REMEMBERING HIS PROMISE, THOUGH MADE only to himself, he proposed going to the cinema. Tom, who was present during the discussion that followed, wanted a Revue, but was overruled.
‘You can’t smoke,’ he objected, but what he really meant was that he wanted to have his physical sensations stimulated by suggestive reminders that he was a breeding rabbit that had never left earth—earth which a single shower could turn into mud.
‘That won’t hurt you for one night, Tom,’ observed Mother, aware vaguely of his difficulty.
They chose the best the advertisements supplied and went off after an early dinner. In a sort of bundle they started, Mother in her finery forgetting the performance was in the dark, Joan, smiling, neat and bright, her little ankles tripping, and Mr. Wimble important, holder of the purse-strings and full of anticipatory wonder. Tom, smoking cheap gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes, was superior and sulky. Like an untidy bundle the family made the journey towards Piccadilly Circus, a bundle with loose ends, patched corners, one end hardly belonging to the other, yet obviously coherent for all that, and with a spot of brilliant colour— Joan’s bright, glancing eyes and eagerly pretty face.
Tom, having bought a halfpenny evening paper, read the sporting and financial news; his racing tips had proved false; his mood was ill-humoured; he eyed the girls on the pavement below, flicking his cigarette ash over the edge of the motor-bus from time to time.
‘What’s on?’ enquired a chance acquaintance across the gangway, with an eye on pretty Joan. ‘Music hall or high-brow legitimate?’
‘Cinema,’ returned Tom in a scratchy voice, ‘with the family. I’m beat to the wide.’
‘Who’s put the wind up you this time?’ enquired his friend.
‘Family. They put it across me sometimes. Can’t be helped.’
‘Good egg!’ was the reply, as the youth looked past him admiringly at Joan.
‘Oh!—my sister,’ mentioned Tom, proudly, and with a flash of self-satisfaction; ‘Joan, a friend of mine—Mr. Spindle,’ adding under his breath something about Rolls Royce and Limousines, as though Mr. Spindle, who was actually merely an employé in some motor works, owned several expensive cars.
Joan, ignorant of the strange modern slang they used, nodded sweetly, then turned to watch the surging throng of energetic humanity on the pavement below. She was in the corner seat. Father and Mother sat below—inside. The sea of human beings rolled past like waves of water.
‘Everybody going somewhere,’ she said half to herself with a thrill of wonder. It struck her that, though hardly any one looked up, some must surely want to fly, and one or two, at least, must know they could. She wondered there were no collisions. All dodged and slid past and side-stepped so cleverly. The energy, skill, and subconscious calculation they used were considerable. In each brain was a distinct and separate purpose, a mental picture of the spot each busily made for, while yet all seemed governed by one common denial: that nothing off the earth was conceivable even. Like crowding ants, they stuck to the ground, shuffling laboriously along the world-worn routes. Their minds, she was persuaded, knew heavy ways, unaware that horizons are made to lift. She watched the herd in search for amusement after the drudgery of the day, engaged upon a common search. What they really sought, she felt, was air. Only they knew it not. In ignorance they toiled to find artificial excitement— pleasure.
She longed to lift them up and swing them loose into undivided space, let them know freedom, lightness, spontaneous carelessness. If they would only dance—it would be something.
‘And all going to the same place,’ she added aloud. She sighed.
‘I hope to God they’re not,’ said Tom in his scratchy voice, thinking of the cinema.
‘Eh?’ remarked Mr. Spindle, with a thrust forward of his head.
The motor-bus lumbered into the Circus and drew up, leaning over to one side.
‘So long,’ said Tom to his friend, ‘we push off here.’
Mr. Spindle offered his hand to Joan, who shook it, but looked past him, refusing the gleaming eye he offered her at the same time. They clambered down to their parents on the pavement, and joined the throng that swept heavily into the pretentious doorways of the cinema building. As they went in Joan glanced at her mother and realised that she loved her. She looked so worried and so helpless. It was pathetic how heavily she moved. Age! The age of the body, of course. But why should she be old? She was barely forty. She was out, seeking with a good expenditure of energy, for pleasure. It struck the girl suddenly that her mother’s ignorance was singular. She knew so little. Somewhere about her—at the corners of her mouth, flickering in her opaque eyes, in the tilt of her ears—was still a vestige of youth and fun and joy. But Mother ignored it, crawling willingly with the herd. Yet the bird lurked in her surely. In spite of this heavy crawling, there were wings tucked away in her somewhere.
