and means.  He was
very practical really at heart, no mere dreamer by any means.  He weighed
the difficulties.  Mother was one of them.  Sad, sad, the bird had left
her; she was a badger now.  He felt uneasy, troubled in his mind.  But he
smiled.  He was fond of her.

'How ever shall we manage?' he asked himself.  'There are so many
incongruous things to reconcile.  Gently, kindly, softly, airily is the
way.'

Then, suddenly, a bird-thought came to help him.  Ah, it was practically
useful, this inspiration from the air.  It was not merely nonsense, then!

'If I just hope and believe, and do my best, and don't think--too much--it
will all come right.  I must be spontaneous and instinctive, not
overweighted by worrying and detailed reason.  I must believe and trust.
That's the way to get what's called good judgment.  See it whole from the
air!'

For the details that perplexed him were, after all, merely different
aspects of one and the same thing--the several points of view of Mother,
Joan, Tom, himself.  Hold in the mind the details in solution, and the
problem must solve itself.  If he understood each one--_that_ was
necessary--while viewing the problem as a whole, the solution must come
spontaneously of itself.  The bird's-eye view would show the way, while he
remained nominally leader, like the bird that heads the triangular wedge
of wild geese across a hundred miles of sky.  This flashed upon him like a
song.

And as he realised this, his trouble vanished; joy took its place; with it
came a sense of confidence, power, even wisdom.  Though the matter was
trivial enough, it was the triumph of instinct: Reason laid out the
details, instinct pieced them together, then Intuition led.  It was seeing
all-over, knowing all-at-once.  Already he had begun to live like a bird,
and Joan, though he knew not how exactly, had taught him.

'Wherever I am, I go,' went darting through his head.  He smiled, felt
light and happy--and strangely wise.  Perhaps he could help.  Perhaps he
was going to be a teacher even.  A Teacher, he realised, must first of all
find out the point of view of the person to be taught, and then discover a
new point of view which will make the wrong or foolish attitude harmonise
with reality.  Everybody is right where he is, however wrong he may be.
Only he must not stay there.  The Teacher is a priest who supplies the new
point of view.  New teaching, however, was not necessary; the world was
choked to the brim with teaching already.  A new airy understanding of old
teaching was the thing. . . .

He was now close to the iron gates of Sun Court Mansions, where he lived.
In the diminutive, yet pretentious, plot of garden stood a tall, leafy
tree.  A gust of wind blew past him at that moment with a roaring sound
that was like laughter, and he saw the tree shake and tremble.
The countless branches tossed in a dozen directions, hopelessly in
disorder, each branch, each twig obeying its own particular little rhythm.
That they all belonged to a single, central object seemed incredible, so
brave the show they made of being independent and apart.

Then, as he stood and watched, seventy thousand leaves turned all one way,
showing their delicate under-skins.  The great tree suddenly blew open.
He saw the trunk to which leaves and branches all belonged.  And at the
wind's order the tree behaved as a single thing, even the most outlying
portions answering to the one harmonious rhythm.  At which moment, once
again, a flock of birds rose from somewhere near with an effortless rush
and swooped in among the leaves with one great gesture common to each one.
They settled with the utmost ease.  The myriad little busy details merged
in one; they disappeared.  But in settling thus, they made the solid green
seem light as air, shiny, almost fluid.

And Wimble, taking the odd hint, felt too that his own difficulties had
similarly turned fluid, melted, disappeared.  The details merged into a
whole; they were referred, at any rate, to some central authority that hid
deep within him.  A wind of inspiration, as it were, had blown him wide
open too.  Details that tossed in different directions, apparently hostile
to one another, betrayed their common trunk.  They showed their
under-sides.  He was aware of an essential unity to which all belonged.

Something in him shone.  He had taught himself, at any rate.  He went
upstairs, confident and light-hearted, breathless a little too, as though
he had enjoyed an exhilarating flight of leagues, instead of a two-mile
trudge along the solid, crowded pavements of Maida Vale.

And later, when he went to bed, he fell asleep upon a gorgeous, airy
conviction: 'The Golden Age lies in front of us, and not behind!'
It was a birdy thought.  He flew into dreamland with it in his wings.



CHAPTER IX


Mrs. Wimble felt the death in another manner.  It disconnected her from
life.  It cut her off from a network of safe, accustomed grooves.
Something solid she had clung to subsided under ground.  A final link with
childhood, youth, and beauty broke.  Death has a way of making survivors
older suddenly.  Mrs. Wimble now admitted age to herself; wore unsightly
and depressing black; felt sentimental about a big 'p' Past; and ruminated
uneasily about other worlds.  Black with her was an admission that an
after-life was at best an open question.  It was a lugubrious conventional
act symbolical of selfish grief, a denial of true religious teaching which
should have faith, and therefore joy, as its illuminating principle.
She did not understand the question.  She had no answer ready.  She said,
'What?'

She referred to the 'lost' at intervals.  It did not occur to her that
what is lost is open to recovery.  When she said 'lost' she really meant
annihilated.  For, though a Christian nominally, and a faithful
church-goer, when she had clothes she considered fit for the Deity to see
her in, her notions of a future state were mental conceptions merely that
contained no real belief.  She was not aware that she did not believe, but
this was, of course, the fact.  Her father, moreover, had long ago
destroyed the reality of the two after-death places generally accepted,
soon after he had taught her that they both existed.  Not wittingly for
his part, nor for her part, consciously.  But since 'heavenly' was a term
he used to describe large sales of corn, and 'Go to hell, you idiot' was a
phrase he applied frequently to underlings in yard and office, his
daughter had grown up with less respect for the actuality of these
localities than she might otherwise have had.

And with regard to her love for him--it was not love at all, but a selfish
dependence tempered with mild affection.  He was now gone; she missed him.
A prop had sunk, a tie with the distant nursery snapped, the sense of
continuity with the fragrance of early days, of toys, of romance and
Christmas presents was no longer there.  Instead of looking backwards--
still possible while a parent lives--she now looked forward into a
muddled, shadowy future that brought depression and low spirits.  It was a
subterranean look.  She went down under ground into her hole, yet
backwards, still peering with pathetic eagerness into the sunshine of life
that she must leave behind.

Therefore, for her father at any rate, she knew not love.  For the one
thing certain and positive about love is that those who feel it _know_,
and to mention loss in the sense of annihilation is but childish
ignorance.  There is physical disappearance, separation, going elsewhere,
but these are temporary, another direction, as Joan expressed it.
Love shouts the fact, contemptuous of exact photographic proof.
No mother worth her salt, at any rate, believes that death is final loss.
She has known union; and Love brings, above all, the absolute
consciousness of eternal union.  'Loss,' used of death, is a devil-word
where love is, and as ignorant as 'loss of appetite' when food has become
a portion of the eater.  One's self is not separable from its-self.
Love, having absorbed the essentials of what it loves, remains because it
_is_; for ever indivisible; there.  The beloved dead step nearer when
their bodies drop aside.  'The dead know where they are, and what they're
doing,' as Joan mentioned.  'It's not for us to worry--in that way.
And they're out of hours and minutes.  They probably have no time to come
back and tell us.'

To which Mother's whole attitude replied with an exasperated 'What?
I don't think you know what you mean, child.'

Joan answered in a flash, her face clouding slightly, then breaking into a
happy smile again:  'But, mother, what people think about a thing has
nothing to do with the real meaning.'

'Eh?' said Mother.

'Their opinion doesn't matter.'

Mrs. Wimble bridled a little.  She was not yet ready to be taught to fly.
In this airy element she felt unsafe, bewildered, and therefore irritable.

'Then you'll find out later, Joan, that it _does_ matter,' she replied
emphatically with ruffled dignity.  'One can't play fast and loose with
things like that, not in this world, my dear.  One must be fixed to
something--somewhere.  Life isn't nonsense.  And you'll remember later
that I said so.'

Joan peeped at her sideways, as a robin might peep at a barking dog.
A tender and earnest expression lit upon her sparkling little face.

'But life is a vision,' she said with a glow in her voice; 'it begins and
goes on just like that,' and she clicked her fingers in the air.
'If you see it from above, from outside--like a swallow--you know it all
at once like in a dream and vision, and it means everything there is to be
meant.  You put in the details afterwards.'  She was perched upon the
window-sill again, her long legs dangling.  She began to sing her
bird-song.

'There, there,' expostulated Mr. Wimble, who was listening, 'we're not
birds yet, Joan, whatever we're going to be,' but the last seven words
dropped unconsciously into the rhythm of her singing tune.  He felt a wind
blow from her into his heart.  Mrs. Wimble, however, remained concealed
behind her _World_.  She was not actually reading anything, because her
eyes moved too quickly from paragraph to paragraph.  But she said nothing
for some moments, and presently she folded the paper with great
deliberation, laying it beside her on the table, and patting it
emphatically.

'Visions are for those that like them,' she announced, moving towards the
door and casting a sideways look of surprise and contempt at her husband
whose silence seemed to favour Joan.  'To my way of thinking, they're
unsettling.  What time does Tom come in to-night?'

They discussed Tom for a few moments, and it was remembered that he had a
latch-key and could let himself in, and that therefore they might go to
bed without anxiety.  But what Mrs. Wimble said upon this unnecessary
topic meant really: 'You're both too much for me; my hopes are set on
Tom.'  She continued her perusal of the _World_ in her room, retiring
shortly afterwards to sleep heavily for nine full hours without a break.



CHAPTER X


Her father stood upside-down--mentally, of course, not physically.
Certain of the Primer 'Epitomes' came in helter-skelter to support his
daughter's nonsense.  At the same time he was aware that he ought to chide
her.  And probably he would have done so but for the fact that before he
knew it, the girl was asking to be forgiven.  He had not seen her move;
his mental sight was still following Mother.  There was a flutter of
something white across the air--and there Joan was--upon his knee.

And so he did not chide her.  Nor did he rebuke her for singing under her
breath what she called 'Mother's Song,' beginning:

      O Disaster!
      You're my Master!

'Your mother's tired to-night,' he observed.  'But all the same, you are a
nasty little tease, you know.' Her arms felt like warm, smooth feathers as
he stroked them.  He seemed floating lightly in mid-air above the roof.
And he remembered vaguely the fairy tales of his youth when Princesses
turned suddenly into swans.  Oh, how beautiful it was, this bird idea,
this seeing and feeling things in the terms of birds.  Those girls in
Greece the gods changed into a nightingale and a swallow--what a
delightful, exhilarating experience!  Easy--and how true!  'The feathery
change came o'er you,' he murmured from the Treasury of Song, then,
interrupting his own mood of curious enjoyment, turned to Joan abruptly.

'Why did you talk like that?' he inquired.

'To make Mother move----'

'To bed, you mean?' he asked, almost severely.

'Yes, no,' said Joan.

'Answer me properly, girl,' he observed.

'Of course not.  Move nearer to you--and me--even to grandpa.  We ought to
be a flock somehow, I felt.  But we looked so separate and apart, you two
on chairs, reading, him out of sight, and me on the window-sill.'

'Eh?'

'We ought to be one thing more.  The whole world ought to be.
Not crowded--oh, there'd be heaps of room to move in--but all together
somehow like birds.  It's only bad birds that are apart--ravens, hawks,
and birds of prey.  All the others flock.'  She darted from his knee and
stood upon her toes a second before him, staring down into his eyes.
'It's coming, you know, Daddy.  It's coming, anyhow!'  She said it
brightly, eagerly, yet with a singular conviction in her tone.
'The whole world's flocking somehow--somewhere--for I feel it.  We shall
all be happy together once we get into the country.'

A shiver of beauty passed through him as he heard her.  He remembered his
walk up Maida Vale, and the rushing, shadowy presentiment in his mind that
something new was on the way.

'Like a single big family, you mean?  All after one high big thing
together?'  He asked it, greatly wondering at her.  But her reply made him
gasp.  Where had she learned such things, unless from the air?

'Your language is so draughty, Daddy.  _I_ mean a bird-world.
Birds aren't unselfish, they're just--together.'

He rubbed his forehead, saying nothing, while she fluttered down upon his
knees again.

'Like my body,' she said.  'Don't you see?'

'Yes, no,' he laughed, using her method unconsciously.

'I can't lace my boot with one hand, but the other isn't unselfish when it
comes to help.  My head is no farther from _me_ than my boot, is it?'
And she sang softly her bird-song of movement and delight, until he felt
the quality of her volatile, aerial mind flash down into his own and
lighten it amazingly.

'My precious little daughter,' he cried, 'you are a bird, and you shall
teach me all your flying secrets.  But, tell me,' he whispered, 'how in
the world did you find out all this?'

'Oh, I can't tell _that_,' she replied almost impatiently, 'for once I
begin to think it all goes, and I feel like an animal in a hole.  But I'll
tell you soon--when the right moment comes--in the fields.  I just go
about and it all shoots into me.'

It was the true bird-quality, always singing, always on the alert, swift
to notice and be glad.

'Yet I said it without thinking,' she went on, 'and the meaning came in
afterwards at the end--all of its own accord.  And that's really the way
to live together.  At least, it's coming----'

'The next stage, the next move!'

'Flight!' she cried, half singing it.

'You live and talk,' he laughed, 'like a German sentence that carries all
in the head and suddenly puts the verb down at the end.'

'Yes, yes,' he realised after she had gone to bed, while he sat there,
pondering her fluid statements, 'there is this new thing coming into life,
and it is in some sense indeed a bird-thing.  It's a new outlook!'

He caught at her feathery meanings none the less.  A great aerial movement
had begun, an etherialisation, a spiritualisation of life.  And in true
spirituality there was nothing vague; its expression was terrifically
definite, stupendously alive, swift, sure, and steady as a mighty bird.
Spirit was a bird of fire.  Joan left him in that dreary sitting-room with
a feeling that life was glorious and that the entire population of the
globe must presently take flight and wing its way to some less ponderous
star--migration.  Joan's language was absurd, yet she left winged ideas
rushing like imperial eagles through his mind.  Humanity was really one,
but on earth alone it would never, never find it out.  In the air it
would.  Its upward struggles were not mere figures of speech.
Routine oppressed and deadened life, prisoning it within a network of
rigid, fixed ideas, and behind barriers of concentrated effort which
turned the fluid stagnant--hard.  Routine was dulling, anti-spiritual.
To live like a quicksand before you get fixed and sank, this was the way.
To be ready for a fire that should burn up all you had.  Life flows,
flies, flows; it has rhythm and abandon; self, by means of boundaries and
casting limits, resists this universal flow towards expansion
characteristic of all Nature.  A bird was poised.  True!  But it was ready
to go in any direction instantly, for it was more various and less
intense, by no means purposeless, and never bound.  It was spontaneous,
instantaneous, for ever on the run.  That was living, that was 'fun.'
People, like animals, were congested.  But life was growing quicker,
lighter, with rhythm, movement everywhere.

The shadow dance began again deliciously.

Yet to act intuitively seemed a dangerous plan for the majority at
present, to live on impulse seemed mere recklessness.  But it would come.
Already people were tired of knowing exact and detailed reasons for all
they did.  Confusion would come first, of course, but out of that
confusion, as out of the apparent trouble of a rising flock of birds, or
the scattered muddle of leaves and branches in a wind-tossed tree, would
follow magnificent concerted life.  Democracy was growing wings.  Soon it
would sing for joy.

Yes, there was truth in it.  Majestic powers were moving already past the
visible curtain of fixed and rigid formulae.  To obey an intuition the
instant it came, was to find the opportunity at hand for carrying it out
effectively.  To wait and hesitate, consider, reflect and reason out, was
to lose the chance.  It was disobedience, and disobedience detached from
power.  Fate was controlled by an obedient and instantaneous mind, for it
meant acting in harmony with these majestic powers.  Understanding
followed later, as with Joan's outlook; the verb came down at the end,
explaining, justifying all that had preceded it.  Good and evil were,
after all, misnomers of the nursery.  In rhythm or out of rhythm was
common, aye, the commonest sense.  Rhythm was simply ease, as
separateness, due to want of rhythm, was dis-ease.

'Oh dear!' sighed Joseph Wimble, as he turned the light out and pattered
down the corridor to bed.  'I feel carried off my feet.  What a buoyant
thing life is, to be sure!  It gets big and light and happy when you least
expect it!  Evidently, there's a big universal thing underlying it all--
that's what she means by air--and to lean upon _that_--subconsciously,
I suppose--to act in rhythm with it----'  He broke off, colliding with a
chest of drawers Mother _would_ keep in the narrow passage.

Then, suddenly, as he switched the light on in his bedroom, he realised
something very big and striking:

'_Of course_, I'm a cosmic, not merely a planetary, being . . .!'



CHAPTER XI


But what followed that night, while it may have caught him into the air,
as he phrased it, and given him an airy point of view, took his breath
away at the same time.  He was not ready yet for so strange a revelation.

He did not sleep very soundly.  Too many ideas were rustling in his brain.
'Rise out of rigid ideas,' a voice kept whispering.  'Hold ideas loosely
in the mind.  Cultivate agility of thought.  Re-fresh, remake your
thought.  Destroy the hard walls that hide God from you.  He is so close
to you always.  Shatter your idols and get free!  Rise out of the network
of fixed ideas!  Watch life without sinking into your own personality.
That is, share every point of view and think in every corner of your body.
Grow alive all over.  Don't think things out in your head; _just see_
them!  Embrace all possibilities! Get into the air! Melt down that
absurdity, the scientific materialist, and show him LIFE!'

He heard these whispered sentences traversing the darkness like singing
arrows whose whistling speed made a noise of words.  Even in sleep he
stood upon his head.  But the arrows, of course, were feathered.
They were feathers.  Wings flashed and fluttered everywhere about him.
He was in a cage.  He must escape.  He tried.  Somehow, it seemed, he used
his whole body instead of his brain alone.  He _was_ escaping. . . .
Life, blown open by a wind, seemed to show its under-side where everything
was one. . . .

