'Look here, Father,' said Joan next day, 'why is it----' then paused,
unable apparently to express herself.
'Eh, child?' He gasped, thinking her question consisted of those three
words alone, and wondering how in the world he was going to satisfy her.
'Why is it,' she went on the next moment, 'that wherever we are we want to
be somewhere else, and whatever we know we want to know something else--
more at any rate? And we never want it alone. We want to tell everything
to some one else, I mean.'
Father almost preferred the first question--it left openings for vaguer
answers. This definiteness increased his difficulty rather. He scratched
his head and passed his fingers through his hair, which looked just then
as if it would neither stay on nor down. He smoothed it deliberately,
thinking as hard and quickly as he could. He knew what the girl meant, of
course, more or less.
'The instinct to _share_ what we like is, I suppose, a proof that we----'
he was going to say.
Before he could utter the words, however, she answered for him: 'Because
we ought to be everywhere at once and know everything at once--like in
that cinema. Isn't that it?'
Mother, it so chanced, just then went past the open door along the
corridor; she went steadily, not to say heavily; she was obviously in one
place at a time, doing one thing at a time, a worthy, practical, useful
human being, and what the world considers a valuable unit of humanity--
yet surely, oh, surely, wrong and a wing-less entity clogged with earth
and the limits that earth-ignorance involved. She was on her way to scold
the servant, to order dinner, or to fetch socks to mend. Good. But it
was the way she went about her job--the un-birdy way--that proved the
badger in her. Air and the careless joy of air was nowhere in her, not
even in her most helpful actions. 'One should take life as a bird takes
the air,' he was thinking again. It had become a motto.
And a flood of shadowy thoughts swept down upon his mind. Joan, when he
turned to find her, had already gone from the room. He was alone.
The half-read newspaper lay upon his knee; Tom had long since gone to the
office; the sun shone in across the sea of roofs and chimney-pots; he saw
a white, soft, fluffy cloud bedded in the blue. A swift shot gloriously
across the narrow strip of sky. And this flood of shadow thoughts poured
in and out of his mind like a hundred thousand swifts.
They would have filled an entire Primer if written out and printed; but in
his mind, together with their host of suggestive correlations, they
flashed and vanished with the speed and ease of the swift, a bird that
seemed only wings, without body, legs, or head--powerful, graceful flight
personified. The laborious absurdity of words made him feel helpless and
rather stupid. He felt lonely, too, exiled from a finer, easier state of
being to which something in him properly and rightfully belonged.
The wings of the spirit stirred and fluttered in him. He sighed.
Joan's sentence vibrated in him like a song, for nothing so much as music
sets free the bird in human beings, enabling the soul to soar beyond all
possible categories of time and space, beyond all confinements and
limitations, even beyond death.
It was his daughter's remark that led in this rushing shower of thoughts
that followed: 'Why is it that, wherever we are, we want to be elsewhere?'
People as a whole were always afflicted with this desire to be somewhere
else. It was true. In London he longed for windy lanes, but in the windy
lanes he thought how nice it would be to see the shops and people in the
streets; at a party he would think with longing of the cosy room at home,
the book and chair beside the fire-corner with his pipe, yet in that
corner with pipe and book he would suddenly lay them down and remember
with envy the gaiety of company, the talk, the laughter, and the bright
companionship he was missing. It was often, if not always, so: the desire
to be elsewhere and otherwise seemed inherent in human beings; they were
never content or satisfied with the place they were in at a given moment.
'It's the restlessness of the race,' he decided, 'for whom movement is so
laborious, slow, and costly. If they moved as a bird moves, swiftly,
instantly, and without trouble or cost, this restlessness would not be
felt.'
Then he paused. 'But it's not merely that,' flashed through him,
'far, far more. It's the expression of a strange and deep belief: the
belief that we ought to be, and should be, _can_ be everywhere at once.
This power lies in us somewhere, only as yet we haven't discovered how to
use it. . . . But it's coming, and air and flight, wings and speed are
already its beckoning symbols. We're being mysteriously quickened.
We ought to be able to know everything, and to be everywhere, at once, in
touch with all the universe, able to draw on all its powers. We have the
right. This longing so to know and be, this uneasy yearning in us, what
is it but an affirmation, a conviction that we can so be? Our wings go
fluttering in our tiny cages. Wherever I am I go--and I _am_ wherever my
thought and desire are.'
