spiritual power to them. Your mind is as literal as a dictionary and
as incoherent. Pages of ink without connected meaning! Verb always in
the infinitive! If you were an old Egyptian, you--you"--he flashed and
spluttered, his tongue shot out again, his keen eyes blazed--"you might
take all those words and spin them into a great interpretation of life,
a cosmic romance, as they did. Instead, you get the bitter, dead taste
of ink in your mouth, and spit it over us like that"--he made a quick
movement of his whole body as a bird that shakes itself--"in empty
phrases."
Khilkoff ordered another bottle of champagne, while Vera, his sister,
said half nervously, "Let's go for a drive; it's moonlight." There
was enthusiasm at once. Another of the party called the head waiter
and told him to pack food and drink in baskets. It was only eleven
o'clock. They would drive out into the desert, have a meal at two in
the morning, tell stories, sing, and see the dawn.
It was in one of those cosmopolitan hotels in Egypt which attract the
ordinary tourists as well as those who are doing a "cure," and all
these Russians were ill with one thing or another. All were ordered
out for their health, and all were the despair of their doctors. They
were as unmanageable as a bazaar and as incoherent. Excess and bed were
their routine. They lived, but none of them got better. Equally, none
of them got angry. They talked in this strange personal way without a
shred of malice or offence. The English, French, and Germans in the
hotel watched them with remote amazement, referring to them as "that
Russian lot." Their energy was elemental. They never stopped. They
merely disappeared when the pace became too fast, then reappeared again
after a day or two, and resumed their "living" as before. Binovitch,
despite his neurasthenia, was the life of the party. He was also a
special patient of Dr. Plitzinger, the famous psychiatrist, who took
a peculiar interest in his case. It was not surprising. Binovitch was
a man of unusual ability and of genuine, deep culture. But there was
something more about him that stimulated curiosity. There was this
striking originality. He said and did surprising things.
"I could fly if I wanted to," he said once when the airmen came to
astonish the natives with their biplanes over the desert, "but without
all that machinery and noise. It's only a question of believing and
understanding----"
"Show us!" they cried. "Let's see you fly!"
"He's got it! He's off again! One of his impossible moments."
These occasions when Binovitch let himself go always proved wildly
entertaining. He said monstrously incredible things as though he
really did believe them. They loved his madness, for it gave them new
sensations.
"It's only levitation, after all, this flying," he exclaimed, shooting
out his tongue between the words, as his habit was when excited; "and
what is levitation but a power of the air? None of you can hang an
orange in space for a second, with all your scientific knowledge; but
the moon is always levitated perfectly. And the stars. D'you think they
swing on wires? What raised the enormous stones of ancient Egypt? D'you
really believe it was heaped-up sand and ropes and clumsy leverage
and all our weary and laborious mechanical contrivances? Bah! It was
levitation. It was the powers of the air. Believe in those powers,
and gravity becomes a mere nursery trick--true where it is, but true
nowhere else. To know the fourth dimension is to step out of a locked
room and appear instantly on the roof or in another country altogether.
To know the powers of the air, similarly, is to annihilate what you
call weight--and fly."
"Show us, show us!" they cried, roaring with delighted laughter.
"It's a question of belief," he repeated, his tongue appearing and
disappearing like a pointed shadow. "It's in the heart; the power of
the air gets into your whole being. Why should I show you? Why should I
ask my deity to persuade your scoffing little minds by any miracle? For
it is deity, I tell you, and nothing else. I _know_ it. Follow one idea
like that, as I follow my bird idea--follow it with the impetus and
undeviating concentration of a projectile--and you arrive at power. You
know deity--the bird idea of deity, that is. _They_ knew that. The old
Egyptians knew it."
"Oh, show us, show us!" they shouted impatiently, wearied of his
nonsense-talk. "Get up and fly! Levitate yourself, as they did! Become
a star!"
Binovitch turned suddenly very pale, and an odd light shone in his keen
brown eyes. He rose slowly from the edge of the chair where he was
perched. Something about him changed. There was silence instantly.
"I _will_ show you," he said calmly, to their intense amazement; "not
to convince your disbelief, but to prove it to myself. For the powers
of the air are with me here. I believe. And Horus, great falcon-headed
symbol, is my patron god."
