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, s.p.a.ce 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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 nutsh.e.l.l . . . 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 b.u.t.tercups 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 att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.t 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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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.