By this time he was half awake.  'I must do something; I must act,' he
dimly realised.  He turned over in his bed, and the sound of arrowy,
rushing air went farther into the distance as he did so.

'It's imagination,' sneered a tiny, wakeful point in his mediocre brain.
Another part of him not brain was alight and shining.

'But you're no farther from Reality by letting your imagination loose,'
sang a returning arrow--in his head.  It came from something bigger than
his mind.  His mind, strutting and arrogant, seemed such an insignificant
part of him, whereas the rest, where the arrows flashed and flew, seemed
so enormous that he was conscious of the 'nightmare touch' of Size.
Mind strove to justify itself, however, and Reason snatched at names and
labels.

'But that's right,' a flying sentence laughed.  'You do not see a thing
until you've named it.  You only feel it.  Once, however, it's described,
it's seen!'

'Aha! That's Joan's fairy-tale method grotesquely cropping up in my
dreams,' he realised--and so, of course, awoke properly.

And it was here that his breath got shorter and his heart beat
irregularly.

The room was dark and silent, but he heard a murmuring as though Night
were talking in her sleep.  The dizziness of great heights was still about
him, and remained a little even when he turned the lights on.  It was four
o'clock.  The room wore a waiting, listening air, as though a moment
before it had all been whirling, and his waking at this unlawful hour had
disturbed it.  Waking had rolled the darkness back, let in light, and
taken--a photograph.  He felt mad and happy--madly happy.  There was
nonsense in him that belonged to careless joy.  The curious notion came
that he ought to introduce himself to the various objects--chairs,
cupboards, book-shelf, writing-table--and apologise to them for having
believed himself separate from them.  He ought to explain.  But the same
second he realised this as wrong, for he himself had been moving,
whirling, too.  Everything had stopped, himself included, when he awoke.
He had stepped aside to look at it.  He had photographed it.  Of course it
stopped.

'I am,' he remembered, 'but wherever I am, I _go_!'

And then, before further Explanation could explain away the truth, he
seized at another diving arrow and saw it whole, though it vanished the
same instant:

'I am the whole room.  I am my surroundings!'

Some new point of view had leaped into him, something almost daemonic that
suggested limitless confidence in his power to overcome all obstacles,
because they were part of his own being.

Objects, things, details--during that amazing second at least--no longer
seemed separate, alone, apart from one another.  They were not anywhere
cut off.  Seen thus, a chair was a cupboard, a table was a basin, _he_
was the ceiling, bed, and carpet.  Equally, a cat was a peacock, a mouse
was an elephant.

He said these words to himself in an astonished whisper, and in doing so
he understood something he didn't understand.  The sentence waited
for the verb, the meaning, and it suddenly came down pop--at the end.
Reason helped a little there, for he had named and described, and
therefore seen what before he had only felt.  Perhaps further
understanding would follow.  The verb would come.  He would get up and
try.  He would do something--act--act out his mood.  Action seemed
suddenly a new kind of language, a three-dimensional language, an
ever-moving language in which objects took on character and played parts
for the sake of expression.  A language of action!  You are whatever you
do. . . .!

And as this arrow shot its message past him it seemed that certain objects
in the room were about to jump at him.  They did not actually move, but
they were just about to move--ready and alert.  The instant he slept they
would rise and fly together again.  It was his point of view, his mind in
him, that made them appear separate.  Each object was clothed in its own
story of information, as it were.  Objects were telling him something.
They were demonstrating an idea.

'I am not alone, although I'm only one,' he said aloud.  'In arithmetic
one is not more lonely than seven.'  But, again, he didn't understand
quite why he said it, while yet he understood perfectly at the same time.
'I'm not quite myself at any rate,' he added, and it was true.  Perhaps he
was a trifle frightened, still hovering on the nightmare edge of sleep.
For all this happened in a single instant when he turned the light up.
With sight his breath came more easily at once, his heart beat steadily
again.

Yet there was certainly a sense of rhythm in the room, though lessening
rapidly.  He must hurry.  The cage was closing round him again.  He heard
the flying voices farther and farther in the distance, but still sweet
with a rhythmical new music.

'Use the mood of the moment, but first understand why it is the mood of
the moment!'

'Use the material you have at once!  Don't wait for something different!'

'There is no need to wait; to wait shows incompetence!'

'Act instantly!  Don't reason, calculate, think!  Operate in a flash!'

He felt, that is, rather as a bird might feel.  There was haste, yet no
hurry, purpose yet leisure, delight without delay, spontaneity.  So he got
out of bed, put on dressing-gown and slippers, and went on tiptoe into the
passage.  Then, standing in the shaft of light from his room, the dark
corridor in front of him, he realised that the entire flat--the furnished
flat that Dizzy & Dizzy had let to him--was alive.  The feathered arrows
were not imagined, the voice was not a dream.  Inanimate things stirred
everywhere about him.  He perceived their undersides and his own.
Their apartness that so dislocated the upper, outer, surface-life was only
apparent after all.  Bars melted.  He felt instantaneous.  'Wherever I am
I go!'  But objects shared the same illusion: wherever they were, they
went!  The sensations of a flock were in him.  A new order of
consciousness was close.

He paused and listened.  No sound was audible.  Mother's door was closed,
but Joan's, he saw, just opposite, stood ajar.  A draught blew coldly on
him.  He tapped gently and, receiving no reply, pushed the door wider and
peeped through.  The light from the corridor behind poured in.  The room
was empty, but the sheets, he saw, had not been lain in.

Recalling then her state of excitement when she went to bed, he searched
the flat, peering cautiously even into Mother's room, but without result.
The front door was bolted on the inner side.  She had not left the
building.  He felt alarmed.  Then a cold air stirred the hair of his head,
and, looking up, he saw that the trap-door in the ceiling was open and
that the ladder looked inviting.  It 'jumped' at him, as he called it,
that is it drew his attention as with meaning.  So he snatched a rug from
the shelf beneath the hat-rack, and, throwing it round his shoulders,
clambered up on to the roof.

It was September and the sky was soft with haze, yet still empty and
hungry for the swallows.  Round balls of vapour pretending to be solid
were being driven by an upper wind across the stars; but the stars were
brilliant and shone through the edges of the vapour.  And the night seemed
in a glow.  The wind did not come down, the roof was still; the mass of
London lay like a smouldering furnace far below, bright patches
alternating with deep continents of shadow.  He heard the town booming in
its sleep, a thick and heavy sound, yet resonant.  And at first he saw
only a confused forest of chimneys about him that rose somewhat ominously
into the air, their crests invisible.  Then, suddenly, one of them bent
over in a curve, fell silently with marvellous grace upon the leaden
covering; and, fluttering towards him softly as an owl, came some one who
had been standing against it--Joan.

This happened in the first few seconds; but even before she came he was
aware that the strange stirring of inanimate nature in the room below had
transferred its magic up here.  It was not discontinuous, that is, but
everywhere.  It had come down into the flat, as from the outside world,
but the singular rhythm emanated first from here--above.  Joan had to do
with it.

It was exquisite, this soft feathery way she came to him across the London
roof, swooping low as with the flight of an owl, an owl that flies so
easily and buoyantly, it seems it never _could_ drop.  It was lovely.
In some such way a spirit, a disembodied life, might be expected to move.
He listened with eager intensity for the first word she would utter.

'Father,' she whispered, 'it's the Bird!'

He felt his entire life leap out on wings into open space.  He had asked
no questions.  She stood in front of him.  Her voice, with its curious
lilt, seemed on the verge of singing.  It came from her lips, but it
sounded everywhere about him, as though delivered by the air itself, as
though it dropped from the unravelling clouds, as though it fell singing
from the paling stars.  Night breathed it.  And it frightened him--for a
moment--out of himself.  His ordinary mind seemed loose, uprooted,
floating away as though compelling music swayed it into great happiness.
His stream of easy breath increased.  He touched that indefinable ecstasy
which is extension of consciousness, caused by what men call crudely
Beauty.  Joy flooded him.

'The Bird!' He repeated the words below his breath.  'What _do_ you mean?'
Yet, even as he did so, something in him knew.  'A bird in her bosom'
flashed across him from some printed page.  The girl, he realised, had
been communing with that type of life to which she was so mysteriously
akin.  Its approach had stirred inanimate nature into language.
Meaning had invaded objects, striking rhythm, almost speech, from inert
details.  Joan had brought this new living thing--new point of view--into
the very slates and furniture.

'The Bird!' he whispered again.

'Our Bird! Daddy.'  And she opened her arms like soft white wings, the
shawl fluttering from them in the starlight.

He ought to have said--'Nonsense; go back to bed; you'll catch your death
of cold!'  Or to have asked 'What bird?  I don't see any bird!'--and
laughed.  Instead he merely echoed her strange remark.  He agreed with
her.  Instinctively, again, he knew something that he didn't know.

'So it is!' he exclaimed in a whisper of excitement, taking a deeper
breath and peering expectantly about him, as though some exhilarating
power drew closer with the dawn.  'I do declare! The Bird--_our_ Bird!'

He caught her hand in his.  She was very warm.  And, touching her, he was
instantly aware of fuller knowledge, yet of less explanation.  A sensation
of keen delight rose in him, free, light, and airy, new vast possibilities
in sight, almost within reach.  He caught, for instance, at the meaning of
this great rhythm everywhere, this impression that dead objects moved and
conveyed a revelation that was so full of meaning it was almost language.
Birds saw them thus, flashing above them, noting one swift, crowded series
of objects one upon another.  It was a runic script in the landscape that
birds read and understood in long sentences of colour, shade, and surface,
pages full of significant pictured outlines, turning rapidly over as they
skimmed the earth.  It was a new language, a movement-language.
Birds read it out to one another as they flew.  They acted it.
Their language was one of movement and of action, three-dimensional; and,
whether they flitted from one chimney to another, or travelled from
Primrose Hill to the suns of Abyssinia, their lives acted out this
significant, silent language.

High, sweet rapture caught him.  Of course birds sang, where men only
grunted and animals, still nearer to the ground, were inarticulate with
unrhythmical noises.

All this flashed and vanished even while his eye lost its way in the
canopy of smoky air immediately above him.

'Listen!' he heard in his ear, like the faint first opening whistle of
some tiny songster.  'They're waking now all over England.  You felt it in
your sleep!  That's what brought you up.  It's the moment just before the
dawn!'

A million, ten, twenty million birds were waking out of sleep.  In field
and wood, in copse and hedge and barn, in tall rushes by the lakes, in
willows upon river banks, in glens and parks and gardens, on gaunt cliffs
above the sea, and on lonely dim salt marshes--everywhere over England the
birds were coming back to consciousness.

It was this vast collective consciousness that had awakened him.  He had
somehow or other taken on, through Joan, certain conditions of the great
Bird-mind.  It was marvellous, yet at the time seemed natural.
He recalled the strange sentences: all descriptive of a bird's mentality,
put into words, of course, by his own brain.  The movement of objects was
merely their new appearance, seen from above in rapid passage, all
speaking, telling something, reporting to the rushing bird the conditions
of the surface where they lay.  And those at the point of lowest approach
in the curve of flight appeared to 'jump.'  The sense of rhythm, moreover,
was the outstanding characteristic of feathered life--in song, in
movement, in beat of wing, in swinging habits of the larger kind when
migration regularly sets in and there is known that 'mighty breath which,
in a powerful language, felt not heard, instructs the fowls of heaven.'
He had responded somehow to the world of greater rhythms in which all airy
life existed, and compared with which human existence seemed disjointed,
disconnected, incomplete in rhythm.

'Air,' he remembered from one of the ridiculous Primers, 'is the highest
perception we have, yet we need not be in the air to get this view.
We have placed the Heaven within us up there, because it was, physically,
our highest place to set it in.'

'Listen! and you'll feel it all over you,' Joan's voice reached him.
'I often come here in the dawn.  I know things here.'

By 'listen' she meant apparently 'receive,' for no sound was audible
except the hum of London town still sleeping heavily.

'So this is how you learn things!  From the air?'

'I don't learn anything--in that sense,' she murmured quickly.
'It's in me.  It just flies out--I see it.'

'Ah!'  He caught a feather and understood.

'Especially when I go like this! Look, Daddy!'  And she darted from his
side and began on tiptoe a movement, half dance, half flight, between the
crowding chimney-stacks.  She vanished and reappeared.  He heard no sound.
The shadows clothed her, now close, now spread out, like wings whose
motion just escaped the measuring eye.  And the dance was revealing in
someway he could not analyse.  She seemed to bring the dawn up.  The ugly
roof turned garden, the chimneys shaded off into trees, as though her
little dance flashed aspiration into rigid bricks.  She interpreted the
flight of darkness, the awakening of wings, the silent rush of dawn.
No modern dancer, interpreting Chopin, Schumann, could have given a
deeper, truer revelation.  She uttered in her movements a language that
she read, but a language for the majority at present undecipherable.
Action and gesture interpreted the inarticulate.

She expressed, he was aware, the return to consciousness of the birds; but
at the same time she expressed a new air-born consciousness that was
stealing out of the skies upon a yet sleeping world.

'By doing it, I understand it,' she laughed softly, but no whit
breathless, as she floated back to his side.  'But I can't tell it in
words till long afterwards.'

The east grew lighter.  The tips of the flying clouds turned red.
A beauty, as of dawn in the mountains, crept slowly over the towered
London world.  It seemed the spires and soaring chimneys steadied down, as
though precipitating a pattern from some intricate movement of the
universe.  Speech failed him for the moment.  For the language of words is
but an invention of civilisation, and he had just heard the runic speech
that is universal and has no grammar but in natural signs of sky and
earth.  And then the words he vainly sought dropped into him suddenly from
the air.  Above him on a chimney crest a group of starlings fell to
chattering gaily; hidden in the leaves of trees far below he heard the
common sparrow chirrup; the earliest swallows, just awake, flashed
overhead, telling the joy of morning in their curves of joy.  In the
distance trilled a rising lark.

The wonder and glory of that breaking dawn lay for him, indeed, beyond all
telling; not that he had been insensible to loveliness in Nature hitherto,
but that he saw new meaning in it now.  In himself he saw it.  The point
of view was new.  To Joan, however, it was merely familiar and natural.
But more--he was aware that in him lay the germ, at least, of a new airy
consciousness that included it all, and that he longed to share it with
the still sleeping world below.  A mighty spiritual emotion swept him.

'Mother would feel cold, and notice the blacks,' she laughed, but there
was love and pity in her laughter.

For her it was all in the ordinary run and flow of habitual life.  She was
aware of no exalted state of emotion.  She said it as normally as a
swallow dares to take an insect from the heart of an amazing sunset.
That sunset and that insect both belong to it.  There was no need to be
hysterical about either one or other.



CHAPTER XII


He woke in the morning and decided that his experience of the night
had been a vivid dream-experience, although that was not to deny a deep
reality to it.  A sense of uplifting joy was in his heart that was the
rhythm of some larger life.  A new lightness pervaded his very flesh and
bones; it sent him along the narrow passage to the bathroom--dancing,
much to the astonishment of the cook who caught a glimpse of the
phenomenon as she stirred the porridge; it made him sing while he sponged
himself, waking Mrs. Wimble earlier than usual and stirring in her an
unwelcome reminder that she was older, stouter than she had been.
For the singing brought back to her a fugitive memory of a sunny Algerian
garden, where life sang to a measure of blue and gold Romance, now
vanished beyond recall.  'Joe's odd this morning,' she thought, turning
over to sleep upon her other side.

But Joe, meanwhile, splashed in his bath and went on singing just because
he couldn't help himself; his voice was meagre, yet it would come out.
He dried himself, standing in a hot sunbeam on the oil-cloth that made him
feel he caught the entire sun.  Such a deluge of happiness, confidence,
natural bliss seemed in him, seemed everywhere about him too.  He could
not understand it, but he felt it, and therefore it was real.  In the rise
and fall of some larger rhythm than he had ever known he swung above a
world that could no longer cage him in.  He saw the bars below him.
Alarm, anxiety, worry, even death were but little obstacles that tried to
trip him up and make him stumble, stop, and give up existence as too
difficult to face.  They lay below him now.  He saw them from above.
He was in the air.  It made him laugh and sing to think that such tricks
could ever have frightened or discouraged him.  Actually they were but of
use to stand on for a leap into the air--taking-off-things, spots to
jump from into space.

'I can't explain it,' occurred to him, 'so it must be true.'  It was a
thing his daughter might have said.  He shared her point of view, it
seemed, completely now.  They were in the air together.

And, though later and by degrees, the airy exhilaration left him, so that
he came down to earth and settled, the descent was gradual and without a
thud.  Something of lightness and of wonder stayed.  The memory of some
loftier point of view guided him all day long amid the tangle of little
difficulties that usually seemed mountainous.  He rose lightly above all
obstacles that opposed and hindered.  He saw them from above, that is, he
saw them in proportion.  Stepping on each in turn, he flew easily over
every one; they served their purpose as jumping-off spots for taking
flight.  It was the Bird's-eye point of view.

But each time he flew thus, he left his mind behind, using it as a cushion
for landing later, easily, without a jarring bump.  And thus, before the
day was over, he realised somewhat this: that the instantaneous,
spontaneous attitude Joan stole from the air and taught him meant simply
that the subconscious became convincingly, superbly, conscious.
The personality operated as a whole without friction or delay from
separate portions that held back and hesitated.  All these lesser,
separate rhythms merged in one.  It mobilised, as with a lightning
instinct, the entire available forces of the being.  He reacted to every
stimulus as a whole, instead of in separate parts.  Action and decision
came in a single flash; to reason, judgment, the weighing of pros and
cons, and so forth, he appealed afterwards.  That is, intuitive knowledge
became instantaneous action.

