The Promise Of Air Part 12

He was in a cage. He must escape. He tried. Somehow, it seemed, he used his whole body instead of his brain alone. He _was_ escaping. . . .

Life, blown open by a wind, seemed to show its under-side where everything was one. . . .

By this time he was half awake. 'I must do something; I must act,' he dimly realised. He turned over in his bed, and the sound of arrowy, rus.h.i.+ng air went farther into the distance as he did so.

'It's imagination,' sneered a tiny, wakeful point in his mediocre brain.

Another part of him not brain was alight and s.h.i.+ning.

'But you're no farther from Reality by letting your imagination loose,'

sang a returning arrow--in his head. It came from something bigger than his mind. His mind, strutting and arrogant, seemed such an insignificant part of him, whereas the rest, where the arrows flashed and flew, seemed so enormous that he was conscious of the 'nightmare touch' of Size.

Mind strove to justify itself, however, and Reason s.n.a.t.c.hed at names and labels.

'But that's right,' a flying sentence laughed. 'You do not see a thing until you've named it. You only feel it. Once, however, it's described, it's seen!'

'Aha! That's Joan's fairy-tale method grotesquely cropping up in my dreams,' he realised--and so, of course, awoke properly.

And it was here that his breath got shorter and his heart beat irregularly.

The room was dark and silent, but he heard a murmuring as though Night were talking in her sleep. The dizziness of great heights was still about him, and remained a little even when he turned the lights on. It was four o'clock. The room wore a waiting, listening air, as though a moment before it had all been whirling, and his waking at this unlawful hour had disturbed it. Waking had rolled the darkness back, let in light, and taken--a photograph. He felt mad and happy--madly happy. There was nonsense in him that belonged to careless joy. The curious notion came that he ought to introduce himself to the various objects--chairs, cupboards, book-shelf, writing-table--and apologise to them for having believed himself separate from them. He ought to explain. But the same second he realised this as wrong, for he himself had been moving, whirling, too. Everything had stopped, himself included, when he awoke.

He had stepped aside to look at it. He had photographed it. Of course it stopped.

'I am,' he remembered, 'but wherever I am, I _go_!'

And then, before further Explanation could explain away the truth, he seized at another diving arrow and saw it whole, though it vanished the same instant:

'I am the whole room. I am my surroundings!'

Some new point of view had leaped into him, something almost daemonic that suggested limitless confidence in his power to overcome all obstacles, because they were part of his own being.

Objects, things, details--during that amazing second at least--no longer seemed separate, alone, apart from one another. They were not anywhere cut off. Seen thus, a chair was a cupboard, a table was a basin, _he_ was the ceiling, bed, and carpet. Equally, a cat was a peac.o.c.k, a mouse was an elephant.

He said these words to himself in an astonished whisper, and in doing so he understood something he didn't understand. The sentence waited for the verb, the meaning, and it suddenly came down pop--at the end.

Reason helped a little there, for he had named and described, and therefore seen what before he had only felt. Perhaps further understanding would follow. The verb would come. He would get up and try. He would do something--act--act out his mood. Action seemed suddenly a new kind of language, a three-dimensional language, an ever-moving language in which objects took on character and played parts for the sake of expression. A language of action! You are whatever you do. . . .!

And as this arrow shot its message past him it seemed that certain objects in the room were about to jump at him. They did not actually move, but they were just about to move--ready and alert. The instant he slept they would rise and fly together again. It was his point of view, his mind in him, that made them appear separate. Each object was clothed in its own story of information, as it were. Objects were telling him something.

They were demonstrating an idea.

'I am not alone, although I'm only one,' he said aloud. 'In arithmetic one is not more lonely than seven.' But, again, he didn't understand quite why he said it, while yet he understood perfectly at the same time.

'I'm not quite myself at any rate,' he added, and it was true. Perhaps he was a trifle frightened, still hovering on the nightmare edge of sleep.

For all this happened in a single instant when he turned the light up.

With sight his breath came more easily at once, his heart beat steadily again.

Yet there was certainly a sense of rhythm in the room, though lessening rapidly. He must hurry. The cage was closing round him again. He heard the flying voices farther and farther in the distance, but still sweet with a rhythmical new music.

'Use the mood of the moment, but first understand why it is the mood of the moment!'

'Use the material you have at once! Don't wait for something different!'

'There is no need to wait; to wait shows incompetence!'

'Act instantly! Don't reason, calculate, think! Operate in a flas.h.!.+'

He felt, that is, rather as a bird might feel. There was haste, yet no hurry, purpose yet leisure, delight without delay, spontaneity. So he got out of bed, put on dressing-gown and slippers, and went on tiptoe into the pa.s.sage. Then, standing in the shaft of light from his room, the dark corridor in front of him, he realised that the entire flat--the furnished flat that Dizzy & Dizzy had let to him--was alive. The feathered arrows were not imagined, the voice was not a dream. Inanimate things stirred everywhere about him. He perceived their undersides and his own.

Their apartness that so dislocated the upper, outer, surface-life was only apparent after all. Bars melted. He felt instantaneous. 'Wherever I am I go!' But objects shared the same illusion: wherever they were, they went! The sensations of a flock were in him. A new order of consciousness was close.

He paused and listened. No sound was audible. Mother's door was closed, but Joan's, he saw, just opposite, stood ajar. A draught blew coldly on him. He tapped gently and, receiving no reply, pushed the door wider and peeped through. The light from the corridor behind poured in. The room was empty, but the sheets, he saw, had not been lain in.

