And then, suddenly, he did look up. Feeling his attention drawn,
he turned and raised his eyes to her. The rays of the setting sun fell on
her dress of white and yellow. She looked like a bird showing its
under-plumage. He waved his hand in return, instinctively making gestures
similar to her own, and as he did so, a Flock of Ideas flew down upon him
like a shower of leaves--nothing very distinct and sharp, but just loose,
flying ideas that were in-the-air-to-day.
They seemed to result from the signalling; they interpreted something he
could not frame in words. They fluttered about his mind, trying to get in
and lodge. It was wireless communication--the kind used by animals, fish,
moths, insects, above all, birds. He remembered the female Emperor-moth
that, hidden in a closed box during the short breeding season, summoned
the males across twenty miles of country until her antennae were cut off,
when no male came near her. He felt as if Joan transmitted ideas to him,
shaking them through the air from invisible antennae. He received the
currents, but could not properly de-code them. He waved back to her
again, then was lost to view round the corner.
'It's a queer thing,' ran through his mind, as though catching the drift
of something she had flashed towards him, 'but Joan's got something no one
else has got--yet. It's coming into the world. Telepathy and wireless
are signs, only she's got it naturally, she's born with it. She's in
touch with everything and everybody everywhere, as though Time and Space
don't trick her as they trick the rest. It's life, but a new kind of
life. It's air life. That's what she means by saying she's an
all-at-once and an all-over person. I understand it, but I haven't got it
myself--and, as if to prove it, he ran into another pedestrian who cursed
him, and, before he could recover himself, collided the next minute with a
lamp-post.
The current that had been pouring through him was interrupted; it switched
elsewhere.
'When more of us get like that,' it went on brokenly, 'when the whole
world feels it'--he snatched at an immense and brilliant certainty that
was gone before he could switch it completely into his mind--'it will be
brotherhood! The world will _feel_ together,--one! It's beginning
already. Only people can't quite manage it yet.'
And the strange lost mood of his youth poured through him, the point of
view that made everybody seem one to him, when air and birds offered the
dream of some inexpressible ideal. . . . He lost himself among the
buttercup fields of spring . . . wandered through Algerian gardens where
the missel-thrush sang in the moonlight and the radiant air was perfumed
with a thousand scents . . . then pulled himself up just in time to avoid
collision with a policeman who came heavily along the solid earth against
him.
'Look where you're a-going,' growled the policeman.
'Go where you're looking,' he answered silently in his mind. 'That's the
important thing--to look and to go!'
He steadied himself then. His mind scurried through the Primers, but
found nothing that helped him much. Joan had asked him about Time and
Space, and he had replied almost as though she had put the words into him
first. Never before had he actually thought in such a way. Time and
Space, as a Primer reminded him, were merely 'Modes under which physical
phenomena are presented to our consciousness, under which our senses act
and by which our thoughts are limited.' Both were illusory, figments of
our finite minds; both could be subdivided or extended infinitely; both,
therefore, were unrealities. They were false, as a picture is false that
makes a pebble in the foreground as large as a cathedral in the background
in order to convey so-called perspective.
And Joan, somehow or other, was aware of this, for she saw things
all-at-once and all-over. He thought of her word 'throughth'; it wasn't
bad. For she applied it to time as well as space. Time was more than a
line to her, it had several directions, like space. He smiled and felt
light and airy. Joan knew a landscape all at once, as though she had
another sense almost. Every man believes he sees a landscape all at once,
but in reality each spot is past by the time he sees it; it happened
several seconds ago; he sees it as it was when the light left it to travel
to his eye. Each spot has its separate _now_; there is no absolute Now.
He had been wrong to tell her there was only the present; he saw it; she
had flashed this into him somehow. To think the future is not there until
it is reached was as false as to think his flat was not there until he
stepped into it. He laughed happily, aware of a strange, light-hearted
carelessness known in childhood first, then known again when he fell in
love and so shared everything in the world. An immensely exalted point of
view seemed almost within his reach from which he could know, see and _be_
everything at once. Joan would know and understand what it meant; yet he
had created Joan . . . and had forgotten . . . He thought of light.
