He plunged into the stream of pedestrians and it struck him how thickly,
heavily clothed they were; the street resembled a sluggish river of dark
liquid; he struggled through it, immersed to his shoulders.
And the flock of curious, elusive thoughts, half-formed, fluttered above
his mind just near enough to drop their shadows before they scattered and
passed on. Much as a kitten pounces on the shadow of shifting foliage on
a lawn his brain pursued and pounced upon them, bringing up the best words
available, yet that did not suit because the necessary words do not exist.
It was only the shadow of the ideas he captured.
'A new language is wanted,' he decided, 'a flying language, with a rapid
air vocabulary, condensed, intense. Everything else is speeding up
nowadays, but language lags behind. It's old-fashioned, slow.
All these ideas I've got, for instance, ought to go into a word or two by
rights. Joan put 'em into me just now from the roof by a couple of
gestures--enough to fill a dozen Primers with words. Ah, that's it!
What comes to me in a single thought--and in a second--takes thousands of
words to get itself told in language. Words are too detailed and clever:
they miss the whole. Aha! There's a new language floating into the world
from the air--a new way, a bird-way, of communicating. We shall share as
the birds do. We shall all understand each other by gesture--thought--
feeling! Instant understanding means a new sympathy; that, again, means a
divine carelessness, based on a common trust and faith.' And the
immensely lofty point of view--as from a dizzy height in space--once more
floated past him.
He steadied himself by pausing to look in at the shop windows. On a
chemist's shelves he saw various things to stimulate, coax and feed people
into keener life. The Invisible Sticking Plaster was there, too, to patch
them up. Next door was a book-shop, where he remained glued to the window
like a fly to treacle-paper. 'Success and how to attain It,' he read,
'in twelve lessons, one shilling'; 'Train your Will and earn more Money,
fourpence halfpenny'; 'The Mysteries of Life, Here and Hereafter, all
explained, sixpence net.' And second-hand copies of various books, marked
'All in this row tuppence only,' including several of the
'What's-in-the-Air-To-day' Primers.
Beyond was a window full of clothing, woollen garments guaranteed not to
shrink; electric or magnetic belts, to store energy, 'special line--a
bargain,' and various goods for keeping warmth in various parts of the
body. All these shops, he reflected, sold things intended to increase or
preserve life, artificial things, cheaply made, and sold to the public as
dearly as possible, things intended to increase life and prevent its
going. In other shops he saw mechanical means for stimulating,
intensifying, driving life along. Life had come to this: All these
artificial tricks were necessary to keep it going. Food, knowledge,
clothes, speed that a bird possessed naturally in abundance. A robin's
temperature in the snow was 110 degrees. Yet human beings required
thousands of shops that sold the conditions for keeping alive,--at a
profit. He passed an undertaker's shop--to die was a costly artificial
business too. There was too much earth in the whole affair. He remembered
that no one ever saw a bird dead, when its death was a natural death.
It slipped away and hid itself--ashamed of being caught dead!
A crowd collected round him, thinking he had discovered something
exciting, and it jostled him until he elbowed his way out. He swerved
dizzily amid the booming, thundering traffic, as he crossed the road and
brought up against a toy-shop, where the sight of balls and butterfly
nets, ships and trains and coloured masks restored his equilibrium.
'Real things are still to be had,' the fluttering shadows danced across
his mind, 'And there are folk who like them!' he added in his own words,
as two tousled-headed children came up and stood beside him, staring
hungrily. He gave sixpence to each, told them to go in and buy something,
and then continued his evening walk along the crowded pavement.
'Life is a great grand thing,' he realised, 'if we could all get together
somehow. It's coming, I think. A change is coming, something light and
airy penetrating all this--this sluggish mass----' he broke off, again
unable to express the idea that fluttered round him--' ah! it's good to be
alive!' he went on, 'but to know it is better still. But you have no
right to live unless you can be grateful to life, and create your own
reason for existing. It means dancing, singing, flying!' He felt new
life everywhere near him; a new supply of a lighter, more vivid kind was
descending from the air. 'It's a new thing coming down into the world;
it's beginning to burst through everywhere: a change, a change of
direction----'
He repeated this to himself as he moved slowly through the surging crowd.