Recalling then her state of excitement when she went to bed, he searched the flat, peering cautiously even into Mother's room, but without result.

The front door was bolted on the inner side. She had not left the building. He felt alarmed. Then a cold air stirred the hair of his head, and, looking up, he saw that the trap-door in the ceiling was open and that the ladder looked inviting. It 'jumped' at him, as he called it, that is it drew his attention as with meaning. So he s.n.a.t.c.hed a rug from the shelf beneath the hat-rack, and, throwing it round his shoulders, clambered up on to the roof.

It was September and the sky was soft with haze, yet still empty and hungry for the swallows. Round b.a.l.l.s of vapour pretending to be solid were being driven by an upper wind across the stars; but the stars were brilliant and shone through the edges of the vapour. And the night seemed in a glow. The wind did not come down, the roof was still; the ma.s.s of London lay like a smouldering furnace far below, bright patches alternating with deep continents of shadow. He heard the town booming in its sleep, a thick and heavy sound, yet resonant. And at first he saw only a confused forest of chimneys about him that rose somewhat ominously into the air, their crests invisible. Then, suddenly, one of them bent over in a curve, fell silently with marvellous grace upon the leaden covering; and, fluttering towards him softly as an owl, came some one who had been standing against it--Joan.

This happened in the first few seconds; but even before she came he was aware that the strange stirring of inanimate nature in the room below had transferred its magic up here. It was not discontinuous, that is, but everywhere. It had come down into the flat, as from the outside world, but the singular rhythm emanated first from here--above. Joan had to do with it.

It was exquisite, this soft feathery way she came to him across the London roof, swooping low as with the flight of an owl, an owl that flies so easily and buoyantly, it seems it never _could_ drop. It was lovely.

In some such way a spirit, a disembodied life, might be expected to move.

He listened with eager intensity for the first word she would utter.

'Father,' she whispered, 'it's the Bird!'

He felt his entire life leap out on wings into open s.p.a.ce. He had asked no questions. She stood in front of him. Her voice, with its curious lilt, seemed on the verge of singing. It came from her lips, but it sounded everywhere about him, as though delivered by the air itself, as though it dropped from the unravelling clouds, as though it fell singing from the paling stars. Night breathed it. And it frightened him--for a moment--out of himself. His ordinary mind seemed loose, uprooted, floating away as though compelling music swayed it into great happiness.

His stream of easy breath increased. He touched that indefinable ecstasy which is extension of consciousness, caused by what men call crudely Beauty. Joy flooded him.

'The Bird!' He repeated the words below his breath. 'What _do_ you mean?'

Yet, even as he did so, something in him knew. 'A bird in her bosom'

flashed across him from some printed page. The girl, he realised, had been communing with that type of life to which she was so mysteriously akin. Its approach had stirred inanimate nature into language.

Meaning had invaded objects, striking rhythm, almost speech, from inert details. Joan had brought this new living thing--new point of view--into the very slates and furniture.

'The Bird!' he whispered again.

'Our Bird! Daddy.' And she opened her arms like soft white wings, the shawl fluttering from them in the starlight.

He ought to have said--'Nonsense; go back to bed; you'll catch your death of cold!' Or to have asked 'What bird? I don't see any bird!'--and laughed. Instead he merely echoed her strange remark. He agreed with her. Instinctively, again, he knew something that he didn't know.

'So it is!' he exclaimed in a whisper of excitement, taking a deeper breath and peering expectantly about him, as though some exhilarating power drew closer with the dawn. 'I do declare! The Bird--_our_ Bird!'

He caught her hand in his. She was very warm. And, touching her, he was instantly aware of fuller knowledge, yet of less explanation. A sensation of keen delight rose in him, free, light, and airy, new vast possibilities in sight, almost within reach. He caught, for instance, at the meaning of this great rhythm everywhere, this impression that dead objects moved and conveyed a revelation that was so full of meaning it was almost language.

Birds saw them thus, flas.h.i.+ng above them, noting one swift, crowded series of objects one upon another. It was a runic script in the landscape that birds read and understood in long sentences of colour, shade, and surface, pages full of significant pictured outlines, turning rapidly over as they skimmed the earth. It was a new language, a movement-language.

Birds read it out to one another as they flew. They acted it.

Their language was one of movement and of action, three-dimensional; and, whether they flitted from one chimney to another, or travelled from Primrose Hill to the suns of Abyssinia, their lives acted out this significant, silent language.

High, sweet rapture caught him. Of course birds sang, where men only grunted and animals, still nearer to the ground, were inarticulate with unrhythmical noises.

All this flashed and vanished even while his eye lost its way in the canopy of smoky air immediately above him.

'Listen!' he heard in his ear, like the faint first opening whistle of some tiny songster. 'They're waking now all over England. You felt it in your sleep! That's what brought you up. It's the moment just before the dawn!'

A million, ten, twenty million birds were waking out of sleep. In field and wood, in copse and hedge and barn, in tall rushes by the lakes, in willows upon river banks, in glens and parks and gardens, on gaunt cliffs above the sea, and on lonely dim salt marshes--everywhere over England the birds were coming back to consciousness.

It was this vast collective consciousness that had awakened him. He had somehow or other taken on, through Joan, certain conditions of the great Bird-mind. It was marvellous, yet at the time seemed natural.