‘Mother, we’re out on a spree,’ whispered Joan. ‘Wherever we are, we go! Let me carry your bag?’
‘Eh, Joan? What d’you say? Don’t shove, my love. We shall get nowhere that way.’ It was the Is-my-hat-on-straight tone of voice—self the centre. She yielded the tiresome bag gratefully.
‘Everywhere, mother,’ Joan whispered gaily. ‘We’ll get everywhere because we belong everywhere. Besides I’m not shoving.’
She glanced round at the other people, all pressing thickly towards the booking-office. All of them had troubles, joys, hopes, fears, and vague desires. All were out to enjoy themselves. Only their faces were so anxious, lined, and care-worn. They wore an enormous quantity of manufactured clothing, and each article of clothing represented similar joys, hopes, fears, and vague desires, complicated toil of those who had made and sold them.
She felt a curious longing—to collect them all together on the roof one morning so that they might dance and hear the birds sing at dawn. If only they could realise the bird-life and what it meant—care-less, happy, singing, dancing; deep purpose underneath it all, but that purpose not clogged with the stupefying detail of unimportant items. The trouble all had taken to clothe themselves suitably for this particular enjoyment was alone enough to kill any spontaneity. She smelt the fields, the keen, fresh air, the dew. She heard a lark rise whistling through the silver air. . . .
And she glanced back at her mother. Her mother was obviously adorned— with effort and difficulty. She looked as if she had walked through a Liberty curtain and parts of the curtain had stuck to her in patches. This complexity of cloth and silk and beads was wrong—funny at any rate. She sighed.
‘It’s all right,’ said her father, catching the sigh behind him. ‘We must take our turn, you know. But I’m out for the best seats—no matter what it costs.’ It was like a breath of air to hear him say it.
‘Extravagance,’ put in Mother under her breath, overhearing. ‘But it is an exception, isn’t it?’ Her mind fixed upon the difficult side of existence, the cost in labour and in pain.
‘Eh?’ said Wimble. He put his gaudy tie straight with a free half-finger.
‘It isn’t every night, I mean,’ whispered Mother. ‘It’s an exception.’ She looked challengingly at the listening crowd. It was very warm. The air smelt of people, clothes, and cheap scent. She was aware of scullery-maids, boot-polish, stable-boys, and wages. The ham in the larder—had they put the fly-cover over it? Oh dear, how sordid even enjoyment was!
‘Move on, please,’ boomed the deep voice of a policeman, and everybody moved on a step or half a step, casting looks of admiration, respect, and exasperation at the Great Bobby who represented rigidity, law, order, and that vague, distant power—the Government. To be spontaneous meant to be arrested, evidently.
‘Wot’ve you got left?’ asked Wimble mildly, facing at last the booking-clerk, then added quickly, ‘Good. I’ll take the three,’ and put the money down. ‘No—four, I mean; four, of course. How stupid of me! Thanks, thanks very much.’ He had forgotten himself. Also, he had felt for a second that he couldn’t afford the price, but yet somehow it didn’t matter. It was stupid, it was extravagant, it was un-practical; no one in their senses could have approved his conduct. The clerk had explained briefly that no cheap seats were left; there was nothing under four shillings—and Wimble, without an instant’s hesitation, had snapped up the expensive seats.
Joan witnessed it with a rush of joy. She saw her father slip several silver discs across the counter and take pink slips of paper in exchange. But it was not his extravagance, nor the prospect of greater comfort, that caused her joy; it was the unhesitating spontaneity. Daddy had not haggled; without hesitation he had taken the risk. He had flown. . . . In reality he could not afford it, yet only a stingy convention might have urged him to be careful. And he had not been care-full.
‘Take no thought . . .’ whispered a voice—was it Joan’s?—in his ear, as they pressed forward. And, as a consequence, he immediately bought several programmes where one would have been sufficient. Ah! They were in full flight. Their wings were spread. The earth lay mapped beneath them. In the silver, dewy dawn they flew. How keen the sweet, fresh air. . . .!
