The Promise Of Air Part 2

Wimble to become very practical, and the halfpenny newspapers stirred her social ambitions for her children. Wimble worked hard and capably, and they made both ends meet. He proved a patient husband and a devoted father, if perhaps a rather vague one. His moment of realisation was over. He accepted the routine of the majority, living methodically, almost automatically, yet always a little absent-mindedly as though much of his intelligence was unconsciously at work elsewhere.

Both parents altered; but, whereas his change was on the surface only, his wife's seemed fundamental and permanent. He was aware that he had altered, she was not aware. They differed radically, for instance, about the prolonged and golden honeymoon in the south.

'The money lasted uncommonly well,' said Mrs. Wimble when they spoke of it; 'it was a pity we didn't keep over a little, wasn't it?' There was a hint of asperity in the droop of her lips.

'We should have it now if we had,' he answered vaguely but with patience.

'But for me it's a memory that will always live.' He spoke with longing tenderness.

'What?' said Mrs. Wimble, who, like all slow thinkers, liked sentences repeated, thus giving time to find an intelligent reply.

'We had a lovely time out there,' she admitted with a sigh, and went on to mention by way of complaint that she feared she was getting rather stout in London. There was no idea in her that she had changed in any other way; she looked back upon Algeria as a kind of youthful madness, half regretting it. That the bird had flown from her heart did not occur to her. Not alone her body, but her mind was getting stout. She had grown so artificial that she was no longer real. The manners, moods, the words and gestures she adopted in order to please or in order to appear as others are, had ended by effectually screening her own natural self, that which is every one's possession of unique value. It was not so much that she was false as that she was not herself. She was unreal.

In Wimble, however, those two years remained as something bewilderingly beautiful. Just out of sight in his heart he wore still the steady glow of it. He never could recall quite what he had felt in those deliriously happy days, yet the knowledge that they had been deliriously happy remained and warmed his blood. It was a big, brave, heartening memory beneath his coloured waistcoat. He dreamed his dream, only he did not tell it to any one--yet. He remained a kind, untidy husband and father.

But that was the outer portion of him. The inner portion flew and soared and even sang. He no longer quite understood the meaning of this inner portion, but some day, he felt, it would be drawn out of him again and recognised. He would be taught to realise it, and what this bird-thing in him meant would be made clear. Already he looked to little Joan with something more than an infatuated father's adoration for her yellow hair, her bright blue eyes, her light and dancing ways. Tom he just loved in the way his mother loved. He remained a rabbit with distinctive tendencies of the animal. But with Joan it was different. In Joan there was something he looked forward to. Even at the age of five there was a glint about her that increased the glow in him; at ten it was still more marked. She puzzled her mother considerably, just as later she alarmed her. 'I'm nervous about the child; she doesn't seem like other girls of her age. I don't see her getting on much,' was her opinion, expressed again and again in the same or similar language. 'Joan seems to me backward.'

'Well,' admitted her husband, 'she's certainly not in a hurry about it.

She's maturing slowly. Lots of them do--when there's a good deal to mature.'

'I hope you're right, Joe.' And then she added with pride by way of compensation--'Tom's coming along nicely, anyhow,'--as though she spoke of a growing vegetable or, as he thought, of a rabbit in a cage with lettuces in front of it, and the idea of mating the chief end in life.

Once past the age of sixteen, however, Joan too came along nicely, and with a sudden rush that reminded her father of a young bird consciously leaving the nest. She seemed to mature so abruptly. There came a wondrous bloom upon her, as though the South poured up and blossomed in her body, mind, and soul. It took her father deliciously by surprise.

The glowing thing in him spread too, rose to the surface, caught fire.

He watched her with amazement, joy, and pride. He felt wings inside him.

Thought danced--flashed against a background of blue and gold again.

'She'll do something in the world before she's done,' he said confusedly to himself, feeling a prophecy he had always made without realising it.

'There's wings in the girl. She'll teach them how to fly!'

He was beginning to realise himself--through her. His early ideal had taken flesh again, but this time with a difference. He had not merely found it. He had created it.

For, more and more lately, the influence of Joan upon him had been growing. It was not merely that she made him feel young again, nor that her queer ways made him aware that he wanted to sing and dance. It was, in a word, that he recognised in her the remarkable thing he had known first in her mother years ago--but released in all its golden fullness.

He recovered in her sparkling presence the imaginative dream that had caught him up into the air in youth, and it was both in her general att.i.tude to life as well as in the odd things she now began to say and do.

Her general att.i.tude expressed it better than her words and acts.

She _was_ it--lived it naturally. She had the Air in her. In her presence the old magic rose over him again. He remembered the strange boyhood's point of view about it--that a new thing was stealing down into the world of men, a new point of view, a new way of looking at old, dull, heavy things, that Air was catching at the heart of humanity here and there, trying to lift it somehow into freedom. He thought of the collective wisdom and brotherhood of birds. He forgot that he was growing old.

The old longing for carelessness, lightness, speed in life--these s.n.a.t.c.hed at him with pa.s.sionate yearning once again. Joan was the air-idea personified. And she had begun to find herself.

But so long now had he lived the mole-existence in London that at first this delicious revival baffled and bewildered him. He could not suddenly acquire speed without the risk of losing balance.