And, realising this, he also grasped what Joan meant by describing a room
as 'happening all at once,' and found meaning also in her nonsense-dream
of feeling for the one-ness of all life everywhere.  The details of the
room could be inserted later according to judgment and desire, and
four-footed animals on the ground might also discover later the point of
view of birds who, from a high altitude in the air, saw everything at
once.  Instantaneous action, immediate conduct, spontaneous behaviour
enlisted the supporting drive of the entire universe behind them.
Properly accepted, absolutely obeyed, such a way of living ensured
inevitable success.  It was irresistible; for since everything was one,
each detail was the whole, and no whole could be disobedient or hostile to
itself.  And this was why he had danced along the passage-way and sung
into his sponge.

Yet this attitude of mind, this point of view, was easily lost again;
it was difficult to hold permanently; to practise, still more difficult.
How to translate it into daily action was the problem.  At breakfast this
new language of action seemed mere phantasy. He certainly _had_ enjoyed a
dream of a three-dimensional language in which objects and things helped
to interpret his own wishes; he remembered that distinctly; and surely it
was not all imagination?  Imagination, he felt sure, included prophecy as
well as memory.

'It's time we found our country cottage,' he remarked, tasting his crisp
Cambridge sausage and bacon.  'I must get to work at once.'

Mother glanced up over the morning newspaper she had crumpled till it
looked like a bundle for lighting the fire.  She had ignored the news and
been deep in the advertisements.  'It's best to go to the agents,' she
observed, folding the paper with the creases uneven and the pages mixed,
then patting it into flatness.  'And if they're no good, we might insert
an advertisement stating our exact requirements.'  She mopped up a remnant
of fried egg with a thick wedge of brown bread at the end of her fork.
'A nice neighbourhood's the chief thing, isn't it?'

Her husband straightened the paper so that the creases fitted evenly and
the pages lay in sequence.  It hurt him acutely to see it twisted; he felt
something out of place inside himself, as though the feathers of a wing
were tangled.  'It'll turn up,' he said airily, 'we shall come across it
suddenly.  I'll go and see some agents all the same, though,' he added.
He had the feeling that the right place would hardly come through agents,
but would just 'turn up.'  Somehow he would be attracted to it: it would
be there before his eyes; it would jump at him.  He had already seen so
many agents.  Newspaper advertisements never mentioned it.  This strange
belief and faith was in him.  'I'll have a look,' he added, as his wife
put the plates together, swept some crumbs carefully from the cloth, then
tapped the marmalade spoon on the rim of the jar before she sucked it
clean.

'There's no good just hoping and trusting to chance,' she said in a
practical voice.  'Nothing comes _that_ way.'  She clicked her tongue,
tasting the marmalade reflectively.

'On the contrary--everything comes that way.'  To believe, he grasped, was
to act with the Whole in which all that was required lay contained.
'Enquire within upon everything.'  He laughed happily.  But his wife had
not followed his thought--nor heard him.

'That's turnip rind, not oranges,' she added.  'They sell you anything
nowadays, and everything's adulterated----' and laid the spoon aside.

'In the country we'll make our own,' her husband interrupted.
'Delicious stuff!'

'If we ever get there,' she replied, 'and if sugar ever goes down again,
and we can get servants who'll condescend to stay.  There's no good being
too remote, remember, or we won't keep a single one.  Servants won't stand
being dull.'  She sighed.  Life to her spelt apprehension.

'Well, we've agreed on Sussex, haven't we?' he answered cheerfully,
hunting for his lost new attitude again.  'A nice bit of wayward Sussex,
where there are trees and fields and perhaps a snap of running water so
that the birds'll come--' he saw the cloud on Mother's face--'  Oh, but in
a nice neighbourhood with decent neighbours,' he added, 'and a town not
too far away, with a cinema and shops, and so on.  Oh, it will come all
right, Mother, don't you worry.  We'll find it sure enough--probably this
very day.  I feel it coming; it's close already; I can almost see it at
this moment.'

'It's there, waiting for us all the time.  The very place,' said Joan
suddenly, clapping her hands softly, and meeting her father's eye.
'Only we've got to want it enough and----'

'Tidy up your place, child,' said Mother sharply, 'and fold your
serviette.  It's time you were at your scales.'  She sighed as Joan obeyed
and left the room, and two minutes later, while Mother made notes on a
squeaky slate for dinner, the sound of C major came to them through the
wall, going rapidly up and down again with both hands.  Only it was
accompanied by a clear and happy voice that sang the notes, or rather sang
a running melody to them that turned even the technical routine into
music.  The drudgery, though faithfully done, brought its fulfilment
almost within reach.  Like a bird, she leaped upon the promise and enjoyed
it.  Scales and music, toil and its results, prophecy and its
accomplishment--even in this tiny detail--seemed present in her
simultaneously.  Carelessness and faithful plodding method went side by
side.  This came to her father as he lit his pipe and listened to the pure
childish voice that unconsciously sang meaning, even beauty, into formal
rigid outline.

'An all-at-once and all-over little creature,' he heard something whisper
to him.  'Care-less and happy as a bird.  The true air quality!
That's the way, of course.  I see it--a sort of bird's-eye view of
beginning and end in one.  The joy of fulfilment shining through the
actual work.  I'll find the cottage that way too!'

He puffed thick clouds of smoke between himself and his wife, who stood
watching him, a touch of apprehension about her somewhere, impatience as
well.  She too was listening.  He recalled the smile of the badger at the
mouth of its hole.  But, at any rate, it was a faithful, practical, and
affectionate badger.  Moreover, once--strange memory--it had known wings,
it had been a bird!  Wrong methods had brought it down to earth.
It puzzled him dreadfully, yet rather sweetly.  The bird, he fancied, must
still lie hidden in her somewhere.

'Joan never can do one thing properly at a time--not even her scales,' she
was saying.  'There she is, trying to sing before she's learnt her notes.
I wish you'd speak to her about it.  But, if you ask _me_, _I_ think it's
good money wasted--those music lessons.'

How right she was, he thought, from her point of view.  At the same time,
how entirely that point of view lacked vision.  A badger criticised a bird
for flying uselessly when there were eggs to be laid and worms to be
pulled up and twigs for a nest to look at instead of rushing landscapes.

'I will, dear.  I'll speak to her at once, before I go to see the agents.
I'll bring back good news at dinner-time.  Now good-bye, bless you.'
He kissed her.  She looked so helpless and pathetic that he kissed her
again, adding 'Good-bye, old thing, don't worry.  Take everything lightly
like a bird and remember--Wherever we are, we go!'

'Good-bye, Joe dear.  Do your best.  You know our limit as to rent.'
He noticed that for once she had not asked him to repeat.

He left the room and walked down the passage to admonish Joan, yet knowing
that there was nothing he could honestly chide her for.  She sang at her
scales for the same reason he sang in his bath.  In both of them, father
and daughter, was the carelessness and joy of air, the certainty that,
whatever they did on earth with effort, toil, and purpose, had in it--
behind it and sustaining it--the glad sweet element of air.  Air had no
divisions, it was whole--a universal radiant element containing end and
beginning, everything.  To act with it instantaneously was to be confident
that fulfilment lay already in the smallest germ of every action.
'The cottage lies there waiting for us now.  Just look for it with faith
and careless happiness. . . .  The perfect music lies within these boring
scales.  Just sing to them.  It brings accomplishment more swiftly near!'

But on opening the door and poking his head inside, he found that she had
ceased singing and was diligently practising.

'That's right,' he said, smiling; 'it's rather dull, but stick to it.
It'll please your mother, and before long you'll be able to play all my
favourite pieces.'

She stopped, swung round on the stool and looked at him.  Her little face
in its wreath of shining hair was very earnest, the eyes big with wonder
as though she had made a great discovery.  He had seen a robin thus,
perched on a window-sill, its head cocked sideways at a crumb of bread--
poise, alertness, happiness in the attitude and gesture.

'Well,' he asked, 'what is it now?  'And pointing to the maze of black
printed notes, she said: 'I only wanted to tell you something I've got
hold of--There are only seven notes after all--only seven altogether.'

'That's all, yes.'

'All the music in the world comes out of that--just seven notes--'

'Combinations of them--with a lot of half-notes too,' he explained.

'But half-notes only suggest.  The real notes are the thing--just seven of
them.  Isn't it jolly?  They'll never frighten me again.  Now, listen a
moment, Daddy, I'll play you what the wings sing when they rush along.
You know--the sound in the air when birds fly past:

     Flow, fly, flow,
     Wherever I am, I go;
     I live in the air
     Without thought or care,
     Flow, fly, flow. . . .

She played and sang till he felt every atom in his being moving
rhythmically to the little doggerel.  He took her in his arms and hugged
her.

'Ah,' he cried, 'I put all this into you unconsciously, and now you're
explaining it to me.  That's fun indeed, isn't it?'

'And I've only used three notes for it--for the tune, I mean,' she
exclaimed breathlessly as he released her.  'I've still got four more.'

He blew her a kiss from the door and went on the top of a 'bus to Dizzy &
Dizzy, who gave him a list of orders to view some half-dozen desirable
cottages and bungalows in Sussex that seemed reasonably within the price
he could afford, but none of which, it so happened, was the thing he
wanted.



And during the day, odd thoughts and feelings, born of that mystic dawn he
had witnessed with the birds, came flitting round him.  Being wordless, he
could only translate them as best occurred to him.  It was impossible to
keep pace with many-sided life to-day unless a new method were discovered.
To skim adequately among the numerous sources of information and
instruction, wings were needed.  With their speed and economy of energy
the feathered mind could dive into all, absorb fresh knowledge instantly,
and pass on swiftly to yet further sources.  At present complete
exhaustion followed the mere bodily and mental effort to keep abreast even
with one line of thought and action.  The bird's-eye view, involving
bird's-eye action, alone could manage it.  It was a case of flow, fly,
flow, indeed.  He was dimly aware of a new method coming softly, silently,
from the air.  Air meant the spiritual method.  While the body, guided by
surefooted, slow, laborious reason, attended to its necessary duties on
the ground, the mind, the soul, the spirit would flow, fly, flow, with the
new powers of the air. . . .

He played lovingly with the idea.  He thought of birds as the aborigines
of the air, the pioneers perhaps.  They represent no climax of evolution.
On the earth men appeared last, preceded by many stages of earlier
development.  Birds were, possibly, but the first, the earliest
inhabitants of their delicious realm, still imperfect, but alive with a
promise for mankind.  They were not an ideal, they merely offered their
best qualities to those below.

The Promise of the Air ran through him like a strain of glad spring music.
Air, he knew, as Joan used the term, meant aether, the mother of all air.
She dreamed of passages to dim old gleaming Hercules adrift in open space,
to Cassiopeia, happily, mightily wandering, to the golden blossoms of the
Nebulae's garden of shining gold.  Across his mind the great flocks of
stars were flying. . . .

'I'm _not_ a "miserable sinner."  It's a lie that "there is no health in
me."  Nor do I believe that another man can "forgive my sins," because I
confess them to him, or that those who refuse to believe as I do--whatever
it is I _do_ believe!--shall forfeit my special favours, least of all
suffer the smallest prick of a pin on that account. . . .!'

If ever he had been affected by the dogmatic teaching of any person or
group of persons, alive or dead, he broke finally with them in that
moment.



CHAPTER XIII


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 employee 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 nowhere
_that_ way.'  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 it _is_ an 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 forgotten _himself_.  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.  '_You_ don'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.  He _had_ paused 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're _alive_!'

'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.  They _would_ enjoy
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 'em _now_, and no interval of time at
all.  Machinery won't be used.  Our _minds_ will 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. . . .



CHAPTER XIV


'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 to _share_ what 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, _can_ be 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 I _am_ wherever 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 to
_share_ experiences 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 cliche.
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 disasters _would_ happen 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--in _mind_,' 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--_not_ shirking 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
they _could_ understand and call it air.  And air is gas, you know.'
He chuckled.  'Whereas what _I_ mean 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 did _not_ sting 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.'

'But _very_ High 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, at _his_ stage, 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 role 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 what _he_ needs.'

' . . . 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 us
_all_ . . .?  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, 'before _all_ can 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's _going 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.



He met his wife in the passage on his way out a little later.
She button-holed him for a moment, a new confidence and lightness in her,
it almost seemed.  She was High Church now.  It concerned their daughter.
Joan, she mentioned, was not quite like other girls of her own age.  She
was growing very fast in mind as well as in body.  She suggested a doctor
for her.  'A London doctor, and before we go to the country.  We might
have her overhauled, you know.  She seems to me light-headed sometimes.'
Mother felt sure it would be wise.  This time she was not anxious, did not
worry as usual; she merely thought of the girl's welfare in the best way
that occurred to her.  From her new High Church pedestal she looked out
upon the world with a temporary new confidence, at any rate.

'Admirable,' agreed her husband.  'I'll take her myself to-morrow.'

'Why not to-day, dear?' she asked, relieved that she need not go herself.

'We're off to look at cottages,' he told her.  'I'll take her
to-morrow.'  And the matter was settled thus.



CHAPTER XV


The visit to the doctor was a great success, and Wimble left two guineas
on the marble mantelpiece without regret.  Joan was growing rapidly in
mind and body, and mind and body should develop evenly if possible,
otherwise there must be unbalance somewhere.  'It's a nervous, restless
age we live in,' observed the physician; 'the mind is apt to take in too
much nourishment and shoot ahead much quicker than it did when _we_ were
young, Mr. Wimble, and unless the body is well cared for, the nervous
system cannot possibly keep even pace with the mass of instruction it
receives at every turn.  The young it is wisest to consider as healthy
animals that need play, food, and rest in right proportions.  Personally,
I prefer to see the mind develop a trifle late, rather than too early.'
He advised, therefore, play, rest, and ample nourishment.  'Half an hour's
rest in the afternoon, or better still, an hour,' he added, 'is an
excellent thing.'  He looked at Joan searchingly, with both severity and
kindness, for he had that mixture of father and policeman which belongs
to most successful doctors.  Joan felt a little guilty.  She had not read
_Erewhon_, of course, yet was vaguely aware she had done something wrong.
To be obliged to see a doctor touched the sense of shame in her.
'The country's just the thing for you,' the specialist mentioned, ignoring
the two guineas that lay within the reach of his hand, 'the very place.'
And Wimble felt relieved as he went out.  It was like a visit to the
police that had ended happily.  Neither he nor Joan had been arrested, but
they had been told they must not do it again.  He had paid a fine.

'Mother'll be very pleased with that,' he remarked, while Joan, glancing
up quickly, seemed glad it was over.  'It's the first time I've ever felt
ill,' she said.  'The moment I saw him I felt I ought to be ill.'

'Suggestion,' he mumbled.  'Never mind.  Mother'll feel better now that
you've been.  That's something.'

They walked happily down Seymour Street together.  'Don't skip, child.
It looks funny in a town.  Besides, you're too big to skip.'  She took a
slower pace to suit his slower little legs.  But even so there were
springs in her feet, and her movements seemed to push the solid earth away
as though she wanted to rise.  'Flow, fly, flow,' she hummed, 'wherever I
am, I go.'

'I shouldn't hum in the street, dear, if I were you,' he chided.
People were staring, he noticed.  'It looks so odd.  I mean it sounds
unusual.'

She turned her bright, happy eyes upon him.  'Daddy, that's the doctor,'
she warned him, 'you're saying "No" to everything.'  She came close and
took his arm, whispering at the same time, 'I believe you're sorry about
the two guineas.  You're trying to get your money's worth, as Tom calls
it,' and the shaft was so true it made him laugh.

They turned down into the great thoroughfare of Oxford Street.
It was brimmed with people, a river filled and running over.
They crossed it somehow, he rather like a bewildered rabbit, a step
forwards, a pause, a hesitating step backwards, a glance in both
directions that saw nothing accurately, and then a flurried run; Joan
catching his outstretched hand and pulling him against his will and better
judgment, while his little coat-tails flapped in the wind.  They landed on
the curb, merged in the stream of pedestrians, bumped into some, collided
with others, and were swept round the swirling corner of the Circus into
the downhill torrent of Regent Street.

'Yet a bird,' he remembered, 'plunges headlong, at fifty miles an hour,
into a forest of branches, swaying possibly in a wind, avoided the
slightest collision, and with unerring and instant calculation
selects a twig and lands on it, balancing with perfect security on feet so
tiny they're not worth mentioning!'  He felt clumsy and inferior.
What co-ordination of sight and muscle!  What confidence!
What poise. . . .  The throng of awkward, crawling, heavy-footed humans
sprawled in all directions; he was one of them, one of the least steady
too.  And yet he was aware of something in himself that did not shake and
wobble, something secure and balanced, something that went gliding with
swift and certain safety.  He noted the easy grace of Joan passing the
shop windows like a nut-hatch along a twig, half dancing and half flitting
on her toes.  It was not a physical thing he felt.  It was not that.
It was a quality--a careless, exquisite balance in herself.  It entered
him too as he watched her.  His soul rested securely amid the turmoil by
means of it.  It was poise.

His thoughts ran on. . . .

'Look, Daddy,' Joan interrupted him.  'Here's a funny sign.  What does it
mean?  Let's go in.'

He drew up beside her, a trifle breathless.  They were in a side street,
the main stream of people pouring away at right angles now, bathed in the
autumn sunshine.

'Look,' she repeated.  'Wings.'  She pointed to a brass plate
advertisement in a little hall-way.  'Isn't it funny?'  He read the sign
in neat black letters against the shining metal: 'Aquarian Society,
Membership Free,' and wondered what it meant.  Ruins and battered objects
of the past occurred to him, for at first he connected the word with
'antiquarian.'  Above them, black tipped with gold, were a pair of
outspread wings, the badge of the Society apparently.  In brackets was
'First Floor,' and a piece of paper pasted below bore a notice:
'Meeting Daily from 11.30 to 1.  All welcome.'