He looked at her. ‘You don’t earn the family income, my dear,’ he observed drily, half-ashamed, half-proud. He fingered the pink tickets nervously, clumsily.
‘But I will,’ she replied. ‘Besides, there’s heaps for everybody really.’
‘You’re an unpractical absurdity,’ he murmured—then gasped.
It was the child’s reply that made him gasp:
‘We’re alive! So we deserve it.’
They swept the meadows and the pine copse in their flight. There was a crimson dawn. They smelt the sea, the wide salt marshes. Freedom of space was theirs.
Perhaps he didn’t quite understand what she meant, yet it made him feel happy and careless. In a sense it made him feel—spiritual. She had said something that was beyond the reach of language, of accurate language. But it was true, true as a turnip. It satisfied him as a mouthful of mashed potatoes, and was as easy to eat and swallow. What a simile! He laughed to himself.
‘Be more accurate in your language,’ he said slyly.
‘And stick in grammar all your life!’ she replied. They moved on. Tom looked superior and aloof. He did not belong to this ridiculous party.
‘Hurry up, Daddy,’ and Joan poked him in the ribs. ‘Mother’s waiting. You’re thinking of your old Primers.’ It was true. He had paused a moment. A sentence had flashed into his mind and made him stop, while Mother and Tom were waiting in the corridor beyond, something about the ‘courage of a fly.’
A fly, the most fearless of attack of all creatures, an insect incapable of fear. He remembered that Athena gave Menelaus, in order that he might resist Hector—what? Not weapons or money or skill or strength. No. Athena gave him—’the courage of a fly.’
It struck him suddenly that the reckless courage of a fly—a fly that settles on the nose, the lips, the hand of a being enormously more powerful and terrible than itself—was unequalled among all living creatures. No lion or tiger dared the half, no man the quarter. But a fly, depending solely on its swift, unconquerable wings and power of darting flight, risked these amazing odds. He—in paying this high price for the tickets recklessly—had shown the courage of the fly: the sneers of Tom, the abuse of Mother, the scorn of cautious and careful convention. He had the money in his pocket, then why not spend it? His labour had deserved it; he had earned it; he was indeed ‘alive.’ Like an audacious fly he had settled on the nose of Fate. And all this Joan had snapped into a sentence:
‘We deserve it. We’re alive!’
‘Is it all right, dear?’ asked Mother anxiously. She was stuck with her elaborate flounces in a corner of the corridor. The programme-seller was at her elbow, pressingly.
‘All right,’ he replied, waving the programmes like a flag of victory, and led the way towards the seats. ‘Everything’s paid.’ He bowed, dismissingly, to the girl. He walked on his toes.
They went in. Mother flounced down proudly, as though the cost, the risk, were hers. Anyhow, they had paid for their seats and had a right to them. Now they could see the show in comfort and with easy consciences. There was a vague feeling that too much had been expended, but it was discreetly ignored. Vanity forbade. Economy might follow. Let it follow. They could enjoy themselves for a few hours. They would enjoy themselves. Some one had paid good money and money well earned. Uneasiness was vulgar. Daddy’s flying attitude influenced them all secretly, and the great human power of make-believe, so gingerly expended as a rule, asserted itself. They took the moment as birds take the air. They flew with him.
Settling themselves into their front-row seats, they fingered their programmes, and felt like Royalty.
Mother looked round her at the inferior human mass. ‘We can see quite well,’ she observed. ‘You were lucky, Joe. You got good seats.’ She was wholly unaware that she tried her wings.
‘Not bad,’ scratched Tom, equally unaware that he flew behind her, though parting from the sticky loamy soil with difficulty. Had his companion of the motor-bus been with him, he would doubtless have said ‘Good egg!’ instead.
‘It’s all right,’ said Wimble. ‘Like to see a programme? ‘He passed over several—all he had. He felt uplifted, without knowing why. He felt reckless, extravagant, careless, happy. He had touched the element of air without knowing it. He had forgotten ‘money,’ toil, conventional rigid formality, the terror of the herd, everything that compressed life into a four-footed rut, like the rut trodden by cows and pigs and rabbits. He had, for a moment, left the earth. He had, however, no idea that he was hovering in mid-air. Having taken a risk with courage—the courage of the fly—he was not quite positive of his dizzy elevation. The strange, intuitive, natural certainty of Joan was not yet quite his. He caught his breath a little in this rarefied air, from this spiritual point of view— this bird’s-eye aspect—he was by no means sure of himself.
