Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  The Promise of the Air ran through him like a strain of glad spring music. Air, he knew, as Joan used the term, meant aether, the mother of all air. She dreamed of passages to dim old gleaming Hercules adrift in open space, to Cassiopeia, happily, mightily wandering, to the golden blossoms of the Nebulae’s garden of shining gold. Across his mind the great flocks of stars were flying. . . .

  ‘I’m not a “miserable sinner.” It’s a lie that “there is no health in me.” Nor do I believe that another man can “forgive my sins,” because I confess them to him, or that those who refuse to believe as I do — whatever it is I do believe! — shall forfeit my special favours, least of all suffer the smallest prick of a pin on that account. . . .!’

  If ever he had been affected by the dogmatic teaching of any person or group of persons, alive or dead, he broke finally with them in that moment.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  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. O
ver 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.’