Joan, he remembered, had called death a change of direction only. But as
he reached the word 'change,' it seemed to jump up at him and hang blazing
with fire before his eyes. He had caught it flying; he held it fast and
looked at it. The other shadows careered away, but this one stayed.
He had caught the thing that cast it. The flock of shadows, he realised,
were not cast by actual thoughts; they were the faint passage through his
mind of mysterious premonitions that Joan's gestures had tossed carelessly
towards him through the air. Coming ideas cast their shadow before.
This one, at least, he had captured in a word, a figure of speech. He had
pounced and caught it by the tail. It fluttered, but could not wholly get
away.
Change was the keyword. A gigantic change was coming, but coming gently,
stealing along almost like a thief in the night, emerging into view
wherever a channel offered itself. Life was being geared up everywhere.
Human activities, physical, mental, spiritual, too, were increasing speed.
Humanity was being quickened. They were passing from earth to air.
Signs were plentiful, though mysterious. His mind roamed through the
Epitomes of his Primers, skimming off the cream. Thinkers, artists,
preachers, although they hardly realised it, were beginning to look up
instead of down; from pulpit, press, and platform the little signs peeped
out and flashed about the mass of expectant men and women. The entire
world seemed standing on tip-toe, ready for a tentative flight at last.
There was a universal expectation abroad that was almost anticipation.
But change involved dislocation here and there, and this dislocation was
apparent in the general confusion that reigned in the affairs of the
world. Stupendous hope was felt, though not yet realised and fulfilled.
No one as yet could justify it. Pessimism and confidence, both strangely
fundamental, were violently active. So long accustomed to terra firma,
the world asked questions of its little coming wings, and the new element
of air frightened even while it attracted--nervous, timid, wild, uneasy
questions were asked on every side. Deprived of the old, comfortable
ideas of Heaven and Hell, and suspicious of the newly hinted promise of
survival, hearts trembled while they listened to so sweet whispers of
escape into the air. The old shibboleths, distrusted, were slinking one
by one into their holes. Science could, perhaps, go usefully no further;
Reason, still proud upon her pinnacle, yet hesitated, unable to advance;
Theology looked round her with dim, tired eyes. The whole starving earth
paused upon a mighty change that should usher in a new and single thing--a
new direction. Alone the few who knew, felt glad and confident--joy.
But they _felt_ it only, for as yet they could not tell it in language
usefully.
They might live it, though!
'Live it--ah!' he exclaimed, and his thoughts came back again to his
queer, birdy daughter. For Joan, he told himself, brimmed over with it.
She had in her the lightness, speed, and shining of the new element; she
was glad and confident, full of joy, bird-happy, aware of principles
rather than of details. She sang. Of all creatures this spontaneous
expression of joy in life was known to birds alone. No other creatures
sang. The essential ecstasy that dwells in air, making its inhabitants
soar, fly, sing, was liberated in her human heart.
True. . . . The weary world stood everywhere on tiptoe, craning its neck
into the air for some new expected prophet who should take it by the--
wing.
It was a marvellous, delightful thought, and it sent his imagination
whirring into space. The wings of his mind went shivering. He gave
expression to it by a sudden gesture of his arms and head, making, it
seemed, a spontaneous effort to rise and fly--and, luckily, no one
observed him making it. It was similar, however, to the movement Joan had
made upon the roof as she stood outlined against the red and yellow sky;
similar, also, to the flashing curve the swallow had shown him not long
afterwards. It conveyed a thousand laborious sentences in a small
spontaneous gesture that was rhythmical. Ah! there was a change of rhythm
coming! And in rhythm lay a new means of instantaneous communication.
Two persons in the same rhythm knew and understood each other completely--
felt together. Then why not all?
The flock of shifting shadows fell more thickly down upon the floor of his
receptive mind. He pounced upon them eagerly.
'Yes, it's an air-thing somehow,' he felt, watching the amazing pattern,
'a bird-thing coming. And she knows it. She's born with it.' He again
remembered the buttercup meadows of Cambridge and the singing gardens of
Algeria, the ecstasy, the light and heat of that exalted passion.
'Her mother had the germ of it, but in Joan it's blossomed out.