The suppressed energy in his voice and manner was indescribable. There
was a sense of lifting, upheaving power about him. He raised his arms;
his face turned upward; he inflated his lungs with a deep, long breath,
and his voice broke into a kind of singing cry, half prayer, half chant:
"O Horus,
Bright-eyed deity of wind,
[1]Feather my soul
Though earth's thick air,
To know thy awful swiftness----"
[1] The Russian is untranslatable. The phrase means, "Give my
life wings."
He broke off suddenly. He climbed lightly and swiftly upon the nearest
table--it was in a deserted card-room, after a game in which he had
lost more pounds than there are days in the year--and leaped into the
air. He hovered a second, spread his arms and legs in space, appeared
to float a moment, then buckled, rushed down and forward, and dropped
in a heap upon the floor, while every one roared with laughter.
But the laughter died out quickly, for there was something in his wild
performance that was peculiar and unusual. It was uncanny, not quite
natural. His body had seemed, as with Mordkin and Nijinski, literally
to hang upon the air a moment. For a second he gave the distressing
impression of overcoming gravity. There was a touch in it of that faint
horror which appals by its very vagueness. He picked himself up unhurt,
and his face was as grave as a portrait in the academy, but with a new
expression in it that everybody noticed with this strange, half-shocked
amazement. And it was this expression that extinguished the claps of
laughter as wind that takes away the sound of bells. Like many ugly
men, he was an inimitable actor, and his facial repertory was endless
and incredible. But this was neither acting nor clever manipulation
of expressive features. There was something in his curious Russian
physiognomy that made the heart beat slower. And that was why the
laughter died away so suddenly.
"You ought to have flown farther," cried some one. It expressed what
all had felt.
"Icarus didn't drink champagne," another replied, with a laugh; but
nobody laughed with him.
"You went too near to Vera," said Palazov, "and passion melted the
wax." But his face twitched oddly as he said it. There was something he
did not understand, and so heartily disliked.
The strange expression on the features deepened. It was arresting
in a disagreeable, almost in a horrible, way. The talk stopped dead;
all stared; there was a feeling of dismay in everybody's heart,
yet unexplained. Some lowered their eyes, or else looked stupidly
elsewhere; but the women of the party felt a kind of fascination. Vera,
in particular, could not move her sight away. The joking reference to
his passionate admiration for her passed unnoticed. There was a general
and individual sense of shock. And a chorus of whispers rose instantly:
"Look at Binovitch! What's happened to his face?"
"He's changed--he's changing!"
"God! Why he looks like a--bird!"
But no one laughed. Instead, they chose the names of birds--hawk,
eagle, even owl. The figure of a man leaning against the edge of the
door, watching them closely, they did not notice. He had been passing
down the corridor, had looked in unobserved, and then had paused. He
had seen the whole performance. He watched Binovitch narrowly, now with
calm, discerning eyes. It was Dr Plitzinger, the great psychiatrist.
For Binovitch had picked himself up from the floor in a way that was
oddly self-possessed, and precluded the least possibility of the
ludicrous. He looked neither foolish nor abashed. He looked surprised,
but also he looked half angry and half frightened. As some one had
said, he "ought to have flown farther." That was the incredible
impression his acrobatics had produced--incredible, yet somehow actual.
This uncanny idea prevailed, as at a séance where nothing genuine is
expected to happen, and something genuine, after all, does happen.
There was no pretence in this: Binovitch had flown.
And now he stood there, white in the face--with terror and with
anger white. He looked extraordinary, this little, neurasthenic
Russian, but he looked at the same time half terrific. Another thing,
not commonly experienced by men, was in him, breaking out of him,
affecting _directly_ the minds of his companions. His mouth opened;
blood and fury shone in his blazing eyes; his tongue shot out like an
ant-eater's, though even in that the comic had no place. His arms were
spread like flapping wings, and his voice rose dreadfully:
"He failed me, he failed me!" he tried to bellow. "Horus, my
falcon-headed deity, my power of the air, deserted me! Hell take him!
Hell burn his wings and blast his piercing sight! Hell scorch him into
dust for his false prophecies! I curse him--I curse Horus!"
