Wimble watched the year draw to its close and run into the past.
Born slowly out of sullen skies, it had shaken off the glistening pearls
of April and slipped, radiant and laughing, into May; at the end of June,
full-bosomed still and stately, it had begun to hasten, lest the roses
hold it prisoner for ever; pausing a moment in August, it looked out with
perfect eyes upon the world as from a pinnacle; then, poised and
confident, began the grand descent down the red slopes of Autumn into the
peace of winter and the snow.
Thus, at least, its history described itself in Wimble's thoughts,
because his little mind, standing on tiptoe, saw it whole and from above.
'You ought to publish it, dear,' said Mother, to whom he mentioned it one
December evening round the fire. 'You really ought to write it.'
He objected that everybody knew it just as well as he did. 'It's always
happening to everybody, so why should I remind them?' 'Because they
don't see it,' was her answer. 'Besides, they'd think you wonderful.'
But Wimble was no writer. He shook his untidy head, yet secretly pleased
with his wife's remark that people don't see the obvious. It was almost
an air-remark. Mother was changing a little. . . . And he dozed in his
chair, thinking how easily the world calls a man wonderful--he has but
to startle it--and how easily, too, that man is destroyed if he believes
its verdict.
With the rare exception of occasional signs like this, however, his wife
had not mobilised her being radically for a big change. She retired into
her prosaic background, against which, as with certain self-protecting,
ultra-cautious animals and insects, she remained safely invisible.
Back to the land proved rather literal for her; she wore her heavy
garden-gloves with pride. At the same time her practical nature, streaked
with affection, patience, and unselfishness, took on, somehow, a tiny
glint of gold. Her eyes grew lighter, her movements less laborious.
Fear lessened in her; joy often caught her by surprise. Sparks, though
not yet flame, lit up her attitude to things, as if, close to her beloved
element of earth, the country life both soothed and blessed her.
She felt at home. She said 'what' far less frequently. This quiet,
peaceful winter was perhaps for her a period of gestation. The family
gathered about her more than in town.
With a buoyancy hard to define and possibly not justified, Wimble watched
her. He looked out upon life about him. His health was good, but this
buoyancy was based on something deeper than that; his health was good
because of it. Nothing mattered, a foolish phrase of those who shirked
responsibilities, was far from him; everything mattered equally expressed
it better. The New Thing coming, which he and Joan called Air, lay
certainly in him, though very far yet from finding full expression.
The germ of it at any rate lay in him, as in her. The fact that they
recognised it was proof of that. A divine carelessness took charge of
his whole life and being; Mother was aware of it; even Tom responded
mildly: 'quite sets a fellow up,' as he expressed it after his rare
week-end visits, the Sunday spent in killing rabbits; 'town's overrated
after all.'
They merged pleasantly enough with their surroundings, melting without
shock into the life of neighbours, sharing the community existence,
narrow, conventional, uninspired though it was. And all through the dark
and clouded months, the skies emptied of birds, weighted at the low
horizons, afraid to shine, yet waiting for the marvellous coming dawn--
all through these heavy weeks and days Joan's presence, flitting
everywhere with careless singing and dancing, shot the wintry gloom with
happy radiance. It was her spontaneous dancing that especially made
Wimble stare and wonder. It conveyed meanings no words could compass,
expressing better than anything else the new attitude he felt coming into
life. He remembered the flood of shadowy ideas her graceful gestures had
poured into him once before when he walked up Maida Vale; and that
strange night in the flat when, seeing her dancing on the London roof, he
was dimly aware of a new language which included even inanimate objects.
The strange shudder that accompanied the vision he had forgotten.
This magical rhythm was her secret. It stirred the heart, making it
vulnerable to impulses from some brighter, happier state _she_ knew
instinctively and in advance. Mother, he noticed, watched her too,
peering above her knitting-needles, moving her head in sympathy,
sometimes a faint, wondering smile lighting upon her bewildered, careworn
face. A real smile, however, for it was in the eyes alone, and did not
touch the lips. Even Tom admired. 'You ought to be taught,' he said
guardedly. 'You'd touch 'em up a bit. If you did that in church the
whole world would go.' He too, without knowing it, realised that
something sacred, inspired, regenerating was being whispered.
Yet Joan herself, though growing older, hardly developed in the ordinary
way. She did not grow up. She remained backward somehow. She lived
subconsciously, perhaps. Some new knowledge, gathering below the
surface, found expression in this spontaneous dancing. With the dawn,
now slowly coming, it would burst full-fledged upon the world,
and the world itself would dance with joy. Meanwhile, a new bloom, a new
beauty settled on the girl, and Mother proudly insisted that she 'must go
to a good photographer and have her picture taken.' But the result was
commonplace, for in the rigid black and white outline all the subtlety
escaped, and, regretting the money wasted, Mother wondered why it had
failed. Like the audience at the Vicarage charities when Joan danced,
she watched the performance, felt a hint of strange beauty, clapped her
hands and wondered 'what it meant.'
'It's her life, you see,' Wimble comforted her. 'And you can't
photograph life. To get her real meaning, we ought to do it with her--
dance it.'
'She's light, rather, for her age,' replied Mother ambiguously.