People would call her primitive, backward, even a little crazy,
'hysterical' is the word they'd use to-day, I suppose--but in reality
she's--er--awfully advanced. To be behind the race is the same as to be
ahead of it, for life is circular and to run fast ahead is to overtake
your tail. Signs of going back are equally signs of going forward.
The same place is passed again and again until all it can teach has been
caught from it; so the brain may be justifying scientifically To-day what
was known instinctively to ancient times. The subconscious becomes the
conscious.'
'No, no,' the shadows painted somewhere behind his thought, 'it's not
circular, it's spiral. We come round to the same place again, only higher
up, above--in the air. And with the bird's-eye view from above comes
understanding.'
Joan, he remembered, had said a few days before, speaking of his
button-hole: 'A flower is a stone put up several octaves.' That was
flight in itself--all she said had flight in it. Her statement was true,
literally, scientifically, spiritually, yet evolution was a word certainly
unknown to her, and the spiral movement equally beyond her mental
vocabulary.
The shadows danced and grouped themselves anew.
He reviewed strange signs that were-in-the-air-to-day, seeing them all as
aspects of one single thing. They were not really disconnected; their
apparent separation was caused by the various angles of survey, just as a
floor seen from below became a ceiling. All that he was thinking now was,
similarly, one big thing caught from various points of view. Some power
swifter, surer than thought in him surveyed it all at once; the tiresome
descriptions his mind laboured over took in the details separately--the
shifting shadows; yet the pattern as a whole was in him, captured by some
kind of instantaneous knowledge such as birds possess. Like Joan, he
caught the bird's-eye view, in principle. Yet she refused to be blinded
and smothered by the details, whereas they certainly muddled _him_.
It was necessary to select the details one thought about evidently.
He tried to stand outside himself and see the single something that
included all the details, and in proportion as he did so he seemed to rise
into the air.
He reviewed these details flashily, and, so doing, got a glimpse, an
inkling, of the entirety whence they arose. All seemed to him significant
evidence of one and the same vast thing; this new, queer, rushing supply
of air-life flowing through everything everywhere, forcing a swift and
rhythmical way in the most unlikely places, modifying human activities in
all directions unaccountably. He saw a hundred of his Primer-Writers
sitting in a studious group about it, each describing certain specific
details, while the general outline of the whole escaped them individually.
Each called his scrap by different names, little aware that all sat
regarding the same one thing. It came up bubbling, dancing, pouring forth
with rhythm, bringing lightness into solid details, unsettling the
old-fashioned, and carrying many off their feet into the air. It was so
brimming that it overflowed; to resist it brought confusion, insecurity,
distress; to go with it was the only way to understand it--accepting the
huge new rhythm. Yet it had so many guises, so many protean forms.
Proteus was, indeed, a deathless truth, things changing into one another
because they all are one.
He felt this new thing as synthesis, unity. The signs he reviewed
combined in a single gesture that conveyed it. Earth, with its reason,
logic, facts, could teach no more; Science was blocked from sheer
accumulation of undigested detail; the new knowledge was not there; a new
element was needed. And it was coming: Air.
Already there was a change even in sight itself, and artists saw things in
a new direction. Mere foolishness to the majority, the cubists, futurists
and the like presented objects to others--others quite as intelligent as
the majority, quite as competent to judge--with an authentic fiat of truth
and beauty. They conveyed an essentially new view of objects, warning the
man in the street that the objective world is illusory and that concepts
built upon the reports of the senses are radically deceptive. A city seen
from an aeroplane resembled a cubist picture. This new sight seemed a
bird's-eye view, again, though using--going back to--the primitive, naked,
savage sight, yet a stage above it, higher, a tumultuous rhythm in it.
The spiral again!
Side by side with it ran a strange new hearing too. The musicians--he
recalled the names that showered through the Primer pages--called
attention to this new hearing-from-another-angle. And, here again, it was
a going back apparently. Debussy used the old, primitive tone scale,
while Strauss and Scriabin, to say nothing of a hundred lesser ears,
extended the rhythm of music to include the world of sounds as none have
dared before. In literature, more swiftly assimilative and interpretative
of the airy inrush, the signs were thickly bewildering. Only, for the
majority, Pan being still misunderstood, the God of Air came more slowly
to his own. But the signs were everywhere, like birds and buttercups in
spring. The bird's-eye view, flashing marvellously, imperishably lovely,
was on the way into the hearts of men, the fairy touch, the protean
aspect, the light, electric rhythm running from the air upon the creaking
ground, urging the mass upwards with singing, dancing, into a synthesis, a
unity like a flock of birds.
