As he reached the pa.s.sage he turned. 'That's the best recipe for hysteria I ever heard,' he cried back, 'and the sooner you're safe in Hanwell, the better for the world!'--and vanished.

It was an abrupt and violent interruption, but yet it startled no one; the thread of interest was not broken; a few heads turned to look, and then faced towards the lecturer again. A general sigh was heard, expressive of relief. The audience settled itself more comfortably, and a deeper concentration of interest was felt at once. The removal of the hostile element produced an immediate increase of attentive earnestness.

It showed first in the lecturer's face; his eyes grew fixed and steady, his manner more confident, more impressive, and his tone of voice had a more authoritative ring than before.

He leaned forward with an air of mysterious intimacy, as though about to share a secret knowledge he had not dared to divulge before a scoffer.

There was a booming note about his voice that thrilled. The charlatan that hides in every human soul slipped out, unconsciously perhaps but unmistakably. It was this, possibly, that affected Wimble as he watched and waited, so eagerly attentive; or, possibly, it was some uncanny antic.i.p.ation of what he was about to hear. An emotion, at any rate, and one shared by others in the small packed room, rose suddenly in his soul.

A little shiver ran down his spine, he shuddered, as once before he had shuddered in Maida Vale.

'Before we close this little meeting,' the deep voice rang, 'and before you go your way and I go mine, per'aps not to come across each other's path again for a tidy while--I want to just say this. It's as well we all should know it, so as we are prepared.'

He fixed his glowing eyes on one of his audience--on Wimble, it so happened--and went on slowly, choosing his words with care and uttering them with a conviction that was not without its impressiveness:

'I want to warn you all, to give you this little word of warning. For I'm led to believe--in fact, I may say it's been given me--that a dying Age-- don't die without an effort. An expiring Age, so to say, seeks to prolong its life. With the result that, just before it pa.s.ses, its characteristics is first intensified. The Powers that have ruled over us for 2000 years make themselves felt with extra strength; and these Powers, seeing that their time is past, are no longer right. They're no longer what we need. Good and right in their time, they now seem wrong, and out of place. They're evil. We see them as evil, any'ow, though they make for good in another way. I don't know if you foller me. Wot I mean is that, when an old Age is pa.s.sing and a new Age coming to birth--there's conflict.'

There was a renewed rustling, as this sentence was written down on many half-sheets that had so far been blank. But Wimble had no need to make a note of it. He remembered that walk down Maida Vale of several months before, and again the singular shudder pa.s.sed like a little wind of ice along his nerves.

'Conflict means trouble,' continued the speaker amid a solemn hush, 'and nothing big ever comes to birth without labour and travail and pain.

We must expect this pain and travail, and be ready for it. A new 'eaven and a new earth will come, but they won't come easily. They will be preceded by a mighty effort of the old ones to keep going a bit longer first. A 'uge up'eaval, physically and spiritually, will take place first--on the earth, that is, as well as in our 'earts--before we all get caught up to meet the Lord in the air.'

His sentences grew slower and more emphatic, more charged with conviction and with warning. He made privileged communications. There were pauses between his utterances:

'I warn you, I prepare you, so that when it comes you will be ready and prepared--not for yourselves, mind, but so as you may 'elp others wot won't quite realise quite wot it all means.

'For there'll be _sacrifice_ as well.

'There's always a sacrifice when a New Age catches 'old of our old earth, and our old earth will shake and tremble in the re-making, and some of us will shake and tremble too. You'll feel, maybe, that shudder in advance and know what it means. Signs and wonders, men's 'earts failing them for fear, and the instability of all solid things.

'There will be _death_.

'Death takes its 'undreds, aye, its thousands at a time like that, and many--the best and finest usually--go out before their time, as it seems.

But--mark this--they go out--to _h_elp!

'There comes in the sacrifice.

'They'll be taken off to 'elp, taken into the air, but taken away from those they leave be'ind.'

His tone grew lower, and a deeper hush pa.s.sed over the little crowd before him. There was dull fire in his eyes. An atmosphere of the prophet clothed him.

'It's just there,' he emphasised, 'that we--we who know--can 'elp.