The voice that should have roared across the silent room emitted,
instead, this high-pitched, bird-like scream. The added touch of sound,
the reality it lent, was ghastly. Yet it was marvellously done and
acted. The entire thing was a bit of instantaneous inspiration--his
voice, his words, his gestures, his whole wild appearance. Only--here
was the reality that caused the sense of shock--the expression on
his altered features was genuine. _That_ was not assumed. There was
something new and alien in him, something cold and difficult to human
life, something alert and swift and cruel, of another element than
earth. A strange, rapacious grandeur had leaped upon the struggling
features. The face looked hawk-like.
And he came forward suddenly and sharply toward Vera, whose fixed,
staring eyes had never once ceased watching him with a kind of
anxious and devouring pain in them. She was both drawn and beaten
back. Binovitch advanced on tiptoe. No doubt he still was acting,
still pretending this mad nonsense that he worshipped Horus, the
falcon-headed deity of forgotten days, and that Horus had failed him in
his hour of need; but somehow there was just a hint of too much reality
in the way he moved and looked. The girl, a little creature, with
fluffy golden hair, opened her lips; her cigarette fell to the floor;
she shrank back; she looked for a moment like some smaller, coloured
bird trying to escape from a great pursuing hawk; she screamed.
Binovitch, his arms wide, his bird-like face thrust forward, had
swooped upon her. He leaped. Almost he caught her.
No one could say exactly what happened. Play, become suddenly and
unexpectedly too real, confuses the emotions. The change of key was
swift. From fun to terror is a dislocating jolt upon the mind. Some
one--it was Khilkoff, the brother--upset a chair; everybody spoke at
once; everybody stood up. An unaccountable feeling of disaster was in
the air, as with those drinkers' quarrels that blaze out from nothing,
and end in a pistol-shot and death, no one able to explain clearly how
it came about. It was the silent, watching figure in the doorway who
saved the situation. Before any one had noticed his approach, there he
was among the group, laughing, talking, applauding--between Binovitch
and Vera. He was vigorously patting his patient on the back, and his
voice rose easily above the general clamour. He was a strong, quiet
personality; even in his laughter there was authority. And his laughter
now was the only sound in the room, as though by his mere presence
peace and harmony were restored. Confidence came with him. The noise
subsided; Vera was in her chair again. Khilkoff poured out a glass of
wine for the great man.
"The Czar!" said Plitzinger, sipping his champagne, while all stood
up, delighted with his compliment and tact. "And to your opening
night with the Russian ballet," he added quickly a second toast, "or
to your first performance at the Moscow Théâtre des Arts!" Smiling
significantly, he glanced at Binovitch; he clinked glasses with him.
Their arms were already linked, but it was Palazov who noticed that
the doctor's fingers seemed rather tight upon the creased black coat.
All drank, looking with laughter, yet with a touch of respect, toward
Binovitch, who stood there dwarfed beside the stalwart Austrian, and
suddenly as meek and subdued as any mole. Apparently the abrupt change
of key had taken his mind successfully off something else.
"Of course--'The Fire-Bird,'" exclaimed the little man, mentioning the
famous Russian ballet. "The very thing!" he exclaimed. "For _us_," he
added, looking with devouring eyes at Vera. He was greatly pleased.
He began talking vociferously about dancing and the rationale of
dancing. They told him he was an undiscovered master. He was delighted.
He winked at Vera and touched her glass again with his. "We'll make
our début together," he cried. "We'll begin at Covent Garden, in
London. I'll design the dresses and the posters 'The Hawk and the
Dove!' _Magnifique!_ I in dark grey, and you in blue and gold! Ah,
dancing, you know, is sacred. The little self is lost, absorbed. It is
ecstasy, it is divine. And dancing in air--the passion of the birds
and stars--ah! they are the movements of the gods. You know deity that
way--by living it."
He went on and on. His entire being had shifted with a leap upon this
new subject. The idea of realising divinity by dancing it absorbed
him. The party discussed it with him as though nothing else existed
in the world, all sitting now and talking eagerly together. Vera
took the cigarette he offered her, lighting it from his own; their
fingers touched; he was as harmless and normal as a retired diplomat
in a drawing-room. But it was Plitzinger whose subtle manoeuvring
had accomplished the change so cleverly, and it was Plitzinger who
presently suggested a game of billiards, and led him off, full now of
a fresh enthusiasm for cannons, balls, and pockets, into another room.