The rush of the wonderful cinema then began, and he forgot himself.
They experienced the sense such a performance leaves behind of having been—as Mother put it—all over the place. Sitting in the dark the individual at first is conscious only of himself, neighbours ignored if not forgotten. The screen then flashes into light, and with the picture, consciousness flashes across the world. The lie of the stationary photograph is corrected, time is denied, partially at least, and space is unable to boast and swagger as it loves to do. The cinema frees and extends the consciousness, restores the past, and sets distance close beneath the eyes. Only the watching self remains—pregnant symbol!—in the darkness.
It was one of the best performances in London; within an hour or two the audience danced from the dingy streets of the metropolis into the sunlight of India, Africa, and of islands among far southern seas. The kaleidoscope of other lands and other ways of thinking, acting, living carried them away with understanding sympathy. From savage wild life drinking at water-holes in the sun-drenched Tropics, they darted across half-charted oceans and watched the penguin and the polar bear amid arctic ice. Over mountains, down craters, flying above cities and peering deep under water, the various experiences of strange distant life came into their ken. They flew about the planet. The leaders of the world gazed at them, so close and real that their emotions were legible on their magnified features. They smiled or frowned, then flashed away, and yet still were there, living, thinking, willing this and that. Widely separated portions of the vast human family presented themselves vigorously, registered a tie of kinship, and were gone again about their business, now become in some sense the business of the audience too. Fighting, toiling, loving, hating, meeting death and adventure by sea and land, creating and destroying, differing much in colour, custom, clothing, and the rest, yet human as Wimble and his family were human, possessed with the same griefs, hopes, and joys, the same passion to live, the same fear of death—one great family.
Joan slipped her arm into that of her father; they nestled closely, very much in sympathy as the world rushed past their eyes upon the screen.
‘We’re flying,’ she whispered, with a squeeze, as the penguins on the polar ice gave place to a scene of negroes sweating in the sun and munching sugarcane while they lazily picked the fluffy cotton. ‘We’re everywhere all-at-once, don’t you see?’ A moment later, as though to point her words, they looked down upon a mapped-out county from an aeroplane. The unimportance of earth was visible in the distance.
‘You can’t fly under water anyhow,’ mumbled Wimble, as they left the air and flashed with a submarine upon sponges, coral, and inquisitive, perfectly poised fish. A black man was trying to knife a shark.
‘I can see what they feel though,’ was the whispered answer. ‘Inside their watery minds, I mean.’
‘Wherever I am I go,’ he thought, but didn’t say it, because by the time he had reflected how foolish it was to remain stuck only upon the minute point of his own tiny personal experience, they were climbing with a scientific Italian of eminence down a crater full of smoke and steam, and could almost hear the thunder of the explosions. But while they went down, everything else went up. Smoke, steam, masses of rock all trying to rise. ‘Gravity is the devil,’ he remembered; ‘it keeps us from flying into the sun.’
The idea made him chuckle, and Joan pinched his arm, giggling too audibly in her excitement.
‘Hush!’ said Mother. They watched in silence then; a bird’s-eye view of the planet was what they watched. With each picture they took part. Every corner of the globe, with its different activities, touched their hearts and minds with interest—busy, rushing life in various forms, and all going on simultaneously, at this very moment—now. Life obviously was one. The strange unity was convincing. Nothing they saw was alien to themselves, for they took part in it. In each picture they ‘wondered what it felt like.’ They took for an instant, longer or shorter, the point of view of a new aspect of life, of something as yet they had not actually experienced. They longed—or dreaded—to stand within that huge cavern of blue lonely ice and hear the waves of the Polar Sea lick up the snow; to taste that sugary cane with animal-white teeth, and feel the fluffy cotton between thick, lumpy fingers; to swim under water and look up instead of down; to crawl fearfully a little nearer to the molten centre of the planet through smoke and fire and awful thundering explosions. They longed or dreaded. Mentally, that is, they experienced a new relationship in each separate case, a relationship that stretched a suburban consciousness beyond its normal ken.