'For we know that death is nothing more nor less than slipping back into your own subconsciousness, and so becoming greater and finer and more active--more useful, too, and with grander powers--than we ever 'ad in our limited, imperfect bodies. And we know that this separate life, ended at death, is nothing but an episode in our universal life which death can never put an end to because it is imperishable. We are part of the universe, not of this little planet alone.

'There'll be mourning, but we can 'elp dry their tears; there'll be terror, but we can take their fear away; there'll be loneliness, but we can show them--show 'em by the way we live--that there'll be reunion better than before. We all meet in the sub-consciousness, and know each other face to face. For it means reunion in the air, which is everywhere at once and universal, and stands for that denial of s.p.a.ce and time--that spiritual haffirmation--we Aquarians call NOW.'

He held out his hands as in blessing over the intently listening and expectant throng. Gazing above their heads into s.p.a.ce, he appeared to concentrate his thoughts a moment. Then his face lightened, as though his mental effort had succeeded.

'After every meeting,' he then went on, but this time in a conversational tone, as friend to friend, the prophet and his flock put aside, 'it is our custom, as you know, to find a carrying-away Sentence. Something you can take away and remember easily. Something that sums up all we've talked about together. Something to keep in your minds and think about every minute of the day until we meet again. Something you can try to live in your daily lives.'

He waited a moment to ensure that all listened closely.

'The sentence I've chosen this time will 'elp you to remember all we've said to-day. It's a symbol that includes the 'ole promise of the air that's so soon to be fulfilled in us.

'I'll now give it out--if yer all ready.'

The expectant, eager, attentive faces were a convincing proof that all were ready and listening attentively.

With a happy and confiding smile, the speaker then p.r.o.nounced the carrying-away sentence:

'The 'eart of a bird lies in the _centre_ of its body.'

CHAPTER XVI

The carrying-away sentence stuck in Wimble's mind as he journeyed back to the flat on the top of a motor omnibus with Joan, for it expressed a concrete fact, a fact that he could understand. 'The heart of a bird lies in the centre of its body,' he murmured to himself happily. It gave him a secret thrill of joy and wonder. His own heart, thrust to the left though it was, felt ageless. The happy, invincible optimism of the bird was in him. To live from the centre was a neat way of expressing what he had been trying to do for so long, and he had not been far wrong in taking the life and att.i.tude of a bird for his symbol. It meant neglecting the strained, laborious effort of the calculating mind, and leaning for help and guidance upon something bigger, deeper, less fallible than the strutting conscious self. The railway guard labelled it the subconscious, that mysterious region in which every soul is linked to every other soul, involving thus that comprehensive sympathy which is the beginning possibly of brotherhood. He phrased it wildly, but that was what he meant.

The bigger self that lay like an ocean behind his separate, personal _thought_ shared everything with every one. The joy, the wisdom of the birds! The elasticity and brilliance of the universal air! The divine carelessness that flows from living at the centre!

'Flow, fly, flow!

Wherever I am, I _go_; I live in the air Without thought or care . . . !'

'Daddy, you mustn't hum in public. It sounds so unusual, and people are staring,' Joan reminded him. 'And you'll forget your hat and leave it behind, if you don't put it on.'

He smoothed his ruffled hair and placed his black billyc.o.c.k upon it.

'So you've woken up at last, have you?' he replied, laughing at her.

'You slept through most of the lecture. What did you make of it,--eh?'

She looked at him with a puzzled expression in her soft, bright eyes.

'D'you think it was all nonsense? Was it true, I mean?' he repeated.

'He didn't lie, but he didn't tell the truth,' she said at once.

'Besides, I wasn't asleep. I heard it all.'

'You mean he didn't explain it properly?' he asked.

'It was the wrong way,' she said.

'Ah! words----'

'He ought to have danced it,' she said suddenly with decision. 'It's too quick, too flashing for words. _I_ could have shown it to them easily, by dancing it.'

He remembered the amazing ideas her dancing gestures on the roof had once put into him. Then, thinking of the teachers of the world conveying their meaning by dancing and gestures from the pulpits, he chuckled.

'Shall we join the Aquarians?' he asked slyly. 'What do you say to becoming members of their Society?'

She took her answer out of his own mind, it seemed.