'Let's go up, Daddy,' Joan said again.  'There's a meeting going on now,
and it's free.  What does it mean?  Something about birds----'

'Water birds, probably,' he said, still puzzling about the strange word;
'_old_ water birds apparently,' he added, combining both possible
derivations; 'perhaps a society to preserve old water birds and provide
artificial paddles when their webbed feet wear out.'

They laughed at the idea, but their laughter hushed as a couple of ladies,
beautifully dressed and with what is called refined, distinguished
bearing, brushed past them and went upstairs, evidently going to the
meeting.  Though they were unknown to him, and it was obvious, in his
black tail-coat and brown boots, that he was a commercial traveller of
sorts, they bowed with a pleasant little smile of polite apology for
pushing past.  'A duchess and her daughter at least!  Old families
certainly!' he thought; 'yet they treated us as equals!'  It startled him,
it was so un-English.  He raised his hat and smiled.  In their manner and
the expression of face he caught something new, a kindness, a sympathy, a
touch of light perhaps, something at any rate quick and alert and gentle
that brought the word 'sympathy' intuitively across his mind.  He held his
hat in his hand a moment.  'They've got air in them,' flashed into him.
'I wonder if they're members.'

'Your head's in a draught, Daddy,' said Joan.  He put his hat on.  A scrap
of conversation reached them from the stairs: 'I'd rather sit well at the
back, I think,' said the younger of the two.

'We shall have to, probably,' was the reply; 'it's always full.
And remember--just keep an open mind and listen.  The quackery doesn't
matter, nor the grammar.  He was only a railway guard'--then something
inaudible as they turned the corner--'his idea of a New Age is true
somewhere, I'm positive.  It was the speed of the train, you know--always
rushing through space--that made him . . .'  And the voices died away.

'Come, Joan, we'll go in too.  What are you dawdling about for?' exclaimed
Wimble on the spur of the moment.  Something in that interrupted sentence
caught him.

'You, Daddy,' she said, as she tripped after him up the stairs.

People were standing in the corridor and in the little hall; the room
beyond, where a heavily-moustached man, with an eager, soap-polished face,
cheerful expression, and bright earnest eyes, stood lecturing, was full.
The two ladies who had preceded them were sitting on a window-sill.
'I'm afraid there are no seats left,' whispered a pleasant, earnest woman
beside the door, 'but I've sent for some chairs.  They'll be here
presently.  I hope you'll hear something out here.' Wimble thanked her
with a nod and smile; he leaned against the wall with Joan and looked
about him.

Some thirty people were crowded into the small inner room, three-quarters
of their number women, what are called 'nice' women.  They were well
dressed; there was a rustle of silk, a faint atmosphere of perfume, and
fur, and soft expensive garments; young and old, he saw, a good many of
them in mourning.  The men looked, generally speaking, like well-to-do
business men; he noticed one clergyman; a few were shabbily dressed; one
or two were workmen, mechanics possibly.  There was an alert attention on
most of the faces, and in the air a kind of eager expectancy, serious,
watchful, yearning, and waiting to be satisfied; sympathetic, it seemed,
on the whole, rather than critical.  One or two listeners looked vexed and
scowling, and a tall, thin-visaged man in the corner was almost angry.
But as a whole he got the impression of people just listening patiently,
people for the most part empty, hungry, wondering if what they heard might
fill them.  He was aware of minds on tiptoe.  Here, evidently, he judged,
was a group of enquiring folk following a new Movement.  'One of the Signs
of what's in the air To-day,' he thought.  'Five years ago these people
would have been in Church, convinced they were miserable sinners with no
good in them.  That mechanic-looking fellow would have been in Chapel.
That portly man with the stolid face, wearing a black tail-coat, a low
collar, a heavy gold watch-chain and a black and white striped tie surely
took round the plate in Kensington.'  The thin-faced angry man was merely
a professional iconoclast.

He wondered.  He thought a moment of the unimaginative English standing
about the island in hordes, marvellously reliable, marvellously brave,
with big, deep hearts, but childishly unobservant, conservative,
conventional, not to be moved till the fire burns the soles of their feet,
sturdy and unemotional, and constitutionally suspicious of all new things.
He saw these hordes, strong in their great earth-qualities, ballast of the
world, but at the same time world-rulers. . . .  And then his thought
flashed back with a snap to the scene before him.  What was this group
after?  Why was it dissatisfied?  Why had it turned from the ancient
shibboleths?  Something, of course, was up.  He wondered.  These people
looked so earnest.  This Aquarian Society, he knew, was one of a hundred,
a thousand others.  It might be rubbish, it might contain a true idea, it
was sure to prove exaggerated.  The people, however, were enquiring.
He glanced at Joan, but her eyes were fixed intently upon the speaker's
face--the face of a former railway guard whose familiarity with speed
(certainly not on _his_ own crawling line, thought Wimble!), with rushing
transit from scene to scene through the air, had opened his mind to some
new idea or other.

'I wonder if he sang "Wherever I am, I go!"' he whispered to Joan.
'He ought to, anyhow!'  But Joan was too intent to hear him.
He swallowed his smile and listened.  The speaker's rough, uncultivated
voice rang with sincerity.  There was a glow about his face that only deep
conviction brings.  To Wimble, however, it all sounded at the moment as if
he had fallen out of his Express Train and picked up his ideas as he
picked up himself.

For at first he could not understand a single word, as though,
coming out of the busy human street, he had plunged neck-deep into a
stream of ideas that took his breath away.  Having missed what had gone
before, he could not catch the drift of what he heard.  Then gradually,
and by degrees, his listening mind fell into the rhythm of the minds about
him; he slipped into the mood of the meeting; his intelligence merged with
the collective intelligence of the others; he merged with the
group-consciousness of the little crowd.  The hostile interjections had no
meaning for him, since those who made them, not being included in the
group-consciousness, spoke an unintelligible language.

The speaker was very much in earnest evidently; he believed what he was
saying, at the moment anyhow.  Possibly this belief was permanent;
possibly it was merely self-persuasion.  Though obviously he expected
hostile comment from time to time, when it came--usually from the
iconoclast in the corner--he rarely replied to it.  This method of
ignoring criticism was not only easier than answering it, it induced an
appearance of contemptuous superiority that increased his authority.

Wimble and his daughter had come in at a happy moment, for the long
stretch of argument and explanation was just over, it seemed, and a
summing up was about to begin.

'So where are we, then, with it all?' asked the lecturer.
'Where 'ave we got to?  Where do we stand?'

He paused, and into the pause fell the angry voice of the thin-faced man:
'Exactly where we started.  You haven't stated one single fact as yet.'

The speaker looked straight in front of him without a word, and the
audience, almost to an individual, ignored the criticism.  They supported
the lecturer loyally, to the point at least of not even turning their
heads away.  They stared patiently and waited.

'Where 'ave we got to,' repeated the man on the platform, 'that's wot we
want to know, isn't it?  After all we've listened to this morning, 'ow do
we stand about it?'

'That's it exactly,' from the interrupter in a contemptuous but intense
tone of voice.  He seemed annoyed that no one was intelligent enough to
support him.  At a Society of Rationalist Control across the road he would
have been at home.  He, too, was a seeker, and a very earnest one, only he
had tumbled into the wrong group.  Across the road he might have been
constructive; here he was destructive merely.

'Well, on the physical plane,' resumed the speaker, 'on wot I might call
the scientific and materialistic plane, as I've tried to show you, the
'ole trend of modern civilisation is towards speed and universality.
That's clear--at least I 'ope I've made it so.  Air, and wot air
represents, shows itself in the physical plane like that.  Distant
countries are getting all linked up everywhere--by wireless, by motor, by
aviation, by cinematograph, and the like.  A kind of telepathy all over
the world is--' he hesitated an instant--'engendered.'

'Go on,' from the critic, 'any word will do as well.'

'That's the scientific side of the business, as it were,' he went on, 'the
practical, everyday aspect we can all understand.  It's the universality
of the new element, air, as it affects the practical mind, so to speak;
the technical understanding and mastery or space--wot I called aether a
little while ago, as you'll remember--or, as the Aquarian Society prefers
to call it, as being simpler and shorter--air.'

'Well,' he added, 'we now want to see 'ow we stand with regard to the
'igher side of life, the mental, spiritual aspect.  Wot does this new Age,
in which air is the key--the symbol like--wot does it mean to the race on
_that_ side?'

'Gas,' interjected the other, but in a lower voice.

From several books lying beside the water-bottle the lecturer selected
one.  He adjusted a pair of heavy reading-glasses to his eyes.

'The link between the two is better expressed than wot I can express it,'
he resumed quickly, 'in this little volume, _The New Science of Colour_--
and colour means light, remember, and light means aether, and aether means
space, universality--so it's all the same.'

'Every bit of it,' came the contemptuous comment from the corner.

'Just this short paragraph--I came across it by chance--except that there
reely is no chance at all--and it puts it well.  It supplies the link.
So I'll read it.'  He heavily emphasised certain words:

'We are approaching an age of mental telepathy, in which the _organism of
the race_ is about to become attuned to the second sense of the earth and
to the third element that sustains her--_i.e. air_--and in which our
action and our outlook will alike assume the characteristics of that
element, which are _elasticity and brilliance_.'

He laid down the book, slowly removing the heavy glasses from his nose,
and while 'that's no proof was heard to snap from the corner, the other
repeated with emphasis of manner, yet lowering his voice at the same time:
'the organism of the race--becoming attuned to _air_--elasticity and
brilliance.'

Fingering his glasses and looking very thoughtful, the speaker kept
silence for a minute or so.  He drank a few sips of water slowly, while
everybody, even the interjector, waited, and those who had been staring at
him turned their eyes away from his face, as though embarrassed to watch
him drink.  He produced a big handkerchief from his coat-tail pocket,
wiped his lips, and replaced the handkerchief with some difficulty whence
it came.  The pause lengthened, but no one stirred.  Then the
earnest-faced woman near the door touched Wimble on the arm and indicated
an empty chair, but Wimble, too absorbed in the proceedings, shook his
head impatiently.  Joan slipped into it.  Joan, he noticed, did not seem
interested; the keen attention she had shown at first had left her face,
she looked half bewildered and half bored.  'She's too much in it to need
explanation,' flashed across him.

The slight shuffling warned the lecturer that the mind of his audience
needed holding lest it begin to wander.  Picking up a sheet of paper
covered with notes, he advanced to the edge of the little platform and
cleared his throat.

'As I've been trying to explain,' he began, ''umanity has now reached a
crushial moment in its development.  The planet we live on belongs to the
sun, and the sun has just entered--in 1881, to be igsact,--the sign of
Aquarius.  Aquarius, according to the old Chaldean system, is wot's called
an Air Sign, and the new powers waking in us all--coming down into our
world now--will be ruled by the element of air.  The Age of Pisces, a
Water Sign, is just finished and done with.  We are entering another
period.  A new Age is beginning--the Age of Air.'  And he glanced about
him as though to catch any evidence of challenge.

'What is an Age?' asked a thin voice from the rear.  It was not hostile,
and heads were turned to find the questioner, but without success.

'An accomplice,' muttered the habitual interrupter to himself.
No one noticed the comment, and Wimble, now completely captured by the
collective sympathy, even wondered what he meant.

'I'll tell you,' continued the lecturer, and referred to the sheet of
notes in his hand.  'I'll tell you again with pleasure.'
He emphasised the word 'again.'  The glasses were readjusted.  With a
certain air of mystery, as though he knew far more than he cared to
impart, he read aloud, emphasising frequent passages as his habit was, and
making here and there effective and semi-theatrical pauses.  Behind this
cheapness, however, burned obviously a deep sincerity and belief.  He
deemed himself a prophet, and he knew a prophet's proverbial fate.

'Astronomers tell us that our sun and his fam'ly of planets revolve around
a central sun, which is millions of miles distant,' he read slowly, 'and
that it requires about 26,000 years to make one revolution.'

Remembering one of his most successful Primers, Wimble sat forward on his
chair, all eagerness.  Here was what the critic called a 'fact' at any
rate.

'This orbit is called the Zodiac,' continued the other, 'and it is divided
into twelve signs.'  He mentioned them, beginning with Aries and Taurus,
and ending with Aquarius and Pisces.  'Now, you asked what is an Age,
didn't you?'  He paused a second.  'Well, our solar system takes a bit
over 2000 years to pass through each of these Signs, and this time is the
measurement of an Age.  And with each Age certain new things 'appen.'

He made this announcement with a certain mysterious significance.

'Certain things 'appen to the planet and to us as lives on it.  Certain
changes come.  They're sure as summer and winter is sure--that is, you can
count on them.  Those who know can count on them--prophets and people with
inner vision.  There you get prophecy and the meaning of prophecy.
Vision!'  And without a vision the people perish--miss their chances, that
is.  The seers, the mystics, always know and see ahead, and this end of
the Age--and of the world as it's sometimes called stupidly--has been
prophesied by many.'

The audience was on tiptoe with anticipation.  Each individual possibly
hoped that certain personal peculiarities of his own were going to be
explained, made wonderful.  Wimble was particularly aware of this
excitement; it dawned upon him that he was about to receive an
explanation, and a semi-scientific explanation too, of his own strange
ideas and feelings.  He glanced across at Joan.  She seemed, to his
amazement, asleep; her eyes were closed, at any rate; her attention was
not held.  He wanted to poke her.  He wanted to say 'I told you so,' or
rather 'You told me so.'  But the speaker had ended his pause, and, to
Wimble's delight, was explaining that this movement of the sun passes
through the Zodiacal Signs in reverse order--'precession of the
equinoxes,' as it is called--Pisces therefore preceding Aquarius instead
of following it.  Here was another 'fact' that his Knowledge Primer
justified.

The personal anticipation in the audience was not immediately satisfied,
however.  The speaker intensified it first by a slight delay.  Aware that
he held the minds before him, he took his time.

'Now, these Signs'--lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper and fixing
them upon a woman in the front row, who at once showed nervousness, as
though she would believe black was white, if only he would stare at some
one else--' these Signs ain't just dead things.  They reveal and express
and convey intelligent life.  They're immense intelligences, they're
Zodiacal Intelligences.  That's wot they are.  The 'ole universe,
remember, is alive, and you and I ain't the only living beings in it, nor
the 'ighest either.  We're not the only _bodies_.  No one can say wot
constitoots a body, a living body, nor define it.  Our planet is a
tuppeny-'alfpenny affair compared to the others, and we're nothing but a
lot of hinsects like ants and so forth on it.  But if the 'ole universe is
alive--and we know it is----'

'Hanwell,' interrupted the angry man.

'----each and every part of it must be alive too.  And you can't leave out
the planets, stars, and suns, the most magnificent bodies, called the
'eavenly bodies, as you know.  They're all living bodies.  They're the
bodies of beings, living beings, but beings far higher than wot we are.
And the Zodiacal Signs are 'igher still.  They represent functions of the
universe, as the ancients knew quite well. They're a kind of intelligence
we may call per'aps a Group Intelligence.'

Again he paused a moment.  Then, as no interruption came, he went on with
greater emphasis than before:

'Now, each of these Zodiacal Intelligences--as the sun, with our little
earth alongside, passes through it--rules over its partickler period.
With every period we enter a new current of forces.  Each period,
therefore, of about 2000 years has new Gods, new characteristics, new
types of 'uman beings with new tendencies and powers and possibilities in
them--a new point of view, if you like to call it so, or, as we Aquarians
call it, a new consciousness.  Well, the Aquarius Sign just beginning, is
an Air Sign.  We're getting our new powers, our new point of view and
hattitude, our new consciousness--from the air.'

In his excitement and deep belief the word 'air' was dangerously near
'hair,' but no one smiled.  Perhaps even the critic experienced similar
difficulties in his home circle that prevented his noticing it, or caring
to take advantage of it if he did.

'I've already referred,' the speaker continued, 'to its effect on the
physical plane, new inventions and the like, and 'ow men now navigate the
air as fish do the sea, and send their thoughts spinning round the world
with the speed of lightning.  That's easy enough.  I mean, you can all see
it for yourselves.  The areoplane's a fac' nobody can't get away from,
whichever way you take it.  But the effect on the spiritual plane is not
so simple.  It's not so easy to describe--far from it, I admit.  When a
new mode of consciousness begins to hoperate in men and women, they find
difficulty in expressing it.  They're puzzled a bit.  They don't know
where they are with it quite.  Those 'oo get it first are called quacks
and charlituns, and maybe swindlers too.  The slower ones regard them with
suspicion, and they may think themselves lucky if they 'ain't stoned or
burned alive or crucified as they once was.'

He smiled, and the audience smiled deprecating with him.

'And the chief reason for their difficulty,' he went on, 'is simply this:
They 'aven't got the language.  Nor the words.  That's it.  The words
describe the experiences of a new type of consciousness don't exist at
first.  They come later, slowly, gradually.  They evolve as the new powers
in the race evolve.'

He took his glasses off and wiped them carefully.

'So wot's the result?' he asked.  'Why, this.  There's only _feeling_
left.  The people that first get the new consciousness feel it in them.
But they can't prove it to others because their power is small.  And they
can't explain it in words, because the words don't exist.  So there you
are.  Only the truth is there too jest the same.'

The challenge in his tone was unmistakable, but no one took it up.
The critic was making notes on his cuff and probably had not heard it.
Some one coughed, however, and feet shuffled here and there.

'_I_ know it's true, and some of you 'ere in front of me know it's true,'
the speaker resumed quickly, his eyes alight and intense conviction in his
tone and manner, 'but we can't do more at first than _feel_ it and be
glad.  All we can do is to show it in our lives.  We can live it.  We can
feel the joy and speed and lightness of the air, and we can live it, show
it.  We can express it that way, leaving the words to follow in good time.
And that's a lot, for example guides the world.'