The nonsense of unintelligible words and decapitated sentences tried to
catch hold of what he felt, only failed to express it because it was too
big for used-up, pedestrian language. He felt this coming change and
swept along with it. He was aware of it all over.
It came, he realised, flushing the most sensitive, receptive channels
first--the artists chiefly--and the apparent ugliness here and there was
due to distortion and exaggeration, to that violence necessary to overcome
the inertia of habit in a narrow groove, the tyranny of Mode.
The accumulated momentum of habit flowing so long in one direction called
for a prodigious rhythm to stop it first, then turn it back--into the new
direction. Mode was the devil--_der Geist der stets verneint_--forbidding
change, destroying innovators, worshipping that formal, dull routine which
is ever anti-spiritual because it photographs a moment and fixes it to
earth for always. . . . It was, of course, attacked, as all new movements
are attacked, with contempt, with ridicule, with anger; but the attacks
were negligible, and could not stay its gathering flow. The bright little
minds of the day charged against it, stuck their clever shafts, and
scuttled back again into the obscurity of their safe, accustomed groove.
Mistaking stagnation for balance, they clung to the solid earth of years
ago, but knew it not.
Of all this his mind did not frame, much less utter, a single word.
But the pattern of its coming fell glowingly across his feelings.
Life too long had been a single photograph; it seemed now a rushing
cinematograph, revolving, advancing, mounting spirally into the air.
He felt it thus. Something new was pushing up the map from underneath to
meet the air; it was sprouting everywhere, going back to deep Pagan joy
and wonder, yet with Reason added to it. Reason looked back breathless to
Instinct long despised and cried, 'Come! Help me out!' And into his
mind leaped the symbolic image of a Centaur combining both these
faculties. He added wings to it.
'Reason--oh, of course! Without reason who could know that at a certain
station there must be a change of carriage?' The train and station once
there, that method of roving once accepted, Reason was as necessary as a
railway ticket. Only--well, he thought of the great Southern Tour and the
perfect motion and perfect knowledge that led those tiny travellers to
their distant destination and brought them home again to the identical
hedge and bush and twig six months later. There was another way of
communication. Birds knew it. The female Emperor-moth used it.
Our wireless poles and instruments followed laboriously to achieve it.
Yet the power itself lay in ourselves too, somewhere, waiting to be
recognised without costly mechanism.
Yes, there surely was another way of travelling, of motion, coming, a
bird-way, yet even swifter, surer still, because independent of the earthy
body. The real, airy part of men and women were acquiring it already,
their real selves, thought and consciousness, learning the new mighty
rhythm by degrees. The transference of thought and consciousness was
close upon them--from the air; wireless communication with all parts of
space; the mysterious, unconscious wisdom of the bird, organised and
directed consciously by men and women.
An immense thrill passed over him. He began to sing softly to himself,
but so softly, luckily, that no one overheard him: 'Flow, fly, flow;
Wherever I am, I _go_!' Joan knew it all unconsciously. She just sang
it.
And bits of a bird-primer flew across his mind, casting the same delicate,
protean shadows against the wall where thought stopped helplessly.
The precocious intelligence of feathered life was still a mystery no
primer-writer could explain. The curlew, he recalled, after wintering in
New Zealand, paused to mate and nest in the South of England on his way to
Northern Siberia, while awaiting the summons to complete its journey when
the ice is gone. 'It is a fact, proved and attested beyond dispute, that
the evening the curlew leaves the South of England is invariably the day
on which the ice breaks in the north, at least two thousand miles
distant.' How does the curlew know it?
He thought of the plover with five drums in his ear, able to hear the
'slow, sinuous movement of the worm in the soil, eight inches below the
hard-crusted surface'; of the lapwing who imitates the sound of rain by
drumming with his feet to bring the worms up; of the cuckoo matching her
egg with those of the foster-mother selected for her baby--hundreds of
variations; of the swallow, mating like the nightingale for life, and of a
certain pair of swallows, in particular, who 'for fifteen consecutive
years returned to the same spot, after wintering in Cape Colony, to build
their nest, arriving invariably on the same day of the year--the 11th of
April'; of the nightingales who winter separately, but return faithfully
together to England in the spring, the female, perhaps, from India, the
male from Persia.