‘It’s very tiring,’ mentioned Mother, during a brief interval of glaring light, ‘and hurts my eyes. And I can’t see why they want to show us those half-naked natives. I’m glad I’m English. Disgusting people, I call them.’
‘They’ll improve it, you know,’ observed Tom; ‘the flickering, I mean. It’s a great invention. Somebody made a bit of cash there all right.’
One couple, at any rate, in the four-shilling seats felt the tie and knew their consciousness extended to include them all. They were engaged with all these various folk and multifarious activities. Humanity was one. The cinema shouted it aloud. The sense of collective consciousness was stirred.
‘Well,’ gasped Mother, blinking her eyes in the sudden light at the end, ‘that was a show, wasn’t it?’ She seemed tired rather than exhilarated.
‘Not half,’ declared Tom, feeling for his cigarettes. He kept the programmes, putting both into his pocket.
‘I’m glad I’m English anyhow,’ repeated Mother, stationary at the mouth of her hole in the ground; but whether she despised the Hottentots, the Eskimo, or the penguins, she did not specify. It was her final verdict merely. The statement said simply that she was satisfied to be her little self, balanced safely on a clod of earth, in a spot of the universe called England. Extension of consciousness gave her no joy at all. She felt unsafe.
They left the theatre slowly, their minds shrinking back with a touch of disappointment, almost of pain, within the prescribed limits of normal, practical life again. Wimble felt he had been flying, and had just come back; he settled with difficulty. In the brief space between the vestibule and the door his thoughts continued flying. There was excitement and anticipation in him. ‘The next stage,’ he said to himself, ‘will be hearing. We shall hear the people talk. After that—not so very far away either—we shall see ‘em now, and no interval of time at all. Machinery won’t be used. Our minds will do the trick. We’ll see everywhere with our thoughts!’ He remembered his Telepathy Primer, giving individual instances, as authentic and well proven as any reasonable person could desire. He felt sure this vast, general development must follow—some faculty of air, swift and flashing as light—the bird’s-eye view.
The murky street, with its damp and chilly air, struck him in the face as he stood with his family a moment, then walked down the steps. There was still a luminous glow in the western sky above the roofs. Mother took his arm to steady herself; Tom was behind, his eyes roving hungrily; Joan flitted just in front.
‘Our ‘bus is over there,’ said Mother, pointing with a black-gloved hand.
‘We’ll take a taxi, my dear,’ was his reply. He hailed one, bundled his astonished family inside, wished the driver ‘Good-evening’ with a smile, and slammed the door upon his own coat-tails.
‘But you haven’t told him the address,’ said Mother.
‘He ought to know,’ exclaimed Wimble, ‘but he’s not a bird yet, so I’d better tell him.’
‘It might be safer,’ added his wife sarcastically, holding on to his coat-tails as he leaned out of the window to do so.
He watched the crowd as they whirled away; he felt happy, happy, happy. With the damp London air he felt as though a part of him still sweltered in the golden sunshine, diving under blue clear water where the sponges and the corals grew. Soft breezes touched his cheek one minute, the next he laid his hand on glittering ice. He heard the surf crashing upon a palm-clad reef. . . . These thronging people, policemen, costers, shop-folk, pale-faced workers, and over-dressed men and women of the big houses, all had some link with himself, that had been drawn closer; but so had the swarthy half-naked folk at the Antipodes who had just claimed his consciousness. They were all one really. Each nation seemed a mood. The sense of oneness leaped upon his heart and seized him.
‘It all happened without our even moving,’ as Joan had said on the way home. ‘I suppose everything’s in us then, really. We’re everywhere.’ And while Tom’s superior ‘Oh, cut it out’ seemed more than usually ignorant and silly, Wimble’s heart flamed within him. For it came to him, like a promise of wind-borne freedom, that there existed in his own being an immense and mighty under-side that was only waiting to be organised into fuller, even into all-embracing, consciousness. Man, he felt sure again, was a cosmic, not only a planetary, being. He could know the stars. The real self was of air. . . .