A murmur of applause greeted the emphatic statement, and Wimble, for one,
was tempted to rise on his toes with waving hands and give his confession
of faith in no uncertain voice.  This railway guard, half quack, half
prophet, this man of the people whose knowledge was as faulty as his
grammar, had offered the first explanation he had yet heard of his own
strange attitude to life and of his experiences since boyhood.  This man,
similarly, had caught his secret from the air.  His exposition might be as
exaggerated and wild as the critic suggested, yet it was somewhere true,
he felt.  The man, owing to his very ignorance perchance, had caught at
the skirts of a new and mighty truth that in a century would have become a
commonplace, but that at the present moment caused others with better
education than himself to talk of Hanwell.  Wimble felt this excitement in
him--to get up before them all and say that he, too, had felt and tried to
live this light, new, swift and spontaneous airy consciousness.
The impulse, the generous desire to help, caught at him.  Another minute
and he might have been on his toes, bearing stammering witness to the
truth that was in him.  The lecturer himself, however, prevented.

'We stand to-day,' he said, using his notes again, 'upon the cusp of the
Aquarian Age.  The Piscean Age lies behind us.  The Zodiacal Intelligences
of that Piscean Age were watery powers and water was its keynote and its
symbol.  It was the Age of Jesus.  Now, listen, please, listen closely,
for 'istory bears me out.'

He moved nearer to the edge of the platform, and heads were craned forward
to lose no word.

'The sun,' he said, in a lowered tone, 'entered the sign of Taurus in the
days of our pre'istoric Adam.  That was the Taurian Age.  Next came the
Arian Age--about the time that Abra'am lived, and with Aries the ram
replaced the bull.  With the rise of the Roman Empire the sun entered the
sign of Pisces, and the Piscean Age began.  It took the fish for its
symbol.  That was the Christian Dispensation with its new outlook and
attitude, its new powers, its new type of consciousness.  Jesus introduced
water baptism, and water became the symbol of purification.  It was a
watery sign, as I told you.  While it lasted, as you'll notice--the last
2000 years--this Piscean Age, with a fish for its symbol, 'as certainly
been one of water, and the many uses of that element 'ave been emphasised,
and sea and lake and river navigation have been brought to a 'igh degree
of efficiency.'

He waited for the impression this was bound to produce.  It was evidenced
by deep silence, broken only by the rustle of paper and soft garments.

'Jesus Himself referred to the beginning of this Aquarian Age in these
words,' he continued solemnly and reverently, 'as you'll find in one of
Wisdom Books they don't include in our own Bible:

    'And then the man who bears the pitcher will walk forth across an
     arc of 'eaven; the sign and signet of the Son of Man will stand
     forth in the Eastern sky.  The wise will then lift up their
     heads and know that the redemption of the earth is near.'

He paused significantly.  Then he added, his hands raised aloft and his
eyes turned toward the ceiling:

'We're already in it, the new Dispensation, the New Age--air.'

'Compressed air,' added the critic, after his long silence.

'Bravo! bravo!' exclaimed Wimble, unable to suppress himself.

'But surely a new Age can only begin in each person individually, and not
in any other sense,' put in the thin voice that had spoken once before.

Unperturbed, the speaker repeated with deep emphasis, his eyes and hands
still raised aloft:

'And air means spiritual.  The Aquarian Age is pre-eminently a spiritual
age; and its meaning may now be apprehended by multitudes of people,
'ungry for truth, who will now come--are already coming--into an advanced
spiritual consciousness.  Our air-bodies is being quickened.'

The last few words seemed to produce a strange effect upon the chief
critic.  Apparently they enraged him.  He fidgeted, half rising from his
chair as though about to make a violent speech in reply.  In the end,
however, he did nothing beyond shrugging his shoulders, with a muttered
'Consciousness indeed!  Why, you don't even know the meaning of the word!'
He leaned back in his seat, unwilling to stay, yet too annoyed to leave;
he resigned himself, keeping his great onslaught perhaps for the close of
the meeting.  Then, suddenly changing his mind, he leaped to his feet.
But the lecturer was before him.  In a ringing voice that held his
audience and drowned the interruption, he dominated the room.
He was about to satisfy the anticipation raised some ten minutes earlier.
He took his listeners into his confidence.

'Now, ladies and gentlemen,' he cried, 'or brothers and sisters, as I'd
prefer to call you if you've no objection, wot is it we Aquarians means
when we talk of air, when we speak of air as the sign of the New Age?  We
call it spiritual.  Wot do we reely mean by that?  'Ow can we show it in
our lives?  Let us come down to plain words, the language of the street.'

There was again a rustle, as pencils and paper were prepared anew for
taking notes.

'It means this--to put it quite plainly, simply: It means living lightly,
carelessly, spontaneously, as a bird does, so to speak, 'oose 'ome is air
and 'oo works 'ard without taking too much thought.  It means living by
faith and that means--' he uttered the next words with great emphasis--
'living by the subconsciousness--by intuition.'

'A bird's heart,' he cried, 'lies in the centre of its body.  _We_ must
live from the centre too.

'That's the secret, and that's the first sign that you're getting it.
There you get the first 'int of this new Aquarian Age, and from the
moment we entered it--not so long ago, forty years or so--this idea of the
Subconsciousness 'as showed itself as the key-word of the day.
It's everywhere already.  Even the scientific men 'as got it.  Bergson
began with 'is intuition, and professors like Frood of Vienna and Young of
Zurich caught on like lightning.  William James too, and a 'undred others.
Why, it's got down into our poietry and novels, and even the pore old
dying pulpits 'ave a smack at it just to try and keep their heads above
water.

'To live by your subconscious knowledge, instead of by your slow old
calculating reason, means a new, airy way of living.  And it's spiritual,
I say, because it stands for the beginning of a new knowledge and
understanding, and therefore a new sympathy with each other.  With
everybody! All sorts of powers lie in our subconsciousness, powers of the
'ole race, powers forgotten and powers to come, and it's in touch with
greater powers still that so far 'ave been beyond us as a race.  All
knowledge 'ides there--God.

'And if you rely upon it, it will guide you--and guide you quickly,
surely, in a flash.  Nor you won't go wrong either, for in your
subconsciousness you touch everybody else; we all join on down
there--within--and that's where the Kingdom of 'eaven lies--and if you
rely upon the Kingdom of 'eaven it will guide you right.  We all touch
'ands if you go deep enough, and that means brotherhood, don't it?  For it
means sympathy, understanding, love.  The 'ottentot's your neighbour.'

He stepped back, squaring his shoulders and drawing a deep breath as he
surveyed his audience.

'Well, it's only just beginning.  Some of us, many of us likely, don't
know about it yet, don't _feel_ it.  We're only ankle-deep as yet.  And
those 'oo ain't aware of this great subconscious life, no amount of
argument or explanation won't put it into them.  A new Age touches
individuals first, one 'ere, one there.  The end of the world, as some
call it, 'appens to each heart alone, as somebody said just now.  But
it'll come to all in the end.  It's coming now.  We're in Aquarius, and
sooner or later we'll _all_ get into the air and know it.  And the new
inventions, the new tricks everywhere, as I told you, are paving the way
already on the physical plane so that even the hintellectuals and
materialists are bound to feel its bigger side before long.

'Air! Why, think of it, and wot a lovely symbol it is! It's everywhere.
It flows.  Nothing belonging to the sky is stationary.  It all moves.
Light grows and wanes, wind falls and rises, clouds, birds pass rapidly
across it.  It 'as nothing rigid about it anywhere.  Breath is the first
sign of life in your body when you're born, and the breath of the spirit
is the first sign of life in your soul when you are born again.  And the
bird, remember, the natural in'abitant of air, 'as its heart in the centre
of its body!

'The subconscious powers, the subconscious life--yes, that's the secret.
To rely upon it, live and act by it, means to act with the 'ole world at
once and know the 'appiness of brother'ood and love.  It means to lose
yourself--your little conscious, surface, limited self--in the bigger
ocean of the air.  'Itherto it's been called living by faith and prayer.
That's all right enough, but it ain't enough.  That means touching the
subconscious at moments only.  We want to touch it always and every
minute.  In this new Aquarian Age it will be at our fingers' ends, so to
speak.  The "sub" will disappear.  The subconscious will become the
conscious.  We shall know everything, and everything at once; we shall be
everywhere, and everywhere at once.' He raised his voice.  'We shall be
ONE, and know that we are ONE.  We shall 'ave spiritual consciousness.'

The noise of an overturned chair was heard.  Outside the shrill blast of
distant factory whistles suggested lunch and food.  The critic, pushing
hastily past the hushed sitters near him, made his way to the door.
As he reached the passage he turned.  'That's the best recipe for hysteria
I ever heard,' he cried back, 'and the sooner you're safe in Hanwell, the
better for the world!'--and vanished.

It was an abrupt and violent interruption, but yet it startled no one; the
thread of interest was not broken; a few heads turned to look, and then
faced towards the lecturer again.  A general sigh was heard, expressive of
relief.  The audience settled itself more comfortably, and a deeper
concentration of interest was felt at once.  The removal of the hostile
element produced an immediate increase of attentive earnestness.
It showed first in the lecturer's face; his eyes grew fixed and steady,
his manner more confident, more impressive, and his tone of voice had a
more authoritative ring than before.

He leaned forward with an air of mysterious intimacy, as though about to
share a secret knowledge he had not dared to divulge before a scoffer.
There was a booming note about his voice that thrilled.  The charlatan
that hides in every human soul slipped out, unconsciously perhaps but
unmistakably.  It was this, possibly, that affected Wimble as he watched
and waited, so eagerly attentive; or, possibly, it was some uncanny
anticipation of what he was about to hear.  An emotion, at any rate, and
one shared by others in the small packed room, rose suddenly in his soul.
A little shiver ran down his spine, he shuddered, as once before he had
shuddered in Maida Vale.

'Before we close this little meeting,' the deep voice rang, 'and before
you go your way and I go mine, per'aps not to come across each other's
path again for a tidy while--I want to just say this.  It's as well we
all should know it, so as we are prepared.'

He fixed his glowing eyes on one of his audience--on Wimble, it so
happened--and went on slowly, choosing his words with care and uttering
them with a conviction that was not without its impressiveness:

'I want to warn you all, to give you this little word of warning.  For I'm
led to believe--in fact, I may say it's been given me--that a dying Age--
don't die without an effort.  An expiring Age, so to say, seeks to prolong
its life.  With the result that, just before it passes, its
characteristics is first intensified.  The Powers that have ruled over us
for 2000 years make themselves felt with extra strength; and these Powers,
seeing that their time is past, are no longer right.  They're no longer
what we need.  Good and right in their time, they now seem wrong, and out
of place.  They're evil.  We see them as evil, any'ow, though they make
for good in another way.  I don't know if you foller me.  Wot I mean is
that, when an old Age is passing and a new Age coming to birth--there's
conflict.'

There was a renewed rustling, as this sentence was written down on many
half-sheets that had so far been blank.  But Wimble had no need to make a
note of it.  He remembered that walk down Maida Vale of several months
before, and again the singular shudder passed like a little wind of ice
along his nerves.

'Conflict means trouble,' continued the speaker amid a solemn hush,
'and nothing big ever comes to birth without labour and travail and pain.
We must expect this pain and travail, and be ready for it.  A new 'eaven
and a new earth will come, but they won't come easily.  They will be
preceded by a mighty effort of the old ones to keep going a bit longer
first.  A 'uge up'eaval, physically and spiritually, will take place
first--on the earth, that is, as well as in our 'earts--before we all get
caught up to meet the Lord in the air.'

His sentences grew slower and more emphatic, more charged with conviction
and with warning.  He made privileged communications.  There were pauses
between his utterances:

'I warn you, I prepare you, so that when it comes you will be ready and
prepared--not for yourselves, mind, but so as you may 'elp others wot
won't quite realise quite wot it all means.

'For there'll be _sacrifice_ as well.

'There's always a sacrifice when a New Age catches 'old of our old earth,
and our old earth will shake and tremble in the re-making, and some of us
will shake and tremble too.  You'll feel, maybe, that shudder in advance
and know what it means.  Signs and wonders, men's 'earts failing them for
fear, and the instability of all solid things.

'There will be _death_.

'Death takes its 'undreds, aye, its thousands at a time like that, and
many--the best and finest usually--go out before their time, as it seems.
But--mark this--they go out--to _h_elp!

'There comes in the sacrifice.

'They'll be taken off to 'elp, taken into the air, but taken away from
those they leave be'ind.'

His tone grew lower, and a deeper hush passed over the little crowd before
him.  There was dull fire in his eyes.  An atmosphere of the prophet
clothed him.

'It's just there,' he emphasised, 'that we--we who know--can 'elp.

'For we know that death is nothing more nor less than slipping back into
your own subconsciousness, and so becoming greater and finer and more
active--more useful, too, and with grander powers--than we ever 'ad in our
limited, imperfect bodies.  And we know that this separate life, ended at
death, is nothing but an episode in our universal life which death can
never put an end to because it is imperishable.  We are part of the
universe, not of this little planet alone.

'There'll be mourning, but we can 'elp dry their tears; there'll be
terror, but we can take their fear away; there'll be loneliness, but we
can show them--show 'em by the way we live--that there'll be reunion
better than before.  We all meet in the sub-consciousness, and know each
other face to face.  For it means reunion in the air, which is everywhere
at once and universal, and stands for that denial of space and time--that
spiritual haffirmation--we Aquarians call NOW.'

He held out his hands as in blessing over the intently listening and
expectant throng.  Gazing above their heads into space, he appeared to
concentrate his thoughts a moment.  Then his face lightened, as though his
mental effort had succeeded.

'After every meeting,' he then went on, but this time in a conversational
tone, as friend to friend, the prophet and his flock put aside, 'it is our
custom, as you know, to find a carrying-away Sentence.  Something you can
take away and remember easily.  Something that sums up all we've talked
about together.  Something to keep in your minds and think about every
minute of the day until we meet again.  Something you can try to live in
your daily lives.'

He waited a moment to ensure that all listened closely.

'The sentence I've chosen this time will 'elp you to remember all we've
said to-day.  It's a symbol that includes the 'ole promise of the air
that's so soon to be fulfilled in us.

'I'll now give it out--if yer all ready.'

The expectant, eager, attentive faces were a convincing proof that all
were ready and listening attentively.

With a happy and confiding smile, the speaker then pronounced the
carrying-away sentence:

'The 'eart of a bird lies in the _centre_ of its body.'



CHAPTER XVI


The carrying-away sentence stuck in Wimble's mind as he journeyed back to
the flat on the top of a motor omnibus with Joan, for it expressed a
concrete fact, a fact that he could understand.  'The heart of a bird lies
in the centre of its body,' he murmured to himself happily.  It gave him a
secret thrill of joy and wonder.  His own heart, thrust to the left though
it was, felt ageless.  The happy, invincible optimism of the bird was in
him.  To live from the centre was a neat way of expressing what he had
been trying to do for so long, and he had not been far wrong in taking the
life and attitude of a bird for his symbol.  It meant neglecting the
strained, laborious effort of the calculating mind, and leaning for help
and guidance upon something bigger, deeper, less fallible than the
strutting conscious self.  The railway guard labelled it the subconscious,
that mysterious region in which every soul is linked to every other soul,
involving thus that comprehensive sympathy which is the beginning possibly
of brotherhood.  He phrased it wildly, but that was what he meant.
The bigger self that lay like an ocean behind his separate, personal
_thought_ shared everything with every one.  The joy, the wisdom of the
birds! The elasticity and brilliance of the universal air! The divine
carelessness that flows from living at the centre!

    'Flow, fly, flow!
     Wherever I am, I _go_;
     I live in the air
     Without thought or care . . . !'

'Daddy, you mustn't hum in public.  It sounds so unusual, and people are
staring,' Joan reminded him.  'And you'll forget your hat and leave it
behind, if you don't put it on.'

He smoothed his ruffled hair and placed his black billycock upon it.

'So you've woken up at last, have you?' he replied, laughing at her.
'You slept through most of the lecture.  What did you make of it,--eh?'

She looked at him with a puzzled expression in her soft, bright eyes.

'D'you think it was all nonsense?  Was it true, I mean?' he repeated.

'He didn't lie, but he didn't tell the truth,' she said at once.
'Besides, I wasn't asleep.  I heard it all.'

'You mean he didn't explain it properly?' he asked.

'It was the wrong way,' she said.

'Ah! words----'

'He ought to have danced it,' she said suddenly with decision.  'It's too
quick, too flashing for words.  _I_ could have shown it to them easily, by
dancing it.'

He remembered the amazing ideas her dancing gestures on the roof had once
put into him.  Then, thinking of the teachers of the world conveying their
meaning by dancing and gestures from the pulpits, he chuckled.

'Shall we join the Aquarians?' he asked slyly.  'What do you say to
becoming members of their Society?'

She took her answer out of his own mind, it seemed.

'If you belong, you belong.  You needn't join.  Societies are only cages,
Daddy.  You're caught and you can't fly on.'

'We could spend the money better, yes,' he mumbled.  'Garden-gloves for
mother, a lawn-mower, a hurricane lantern for stormy nights or
something----'

'Much, much better,' she agreed.

'When once we've found the cottage,' he went on vaguely.

'It's there,' she interrupted instantly.  'Let's get the hurricane
lantern.  I'd love to choose it with you.  May I?'