He sat back and thought about it. It seemed to him a great discovery.
He felt sure that somewhere in himself lay the power to be everywhere at
once, one with everybody and everything. To be aware of everybody
everywhere was the first step at any rate, and the cinema had dropped a
hint that it was coming.
'Well--but the practical meaning of it--what? The use that people like
Mother should make of it--what? Bodies will never actually fly.
Certainly not, but thought flies already, and it only remains for
consciousness to accompany it. Bodies, of course, are earth; yet they
will, they must, grow lighter, more responsive, both as receiving and
transmitting instruments, consciousness no longer focussed only where the
body is. We shall be human cinemas,' he thought, 'going where we will,
instantaneously and easily as a bird, seeing all and knowing all.
Universal consciousness, of course, is a spiritual condition; it is an Air
quality, space and time denied. The Kingdom of Air is within us.
We shall experience air with its collective instantaneity. . . .'
He folded his newspaper and went down the narrow corridor to his little
private den. 'Oh, that I had the wings of a dove,' occurred to him and
made him smile. 'A cry of the soul, of course,' he realised, as he took
his twenty limited steps between the rigid walls. He stubbed his toe
against the desk, and sat down in his revolving chair.
The ideas set in motion by Joan's remark continued flowing, flying through
him. He seized what he could catch.
'Our bodies, responding to a swifter, happier, more careless attitude of
mind, will gradually grow lighter, more sensitive; become less dense and
earthy; until at last we shall feel with everybody everywhere. No longer
separate and cut off from others, divided as earth is divided, we shall
win this immense increase of sympathy and be everywhere we want to be,
every-at-once, as Joan put it. We shall move with our thought--air!
We shall have instantaneity--air again! Our bodies may not fly, but our
consciousness will fly to one another, as light flies across the universe
unerringly from sun to sun--bodies of light. Like the birds in England,
we shall know when the Siberian ice has broken. We shall be off!'
The thrill of some mighty wisdom came very near.
He became strangely aware--it was like the lifting of great wings within
his soul--that this collective, airy consciousness was already gathering
the world into a flock; and it was the cinema, explained by Joan's brief
sentence, that flashed the amazing and uplifting thought upon him.
Whirling round and round in his revolving chair, reason tried to grapple
with the rush of ideas. The contents of a hundred Primers rose
higgledy-piggledy, to congest his mind and memory. But his soul, rising
like a lark, outdistanced everything he had ever read. The one clear
dazzling certainty was this: 'We shall no longer be cut off and separate
from others.' A variant, surely, of loving, and therefore knowing, all
neighbours as ourselves. A thousand years as one day! To be everywhere
at once and to know everybody was, after all, but to slip the cables of
the tiny, separate self, and experience the Whole. Hence the desire to be
always elsewhere and otherwise. Hence, too, the innate yearning to
_share_ experiences of all kinds with others. 'Nirvana' dropped from a
forgotten Primer into him, and for the first time pages of laborious
explanation utterly ignored, he grasped its gracious meaning fully. 'To
meet the Lord in the air and be for ever with him,' came another cliche.
They poured and rained upon him in their naked meanings, undisguised by
words.
'Ah! To live in the Whole was not, then, to lose individuality, but to
extend and share it!' He spun round and round happily in his chair.
'Grand bird idea, and air ideal!' He saw in his heart the nations taking
wing at last, leaving earth below them, free of space and free of time,
sharing this new and undivided consciousness. It was spiritual, of
course; yet not an inaccessible nor a different state; it was a state
growing naturally and truly out of the physical. Spontaneous living and
the bird's-eye point of view were the first faint signs of its
approach. . . .
The chair stopped turning, while he filled and lit his pipe, watching the
clouds of blue smoke float here and there in wreaths and eddies.
Joan's eyes peered across it at him like a phantom's. . . . 'It's immense,
but very simple,' he was thinking, 'her funny little song puts it all in a
nutshell . . . and the way she tries to live . . .' when a heavy tread
disturbed him and something came into the room.
'Joe dear!' said his wife as she entered,--'but you've got no air here!'
She opened a window, while he at once sprang up and opened another.
Her manner gave him the impression that she had come in with a definite
purpose; she had something important she wished to say. He decided to let
it come out naturally. He would wait.
'Not both,' she said, 'it makes a draught,' and closed her own.
'Bless you, my dear,' he exclaimed, 'you do look after me splendidly.'