A hundred marvels of air-life came back to him; all 'instinct'--only
'mere instinct'! Birds, birds, birds! The wisdom of the birds!
Their communications, their flocking together, their swift rhythmical
movements, their singing language, their unity, their--brotherhood!
From the air the new thing was rushing down upon the world, yes. Yet not
alone the sensitive artist-temperament perceived it; it came overflowing
into far less delicate channels as well, breaking up the old with
difficulty, but producing first a tumult of disturbance that would later
fall into harmonious rhythm too. There were everywhere new men, new
women; behind the Woman Movement, for all its first excess, was a
colossal, necessary, inevitable thing. Once rhythmical, the disorder and
extravagance would become order, balance. The neuter woman was a passing
moment in it, not to endure. The new woman was but another sign of the
airy invasion which the painters and musicians, the writers and the
preachers, felt. And the air-man, with new nerves, new courage, new
outlook upon energy, even new bird-like face and strange lightning eyes,
was another obvious, physical, yet only half-physical, expression.
His audacious courage seemed somehow to focus the new consciousness
preparing. The birds were coming everywhere. A new element, a new
direction!
In advance of the invasion, making way for it, old solid obstacles were
everywhere breaking down. He seemed to recognise a crumbling of
religions, of religious forms. The rigid creeds and dogmas, made by man,
and imprisoning him so long, were turning fluid before the stress of the
new arrival, melting down like sand-castles when the tide comes in.
They must hurry to adapt themselves, or else cease to exist.
Formal, elaborate, dead-letter theology must go, to let in--Religion.
The churches seemed to have become unreal already, continuing,
parrot-like, to teach traditional doctrines the people have long ago
abandoned. He heard another Primer whisper in his ear. 'Every one is
aware of the failure of the churches to touch modern life; to escape from
their grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations
of old-fashioned formulae, instead of finding vital, human, developing
expressions of the spiritual craving in man. They do not teach _that the
Kingdom of Heaven is on earth_. They have isolated religion from
practical life. Religion must evolve with the evolution of human
culture'--or disappear. Its teaching must take wings and rise to lead
into the air, or remain stagnant on the ground in ruins, stony,
motionless, dead, a photograph.
The 'wireless imagination' of the futurist was not so meaningless as it
sounded. The exaggeration that preceded the new arrival would soon pass.
Only, the first flight took the breath away a little, as when a man, from
walking, breaks into a run to leap into an unknown element. Through the
scientific world the quiver was running too. What's coming next? What in
the world is going to happen? seemed the universal cry. The composite
face of the world already assumed the eager lineaments of the great
bird-visage. The air was coming.
The rhythm of life was everywhere being accelerated, and side by side with
the mechanical expression in telephones and wireless communications, a
quickening transformation of human sensibility was taking place as well.
It was the running start for a leap into the air. Facilities for
increasing the spontaneity of living existed at every street corner, but
it was air that first produced them. Air made them possible. There was
even approach towards the unification of the senses, one man hearing
through his teeth and skull, another seeing through his temples.
The localisation of sensibility was merging into a unified perception
whereby people would presently know all-over and at-once. They would
realise the eternal principle and ignore the obscuring details. Once they
all felt together as the bird did, brotherhood, which is sharing all in
natural sympathy, would be close. . . .
The shadow-patterns flashed and rustled on across his mind. In a couple
of minutes all these wild ideas occurred to him. They were
extraordinarily elusive, yet extraordinarily real. In an interval as
brief as that between saying 'Quite well, thank you,' to some one who asks
'How are you?' this flock of suggestions swept over him and went their
way. They never grew clear enough to be actual thoughts; they were just
passing hints of what was in-the-air-to-day. All telescoped together in a
rapid rush, marked him, vanished, yet left behind them something that was
real. They came through his skin, he fancied, rather than through his
brain. They came all over.