They departed arm in arm, laughing and talking together.
Their departure, it seemed, made no great difference at first. Vera's
eyes watched him out of sight, then turned to listen to Baron Minski,
who was describing with gusto how he caught wolves alive for coursing
purposes. The speed and power of the wolf, he said, was impossible to
realise; the force of their awful leap, the strength of their teeth,
which could bite through metal stirrup-fastenings. He showed a scar on
his arm and another on his lip. He was telling truth, and everybody
listened with deep interest. The narrative lasted perhaps ten minutes
or more, when Minski abruptly stopped. He had come to an end; he looked
about him; he saw his glass, and emptied it. There was a general pause.
Another subject did not at once present itself. Sighs were heard;
several fidgeted; fresh cigarettes were lighted. But there was no sign
of boredom, for where one or two Russians are gathered together there
is always life. They produce gaiety and enthusiasm as wind produces
waves. Like great children, they plunge whole-heartedly into whatever
interest presents itself at the moment. There is a kind of uncouth
gambolling in their way of taking life. It seems as if they are always
fighting that deep, underlying, national sadness which creeps into
their very blood.
"Midnight!" then exclaimed Palazov, abruptly, looking at his watch;
and the others fell instantly to talking about that watch, admiring
it and asking questions. For the moment that very ordinary timepiece
became the centre of observation. Palazov mentioned the price. "It
never stops," he said proudly, "not even under water." He looked up at
everybody, challenging admiration. And he told how, at a country house,
he made a bet that he would swim to a certain island in the lake, and
won the bet. He and a girl were the winners, but as it was a horse they
had bet, he got nothing out of it for himself, giving the horse to her.
It was a genuine grievance in him. One felt he could have cried as he
spoke of it. "But the watch went all the time," he said delightedly,
holding the gun-metal object in his hand to show, "and I was twelve
minutes in the water with my clothes on."
Yet this fragmentary talk was nothing but pretence. The sound of
clicking billiard-balls was audible from the room at the end of the
corridor. There was another pause. The pause, however, was intentional.
It was not vacuity of mind or absence of ideas that caused it. There
was another subject, an unfinished subject that each member of the
group was still considering. Only no one cared to begin about it
till at last, unable to resist the strain any longer, Palazov turned
to Khilkoff, who was saying he would take a "whisky-soda," as the
champagne was too sweet, and whispered something beneath his breath;
whereupon Khilkoff, forgetting his drink, glanced at his sister,
shrugged his shoulders, and made a curious grimace. "He's all right
now"--his reply was just audible--"he's with Plitzinger." He cocked his
head sidewise to indicate that the clicking of the billiard-balls still
was going on.
The subject was out: all turned their heads; voices hummed and buzzed;
questions were asked and answered or half answered; eyebrows were
raised, shoulders shrugged, hands spread out expressively. There came
into the atmosphere a feeling of presentiment, of mystery, of things
half understood; primitive, buried instinct stirred a little, the kind
of racial dread of vague emotions that might gain the upper hand if
encouraged. They shrank from looking something in the face, while yet
this unwelcome influence drew closer round them all. They discussed
Binovitch and his astonishing performance. Pretty little Vera listened
with large and troubled eyes, though saying nothing. The Arab waiter
had put out the lights in the corridor, and only a solitary cluster
burned now above their heads, leaving their faces in shadow. In the
distance the clicking of the billiard-balls still continued.
"It was not play; it was real," exclaimed Minski vehemently. "I can
catch wolves," he blurted; "but birds--ugh!--and human birds!" He was
half inarticulate. He had witnessed something he could not understand,
and it had touched instinctive terror in him. "It was the way he
leaped that put the wolf first into my mind, only it was not a wolf at
all." The others agreed and disagreed. "It was play at first, but it
was reality at the end," another whispered; "and it was no animal he
mimicked, but a bird, and a bird of prey at that!"