He gave her a sudden hug and kiss that startled her. Looking at him in a
puzzled, wistful way, she smiled, and something of long-forgotten days
slipped in magically between them for an instant. He saw a yellow scarf
across the smoke; she saw perhaps, a breathless boy with a field of golden
buttercups behind him. . . .
'You catch cold so easily,' she mumbled, then added quickly, 'the country
will suit us all better, won't it?'
'Yes,' he answered, 'yet, once we're there, we shall want to be somewhere
else, I suppose----'
'Oh, I hope not, Joe,' with a Martha sigh. 'Whatever makes you think
that?'
'We can be, anyhow; we must remember that.'
'Oh dear, Joe, you're very restless these days,' she exclaimed, and the
way she said it made him realise her customary load of apprehension, her
care-full, heavy way of taking life, seeing the difficulties first.
Pessimism was a sure sign of waning life-forces. He felt pity and
sympathy. And instantly an eddy of his recent whirlwind ideas swept down
upon him and joy followed. He longed to communicate this joy to his wife,
the joy she had known in her days of courtship long ago when the airy
consciousness had touched her. And, as though to emphasise the contrast
between their points of view, a wasp buzzed in through the open window
just then, and Mother--shrank.
In a flash he understood her very clearly. Her attitude to life was fear.
Unable to leave the ground, she was always afraid of being caught. If she
met a cow, it would toss her; a goat, it meant to butt her; a dog, a cat
only waited an opportunity to bite or scratch, a wasp came in on purpose
to sting her and not merely because it had lost its way. She invariably
locked the door of her room and looked under the bed; she was nervous
about lamps--they would blow up if she tried to put them out. Probably
all these disasters _would_ happen to her; her shrinking attitude of fear
attracted the very thing she dreaded. People similarly would deceive her,
since she expected, even demanded, it of them. In a word, the trouble she
dreaded she attracted.
'Fly at anything you're afraid of,' he said suddenly. 'That paralyses it.
It can't happen then. Or, better still, fly over it.' But she looked so
bewildered, puzzled, even unhappy, that he got up and took her hand.
'Don't mind me, Mother dear,' he said soothingly; 'I've got an idea,
that's all.' His heart brimmed full with comfort; her face said so
plainly 'I don't understand, I feel out of it, I'm a little frightened!
Only I can't express it quite.' 'It's immense but very simple,' he went
on; 'Joan put it into me, I believe, first, and Joan was born out of us
both, out of you and me, in those brilliant happy days when we were afraid
of nothing. So it belongs to you, too, you see.' He paused, giving her
an opportunity to state her mission.
'It's all a bit beyond me, I'm afraid,' said Mother patiently, an anxious
expression in her eyes. But there was admiration as well. It occurred to
her perhaps that she might have married a genius after all. She did not
yet make her special and particular announcement, however. She would do
so in her own way presently, no doubt.
'Mother,' he said abruptly, 'there's nothing in the universe beyond you.'
He dropped her hand and stood erect, opening his short arms to the sky
outside the window. The wasp buzzed out at that moment, and left him her
undivided attention. His eyes were fixed upon the clouds where the
swallows darted. 'Mother,' he went on, 'I'm illogical, unscientific,
ignorant rather, and very confused in mind--in _mind_,' he emphasised
'but this immense idea beyond all books and learning has come to me, and
I'm sure it's wisdom, though I call it Air.'
'Air,' she repeated slowly. 'Yes, dear.'
'Air, dear, yes, and that means living like the birds, more carelessly,
more lightly, taking no thought for the morrow--_not_ shirking work and
duties and so on, but----'
'But we know all that,' she interrupted. 'I mean, we've read it.
It's this sort of having-faith business. It's all right for people with
money.'
'The very people,' he corrected her, 'for whom it's most difficult.'
'Oh dear,' and she heaved another Martha sigh. There was a pause.
'Couldn't you put it in a book, Joe--write it?' she asked, pride in one
eye and ambition in the other. He looked very much of a man, standing
there so erect with his eyes fixed on space above her head. 'We could do
with a bit extra, too.'
'And might help other people,' he added, 'eh?'
She said nothing to that. 'It might sell; you never know.'
He shook his head. He realised, once again, the pathos in her, and at the
same time that she vampired him. It's the pathetic people that ever
vampire and exhaust those who are more vital.
