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.