Vera thrilled. In the Russian woman hides that touch of savagery which
loves to be caught, mastered, swept helplessly away, captured utterly
and deliciously by the one strong enough to do it thoroughly. She left
her chair and sat down beside an older woman in the party, who took
her arm quietly at once. Her little face wore a perplexed expression,
mournful, yet somehow wild. It was clear that Binovitch was not
indifferent to her.
"It's become an _idée fixe_ with him," this older woman said. "The
bird idea lives in his mind. He lives it in his imagination. Ever
since that time at Edfu, when he pretended to worship the great stone
falcons outside the temple--the Horus figures--he's been full of it."
She stopped. The way Binovitch had behaved at Edfu was better left
unmentioned at the moment, perhaps. A slight shiver ran round the
listening group, each one waiting for some one else to focus their
emotion, and so explain it by saying the convincing thing. Only no one
ventured. Then Vera abruptly gave a little jump.
"Hark!" she exclaimed, in a staccato whisper, speaking for the first
time. She sat bolt upright. She was listening. "Hark!" she repeated.
"There it is again, but nearer than before. It's coming closer. I
hear it." She trembled. Her voice, her manner, above all her great
staring eyes, startled everybody. No one spoke for several seconds; all
listened. The clicking of the billiard-balls had ceased. The halls and
corridors lay in darkness, and gloom was over the big hotel. Everybody
was in bed.
"Hear what?" asked the older woman soothingly, yet with a perceptible
quaver in her voice, too. She was aware that the girl's arm shook upon
her own.
"Do you not hear it, too?" the girl whispered.
All listened without speaking. All watched her paling face. Something
wonderful, yet half terrible, seemed in the air about them. There was a
dull murmur, audible, faint, remote, its direction hard to tell. It had
come suddenly from nowhere. They shivered. That strange racial thrill
again passed into the group, unwelcome, unexplained. It was aboriginal;
it belonged to the unconscious primitive mind, half childish, half
terrifying.
"_What_ do you hear?" her brother asked angrily--the irritable anger of
nervous fear.
"When he came at me," she answered very low, "I heard it first. I hear
it now again. Listen! He's coming."
And at that minute, out of the dark mouth of the corridor, emerged two
human figures, Plitzinger and Binovitch. Their game was over: they
were going up to bed. They passed the open door of the card-room.
But Binovitch was being half dragged, half restrained, for he was
apparently attempting to run down the passage with flying, dancing
leaps. He bounded. It was like a huge bird trying to rise for flight,
while his companion kept him down by force upon the earth. As they
entered the strip of light, Plitzinger changed his own position,
placing himself swiftly between his companion and the group in the dark
corner of the room. He hurried Binovitch along as though he sheltered
him from view. They passed into the shadows down the passage. They
disappeared. And every one looked significantly, questioningly, at his
neighbour, though at first saying no word. It seemed that a curious
disturbance of the air had followed them audibly.
Vera was the first to open her lips. "You heard it _then_," she said
breathlessly, her face whiter than the ceiling.
"Damn!" exclaimed her brother furiously. "It was wind against the
outside walls--wind in the desert. The sand is driving."
Vera looked at him. She shrank closer against the side of the older
woman, whose arm was tight about her.
"It was _not_ wind," she whispered simply. She paused. All waited
uneasily for the completion of her sentence. They stared into her face
like peasants who expected a miracle.
"Wings," she whispered. "It was the sound of enormous wings."
* * * * *
And at four o'clock in the morning, when they all returned exhausted
from their excursion into the desert, little Binovitch was sleeping
soundly and peacefully in his bed. They passed his door on tiptoe.
But he did not hear them. He was dreaming. His spirit was at Edfu,
experiencing with that ancient deity who was master of all flying life
those strange enjoyments upon which his own troubled human heart was
passionately set. Safe with that mighty falcon whose powers his lips
had scorned a few hours before, his soul, released in vivid dream, went
sweetly flying. It was amazing, it was gorgeous. He skimmed the Nile
at lightning speed. Dashing down headlong from the height of the great
Pyramid, he chased with faultless accuracy a little dove that sought
vainly to hide from his terrific pursuit beneath the palm trees. For
what he loved must worship where he worshipped, and the majesty of
those tremendous effigies had fired his imagination to the creative
point where expression was imperative.