The Promise Of Air Part 9

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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ation.

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 h.e.l.l, 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 s.h.i.+bboleths, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.p.a.ce. The wings of his mind went s.h.i.+vering. 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 b.u.t.tercup meadows of Cambridge and the singing gardens of Algeria, the ecstasy, the light and heat of that exalted pa.s.sion.

'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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ton-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 s.h.i.+fting 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 flas.h.i.+ly, 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, rus.h.i.+ng 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 sc.r.a.p 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-fas.h.i.+oned, and carrying many off their feet into the air. It was so br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 acc.u.mulation 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 a.s.similative and interpretative of the airy inrush, the signs were thickly bewildering. Only, for the majority, Pan being still misunderstood, the G.o.d of Air came more slowly to his own. But the signs were everywhere, like birds and b.u.t.tercups in spring. The bird's-eye view, flas.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s 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, flus.h.i.+ng 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 acc.u.mulated 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, wors.h.i.+pping 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 rus.h.i.+ng cinematograph, revolving, advancing, mounting spirally into the air.

He felt it thus. Something new was pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce; the mysterious, unconscious wisdom of the bird, organised and directed consciously by men and women.

An immense thrill pa.s.sed 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.s.

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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sing 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 flus.h.i.+ng dawn. These, perhaps, felt it coming. But few as yet--one in a million, say--would dare to fly.

He watched them as he pa.s.sed along, feeling them gathering him in.