Wimble looked about him as the heavy vehicle lumbered clumsily along its
swaying journey.  The soft autumn sunshine of hazy gold lay on the
streets, but there was a nip, a sharpness in the air that put an electric
sparkle into everything.  The solid world was really lighter than it
looked.  There was a covert brilliance ready to dart forth into
swift-rushing flame.  He felt the throbbing sheen and rustle in the golden
light, and his heart sang with joy above the heavy streets and pavements.
He was aware of a point of view that almost denied weight to inert matter,
making the dead mass of the universe alive and dancing.  This nip and
sparkle in the air interpenetrated all these fixed and heavy things, these
laborious structures, these rigid forms, dissolving them into flowing,
ever-changing patterns of fluid loveliness.  He saw them again as powder,
the parks and road blown everywhere, the pavements lifted, the walls wide
open to the sky.  The solid earth became transparent, flooded with light
and air.  It seemed etherealised.  It spread great golden wings towards
the blazing sun and limitless sky.  Air knew no fixed and rigid forms.
Societies, of course, were only cages.  He saw the huge cage of the earth
blow open.  Humanity flew out at last. . . .

'We'll get three, and at once,' he remarked, referring to the lanterns.
'And a pair of hedge-clippers as well, a ladder for the fruit trees, two
pair of best garden-gloves for mother, and a revolving summer-house where
she can follow the sun--and sit in peace.'

That ridiculous lecture acted like some mental cuckoo that had chucked
him finally out of the nest into the air.  If he did not actually fly,
he certainly walked on air, with the same faith that had once been claimed
for walking on the sea.  He became a daring and a happy soul.
Air represented a confident and free imagination in which everything was
possible.  Earth he still loved, but only as a place to land on and take
off from.  Imagination and intuition must still, at his present stage, be
backed and checked by reason; earth was still there to sleep on.  But that
spontaneous way of living which is air, using the ground merely as the
swallow does--a swallow that exists in space and almost entirely neglects
its legs--this careless and new attitude leaped forward in him towards
realisation.  A bird, he remembered, though apparently so free and
careless, works actually with an ordered precision towards great purposes.

He seemed conscious suddenly of a complete and absolute independence,
beyond the need of any one's comprehension.  Few, if any, would understand
him, but that did not matter.  The need to be understood was left behind,
below.  He had soared beyond the loneliness even of a god.  He felt very
humble, but very happy.  And the loneliness would be but temporary, for
the rest of the world would follow before long. . . .

The motor omnibus lurched and stopped with grunting noises.  Wimble, led
by his more nimble daughter, climbed down the narrow spiral stair.
He glanced upwards longingly as he descended.  He saw the flashing birds.
'The brotherhood of the air,' he thought.  'Oh, how the earth must yearn
for it!'

'There's an ironmonger,' cried Joan, pointing across the road.  And they
went in to buy the hurricane lanterns.  They assumed, that is, that the
cottage was already found.

Then, after luncheon, while Mother criticised the garden-gloves, observing
with regard to the hurricane lanterns that it was 'living backwards,
rather, to buy things before we have the place to use them in,' he took
from the book-shelf his copy of the _Queen of the Air_ and read once again
a favourite passage.  It was thumb-marked, the margin scored by his pencil
long years ago.

' . . . the bird, in which the breath, or spirit, is more full than in any
other creature and the earth-power least. . . .  It is little more than a
drift of the air brought into form by plumes; the air is in all its
quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh, and glows with air
in its flying, like a blown flame: it rests upon the air, subdues it,
surpasses it, outraces it;--_is_ the air, conscious of itself, conquering
itself, ruling itself.

'Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air.
All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit
together in its song . . . unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in
its gladness, interpreting all intense passion through the soft spring
nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping
and twittering among the boughs and hedges through heat of day, like
little winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals
of the wild rose. . . .'

His reading was interrupted by the entrance from the passage of his wife,
her face heavily veiled; she was dressed for the street, in solemn black;
she wore a mysterious yet very confident expression.  'Joe dear, I'm going
out.  I have an appointment at three o'clock sharp.  I mustn't be late.'

He watched her with an absent-minded air for a moment, as though he saw
her for the first time almost; all he could remember about her just then
was that during the cinema performance she had said with proud
superiority: 'I'm glad I'm English.'  Then, recognising his wife, he
realised that she was going to confession, of course, for he guessed it by
the way she folded her hands, waiting patiently for a word of
commendation.

'All right, my dear,' he said, 'and good luck.  You'll be back for tea, I
suppose.'  He rose and kissed her on her heavy veil, and she went out with
a smile.  'I'm so glad,' he added.

'That's her stage,' he thought to himself, 'and the critic and the
Aquarian quack have their stage, and I have mine.  It's all right.'

There were immense tracts of experience in everybody, unknown, unused, but
waiting to be known and used.  Some people lived in one tract only, caged
and fixed, unaware of the vast freedom a little farther outside
themselves.  Different people knew different tracts, each positive that
his own particular tract alone was right--as for him, assuredly, it was--
thinking also that it was the only one, the whole, which, assuredly, it
was not.  There was, however, assuredly, a point of view, the bird's, that
saw all these tracts at once, the boundaries and divisions between them
mere walls erected by the mind in ignorance.  The bird's-eye view looked
down and saw the landscape whole, the divisions unreal, the separation
false.  This attitude was the attitude of air; air unified; the unity of
humanity was realised.  Consciousness, focussed hitherto upon little
separate tracts with feeble light, blazed upon all at once with shining
splendour.

It was true.  A great world-telepathy was being 'engendered,' barriers of
creed and class were crumbling, democracy was combing out its mighty
wings; the 'tracts' inhabited by Mother, Tom, the quack, the critic, by
himself and by Joan, by that narrow snob and gossip at the tea-party who
asked, 'Who _was_ she?'--all these would be seen as adjoining little
strips belonging to the universal air which knows neither strips,
divisions nor boundaries.

A great light blazed into his heart.  He wondered.  Apparently it was the
little, simple, insignificant people, and not the great minds of the day,
who were the first to become aware of air.  The great ones were too rigid.
Air rushed first into the hearts of the uneducated, the ignorant, the
unformed and informal--the little children of the race.  It has been ever
so.  The learned, knowing too much, solid with facts and explanations, are
no longer fluid.  They neither flow nor fly.  The brotherhood of air, he
grasped, would come first through the untaught babes and little children
of earth's vast, scattered family.

And, while these vague reflections danced across his mind, dropping their
curious shadows upon his own little tract of experience, his wife was
whispering her sins to another mind who should forgive them for her, the
critic was writing a vehement pamphlet to prove that he alone was right,
Tom, in the office, was scheming new plans for making money that should
satisfy his natural desires for pleasure and self-indulgence, the quack
was elaborating Zodiacal Explanations in his studio next to his Private
Consulting Room, and Joan----

He listened.  A light, tripping step went down the corridor, passed his
door and began to climb the ladder to the open skylight in the hall.
He listened closely, eagerly, a new rhythm catching at his heart.
The little song came to him faintly through the obstructing barriers of
brick and mortar.  He caught the tap and tremble of her feet upon the
roof.

Joan sang and danced above the world.



CHAPTER XVII


'Careless as a bird!  Bird-happy and bird-wise,' he murmured to himself
as they moved in a month later.  For he had found a cottage as by
instinct.  It was not on the agents' list of modern, ugly and comfortless
cages, but was an old-world little place that had caught his eye by the
corner of the lane as he returned to the country station, weary and
almost faith-less, after a vain inspection.  A white board suddenly
peered at him through the branches of a yew, there were roses up the
walls, a tiny fountain played on the lawn, and beyond he caught a glimpse
of a neglected orchard, sloping fields of yellow ragwort, and a stream.
The stream, moreover, ran under the road just there, so that he could
look down into it from the old stone bridge.  The water ran swiftly, but
deep enough to grow long weeds of green and gold that swung with the
current like thick fairy hair.  Two or three silver birches shone and
rustled by the wicket-gate. He went in.  A robin hopped up, inspected
him, and hopped away into the shadow of the yew.

The interior seemed to him like a bit of forest--the beams, the
panelling, the dark, stained settles. Yet there was a bathroom, too, the
kitchen was large and light, the bedrooms airy, the living-rooms just
right in size and number.  The front windows looked out across the
rose-plot to the little green where the geese were gabbling, while the back
ones opened straight into the orchard, where fruit and walnut trees stood
ankle deep in uncut grass.  The windows, too, were wide and high, letting
in big stretches of the sky.  Also, there were a mulberry-bush and
several heavy quince trees. And the stream ran singing and bubbling
between the orchard and the farther fields, where, amid the sprinkled
gold of the ragwort, scuttled countless rabbits.

Moreover, it was cheap, the drains were safe, the church was as
picturesque as an old-fashioned Christmas card, and the vicar was brother
to a peer.  Thus there was something for everybody.  The nest was found.
Mother inspected it in due course and gave her modified approval;
Tom said it 'sounded ripping,' he would 'run down for week-ends'
whenever he could; and Joan, catching her breath when she saw it first
on the afternoon of a golden-brown October day, felt a lump in her throat
and moisture in her eyes, such happiness rose in her breast.  She stood
with her father in the sandy lane,--Mother had gone inside at once,--the
larches rustling and the excited geese examining their stiff town
clothing from behind. On the topmost branch of an apple tree a big brown
thrush was singing its heart out over the garden, its small packed
outline silhouetted against the pale blue sky.  Joan caught her father's
hand.

'Look!' she whispered, pointing.  'Listen!'

He did so. He felt the strange excitement in the child.  Her lips were
parted and her shining eyes turned heavenwards a moment.  The thrush
poured forth its liquid song deliciously; and the sound sank into his
heart as though it expressed the full happiness of the air that welcomed
them to the cottage and the garden.  He experienced surely something of
the soft air-magic as he stood there watching, listening.  The natural
joy and sweetness of it touched him deeply.  And his daughter sang a
strange thing then, murmuring it to herself. He only just caught
the curious words:

    'There's a bird for me
     On the apple tree!
     It's explaining all the garden!'

Up the scaffolding of the quaint phrases he passed, as it were, with her
into the clear air beside the singing bird: that scrap of nonsense
'explaining all the garden' did the trick.  A sack of meanings seemed
emptied before him out of the sweet October sky. The interesting,
valuable ideas in life began, he realised, just where language stops--
intelligible, sensible language, that is. Then came either poetry,
legend, nonsense, or else mere silence. Joan used a combination of the
former.

'Words are parvenu people,' he recalled a Primer sentence, 'as compared
with thought and action.  Communications between God and man must always
be either above or below them; for with words come in translations.'

'Explaining all the garden!'  The touch of nonsense brought a thousand
'translations' into his mind. The air was full of fluttering meanings
that showered about him. He balanced aloft on the twig beside the singing
thrush, his sight darting, as with the bird's-eye view, upon recent
happenings. He read various translations instantaneously.

In front of him stood the cottage and garden, the fields and trees and
stream he had dreamed about with his daughter--an accomplished, solid
fact. It had come as by magic, materialised by thought and desire, and
yet, as Mother said, 'by chance.'  But the chance included method,
because Fate obeyed a confident Belief.  And circumstances were moulded
or modified by faith. He and Joan somehow held the sure sweetness of
fulfilment in their minds from the beginning; they had always believed,
indeed had known, the cottage would be found.  And it had been found.
He had not fussed nor worried; there had been no friction due to the grit
of doubt. Like his queer, spontaneous daughter, he had believed in
his dream--and at the same time kept his eyes wide open like a hawk.

As he stood there, listening to the song of the thrush and aware of its
poise on the swaying twig balanced so steadily, yet alert for spontaneous
flight in any direction, these fluttering translations of the child's
nonsense words shot through him. The joy of the happy thrush shone in his
heart, explaining the garden that was life.

The bird, at that moment, flew off with a whirr of wings, still singing
as it vanished with an undulating swoop over the roof towards the
orchard.  Across the patch of watery blue sky he had been watching shot
half a dozen swallows, then intent only upon darting insects, although on
the eve of their huge journey of ten thousand miles.  Beyond them two
plover tumbled like blown leaves towards the ground, yet rising again
instantly before they touched it . . . and into his hand he felt Joan's
fingers creep softly. He looked down into her eyes, moist with
excitement, joy, and wonder. The magic of the air seemed all about them,
in their minds and hearts and very bodies even.

'You've found a real nest, Daddy, but we can travel everywhere from
here.'  It was said simply, as though a bird had learned to speak.
'Think of the journeys we shall make--just by staying here!'

'The cottage seems swung in the branches, doesn't it?' he replied.
'Come on, now; let's go inside.'  And he walked across the lawn, lifting
his feet quickly, lightly, as though he feared his weight might hurt the
earth, yet still more as though he might any instant spring into the air
and follow the thrush, the plover, or the swallows.

Upon the threshold of the open door, at that minute, Mother faced them.
Having made her inspection of the arrangements and the furniture, all
that the workmen had done in the last few days, she came out to report.
She stood there very solidly, her feet in goloshes, planted tenaciously
upon the damp October earth. She was smiling contentedly; behind her
gleamed the white apron of the parlourmaid.  Tea obviously was ready and
she was waiting for them to come in.  A fire burned pleasantly in the
dining-room, glinting on a clean white table-cloth.  There were buttered
toast and a jug of cream--solid realities both.  This atmosphere of
wholesome, earthly comfort glowed about her. Her very smile conveyed it.

'Mother's settled down already,' Joan whispered.  'She likes it!
That means Tom'll like it too.  But she'll live indoors.'

In his own mind, however, rose another thought, although he agreed with
what she said. He was thinking how odd it was that Mother always appeared
to be settled in the mouth of a hole.  She stood, framed by the dark
doorway, as though a deep burrow stretched behind her and below.
The simile of the nervous badger, peering forth upon a dangerous upper
world, passed through him.  A great tenderness rose in his heart.
Mother, he knew, though she had done no actual work, had felt the move a
heavy strain.  To dig a new hole, of course, was a dusty and laborious
job, whereas to flutter across a few fields to another tree was but a
careless joy.

'I've been through all the rooms,' she said cautiously, as they went
down the passage, 'and everything seems very nice indeed, Joe.  The wood
makes it seem a bit dark, perhaps, but it's all very respectable.  And
the parlour looks really quite distinguished.  Tea's laid for us in the
dining-room.'

They went in; the fire shone brightly; the lamp was lit.  Mother moved
towards the great silver tea-pot, letting herself down with a sigh into
the black horsehair arm-chair.  It was as though she went down into the
earth.  He sat with his cup of tea in the wide settle of the ingle-nook,
and Joan, having first seen to her parents' wants, then took the corner
facing him.



They settled in. Yet this settling was characteristic of the family, for
whereas Mother settled down, Mr. Wimble and his daughter became
unsettled.  That is, they felt restless.  Mother, with the security of a
comfortable home and comfortable income at her back, cropped her food
safely, yet wondered why she felt dull and bored and lonely.  There is no
call to describe the actions and reactions of her familiar type to the
conditions of the quiet country life, and her chief tragedy that winter
was perhaps that when 'his lordship, the vicar,' called, he surprised her
in old garden clothes, the fire in the 'distinguished parlour'
(kept unused against just this particular event) unlighted, so that she
was obliged to receive him in the dark dining-room with the ungentlemanly
settles.

Joan and her father were unsettled for the very reason that made her
settled. Mother felt her feet. They felt their wings.

A week after the settling in, their restless feeling, wholly
unanticipated, came to a head. The windy skies were already calling the
swallows together swiftly, collecting their mobile squadrons in a few
hours for the grand southern tour. And these amazing birds seemed nothing
less than an incarnation of the air itself. There is nothing of earth
about them anywhere; their feet are too weak to stand on the ground;
every darting turn they make is a movement of the entire creature, rather
than of the head first and then the body; they have no necks, their
bullet heads turn simultaneously with the tail, and all at once. Joan and
her father watched them daily going about their careless, windy life,
gathering on the telegraph wires, giving the young ones hints, on the
wing to the very last minute. They had no packing-up to do.

'They'll be off soon now,' said Joan.  'Wherever they are, they go--don't
they?'  There was a tinge of restless desire in her eyes as she followed
their movements.

'A few days, yes,' said her father.  'About the middle of the month they
leave. _They_ know right enough.'

And two days later--it was October 15th--Joan woke at dawn and looked out
of her open window.  The twittering of many thousand voices had called
her out of sleep, but something in her heart had called her too.
It was very early, the daylight of dawn, yet not the daylight quite, and
everywhere, from fields and trees, the chorus of bird-life was audible.
Birds sing their best and loudest always in that half-hour which precedes
the actual dawn.  The volume is astonishing.  'As the real daylight
comes, it sinks and almost ceases, and never in the whole twenty-four
hours is there such an hour again.'  The entire air seemed calling
'good-bye and safe return' to those about to leave.

Joan ran and woke her father.  'They're off,' she whispered, as he
crawled out of his warm bed, careful not to waken his wife.  'Come and
say good-bye.'

The peculiar joy and mystery of early morning was in the quiet house and
in the sharp tang of the fresh, cool autumn air.  In nightgown and
pyjamas, a single rug about their shoulders, they leaned out
of the upper window.  The ivy rustled just beneath them on the wall,
there was a whisper among the yellow walnut leaves to their right, the
orchard trees hung still and motionless, breathing out the perfume of
earth and fruit and heavy dew.

The sky, however, was alive; it seemed all motion; even the streaky
clouds tinged with pale colour looked like stretched wings mightily
extended.  And the vague murmur of a flock of birds rose everywhere.
There was a hurricane of wings above the world, as the armies of the
swallows came carelessly together.  They left in scattered groups, but
with every party that left, another instantly assembled, born out of
empty space. Multitudes took the wing towards the sea, while other
darting multitudes collected instantly behind them.  The air, indeed, was
alive and whirring into a symbol of lovely, rushing flight--swarming,
settling, turning, wheeling in a turmoil of ascending and descending
feathers that yet expressed a design of ordered beauty.  Myriad clusters
formed, then instantly dispersed again, threaded together upon one
invisible pattern; now herded into a wedge, shaped like a wild black
comet, now circling, streaming, dividing, melting away into a living
cloud.  The evolutions were bewildering.

