THE CALL OF THE BODY
One night, towards the end of the practice flights, a strange thing
happened, which showed that the time for the final flight of escape was
drawing near.
They had been out for several hours flying through a rainstorm, the
thousand little drops of which stung their faces like tiny gun-shot.
About two in the morning the wind shifted and drove the clouds away as
by magic; the stars came out, at first like the eyes of children still
dim with crying, but later with a clear brilliance that filled Jimbo and
the governess with keen pleasure. The air was washed and perfumed; the
night luminous, alive, singing. All its tenderness and passion entered
their hearts and filled them with the wonder of its glory.
"Come down, Jimbo," said the governess, "and we'll lie in the trees and
smell the air after the rain."
"Yes," added the boy, whose Older Self had been whispering mysterious
things to him, "and watch the stars and hear them singing."
He led the way to some beech trees that lined a secluded lane, and
settled himself comfortably in the top branches of the largest, while
the governess soon found a resting-place beside him. It was a deserted
spot, far from human habitation. Here and there through the foliage they
could see little pools of rain-water reflecting the sky. The group of
trees swung in the wind, dreaming great woodland dreams, and overhead
the stars looked like a thousand orchards in the sky, filling the air
with the radiance of their blossoms.
"How brilliant they are to-night," said the governess, after watching
the boy attentively for some minutes as they lay side by side in the
great forked branch. "I never saw the constellations so clear."
"But they have so little shape," he answered dreamily; "if we wore
lights when we flew about we should make much better constellations than
they do."
"The Big and Little Child instead of the Big and Little Bear," she
laughed, still watching him.
"I'm slipping away----" he began, and then stopped suddenly. He saw the
expression of his companion's eyes, which were looking him through and
through with the most poignant love and yearning mingled in their gaze,
and something clutched at his heart that he could not understand.
"----not slipping out of the tree," he went on vaguely, "but slipping
into some new place or condition. I don't understand it. Am I--going off
somewhere--where you can't follow? I thought suddenly--I was losing
you."
The governess smiled at him sadly and said nothing. She stroked his
wings and then raised them to her lips and kissed them. Jimbo watched
her, and folded his other wing across into her hands; he felt unhappy,
and his heart began to swell within him; but he didn't know what to say,
and the Older Self began slowly to fade away again.
"But the stars," he went on, "have they got things they send out
too--forces, I mean, like the trees? Do they send out something that
makes us feel sad, or happy, or strong, or weak?"
She did not answer for some time; she lay watching his face and fondling
his smooth red wings; and, presently, when she did begin to explain,
Jimbo found that the child in him was then paramount again, and he
could not quite follow what she said.
He tried to answer properly and seem interested, but her words were very
long and hard to understand, and after a time he thought she was talking
to herself more than to him, and he gave up all serious effort to
follow. Then he became aware that her voice had changed. The words
seemed to drop down upon him from a great height. He imagined she was
standing on one of those far stars he had been asking about, and was
shouting at him through an immense tube of sky and darkness. The words
pricked his ears like needle-points, only he no longer heard them as
words, but as tiny explosions of sound, meaningless and distant. Swift
flashes of light began to dance before his eyes, and suddenly from
underneath the tree, a wind rose up and rushed, laughing, across his
face. Darkness in a mass dropped over his eyes, and he sank backwards
somewhere into another corner of space altogether.
The governess, meanwhile, lay quite still, watching the limp form in the
branches beside her and still holding the tips of his red wings.
Presently tears stole into her eyes, and began to run down her cheeks.
One deep sigh after another escaped from her lips; but the little boy,
or the old soul, who was the cause of all her emotion, apparently was
far away and knew nothing of it. For a long time she lay in silence, and
then leaned a little nearer to him, so as to see his full face. The eyes
were wide open and staring, but they were looking at nothing she could
see, for the consciousness cannot be in two places at the same time, and
Jimbo just then was off on a little journey of his own, a journey that
was but preliminary to the great final one of all.
"Jimbo," whispered the girl between her tears and sighs, "Jimbo! Where
have you gone to? Tell me, are they getting ready for you at last, and
am I to lose you after all? Is this the only way I can save you--by
losing you?"
There was no answer, no sign of movement; and the governess hid her face
in her hands and cried quietly to herself, while her tears dropped down
through the branches of the tree and fell into the rain-pools beneath.
For Jimbo's state of oblivion in the tree was in reality a momentary
return to consciousness in his body on the bed, and the repaired
mechanism of the brain and muscles had summoned him back on a sort of
trial visit. He remembered nothing of it afterwards, any more than one
remembers the experiences of deep sleep; but the fact was that, with the
descent of the darkness upon him in the branches, he had opened his eyes
once again on the scene in the night-nursery bedroom where his body lay.
He saw figures standing round the bed and about the room; his mother
with the same white face as before, was still bending over the bed
asking him if he knew her; a tall man in a long black coat moved
noiselessly to and fro; and he saw a shaded lamp on a table a little to
the right of the bed. Nothing seemed to have changed very much, though
there had probably been time enough since he last opened his eyes for
the black-coated doctor to have gone and come again for a second visit.
