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!'