As the eastern horizon began to burn with red and gold, the wings took
colour faintly, brightening as an upward slant revealed their pallid
under-sides, then darkening again as they tilted backwards.
The swallows alternately focussed and dispersed. Separate hordes, turning
at high velocity with one accord, shot forth and away to the south. They
rose, they sank, they vanished. They went first to the coast; for their
migration, led by the infallible sense of orientation which is
subconscious knowledge, takes place chiefly in the night--in darkness.
Within a brief half-hour the whole of the immense army disappeared.
The sky was still and silent, motionless and empty.  The swallows were
gone.

'They've taken part of me with them,' whispered Joan, 'part of my
warmth,' and she drew the rug closer about her shoulders as the October
sun came up above the misty fields.

'They'll be in Algeria to-morrow,' sighed her father, 'and I'd like to be
there too.'  His thought went back to the sun-drenched garden where
nightingales sang in the February moonlight. . . .  The old romance
stirred in him painfully.  'Mother, poor old Mother,' he murmured to
himself, 'she seemed so wonderful then.  How strange!'  He felt himself
old suddenly.  He felt himself caught, caged--stuck.

'That's where I was born, wasn't it?' Joan asked, catching the sentence.
She straightened herself suddenly, throwing the rug aside; the sun shone
into her face and on her golden hair that fell rippling over her
nightgown.  The light gleamed, too, in her moistened eyes.  He saw joy
steal back upon her.  'But, Daddy,' she exclaimed with an odd touch of
confident wonder in her voice and look, 'we _can_ be there just the
same, if we want to.'  She raised herself on her toes a moment as though
she were going to dance or fly.  In the pale gold light of the sunrise
she looked like some ethereal bird of fire rising into the air.

'We can be everywhere--everywhere at once--really!  Don't you see?
We always want to be somewhere else anyhow.  That proves it.'

And as she said it, he remembered the cinema, and felt his wings again;
he was free, uncaged; of course he could go anywhere, everywhere at once
almost.  He knew himself eternally young.  He realised Air, that which is
everywhere at once and cannot age.  Earth obeys time, grows old, changes,
and eventually dies; but air is ever changeless, free of time altogether,
unageing.  It cannot wear away, it is invisible, omnipresent. The wings
of the spirit opened in him, rose into space and light, then flashed,
darting after the amazing swallows. 'Wherever I am, I go,' he hummed, as
he went softly back along the cold passage and crept cautiously into bed
beside his wife, who, heavily breathing still, had not moved since he
left her, and lay in ignorance of the sunrise, as also of the army of
happy wings that by now were already out of England and far across the
sea.

And, later in the day, as he stood with her near a gravel-pit beside the
road, watching a colony of busy starlings, she objected: 'What a noise
and fuss about nothing!  What a nuisance they are, Joe. _Do_ come on,
dear.  There's really nothing to watch, and I want to get in and change
my things in case any callers come.'

He remembered a passage about starlings written by a strenuous big-game
hunter, who yet had the air-magic in his blood.  He quoted it to her, as
best he could, and she said it was pretty:

'Happy birdies!  What a bore all morality seems, as one watches them.
How tiresome it is to be high in the scale (and human)!  Those who would
shake off the cobwebs--who are tired of teachings and preachings and
heavy-high novellings, who would see things anew, and not mattering,
rubbing their eyes and forgetting their dignities, missions, destinies,
virtues, and the rest of it--let them come and watch a colony of
starlings at work in a gravel-pit.'

'Yes,' he agreed, 'quite pretty. Selous got a glimpse there--didn't he?
--but only a glimpse.  The great thing is to see it _all_.  He forgot the
swallows.'

His thought ran on, fragments becoming audible sometimes.  'It's all one,
you see.  Stars and starlings are the same one thing, only differently
expressed. . . .  That's what genius does, of course.  Genius has the
bird's-eye point of view. . . .  It sees analogies everywhere, the
underlying unity of everything--sees the similar in the dissimilar.
It reduces the Many to the One,' he added in a louder tone, as a Primer
came opportunely to his support.

'I ask you, Mother,' he cried with enthusiasm, 'what else is genius but
that?  I ask you?'

'What?' said Mother, as they went indoors.



CHAPTER XVIII


Wimble watched the year draw to its close and run into the past.
Born slowly out of sullen skies, it had shaken off the glistening pearls
of April and slipped, radiant and laughing, into May; at the end of June,
full-bosomed still  and stately, it had begun to hasten, lest the roses
hold it prisoner for ever; pausing a moment in August, it looked out with
perfect eyes upon the world as from a pinnacle; then, poised and
confident, began the grand descent down the red slopes of Autumn into the
peace of winter and the snow.

Thus, at least, its history described itself in Wimble's thoughts,
because his little mind, standing on tiptoe, saw it whole and from above.
'You ought to publish it, dear,' said Mother, to whom he mentioned it one
December evening round the fire.  'You really ought to write it.'
He objected that everybody knew it just as well as he did.  'It's always
happening to everybody, so why should I remind them?'  'Because they
don't see it,' was her answer. 'Besides, they'd think you wonderful.'
But Wimble was no writer.  He shook his untidy head, yet secretly pleased
with his wife's remark that people don't see the obvious.  It was almost
an air-remark.  Mother was changing a little. . . . And he dozed in his
chair, thinking how easily the world calls a man wonderful--he has but
to startle it--and how easily, too, that man is destroyed if he believes
its verdict.

With the rare exception of occasional signs like this, however, his wife
had not mobilised her being radically for a big change.  She retired into
her prosaic background, against which, as with certain self-protecting,
ultra-cautious animals and insects, she remained safely invisible.
Back to the land proved rather literal for her; she wore her heavy
garden-gloves with pride. At the same time her practical nature, streaked
with affection, patience, and unselfishness, took on, somehow, a tiny
glint of gold.  Her eyes grew lighter, her movements less laborious.
Fear lessened in her; joy often caught her by surprise.  Sparks, though
not yet flame, lit up her attitude to things, as if, close to her beloved
element of earth, the country life both soothed and blessed her.
She felt at home.  She said 'what' far less frequently.  This quiet,
peaceful winter was perhaps for her a period of gestation.  The family
gathered about her more than in town.

With a buoyancy hard to define and possibly not justified, Wimble watched
her. He looked out upon life about him.  His health was good, but this
buoyancy was based on something deeper than that; his health was good
because of it. Nothing mattered, a foolish phrase of those who shirked
responsibilities, was far from him; everything mattered equally expressed
it better.  The New Thing coming, which he and Joan called Air, lay
certainly in him, though very far yet from finding full expression.
The germ of it at any rate lay in him, as in her. The fact that they
recognised it was proof of that.  A divine carelessness took charge of
his whole life and being; Mother was aware of it; even Tom responded
mildly: 'quite sets a fellow up,' as he expressed it after his rare
week-end visits, the Sunday spent in killing rabbits; 'town's overrated
after all.'

They merged pleasantly enough with their surroundings, melting without
shock into the life of neighbours, sharing the community existence,
narrow, conventional, uninspired though it was.  And all through the dark
and clouded months, the skies emptied of birds, weighted at the low
horizons, afraid to shine, yet waiting for the marvellous coming dawn--
all through these heavy weeks and days Joan's presence, flitting
everywhere with careless singing and dancing, shot the wintry gloom with
happy radiance.  It was her spontaneous dancing that especially made
Wimble stare and wonder.  It conveyed meanings no words could compass,
expressing better than anything else the new attitude he felt coming into
life.  He remembered the flood of shadowy ideas her graceful gestures had
poured into him once before when he walked up Maida Vale; and that
strange night in the flat when, seeing her dancing on the London roof, he
was dimly aware of a new language which included even inanimate objects.
The strange shudder that accompanied the vision he had forgotten.

This magical rhythm was her secret.  It stirred the heart, making it
vulnerable to impulses from some brighter, happier state _she_ knew
instinctively and in advance.  Mother, he noticed, watched her too,
peering above her knitting-needles, moving her head in sympathy,
sometimes a faint, wondering smile lighting upon her bewildered, careworn
face.  A real smile, however, for it was in the eyes alone, and did not
touch the lips.  Even Tom admired. 'You ought to be taught,' he said
guardedly.  'You'd touch 'em up a bit.  If you did that in church the
whole world would go.'  He too, without knowing it, realised that
something sacred, inspired, regenerating was being whispered.

Yet Joan herself, though growing older, hardly developed in the ordinary
way. She did not grow up.  She remained backward somehow.  She lived
subconsciously, perhaps.  Some new knowledge, gathering below the
surface, found expression in this spontaneous dancing.  With the dawn,
now slowly coming, it would burst full-fledged upon the world,
and the world itself would dance with joy.  Meanwhile, a new bloom, a new
beauty settled on the girl, and Mother proudly insisted that she 'must go
to a good photographer and have her picture taken.'  But the result was
commonplace, for in the rigid black and white outline all the subtlety
escaped, and, regretting the money wasted, Mother wondered why it had
failed.  Like the audience at the Vicarage charities when Joan danced,
she watched the performance, felt a hint of strange beauty, clapped her
hands and wondered 'what it meant.'

'It's her life, you see,' Wimble comforted her.  'And you can't
photograph life. To get her real meaning, we ought to do it with her--
dance it.'

'She's light, rather, for her age,' replied Mother ambiguously.
'But everybody seems to love her somehow,' she added proudly.
'She seems to make people happy. P'r'aps later she'll develop and get
sensible.'  She sighed, and resumed her knitting.  Presently she got up
to light the lamps.  'The days are drawing out, Joe,' she mentioned,
smiling.  'Spring will be here before we know it.' He lifted the chimney
to help her, turned up the wick, struck a match, and kissed her fondly.

The country life, it seemed, had brought them all together more, made
them aware of their underlying unity, as it were.  They flocked.  Wimble,
dressed now in wide brown knickerbockers, wearing bright stockings and
brogue shoes with feathered tongues that flapped when he walked, noticed
the change with pleasure. The new attitude was only in his brain as yet,
but it was already stealing down into his heart.  This increased sense of
a harmonious manifold unity in the family impressed him, and it was Joan,
he felt, who made him see it, if she was not also the cause of its coming
to pass.  Only some spiritual actuary could make it quite clear, but he
discerned the oneness behind the different members of his family, uniting
them.  In this subconscious, completer self lay full understanding.
There was no need to pay annual subscriptions to an Aquarian Society to
realise that!  Moreover, if a small family with such divergent interests
and ambitions could flock and realise unity, the larger family of a
village, country, nation could do the same--once the underlying unity
were realised.  That was the difficulty.  The whole world was, after all,
but a single family, humanity. . . .  In his quiet country nook Wimble
dreamed his great dream.  He saw the nations with but a single flag, a
single drum, a single anthem, true to a larger single patriotism that
could never again be split up into lesser divisional patriotisms.  The
universal fraternity of indivisible Air was coming; the subconscious
where individuals pooled their surface differences would become
conscious; that was the truth, he felt, the one great thing the Aquarian
lecturer had said. . . .  He remembered the cinema, with its mechanical
suggestion of a unification of world-experience faintly offered; he
remembered the free, happy, collective life of the inhabitants of air,
the natural singers of the world.  The deep underlying sense of unity
buried in the subconscious once realised, full understanding must follow,
and with complete understanding the way was cleared for love.  And it was
Joan's dancing, somehow, that set the dream within his heart.  The new
attitude to life he imagined dawning on the world was the first hint of a
coming spiritual consciousness, and for spiritual consciousness the
totality of things is present.  'All at once and everywhere at once,' as
she had put it.  His heart swelled big within him as he dreamed. . . .

'Coal's getting very expensive,' mentioned Mother, as she leaned forward
beside him to poke the fire.  'We'd better mix it with coke.  You might
find out, Joe. We can't go on at this rate.'

'I will, dear,' he replied.  'I'll write to Snodden and Tupps at once.'
He patted her knee and got up to go to his little den where he kept his
papers, books, and pipes, reflecting as he did so that it was easy enough
to love the world; it was loving the individual that breaks the heart.
Pricked by an instant of remorse, then, it occurred to him that a pat on
the knee, as a sign of love, might be improved.  He trotted back and
kissed her.  'We must flock more and more and more,' he mumbled, and
before she could say 'What, Joe?' he gave her another kiss and was gone
to write to his coal merchant as she had suggested.  He would bring back
the bird into Mother's heart or die in the attempt.  If the new thing he
dreamed about didn't begin at home, it was not worth much.  He felt
happy, so happy that he longed to share it with others; he would have
liked to mention it in his letter to the coal merchant.  Instead, he
merely began, 'Dear Messrs. Snodden and Tupps,' yet signed himself,
'Yours full of faith,' since 'faithfully' alone sounded insincere.

'Odd,' he reflected, 'that unless happiness is shared, it's incomplete,
unsatisfying.  The chief item lacks.  Selfish happiness is a
contradiction in terms.  We are meant to share everything and be together
more.  There's the instinctive proof of it.'  If the coal merchant felt
equally happy, he might even have shared his coal.  'But he'd only think
me mad if I suggested that,' thought Wimble, chuckling.  'We can exchange
coal and money and still love one another.'  He posted the letter before
he could change his mind, and came back  to his wife.  'Some day,' he
said, as he sat down and poked the fire, 'some day, Mother, and not very
far off either, we shall all be sharing everything all over the world,
just as birds share the air and worms and water.' This time she did not
ask him to repeat his words.  She smiled a comfortable smile half-way
between belief and incredulity.  'You really think so, Joe?' 'It's
coming,' he rejoined; 'it's in the air, you know, for I feel it.
Don't you?' he added.  He leaned nearer and softly whispered in her ear,
'You're happy here, aren't you, Mother?  Much happier than you used to
be?  'She smiled again contentedly.  'The country air, Joe dear,' she
replied.  'The bird's flown back into you,' he said, taking her hand and
ignoring the bunch of knitting-needles that came pricking with it.
'Perhaps,' she mumbled, 'perhaps.  Life's sweeter, easier than it used to
be--in some ways.'  She flushed a little, while Wimble murmured to
himself, yet just low for her to hear, 'and in your heart some late lark
singing, dear.  A new thing is stealing down upon us all.'  'There's
something coming, certainly,' she agreed.  'Come,' he corrected her, 'not
coming.  It's here now.'  Holding hands, they looked into each other's
eyes, as Joan's little song and dancing steps went down the passage just
outside.



CHAPTER XIX


January sparkled, dropped like a broken icicle, and was gone; February,
so eager for the sun that she shortens her days while lengthening her
searching evening hours, summoned one night the tyrant winds of March;
these shouted and blew the world awake, then yielded with a sigh to the
kiss of April's laughter.  A disturbing sweetness ran upon the world,
agitating the hearts and minds of men.  Yearning stirred even among deep
city slums; in the country hope and desire burst into glad singing.
Spring returned with her eternal magic.  The hawthorn was in bloom.

The birds came back, filling the air with song, with the glance of wings
and the whirr of feathers, with the gold and confidence of coming summer.
The air was alive again with careless joy.  Wimble responded instantly.
The thrill pierced to his very marrow.  Memories revived like
wild-flowers, and his thoughts, shot with the gold and blue of lost
romance, turned to the open air.  He got some sandwiches, mounted his
bicycle, and, followed by Joan, started in a southerly direction as once,
long years ago, he had escaped from streets and lectures to spend a day
with his beloved birds.  This time, however, it was not the
willow-haunted Cambridge flats that were his aim.  He took Joan with him
to the bare open downs above the sea.

It was a radiant morning, and a south-west wind blew gently in their
faces.  Wimble's felt hat fluttered behind him at the end of a string, as
they skimmed down the sandy lanes towards Lewes, the smooth, scooped
hollows of the downs coming nearer every minute.  Their majestic outline
seemed hung down from the sky itself, yet in spite of their mass they had
a light, almost transparent look in the morning brilliance.  They melted
into the air.  The noble line of them flung upwards the space as though
time met eternity and disappeared.

Down the long hill into the ancient town Joan shot past him.  He noticed
her balance, and thought of the perfect equilibrium of a bird that shoots
full speed upon its resting-place, then stops, securely poised, making no
single effort to recover steadiness.  For all its tiny legs, no bird
wobbles or overbalances, much less trips or stumbles.  Joan flew ahead of
him, both hands off the bars.  The careless gesture reminded him of the
matchless grace of the wagtail.  He laughed aloud, coasting after her
unconscious ease with his own more deliberate, reasoned caution.
'She could fly to Africa without a guide!' he thought, aware for an
instant of the great subconscious rhythm in Nature birds obeyed
instinctively.  No wonder their purposes were carelessly achieved.
'She's sure,' he added.  'Something very big takes care of her, and she
knows it.'

They walked up the steep hill out of the town, ran to the left along a
chalky lane, dipped in between the folds of grassy hills and great
covering fields, Joan leading always without hesitation.  Once they
paused to watch the aerial evolutions of a body of plover, rising,
falling, tumbling, turning at full speed without confusion or collision,
as though one single telepathic sympathy operated throughout the entire
mass of individuals.  Instinct the Primers called it, but Wimble,
recalling the Aquarian lecture, caught at another phrase--subconscious
unity.  It was a power, at any rate, beyond man's conscious reasoning
mind.  The careless safety of the birds amazed him.  'Air wisdom!' he
exclaimed aloud to Joan; 'we shall all have it some day!'  It was odd how
that crazy lecture had lodged ideas in his thoughts, claiming
confirmation, returning again and again to his memory.  They coasted down
a grassy track into a village, left their bicycles behind a farmer's
gate, and sat down a moment to recover breath.  It was ten o'clock in the
morning.

From the tiny hamlet, where a few flint cottages and barns clustered
about an ivied church, they took the path southwards up the slope.
In the cup or the hills below them sheltered the toy buildings and the
trees.  The rooks, advertising their clumsy flight and semi-human ways,
cawed noisily, playing in the gusty wind.  They showed off consciously,
devoid of grace.  One minute the scene was visible below, a perfect
miniature; the next it was hidden by a heavy shoulder of ground; the
earth had swallowed it, church, houses, trees, and all.  No sound was
audible.  Even the rooks had vanished.  In front stretched an open and a
naked world.  The human couple paused a moment and stared.  The wind went
past their ears.  There was a sense of immensity and freedom.  There was
great light.  They were on the Downs.