He held an instrument in his hands that shone brightly in the lamplight.
Jimbo saw this plainly and wondered what it was. He felt as if he were
just waking out of a nice, deep sleep--dreamless and undisturbed. The
Empty House, the Governess, Fright and the Children had all vanished
from his memory, and he knew no more about wings and feathers than he
did about the science of meteorology.
But the bedroom scene was a mere glimpse after all; his eyes were
already beginning to close again. First they shut out the figure of the
doctor; then the bed-curtains; and then the nurse moved her arm, making
the whole scene quiver for an instant, like some huge jelly-shape,
before it dipped into profound darkness and disappeared altogether. His
mother's voice ran off into a thin trickle of sound, miles and miles
away, and the light from the lamp followed him with its glare for less
than half a second. All had vanished.
"Jimbo, dear, where have you been? Can you remember anything?" asked the
soft voice beside him, as he looked first at the stars overhead, and
then from the tracery of branches and leaves beneath him to the great
sea of tree-tops and open country all round.
But he could tell her nothing; he seemed dreamy and absent-minded, lying
and staring at her as if he hardly knew who she was or what she was
saying. His mind was still hovering near the border-line of the two
states of consciousness, like the region between sleeping and waking,
where both worlds seem unreal and wholly wonderful.
He could not answer her questions, but he evidently caught some reflex
of her emotions, for he leaned towards her across the branches, and
said he was happy and never wanted to leave her. Then he crawled to the
end of the big bough and sprang out into the air with a shout of
delight. He was the child again--the flying child, wild with the
excitement of tearing through the night air at fifty miles an hour.
The governess soon followed him and they flew home together, taking a
long turn by the sea and past the great chalk cliffs, where the sea sang
loud beneath them.
These lapses became with time more frequent, as well as of longer
duration; and with them the boy noticed that the longing to escape
became once again intense. He wanted _to get home_, wherever home was;
he experienced a sort of nostalgia for the body, though he could not
remember where that body lay. But when he asked the governess what this
feeling meant, she only mystified him by her answers, saying that every
one, in the body or out of it, felt a deep longing for their final
_home_, though they might not have the least idea where it lay, or even
to be able to recognise, much less to label, their longing.
His normal feelings, too, were slowly returning to him. The Older Self
became more and more submerged. As he approached the state of ordinary,
superficial consciousness, the characteristics of that state reflected
themselves more and more in his thoughts and feelings. His memory still
remained a complete blank; but he somehow felt that the things, places,
and people he wanted to remember, had moved much nearer to him than
before. Every day brought them more within his reach.
"All these forgotten things will come back to me soon, I know," he said
one day to the governess, "and then I'll tell you all about them."
"Perhaps you'll remember me too then," she answered, a shadow passing
across her face.
Jimbo clapped his hands with delight.
"Oh," he cried, "I should like to remember you, because that would make
you a sort of two-people governess, and I should love you twice as
much."
But with the gradual return to former conditions the feelings of age and
experience grew dim and indefinite, his knowledge lessened, becoming
obscure and confused, showing itself only in vague impressions and
impulses, until at last it became quite the exception for the
child-consciousness to be broken through by flashes of intuition and
inspiration from the more deeply hidden memories.
For one thing, the deep horror of the Empty House and its owner now
returned to him with full force. Fear settled down again over the room,
and lurked in the shadows over the yard. A vivid dread seized him of the
_other door_ in the room--the door through which the Frightened Children
had disappeared, but which had never opened since. It gradually became
for him a personality in the room, a staring, silent, listening thing,
always watching, always waiting. One day it would open and he would be
caught! In a dozen ways like this the horror of the house entered his
heart and made him long for escape with all the force of his being.
But the governess, too, seemed changing; she was becoming more vague and
more mysterious. Her face was always sad now, and her eyes wistful; her
manner became restless and uneasy, and in many little ways the child
could not fail to notice that her mind was intent upon other things. He
begged her to name the day for the final flight, but she always seemed
to have some good excuse for putting it off.
"I feel frightened when you don't tell me what's going on," he said to
her.
"It's the preparations for the last flight," she answered, "the flight
of escape. He'll try to prevent us going together so that you should get
lost. But it's better you shouldn't know too much," she added. "Trust me
and have patience."
"Oh, that's what you're so afraid of," he said, "_separation_!" He was
very proud indeed of the long word, and said it over several times to
himself.
And the governess, looking out of the window at the fading sunlight,
repeated to herself more than to him the word he was so proud of.
"Yes, that's what I'm so afraid of--separation; but if it means your
salvation----" and her sentence remained unfinished as her eyes wandered
far above the tops of the trees into the shadows of the sky.
And Jimbo, drawn by the sadness of her voice, turned towards the window
and noticed to his utter amazement that he could _see right through
her_. He could see the branches of the trees _beyond_ her body.
But the next instant she turned and was no longer transparent, and
before the boy could say a word, she crossed the floor and disappeared
from the room.