'But everybody seems to love her somehow,' she added proudly.
'She seems to make people happy. P'r'aps later she'll develop and get
sensible.' She sighed, and resumed her knitting. Presently she got up
to light the lamps. 'The days are drawing out, Joe,' she mentioned,
smiling. 'Spring will be here before we know it.' He lifted the chimney
to help her, turned up the wick, struck a match, and kissed her fondly.
The country life, it seemed, had brought them all together more, made
them aware of their underlying unity, as it were. They flocked. Wimble,
dressed now in wide brown knickerbockers, wearing bright stockings and
brogue shoes with feathered tongues that flapped when he walked, noticed
the change with pleasure. The new attitude was only in his brain as yet,
but it was already stealing down into his heart. This increased sense of
a harmonious manifold unity in the family impressed him, and it was Joan,
he felt, who made him see it, if she was not also the cause of its coming
to pass. Only some spiritual actuary could make it quite clear, but he
discerned the oneness behind the different members of his family, uniting
them. In this subconscious, completer self lay full understanding.
There was no need to pay annual subscriptions to an Aquarian Society to
realise that! Moreover, if a small family with such divergent interests
and ambitions could flock and realise unity, the larger family of a
village, country, nation could do the same--once the underlying unity
were realised. That was the difficulty. The whole world was, after all,
but a single family, humanity. . . . In his quiet country nook Wimble
dreamed his great dream. He saw the nations with but a single flag, a
single drum, a single anthem, true to a larger single patriotism that
could never again be split up into lesser divisional patriotisms. The
universal fraternity of indivisible Air was coming; the subconscious
where individuals pooled their surface differences would become
conscious; that was the truth, he felt, the one great thing the Aquarian
lecturer had said. . . . He remembered the cinema, with its mechanical
suggestion of a unification of world-experience faintly offered; he
remembered the free, happy, collective life of the inhabitants of air,
the natural singers of the world. The deep underlying sense of unity
buried in the subconscious once realised, full understanding must follow,
and with complete understanding the way was cleared for love. And it was
Joan's dancing, somehow, that set the dream within his heart. The new
attitude to life he imagined dawning on the world was the first hint of a
coming spiritual consciousness, and for spiritual consciousness the
totality of things is present. 'All at once and everywhere at once,' as
she had put it. His heart swelled big within him as he dreamed. . . .
'Coal's getting very expensive,' mentioned Mother, as she leaned forward
beside him to poke the fire. 'We'd better mix it with coke. You might
find out, Joe. We can't go on at this rate.'
'I will, dear,' he replied. 'I'll write to Snodden and Tupps at once.'
He patted her knee and got up to go to his little den where he kept his
papers, books, and pipes, reflecting as he did so that it was easy enough
to love the world; it was loving the individual that breaks the heart.
Pricked by an instant of remorse, then, it occurred to him that a pat on
the knee, as a sign of love, might be improved. He trotted back and
kissed her. 'We must flock more and more and more,' he mumbled, and
before she could say 'What, Joe?' he gave her another kiss and was gone
to write to his coal merchant as she had suggested. He would bring back
the bird into Mother's heart or die in the attempt. If the new thing he
dreamed about didn't begin at home, it was not worth much. He felt
happy, so happy that he longed to share it with others; he would have
liked to mention it in his letter to the coal merchant. Instead, he
merely began, 'Dear Messrs. Snodden and Tupps,' yet signed himself,
'Yours full of faith,' since 'faithfully' alone sounded insincere.
'Odd,' he reflected, 'that unless happiness is shared, it's incomplete,
unsatisfying. The chief item lacks. Selfish happiness is a
contradiction in terms. We are meant to share everything and be together
more. There's the instinctive proof of it.' If the coal merchant felt
equally happy, he might even have shared his coal. 'But he'd only think
me mad if I suggested that,' thought Wimble, chuckling. 'We can exchange
coal and money and still love one another.' He posted the letter before
he could change his mind, and came back to his wife. 'Some day,' he
said, as he sat down and poked the fire, 'some day, Mother, and not very
far off either, we shall all be sharing everything all over the world,
just as birds share the air and worms and water.' This time she did not
ask him to repeat his words. She smiled a comfortable smile half-way
between belief and incredulity. 'You really think so, Joe?' 'It's
coming,' he rejoined; 'it's in the air, you know, for I feel it.
Don't you?' he added. He leaned nearer and softly whispered in her ear,
'You're happy here, aren't you, Mother? Much happier than you used to
be? 'She smiled again contentedly. 'The country air, Joe dear,' she
replied. 'The bird's flown back into you,' he said, taking her hand and
ignoring the bunch of knitting-needles that came pricking with it.
'Perhaps,' she mumbled, 'perhaps. Life's sweeter, easier than it used to
be--in some ways.' She flushed a little, while Wimble murmured to
himself, yet just low for her to hear, 'and in your heart some late lark
singing, dear. A new thing is stealing down upon us all.' 'There's
something coming, certainly,' she agreed. 'Come,' he corrected her, 'not
coming. It's here now.' Holding hands, they looked into each other's
eyes, as Joan's little song and dancing steps went down the passage just
outside.