'I'm not literary,' he replied, 'not literary in that way. Only the few
with air in them would catch my idea, and the others, the commonplace
Press in particular which decides the sale of a book, would find a joke
they _could_ understand and call it air. And air is gas, you know.'
He chuckled. 'Whereas what _I_ mean is Air--instantaneous unifier of
thought and action, the L.C.D. of a new order of existence, a new point of
view born of collective sympathy, as with a flock of birds, community
involving something akin to the strange bird-wisdom and bird-knowledge--'
he took a deep breath--'the solvent of all philosophic and religious
problems----'
She caught a word and clutched it. 'Religious people,' she put it
hurriedly, 'might buy it--a book like that.'
He came back from his flight with a thud, landing beside her.
'Their imagination is too sluggish, dear. As a rule, too, they have not
intellect enough to detect the comic element in life. They can't laugh at
themselves. They exclude joy and fun and play. They never really sing.'
'They do, yes,' said Mother--'I mean they don't. That's quite true.'
She settled herself more comfortably in her chair. Evidently she
appreciated his talking to her of his intimate thought; she felt herself
taken into his confidence and liked it. It made it easier for her to say
what she had come to say. Noticing her gesture his own sympathy and pity
deepened. 'Ah, Mother dear,' he exclaimed, touched by a sudden pathos,'
it's wonderful to be alive, isn't it? And to be able to think and feel
ideas tearing about inside you? It's worth everything--just to be able to
say "I am," and still more wonderful if you can add "I go." That's the
secret. Live in the interest of the actual moment, but never imagine that
it ties you there, eh? Life lies at your feet in a map; you can take what
direction you please. Choice is your own, you can take or leave--as
literally as when you stand above a jeweller's counter. One person
chooses the bright stones, another the dark. It's all a matter of
selection. On a picnic you may select the midge that stings you, the few
drops of rain that fell, or the midges that did _not_ sting you. . . .
You can choose gloom or joy, I mean, just as you----'
'Joe dear,' she interrupted, sitting forward in her chair, 'there's
something I wanted to say to you--seriously.'
He took her hand again. He had noticed the growing pucker between her
eyes and knew the difficulty she experienced in unburdening herself of
something. He had chattered in this way to give her confidence and show
his sympathy. But she had not followed, had not understood. She had
remained safe in the mouth of her hole.
'Talking of religion, as you were just now,' she went on with an effort
rather, 'I--I wanted to talk to you about it.' There was a hint, but a
very tiny hint, of challenge in her voice.
'Of course, of course,' he said encouragingly, patting the hand he held.
There was a moment's silence, while their eyes met and he smiled into her
troubled face. What she was about to say meant much to her, and she
feared opposition. She took a deeper breath.
'I'm thinking of becoming High Church,' she announced.
'Admirable!' he exclaimed. 'I'm delighted!'
'What! You don't mind, dear?'
'It's just exactly what'll suit you,' he replied happily. 'Just what you
need.'
'But _very_ High Church--it means confession, you know,' she went on
quickly, relieving herself of ideas evidently long pent up, 'and it must
be very helpful, I think, knowing one's sins forgiven.'
'Helpful, and very pleasant,' he agreed, lowering his eyes from hers. The
sudden sense of his own failure towards her pained him. She needed some
one to lean on, to confide in, to unburden herself upon, and she turned to
a paid official instead of to himself. She didn't know yet that she could
confess to herself and so forgive herself, which meant understanding her
sins and deciding not to repeat them. She needed some one who could do
this for her. It was the stage she was at. 'Splendid,' he reflected,
'there were creeds for every stage. What a mercy!' And while she
explained herself now without shyness, but with a confusion as great as
his own, at _his_ stage, he listened to her as vaguely as, doubtless, she
had listened to him. He glanced down at his newspaper, not to read it
exactly, but in the way a man who wants to think--to think subconsciously
perhaps--takes up the object nearest to his hand and regards it
attentively. His eye ran along the print, while his thought was:
'She wants something, some one to lean upon, of course, poor soul.
I'm not sufficient, I don't give her sympathy enough. I'll do better in
future. Her wings are on the flutter.'
' . . . Something to guide and help one a bit,' he heard her saying.
'The very thing, Mother, the very thing,' he put in. 'I'm so glad.
It'll speed you up. Quickening--that's it, isn't it? Quickening of the
spirit, and of the body too,' he added. 'You'll be flying with us next!'