By overtaking the rays of light thrown off from the battle of Waterloo he
could see it happening _now_; if he moved forward at the same pace as the
rays he could see Waterloo stationary; if he moved faster he could see the
battle going backwards, of course. But Waterloo remained always--there.
Time and space were mere tricks. The unit of perception decided the
childish dream of measurement. 'Ha, ha!' he chuckled. 'Real perception
is for the inner self, then, omnipresent, omniscient--at-once and
all-over.' To realise 'I am' was to identify oneself with all, and
everywhere. 'Wherever I am, I--_go_!'
'That's it,' he concluded abruptly, dropping upon a bench in a little Park
he had reached, 'Joan doesn't think or reason. She just knows. She's an
all-over and all-at-once person!' And he put the Primers, with their
neat, clever explanations, out of his head forthwith.
'Cleverness,' he reflected, leaning back in the soft smothering dusk,
'is the hall-mark of To-day. It is worthless. It is the devil.
It separates, shuts off, confines and crystallises what should flow and
fly. Birds ain't clever. They just know. There's no cleverness in that
Southern Tour, there's knowledge--all shared together.' The Primer
writers, men who had made their names, were clever merely.
By concentrating on a single thing they could describe it, but they didn't
know it, because the whole was out of sight. They explained the bit of
truth. Joan, ignorant of the photographic details they described and
explained, yet knew the whole--somehow. But how? Wherever she was, she
went!
He drew a long breath as if he had flown ten miles.
'She's something new perhaps,' he felt run through him, 'something new and
brilliant flashing down into the old, tired world.' He lit his pipe with
difficulty in the wind, fascinated by the marvel of the little flaming
match. 'She's off the earth--a new type of consciousness altogether--sees
old things in another way--from above and all at once. She's got the bird
in her--'Half-angel and half-bird,' he remembered with a sigh. Only that
morning an essay on Rhythm in his newspaper, _The Times_, had mentioned:
'Angels have been called the Birds of God, and an angel, as we imagine
him, is a being that can do all good things as easily as a bird flies.
When we represent him with bodily wings we are thinking of the wings of
his spirit, and of a soaring power of action and thought for which we have
no analogy in this world except in the physical beauty of flight.'
'By Jove!' he cried aloud.
A flock of sparrows, startled by a cat, rose like a fountain of grey
feathers past him, whirring through the air. There were fifty of them,
but they moved like one.
'Got a whole flock in her!' he added.
He watched the fluttering mass of busy wings as they shot into a leafy
plane tree overhead and vanished. A touch of awe stole over him.
'There's a whole flight of birds in her. She's a lot, yet one,' he went
on under his breath, thinking that the fifty sparrows went out of sight
like one person who turns a corner and is gone. How did they manage it?
By what magical sympathy, as though one single consciousness actuated them
all, did they swerve instantly together?
There was something uncanny about it. He felt a little creepy even. . . .
The shadows were stealing over the deserted Park. A low wind shivered
through the iron fence. A vast nameless power came close. . . . He got
up slowly, heavily, and went out into the crowded street, glad a moment to
feel himself surrounded by men and women, all following routine, thick,
solid, reasoning folk, unable to fly. A swallow, flashing like visible
wind across the paling sky of pink and gold, went past him. He looked up.
He sighed. He wondered. Something marvellously sweet and lofty stirred
in him. With intense yearning he thought of his little, strange, birdy
daughter, Joan, again. His absorbing love for her spread softly to
include the world. 'If she should teach them . . .!' came the bewildering
idea, as though the swallow dropped it into him. 'Drag them out of their
holes, show them air and wings, make them bird-happy . . . teach them
that!'
A tremendous freedom, lofty and careless, beckoned to him,--release,
escape at full speed into the infinite air; all cages opened, all bars
destroyed, doors wide and ceilings gone; that was what he felt.
But lack of words blocked the completion of the wild, big thought in him,
for he had never felt quite like this since early youth, and had no means
of describing the swift yet deep emotion that was in him. He could not
express it--unless he sang. And he was afraid to sing. The County
Council would misinterpret Joy. There was an attendant in the Park, a
policeman in the road; he would be locked up merely.