"Water birds, probably," he said, still puzzling about the strange word; "_old_ water birds apparently," he added, combining both possible derivations; "perhaps a society to preserve old water birds and provide artificial paddles when their webbed feet wear out."
They laughed at the idea, but their laughter hushed as a couple of ladies, beautifully dressed and with what is called refined, distinguished bearing, brushed past them and went upstairs, evidently going to the meeting. Though they were unknown to him, and it was obvious, in his black tail-coat and brown boots, that he was a commercial traveller of sorts, they bowed with a pleasant little smile of polite apology for pushing past. "A d.u.c.h.ess and her daughter at least! Old families certainly!" he thought; "yet they treated us as equals!" It startled him, it was so un-English. He raised his hat and smiled. In their manner and the expression of face he caught something new, a kindness, a sympathy, a touch of light perhaps, something at any rate quick and alert and gentle that brought the word "sympathy" intuitively across his mind. He held his hat in his hand a moment. "They"ve got air in them," flashed into him.
"I wonder if they"re members."
"Your head"s in a draught, Daddy," said Joan. He put his hat on. A sc.r.a.p of conversation reached them from the stairs: "I"d rather sit well at the back, I think," said the younger of the two.
"We shall have to, probably," was the reply; "it"s always full.
And remember--just keep an open mind and listen. The quackery doesn"t matter, nor the grammar. He was only a railway guard"--then something inaudible as they turned the corner--"his idea of a New Age is true somewhere, I"m positive. It was the speed of the train, you know--always rushing through s.p.a.ce--that made him . . ." And the voices died away.
"Come, Joan, we"ll go in too. What are you dawdling about for?" exclaimed Wimble on the spur of the moment. Something in that interrupted sentence caught him.
"You, Daddy," she said, as she tripped after him up the stairs.
People were standing in the corridor and in the little hall; the room beyond, where a heavily-moustached man, with an eager, soap-polished face, cheerful expression, and bright earnest eyes, stood lecturing, was full.
The two ladies who had preceded them were sitting on a window-sill.
"I"m afraid there are no seats left," whispered a pleasant, earnest woman beside the door, "but I"ve sent for some chairs. They"ll be here presently. I hope you"ll hear something out here." Wimble thanked her with a nod and smile; he leaned against the wall with Joan and looked about him.
Some thirty people were crowded into the small inner room, three-quarters of their number women, what are called "nice" women. They were well dressed; there was a rustle of silk, a faint atmosphere of perfume, and fur, and soft expensive garments; young and old, he saw, a good many of them in mourning. The men looked, generally speaking, like well-to-do business men; he noticed one clergyman; a few were shabbily dressed; one or two were workmen, mechanics possibly. There was an alert attention on most of the faces, and in the air a kind of eager expectancy, serious, watchful, yearning, and waiting to be satisfied; sympathetic, it seemed, on the whole, rather than critical. One or two listeners looked vexed and scowling, and a tall, thin-visaged man in the corner was almost angry.
But as a whole he got the impression of people just listening patiently, people for the most part empty, hungry, wondering if what they heard might fill them. He was aware of minds on tiptoe. Here, evidently, he judged, was a group of enquiring folk following a new Movement. "One of the Signs of what"s in the air To-day," he thought. "Five years ago these people would have been in Church, convinced they were miserable sinners with no good in them. That mechanic-looking fellow would have been in Chapel.
That portly man with the stolid face, wearing a black tail-coat, a low collar, a heavy gold watch-chain and a black and white striped tie surely took round the plate in Kensington." The thin-faced angry man was merely a professional iconoclast.
He wondered. He thought a moment of the unimaginative English standing about the island in hordes, marvellously reliable, marvellously brave, with big, deep hearts, but childishly un.o.bservant, conservative, conventional, not to be moved till the fire burns the soles of their feet, st.u.r.dy and unemotional, and const.i.tutionally suspicious of all new things.
He saw these hordes, strong in their great earth-qualities, ballast of the world, but at the same time world-rulers. . . . And then his thought flashed back with a snap to the scene before him. What was this group after? Why was it dissatisfied? Why had it turned from the ancient shibboleths? Something, of course, was up. He wondered. These people looked so earnest. This Aquarian Society, he knew, was one of a hundred, a thousand others. It might be rubbish, it might contain a true idea, it was sure to prove exaggerated. The people, however, were enquiring.