The pedestrians, meanwhile, shuffled past him heavily; he made his way
with difficulty, the thick stream opening to let him through, then closing
in again behind him. He felt closely in touch with them all, in more ways
than one; but the majority were still groping on the ground, hunting for
luxurious holes to shelter in. Only a few were looking up. He saw, here
and there, an eager face turned skywards, tipped with the beauty of a
flushing dawn. These, perhaps, felt it coming. But few as yet--one in a
million, say--would dare to fly.
He watched them as he passed along, feeling them gathering him in.
He saw the endless, seething crowd as a unit. He felt their strength,
their beauty. He was aware of democracy, virile, proud, inevitable.
He felt the hovering bird above it somewhere, immense, inspiring.
The advancing tide was rising, undermining caste and class distinctions
steadily, breaking down conventions, the feeblest sand-castles children
ever built. He heard an awful thunder too. It revealed a storming
majesty, shattering, cataclysmic, making most hearts afraid--the opening
and stirring of multitudinous huge wings. Yet it was merely the new
element coming, the great invasion with its irresistible rhythm.
Democracy wore striped wings beneath its Sunday black, powerful,
magnificent eagle-wings. Birds flying in their thousands, he recalled,
convey sublimity. But yet he shuddered. The rising of such tremendous
wings involved somewhere--blood.
He saw, with his bird's-eye view, the general levelling up, or levelling
down, in progress. No big outstanding figure led the world to-day.
There were no giants anywhere. Much of a muchness ruled in art and
business, as in statesmanship. No towering figures showed the way into
the air. On the other hand there was degeneracy that could not be denied.
He saw it, however, like the dirty flotsam seaweed pushed in front of a
great high-tide. Degeneracy precedes new growth when that growth is of a
different kind. Out of decaying wood springs a tree of fairer type, and
from the ashes of a burnt hemlock forest emerge maple, birch and oak,
while the flaming Fireweed lights the way with beauty. When a Canadian
forest is destroyed by fire, the growth next spring is of a totally new
kind, and no one has yet told whence came the seed of this new, different
growth. After a prairie fire, similarly, new flowers spring up that were
not there before. The subsoil possibly has concealed them; they are
discovered by the fiery heat. The decay of old, true grandeur he saw
everywhere, the democratic vulgarisation of beauty, the universal
levelling up and levelling down, but he saw these as evidence of that
crumbling of too in-bred forms which announced the new coming harvest from
the air. It was but the decay of old foundations which have served their
time.
'We shall build lighter,' he half sang, half whispered to himself,
squeezing between a lamp-post and a workman who came rolling unsteadily
out of a tavern door; 'birds'-nests, up among the swinging trees!
We shall live more carelessly, and nearer to the stars! No cellars any
more, no basements, but gardens on the roof! Winds, colours, sunshine,
air! Oh!----' as the man bumped into him and sent him off the pavement
with 'Beg parding, sir!' 'No, I beg yours,' he replied, and came down to
earth with a crash, remembering that supper was at seven-thirty and he
must be turning homewards.
So he turned and retraced his steps, feeling somehow that he had come down
from the mountain tops or from a skimming rush along high windy cliffs.
The net result of all these strange half-thoughts was fairly simple.
His imagination had been stirred by the sight of his daughter in the
sunset making those suggestive gestures against the coloured sky.
With her hands she had flung a shower of silver threads about him; along
these, somehow, her own queer ideas flashed into him. A new point of
view, a new attitude to life, something with the light, swift rhythm of a
bird's flight was coming into the minds of men. Most of those who felt it
were hardly conscious, perhaps, that they did so, because carried along
with it. The old were frightened, change being difficult for them; but
the young, the more sensitive ones among them at any rate, stretched out
their arms and legs to meet the flowing, flying invasion. 'Flow, fly,
flow; wherever I am--I _go_,' was in the air to-day. Joan knew.
New hope, new light, new language, all aspects of joy and confidence,
seemed dawning. Air and birds were symbols of it. It was rhythmical,
swift, spontaneous. It sang. It was bird-happy and bird-wise. It was a
new kind of consciousness, yet more than a mere expansion of present
consciousness. It was a new direction altogether, while its object,
purpose, aim was the oldest dream known to this old-tired world--
brotherhood and unity. A bird brotherhood! The wisdom of the Flock!
'I declare,' he murmured, laughing quietly to himself, 'if any one could
hear me--see inside my mind just now--they'd say I was----!'