'Oh, Daddy,' cried Joan, 'we're out of England!  This is the world!'

'And the world has blown wide open!' he replied.  'I feel everywhere at
once!'  The gust whirled his words and laughter into space.
'The misunderstanding of streets and houses leaves----' he snatched at
the same time at his vanishing hat and seized the cord.

Joan flung herself backwards against the wind with arms spread out, her
hat in one hand and a blue-ribbon that had tied her hair fluttering in
the other.  The loosened hair streamed past her neck, great strands of it
flattened against the curve of her back as well, her short skirts
flapping with a noise like sails.  Then, turning about, she faced the
gust, and everything streamed the other way.  The wind clapped the
clothes so tight against her slender figure that it seemed to undress
her, or rather made them fit as tight and neat as feathers.  Like some
bird of paradise, indeed, she looked, the slim black legs straining to
take the air.  She began to dance.

And as he watched the golden hair against the blue, there flashed into
him the memory of a distant day, when a saffron scarf had set his heart
on fire with strange airy yearnings, and the blue and golden earth had
danced to the tune of another spring.  The tiny human outline amid this
vast expanse seemed wonderful, so safe, so exquisite, caught in some
rhythm born of the immensities of sky and earth and ocean.  A mile to the
southward lay the sea.  There was a taste of clover-honey, a tang of
salt, and the gorse laid its sweetness in between the two.  Memories
crowded upon him as he watched Joan playing and dancing.  The fervour and
earnestness of her pleasure exhilarated him.  'Blithe creature,' he said
to himself, 'you were surely born to fly!'--and remembered Mother as she
once had been and as she was now.  Why had it all left her, this joyous
rapture of their early days together?  Had the bird flown really from her
heart and into Joan?  Was it not merely caged awhile?  Had he himself not
helped to cage it?  He recalled her radiant face beside the pond among
the emerald Cambridge fields, and the old first love poured back upon him
in a flood.

In a lull of the wind he caught the ecstatic singing of a lark, and at
the same moment Joan danced back to his side suddenly and seized his arm.
Her voice, it almost seemed, carried on the trill and music of the lark.
'It's all new as gold,' she cried.  'Everybody'd live for ever up here.
We must bring Mother.  She'd flow fly flow all over!'

'Dance, my child,' he exclaimed, 'don't talk!  Go on with your dancing.
It gives me ideas.'

'But you're always thinking,' she said, still breathless from her
exertions.  'It spoils everything, that thinking and thinking----'

'It's not thinking,' he interrupted, 'it's seeing.  When you dance I see
things.  I see everything at once.  It's like a huge vision, yet so small
and simple that it's all in my head at once.  It explains the universe
somehow to me.  Thinking indeed!  Why, I never thought in my life----'

'There's a bird for me, On the apple tree, It's explaining all the
garden,' sang the girl, dancing away towards the yellow gorse.
Her father's words conveyed no meaning to her; she had not listened.
He watched her.  Her movements, he felt, obeyed the great unconscious
rhythm that breathes through nature, through the entire universe, from
the spinning midge to the most distant sun.  Surely it must include
humanity as well, these millions of separate individuals who had lost it
temporarily, much as Mother had lost the 'bird.'  He, too, was caught
along with it, as though he shared it, did it, danced it.  He could see
what he could not say.  He understood.  Immense, yet at lightning speed,
the meaning of Air slid with that simple dancing deep into his heart.
It was unity of life everywhere that he saw interpreted, and the ease,
the grace, the carelessness were due to their being mothered and
inspired by Nature's great safe rhythm.  Relying on this, as birds did,
there was safety, unerring intelligence, infallible guidance, flight from
Siberia to Abyssinia possible without a leader.  Birds migrated at night,
he remembered, stopping at dawn to rest and sing, then going on again in
the twilight: surer of their inner guidance in the darkness than in the
blaze of daylight.  Amazing symbol!  Instinct, unconscious,
subconscious--whatever it might be called in rigid language, this deep
attitude, poised and steady, obeyed the mighty rhythm that realised the
underlying unity of all that lives, of everything.  Thought breaks this
rhythm, which it should merely guide; reason reduces, opposes, and
finally interrupts it.  His backward child--and she was still a child for
all her eighteen years--had somehow tapped it.

'Dance, my child, dance on!' he cried as he followed her.  'You dance joy
and brotherhood into my heart.'  And, looking more like a mechanical
gollywog than a human being who has discovered truth, he floundered after
her as a gnome might chase a butterfly.  Thus, swinging along between the
yellow gorse, over the tumuli, leaping the rabbit holes, he realised that
the love and joy he sought and dreamed about was here and now; not in
some future Golden Age, but at his very feet upon the earth.  All that he
meant by Air and the Airy Consciousness was _now_.  This little prophet
without a lyre saw it clear.  Torn by the brambles, tripped by the holes,
he chased his marvellous dream as once, years before, he had chased an
elusive streak of gold across the Cambridge flats.  He was caught by the
elemental rhythm of the Downs, borrowed in its turn from the suns of
uttermost space that equally obeyed and shared it.

He looked about him.  Immense domed surfaces, smooth as a pausing ocean,
stretched undulating to dim horizons; air lifted the earth into
immaterial space; they intermingled; and sight roved everywhere without a
break.  Upon this vast expanse there were no details to enchain
attention, blocking the rhythm of the eye; no points of interest stood
up, as in mere 'scenery,' to fasten feeling to a limited area.
Enjoyment soared, unconfined, on wings.  He saw no barriers, no trees, no
hedges or divisions; no summits startled him with 'See, how big I am!'
all self-asserting items lacked.  Wind, sky, and sea offered their
unconditioned, limitless invitation.  Even the flowers were unobtrusive,
the ragwort, thyme, and yellow gorse claimed no deliberate notice, and
the thistle-down flew past like air made visible.  It was, in a word,
this liberation from detail, snapping attention with definite objects,
that set him free in mind, as Joan already proved herself free in action.
Earth here was sublimated into air.

'Good heavens!' his heart cried out.  'It's here, it's now--this new
thing coming from the Air!'

This deep rhythm of the landscape caught his very feet, making even his
physical movements elastic, springy, sharing the rise and fall of flight
expressed in the waving surface of the world about him.  He no longer
stumbled.  Joan's dancing, though apparently she merely leapt to catch
the thistle-down, or played with her flying hair and fluttering ribbon,
interpreted in the gestures of her young lithe figure all he felt, but
reproduced it unconsciously.

This was, indeed, not England, but the world.

'We're over the edge of everything,' sang Joan, catching at his hand.
'Hold up, Daddy! Hold up!'  She tugged him along to join her wild, happy
dance.  'You ought to sing.  We're over the edge of the world!'

'Above it,' he cried breathlessly.  'We're in the air.  Look out, my
dear----!'

She had suddenly released his hand and sent him spinning with the
unaccustomed momentum.  Her yellow hair vanished beyond a sea of golden
gorse.  Her figure melted against it, she was out of sight.  'I'm not a
bird yet, at any rate,' he gasped, settling to rest upon a convenient
mound and mopping his forehead.  'Not in body, at least. I've got no
balance to speak of.  I think too much--probably.'  He heard her singing
somewhere far behind him, and again a lark overhead took up the note and
bore it into space.

But with the repose of his creaking muscles and elderly body, the rhythm
he had tried to dance now slipped under his ageless and untiring soul.
Like a rising wind the Downs were under him and he was up.  Seeking a
point to settle on, his eye found only strong, subtle lines against the
blue, and running along these lines, his spirit was flung forwards with
them, upward into limitless space.  No peak, no precipice blocked their
endless utterance; they flowed, they flew, and Wimble's heart flew with
them.  The sense of unity, characteristic of airy freedom, invaded his
soul triumphantly with its bird's-eye view.  He saw life whole beneath
him.  Perhaps he dozed, perhaps he even slept; at any rate he knew this
strange perspective that showed him life, with its huge freight of
plodding humanity, rising suddenly into the air.

To rely upon inner, subconscious guidance was to rely upon that portion
of his being--that greater portion--which obeyed spontaneously an immense
rhythm of the mothering World-Spirit.  Thought broke this rhythm; Reason
was clever but not wise.  The subconscious powers, knowing nothing, yet
approached omniscience; enjoyed omnipresence, while still being _here_.
In that state his individuality pooled in sympathy with all others
everywhere, tapping a universal wisdom which is available to intuition
but not to argument, and is so simple that a child, a bird, may know it
easily, singing and dancing its expression naturally.  Unerring,
infallible, it is the rhythm of divinity, it is reliance upon deity.

This germ of understanding sprouted in his heart, and practice would
develop it.  He realised himself linked up, not alone with Nature, but
with the entire human family--and hence, with Mother.  The practice, it
was obvious, began with Mother.  He must see to it at once.  Yet, though
clear as crystal in his heart, in his mind it all remained confused, too
shy for language, so that he recalled what the railway guard had said--it
cannot yet be told, but it can be lived.

His heart flew like a bird through empty space, above all obstacles,
above all barriers.  There was no detail to enchain attention, nothing to
obscure free vision; the soul in him, grand super-bird, took flight.
The airy attitude to life became divinely clear and simple, because, with
this bird's perspective, he saw life whole.  Details that blocked
creative energy on earth with fear and difficulty, seemed negligible
after all; they were places to take off from.  As wings trust carelessly
for support upon the universal, ethereal element enveloping them, so
could, so must, his will know faith and safety in the immense and
powerful rhythms that guide that delicate thrush, the redwing, from
Siberia to England every autumn, and steer Sirius  unleashed,
untroubled,  towards his  eternal goal.  He watched the little wheatears,
back from Africa, flitting from perch to perch of tufted grass, soon to
leave for their summer in distant Norway.  Obedient to this serene and
mighty guidance, secure upon these everlasting wings, he saw the bird in
humanity open its wings at last.  A new reliance upon subconscious
inspiration, linking all together, from the butterfly to the angel,
flashed through him, air its symbol, wings and flight its emblem.
He realised, with an instant's strange intensity, the unity of
indivisible air manifested in all forms of life the planet bore.

This undetailed space about him inspired him oddly, it symbolised his
dream, the dream that had haunted him since earliest youth.  He looked
_down_ upon the world beneath him, upon the stretch of years he had flown
over, upon the congested streets and houses where men lived, upon the
iron conventions and traditions imprisoning their minds from escape into
freedom that yet lay so close.  The element of earth weighed still
heavily upon them; earth builds forms; air, being form-less, offered
liberty.  He saw these million forms already crumbling; he saw the masses
at the upper windows, on the roofs, all looking--up.  With the coming of
air, the day of forms was passing.  The ferment, the unrest, the
universal questing shone in these upturned eyes.  They would not look
down again.  The vital force had drained out of a thousand forms which
have served their day; no past tradition was absolute; they had found it
out.  Everywhere he saw the emergence of this new spirit, leaving behind
it the empty, unsatisfying forms, yearning for fuller self-expression
that the unifying ethereal element of air now promised.  The roofs were
strangely crowded.  He saw the myriad figures.  He saw that some of them
already sang and danced!

Already the new mighty rhythm caught them whirling into space, each soul
more and more _en rapport_ with the universal world-soul.  Into their
hearts, with the lift of wings and a happy bird-like song, it stole
subconsciously; the formulae of doctrine which change and shift were
giving place to inner experience, and inner experience cannot be
destroyed, since it is formless, acknowledging no boundaries, obedient to
no creed.  Form was dying, life was being born. . . .

He watched the tumbling plover, the sea-gulls grandly sailing, the
soaring lark; the floating thistledown went past along the careless wind;
he saw his un-thinking daughter's natural, happy dancing, one and all
interpreting this message of the air, this promise of liberty that
brimmed his deep heart and his uneducated mind.  The huge simplicity of
the naked Downs made him see existence singularly as a whole; across the
open sweep before him the air came sweetly, blowing the tangle of
artificial living into easy rhythm and dancing everywhere.

He saw the accidental barriers between creed and sect and nation blown
away.  A new spiritual unity took their place, a synthetic life, the
parts highly specialised, as with birds, yet the whole in perfect
harmony.  The day of special, exclusive dispensations had disappeared,
and this organic spiritual unity, with its new religion of service,
lifted the people as with mighty wings.

'Dance on, my child! dance on!' he cried, 'it makes me see things whole!'
He watched her light, flying movements against the sea of yellow gorse,
the hair like a saffron scarf upon the wind, her radiant face shining and
laughing with the blue of endless space behind it.  She did not heed his
words; she danced away again; she seemed one with the tumbling plover,
the sailing sea-birds, and the drifting thistle-down.  She danced with
the Spring, and the air was in her heart.

The spirit quickened in him as he saw her.  His consciousness, he knew,
was but a fragment of an immense and deeper consciousness, of limitless
scope and powers; this greater self made affirmations to which no mere
intellect would dare to set the boundaries.  With the air there was a
return of joy, belief and wonder into a world that has too long denied
all three.  Intellect might stand aside a little longer, watching
cautiously, like Mother, the flights of intuition, that flashing bird of
fire that strikes and vanishes; but science, hitherto destructive
chiefly, must enter a new field or be discredited.  It must become
constructive, it must examine spiritual states.  The barrier between the
organic and the inorganic was already breached.

'Dance on!  My heart flies dancing with you!'

With you!  Rather with everything and every one!  For he had this curious
inspiration, as though all his past condensed now into a single moment--
that a new attitude, due to the subliminal consciousness becoming
consciously organised with its myriad and mighty powers, was stealing
down into the hearts of men from the air.  Since its outstanding
characteristic was a fuller understanding, a natural sharing,
a deep, instinctive sympathy, it involved an actual realisation of
spiritual unity that intellect alone has never yet achieved, and never
can.  It was no flabby, Utopian, idealistic brotherhood he saw, but
a practical, co-operative life based upon those greater powers, and upon
that completer understanding lying, hid with God, in the subliminal
regions of humanity.  Experienced hitherto sporadically, only, he saw
in what his heart called the promise of the air, their universal
acceptance and development. . . .  In a second of time, this all flashed
into him as he watched the dancing little human figure on the gigantic
landscape.  And after it, if not actually with it, rose that
unaccountable, uneasy, half-terrible emotion of deep-seated pain he had
known before--the shudder . . .  He trembled, tried to sing.  Then the
gorse pricked him where he lay.  He turned to make himself more
comfortable.  He wriggled.  The attempt to sing tickled his throat and he
coughed.

He sat up, feeling in his pockets for a pencil and paper.  For the first
time in his life he felt he must write.  'I must give it out,' he mumbled
to himself.  'It's so wonderful, so simple.  I must share it.  I must
tell it to others--to everybody.'  He actually made some notes.
'Ah,' he thought, as he read them over a few days later, 'they're no
good.  I don't _quite_ understand them now, to tell the truth.'
He sighed.  'I'm only muddled,' he decided, 'just a Man in the Street
bewildered by a touch of inspiration that blew into me!'

He lay watching Joan for a little longer, dancing in the middle distance
still.  The zest of a bird was in her, the toss, the scamper.
Lithe, spinning, sure, her movements interpreted the air far more clearly
than his thoughts could compass it in words.  Her song came to him with
the breeze.  He watched her, then waved the packet of sandwiches above
his head.  He was hungry.  They ate their lunch, and spent the rest of
the day exploring the great spaces round them.

It was evening when they got home; they heard the random sweetness of the
thrush's song among the laurels on the lawn; a nightjar was churning in
the dusk beyond; there was a subdued and tiny chattering of the swallows
in the eaves.  They found Mother among the flower-beds, wearing her big
garden-gloves.  Wimble took her in his arms and kissed her.

'It's come, Mother, it's come,' he whispered against her cheek.
'And, d'you know?--you've been with us all day long.'

She looked up, peaceful and happy, a smell of garden earth about her, and
the glow of the sunset in her eyes.  'Have I really, Joe dear?' she said.
'How lovely!'  And then she added: 'I believe it is; yes, I believe it
is.'

Next morning Wimble woke very, very early--close upon three o'clock.
He peered out of the window a moment.  The dawn, he saw with a happy sigh
of wonder, was just beginning to break.  The gleam of light fell upon
Mother's face; and the singing of a lark high up in the clearing air came
to him.  At the same moment Mother moved in her bed close by; her heavy
breathing was interrupted.  He listened.  She was talking in her sleep,
though the words were indistinguishable.  He waited, thinking she might
get up and walk.  Her eyes, however, did not open; she lay still again.
He slipped over to tuck the blankets more securely round her.
'Bless her!' he thought.  'She's asleep!  Her surface consciousness is
merged with her deep, safe, wise subconsciousness----'  And his thought
broke off abruptly.  It had suddenly occurred to him that the
sleep-walker and the migrating bird both found their way unerringly in
the darkness, both obedient to inner guidance.  He stood still an
instant, looking down upon her face in the pale morning light.

'Who, what guides the redwing over hills, and vales, and seas?' he
whispered.  'Who, what guides the sleep-walker amid the intricacies of
Maple furniture?'  He chuckled to himself.  It was odd how the comic
Aquarian lecture cropped up in his memory like this once more.

He bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek, then went back to bed.
Mother still mumbled in her sleep--' Flow, fly, flow,' he seemed to
catch, 'it's coming, coming . . . '

'It's the bird returning to her heart,' he whispered to himself.
Deep down inside her being something sang; outside, the carolling of the
lark continued, blithe and joyous in the breaking dawn.  As he fell
asleep, the two sounds were so curiously mingled that they seemed almost
indistinguishable. . . .



_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.