He glanced at Joan, but her eyes were fixed intently upon the speaker"s face--the face of a former railway guard whose familiarity with speed (certainly not on _his_ own crawling line, thought Wimble!), with rushing transit from scene to scene through the air, had opened his mind to some new idea or other.
"I wonder if he sang "Wherever I am, I go!"" he whispered to Joan.
"He ought to, anyhow!" But Joan was too intent to hear him.
He swallowed his smile and listened. The speaker"s rough, uncultivated voice rang with sincerity. There was a glow about his face that only deep conviction brings. To Wimble, however, it all sounded at the moment as if he had fallen out of his Express Train and picked up his ideas as he picked up himself.
For at first he could not understand a single word, as though, coming out of the busy human street, he had plunged neck-deep into a stream of ideas that took his breath away. Having missed what had gone before, he could not catch the drift of what he heard. Then gradually, and by degrees, his listening mind fell into the rhythm of the minds about him; he slipped into the mood of the meeting; his intelligence merged with the collective intelligence of the others; he merged with the group-consciousness of the little crowd. The hostile interjections had no meaning for him, since those who made them, not being included in the group-consciousness, spoke an unintelligible language.
The speaker was very much in earnest evidently; he believed what he was saying, at the moment anyhow. Possibly this belief was permanent; possibly it was merely self-persuasion. Though obviously he expected hostile comment from time to time, when it came--usually from the iconoclast in the corner--he rarely replied to it. This method of ignoring criticism was not only easier than answering it, it induced an appearance of contemptuous superiority that increased his authority.
Wimble and his daughter had come in at a happy moment, for the long stretch of argument and explanation was just over, it seemed, and a summing up was about to begin.
"So where are we, then, with it all?" asked the lecturer.
"Where "ave we got to? Where do we stand?"
He paused, and into the pause fell the angry voice of the thin-faced man: "Exactly where we started. You haven"t stated one single fact as yet."
The speaker looked straight in front of him without a word, and the audience, almost to an individual, ignored the criticism. They supported the lecturer loyally, to the point at least of not even turning their heads away. They stared patiently and waited.
"Where "ave we got to," repeated the man on the platform, "that"s wot we want to know, isn"t it? After all we"ve listened to this morning, "ow do we stand about it?"
"That"s it exactly," from the interrupter in a contemptuous but intense tone of voice. He seemed annoyed that no one was intelligent enough to support him. At a Society of Rationalist Control across the road he would have been at home. He, too, was a seeker, and a very earnest one, only he had tumbled into the wrong group. Across the road he might have been constructive; here he was destructive merely.
"Well, on the physical plane," resumed the speaker, "on wot I might call the scientific and materialistic plane, as I"ve tried to show you, the "ole trend of modern civilisation is towards speed and universality.
That"s clear--at least I "ope I"ve made it so. Air, and wot air represents, shows itself in the physical plane like that. Distant countries are getting all linked up everywhere--by wireless, by motor, by aviation, by cinematograph, and the like. A kind of telepathy all over the world is--" he hesitated an instant--"engendered."
"Go on," from the critic, "any word will do as well."
"That"s the scientific side of the business, as it were," he went on, "the practical, everyday aspect we can all understand. It"s the universality of the new element, air, as it affects the practical mind, so to speak; the technical understanding and mastery or s.p.a.ce--wot I called aether a little while ago, as you"ll remember--or, as the Aquarian Society prefers to call it, as being simpler and shorter--air."
"Well," he added, "we now want to see "ow we stand with regard to the "igher side of life, the mental, spiritual aspect. Wot does this new Age, in which air is the key--the symbol like--wot does it mean to the race on _that_ side?"
"Gas," interjected the other, but in a lower voice.
From several books lying beside the water-bottle the lecturer selected one. He adjusted a pair of heavy reading-gla.s.ses to his eyes.
"The link between the two is better expressed than wot I can express it,"
he resumed quickly, "in this little volume, _The New Science of Colour_-- and colour means light, remember, and light means aether, and aether means s.p.a.ce, universality--so it"s all the same."
"Every bit of it," came the contemptuous comment from the corner.
"Just this short paragraph--I came across it by chance--except that there reely is no chance at all--and it puts it well. It supplies the link.
So I"ll read it." He heavily emphasised certain words:
"We are approaching an age of mental telepathy, in which the _organism of the race_ is about to become attuned to the second sense of the earth and to the third element that sustains her--_i.e. air_--and in which our action and our outlook will alike a.s.sume the characteristics of that element, which are _elasticity and brilliance_."