And that reminded him of his wife. He remembered that he was thinking of
moving into the country with his family before very long. He came back to
a definite thought again. He pondered facts and ways and means. He was
very practical really at heart, no mere dreamer by any means. He weighed
the difficulties. Mother was one of them. Sad, sad, the bird had left
her; she was a badger now. He felt uneasy, troubled in his mind. But he
smiled. He was fond of her.
'How ever shall we manage?' he asked himself. 'There are so many
incongruous things to reconcile. Gently, kindly, softly, airily is the
way.'
Then, suddenly, a bird-thought came to help him. Ah, it was practically
useful, this inspiration from the air. It was not merely nonsense, then!
'If I just hope and believe, and do my best, and don't think--too much--it
will all come right. I must be spontaneous and instinctive, not
overweighted by worrying and detailed reason. I must believe and trust.
That's the way to get what's called good judgment. See it whole from the
air!'
For the details that perplexed him were, after all, merely different
aspects of one and the same thing--the several points of view of Mother,
Joan, Tom, himself. Hold in the mind the details in solution, and the
problem must solve itself. If he understood each one--_that_ was
necessary--while viewing the problem as a whole, the solution must come
spontaneously of itself. The bird's-eye view would show the way, while he
remained nominally leader, like the bird that heads the triangular wedge
of wild geese across a hundred miles of sky. This flashed upon him like a
song.
And as he realised this, his trouble vanished; joy took its place; with it
came a sense of confidence, power, even wisdom. Though the matter was
trivial enough, it was the triumph of instinct: Reason laid out the
details, instinct pieced them together, then Intuition led. It was seeing
all-over, knowing all-at-once. Already he had begun to live like a bird,
and Joan, though he knew not how exactly, had taught him.
'Wherever I am, I go,' went darting through his head. He smiled, felt
light and happy--and strangely wise. Perhaps he could help. Perhaps he
was going to be a teacher even. A Teacher, he realised, must first of all
find out the point of view of the person to be taught, and then discover a
new point of view which will make the wrong or foolish attitude harmonise
with reality. Everybody is right where he is, however wrong he may be.
Only he must not stay there. The Teacher is a priest who supplies the new
point of view. New teaching, however, was not necessary; the world was
choked to the brim with teaching already. A new airy understanding of old
teaching was the thing. . . .
He was now close to the iron gates of Sun Court Mansions, where he lived.
In the diminutive, yet pretentious, plot of garden stood a tall, leafy
tree. A gust of wind blew past him at that moment with a roaring sound
that was like laughter, and he saw the tree shake and tremble.
The countless branches tossed in a dozen directions, hopelessly in
disorder, each branch, each twig obeying its own particular little rhythm.
That they all belonged to a single, central object seemed incredible, so
brave the show they made of being independent and apart.
Then, as he stood and watched, seventy thousand leaves turned all one way,
showing their delicate under-skins. The great tree suddenly blew open.
He saw the trunk to which leaves and branches all belonged. And at the
wind's order the tree behaved as a single thing, even the most outlying
portions answering to the one harmonious rhythm. At which moment, once
again, a flock of birds rose from somewhere near with an effortless rush
and swooped in among the leaves with one great gesture common to each one.
They settled with the utmost ease. The myriad little busy details merged
in one; they disappeared. But in settling thus, they made the solid green
seem light as air, shiny, almost fluid.
And Wimble, taking the odd hint, felt too that his own difficulties had
similarly turned fluid, melted, disappeared. The details merged into a
whole; they were referred, at any rate, to some central authority that hid
deep within him. A wind of inspiration, as it were, had blown him wide
open too. Details that tossed in different directions, apparently hostile
to one another, betrayed their common trunk. They showed their
under-sides. He was aware of an essential unity to which all belonged.
Something in him shone. He had taught himself, at any rate. He went
upstairs, confident and light-hearted, breathless a little too, as though
he had enjoyed an exhilarating flight of leagues, instead of a two-mile
trudge along the solid, crowded pavements of Maida Vale.
And later, when he went to bed, he fell asleep upon a gorgeous, airy
conviction: 'The Golden Age lies in front of us, and not behind!'
It was a birdy thought. He flew into dreamland with it in his wings.