And while she poured into his ears the confused but genuine story of her
need, his own mind continued its own wordless thoughts. He saw the
millions of history wading through the creeds, and, thank heaven, there
were creeds enough to satisfy every type. For himself, a creed seemed to
play the role of a porter in a mountain climb--carrying the weight from
the climber's shoulders, but never guiding. Nevertheless, he blessed them
all, and the Creed Primers in a long series with red covers and black
lettering flashed across his memory. 'All true,' he realised, 'every
blessed one of them. And no wonder each man swears by his own that it
alone is true. For it is true; it's exactly what _he_ needs.'
' . . . I was sure you wouldn't mind, Joe dear. I knew you'd understand,'
came from Mother at last.
'And so you shall, dear. It'll help you along magnificently.
We'll start the moment we get into the country--start it up, eh?'
'I have begun already,' she said, more sure of herself.
'Better still,' was his reply.
She got up, patted his shoulder awkwardly, kissed him, and stood a moment
by his chair; a second later the door closed behind her. But hardly had
her step died away along the corridor than the words his eye had rested
upon absent-mindedly in the newspaper, rose and offered themselves. It
was a coincidence, of course, but coincidences do occur. The sentence lay
in the middle of a paragraph concerned with some new book or other, a book
on Russia, he discovered, by glancing higher: '. . . She has a
far-reaching vision, and her Church at least has for long been preoccupied
with the idea of the union of humanity. . . . The idea of brotherhood and
even universal brotherhood, permeates all classes of society . . .'; while
opposite, and level with it in the adjoining column, oddly enough, was a
notice of an article in some important Review or other with the title 'The
New Religion.' The sentence quoted that caught his eye referred to the
Church of England: 'A pitifully forlorn body, bankrupt in valour and
policy, resource and prestige.' No one To-day with spiritual needs could,
apparently, rely upon it; the new spirit regarded it as prehistoric.
The people were far ahead of it already. . . .
He laid the paper down and wondered; the two statements capped his flying
ideas so appositely.
'Yes, there's a new thing coming into life,' he exclaimed aloud.
'It's in the air, even in this vulgar halfpenny paper.' He relit his pipe
and smoked a moment hard. 'Of course it's not generally realised yet,' he
went on to himself between the puffs; 'but that's not odd after all: it's
taken the world two thousand years to realise Christ, and only a few
realised Him when He was there. When--how--will this new spirit touch us
_all_ . . .? What's got to happen first, I wonder?'
He sighed and a curious shiver ran down his spine. Nothing, he
remembered, was born, nothing big and deep ever came to birth, without
travail and upheaval. He was conscious of this strange shiver in his
being. He almost shuddered. His pipe went out. Through the open window
he looked down upon the crowded pavements, but the next instant looked up
to where the swallows danced and twittered happily in the summer light and
air.
The vision in Maida Vale came back to him when the masses, clothed in
black, had seemed to rise and open a million mighty wings. He remembered
the singular idea of blood that had accompanied it. And again a shudder
touched him.
'Something's got to happen first,' he sighed, 'before _all_ can take the
air. Something's got to happen.' And then, as a burst of sunshine and
cool wind entered the room together by the window, a sudden conviction
swept him off his feet. The world blew open; the nations rose in a
stupendous flock before his eyes; humanity as a unit spread its wings.
'something's _going to happen_,' he exclaimed, 'but out of it will grow
the new birth of happy air!' There was both joy and shuddering in his
heart, but the joy was uppermost.
He met his wife in the passage on his way out a little later.
She button-holed him for a moment, a new confidence and lightness in her,
it almost seemed. She was High Church now. It concerned their daughter.
Joan, she mentioned, was not quite like other girls of her own age. She
was growing very fast in mind as well as in body. She suggested a doctor
for her. 'A London doctor, and before we go to the country. We might
have her overhauled, you know. She seems to me light-headed sometimes.'
Mother felt sure it would be wise. This time she was not anxious, did not
worry as usual; she merely thought of the girl's welfare in the best way
that occurred to her. From her new High Church pedestal she looked out
upon the world with a temporary new confidence, at any rate.
'Admirable,' agreed her husband. 'I'll take her myself to-morrow.'
'Why not to-day, dear?' she asked, relieved that she need not go herself.
'We're off to look at cottages,' he told her. 'I'll take her
to-morrow.' And the matter was settled thus.