He laid down the book, slowly removing the heavy gla.s.ses from his nose, and while "that"s no proof was heard to snap from the corner, the other repeated with emphasis of manner, yet lowering his voice at the same time: "the organism of the race--becoming attuned to _air_--elasticity and brilliance."
Fingering his gla.s.ses and looking very thoughtful, the speaker kept silence for a minute or so. He drank a few sips of water slowly, while everybody, even the interjector, waited, and those who had been staring at him turned their eyes away from his face, as though embarra.s.sed to watch him drink. He produced a big handkerchief from his coat-tail pocket, wiped his lips, and replaced the handkerchief with some difficulty whence it came. The pause lengthened, but no one stirred. Then the earnest-faced woman near the door touched Wimble on the arm and indicated an empty chair, but Wimble, too absorbed in the proceedings, shook his head impatiently. Joan slipped into it. Joan, he noticed, did not seem interested; the keen attention she had shown at first had left her face, she looked half bewildered and half bored. "She"s too much in it to need explanation," flashed across him.
The slight shuffling warned the lecturer that the mind of his audience needed holding lest it begin to wander. Picking up a sheet of paper covered with notes, he advanced to the edge of the little platform and cleared his throat.
"As I"ve been trying to explain," he began, ""umanity has now reached a crushial moment in its development. The planet we live on belongs to the sun, and the sun has just entered--in 1881, to be igsact,--the sign of Aquarius. Aquarius, according to the old Chaldean system, is wot"s called an Air Sign, and the new powers waking in us all--coming down into our world now--will be ruled by the element of air. The Age of Pisces, a Water Sign, is just finished and done with. We are entering another period. A new Age is beginning--the Age of Air." And he glanced about him as though to catch any evidence of challenge.
"What is an Age?" asked a thin voice from the rear. It was not hostile, and heads were turned to find the questioner, but without success.
"An accomplice," muttered the habitual interrupter to himself.
No one noticed the comment, and Wimble, now completely captured by the collective sympathy, even wondered what he meant.
"I"ll tell you," continued the lecturer, and referred to the sheet of notes in his hand. "I"ll tell you again with pleasure."
He emphasised the word "again." The gla.s.ses were readjusted. With a certain air of mystery, as though he knew far more than he cared to impart, he read aloud, emphasising frequent pa.s.sages as his habit was, and making here and there effective and semi-theatrical pauses. Behind this cheapness, however, burned obviously a deep sincerity and belief. He deemed himself a prophet, and he knew a prophet"s proverbial fate.
"Astronomers tell us that our sun and his fam"ly of planets revolve around a central sun, which is millions of miles distant," he read slowly, "and that it requires about 26,000 years to make one revolution."
Remembering one of his most successful Primers, Wimble sat forward on his chair, all eagerness. Here was what the critic called a "fact" at any rate.
"This...o...b..t is called the Zodiac," continued the other, "and it is divided into twelve signs." He mentioned them, beginning with Aries and Taurus, and ending with Aquarius and Pisces. "Now, you asked what is an Age, didn"t you?" He paused a second. "Well, our solar system takes a bit over 2000 years to pa.s.s through each of these Signs, and this time is the measurement of an Age. And with each Age certain new things "appen."
He made this announcement with a certain mysterious significance.
"Certain things "appen to the planet and to us as lives on it. Certain changes come. They"re sure as summer and winter is sure--that is, you can count on them. Those who know can count on them--prophets and people with inner vision. There you get prophecy and the meaning of prophecy.
Vision!" And without a vision the people perish--miss their chances, that is. The seers, the mystics, always know and see ahead, and this end of the Age--and of the world as it"s sometimes called stupidly--has been prophesied by many."
The audience was on tiptoe with antic.i.p.ation. Each individual possibly hoped that certain personal peculiarities of his own were going to be explained, made wonderful. Wimble was particularly aware of this excitement; it dawned upon him that he was about to receive an explanation, and a semi-scientific explanation too, of his own strange ideas and feelings. He glanced across at Joan. She seemed, to his amazement, asleep; her eyes were closed, at any rate; her attention was not held. He wanted to poke her. He wanted to say "I told you so," or rather "You told me so." But the speaker had ended his pause, and, to Wimble"s delight, was explaining that this movement of the sun pa.s.ses through the Zodiacal Signs in reverse order--"precession of the equinoxes," as it is called--Pisces therefore preceding Aquarius instead of following it. Here was another "fact" that his Knowledge Primer justified.