He became aware of a maddening desire to escape. He wanted air. Joan, he felt positive, knew the way. But the majority of people about him--his wife, Tom, their visitors, their neighbours--had not the least idea what it was he meant. And this lack of comprehension gave him a feeling of insecurity. He was out of touch with his environment. He was above, beyond, in advance of it. He was in the air a little.

He looked down on them--in one sense.

There were times when he did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet. 'Everything looks different suddenly,' as he expressed it.

He saw things upside down, or inside out, or backwards forwards.

And the condition first betrayed itself one afternoon when he returned unexpectedly from work--he was still traveller to a publishing house--and found his wife talking over the tea-cups with a caller. He burst into the room before he knew that any one was there, and did not know how to escape without appearing rude. He sat down and fingered a cup of tea. They were talking of many things, the sins of their neighbours in Maida Vale, chiefly, and after the pause and interruption caused by his unwelcome entrance, the caller, searching for a suitable subject, asked:

'You've heard about Captain Fox, I suppose?'

'What?' asked Mrs. Wimble, opening her eyes as though anxious to read the other's thoughts. Evidently she had not heard about Captain Fox.

'I don't think I have,' she said cautiously. 'What--in particular?'

'He's going to marry her,' was the reply. 'I know it for a fact.

But don't say anything about it _yet_, because I heard it from Lady Spears, who . . .'

She dragged a good deal of Burke into the complicated explanation, making it as impressive as she could. Captain Fox, who was no better than he should be, according to the speakers, paid rather frequent visits upon the young widow of the ground-floor flat, who should have been better than she was. To find that honest courtship explained the friendship was something of a disappointment. Mrs. Marks wished to be the first to announce the innocent interpretation, to claim authorship, indeed--having persistently advocated the darker view.

'Who'd ever have guessed that?' exclaimed Mrs. Wimble, off her guard a moment. 'You always told me----'

The face of her caller betrayed a pa.s.sing flush.

'Oh, one always hoped,' she began primly, when Mrs. Wimble interrupted her with a firm, clear question:

'By the bye, who _was_ she?' she asked.

And hearing it, Wimble felt his world turn upside down a moment.

He realised, that is, that his wife saw it upside down. For his wife to ask such a question was as if he had asked it himself. He felt ashamed.

His world turned inside out. He looked down on them. He rose abruptly, finding the energy to invent a true-escaping sentence:

'You ask who she _was_,' he said, not with intentional rudeness, yet firmly, 'when you ought to ask----'

Both ladies stared at him with surprise, waiting for him to finish.

He was picking up the cup his sudden gesture had overturned.

'Who she _is_,' concluded Wimble, with the astonishment of positive rebuke in his tone. 'What can it matter who she was? It's what she is that's of importance. The Captain's got to live with _that_.' And then the escaping-sentence: 'If you'll excuse me, Mrs. Marks, I have to go upstairs to see a book'--he hesitated, stammered, and ended in confusion--'about a book.' And off he went, making a formal little bow at the door.

He went into the dining-room down the pa.s.sage, vaguely aware that he had not behaved very nicely. 'But, of course, I'm not a gentleman exactly,'

he said to himself; 'what's called a gentleman, that is. Father was only an a.n.a.lytical chemist.'

He stood still a moment, then dropped into a chair beside the table with the red and black check cloth. His mind worked on by itself, as it were.

'What I said was true, anyhow. People always ask, "Who was she?" about everything. What the devil does that matter? It's what you are that counts. Father was a chemist, but I--I----'

He got up and walked over to the clock, because the clock stood on the mantelpiece, and there was a mirror behind it. He wanted to see his own face. He stared at himself a moment without speaking, thinking, or feeling anything. He put his tie straight and picked a bit of cotton from his shoulder.

'I am Joseph Wimble, not a gentleman quite, not of much account anywhere perhaps, but a true workman, earning 250 pounds a year, knowing all about the outside, and something about the inside of books; thirty-seven years old, with a boy at the Grammar School, a girl of sixteen in the house, and married to--to----' He paused, turned from the mirror, and sat down.

It cost him an effort to remember--'to Joan Lumley, daughter of a corn-chandler in Norfolk, who might die any moment and leave us enough to live on,' he went on, 'in a more comfortable position,' pa.s.sing his hand over his forehead; 'and my life is insured, and I've put a bit by, and Tom's to be a solicitor's clerk, and everything's going smoothly except that taxes----'

The sound of an opening door disturbed him. He felt confused in his mind.

He heard Mrs. Marks saying loudly, 'And please say good-bye for me to your _h_usband,' the aspirate so emphasised that it was obviously an insecurity. She intended he should hear and understand she bore him no ill-will for his bad manners, yet despised him. The steps went downstairs, and the two questions came back upon him like pistol-shots:

'Who _was_ she? Who _am_ I?

He realised he had been wandering from the point.

'I'm a centre of life, independent and unafraid,' thought flashed an answer. 'I'm what I make myself, what I think myself. I'm not seeing things upside down; I'm beginning to think for myself, and that's what it is. No one, nor nothing, nor anything anywhere in the world,' he went on, mixed in speech, but clear in mind, 'can prevent me from being anything I feel myself, will myself, say I am. I've never read nor thought nor bothered my head about things before. By heavens! I'll begin! I _have_ begun----'

'What's the matter, Joe? Have you got a headache, or is it the books bothering you, dear?' His wife had come in upon him.