“I mean it,” I said. “I’ve been thinking it over. I’ve made up my mind.
It’s no good arguing. I shall go in for work—real work. No! this isn’t
work; it’s only laborious cheating. But I’ve got an idea! It’s an old
idea—I thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Why
should I fence about with you? I believe the time has come for flying
to be possible. Real flying!”
“Flying!”
I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my life. My
uncle, after some half-hearted resistance and a talk with my aunt,
behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed up an arrangement
that gave me capital to play with, released me from too constant a
solicitude for the newer business developments—this was in what I may
call the later Moggs period of our enterprises—and I went to work at
once with grim intensity.
But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper place.
I’ve been leaving the story of my uncle altogether too long. I wanted
merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I took to these
experiments after I had sought something that Marion in some
indefinable way had seemed to promise. I toiled and forgot myself for a
time, and did many things. Science too has been something of an
irresponsive mistress since, though I’ve served her better than I
served Marion. But at the time Science, with her order, her inhuman
distance, yet steely certainties, saved me from despair.
Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the
lightest engines in the world.
I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It’s hard
enough simply to get it put down in the remotest degree right. But this
is a novel, not a treatise. Don’t imagine that I am coming presently to
any sort of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings and
hammerings _now_, I still question unanswering problems. All my life
has been at bottom, _seeking_, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always
with the thing seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil,
in force, in danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearly
understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundly
and fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself; I don’t know—all
I can tell is that it is something I have ever failed to find.