She put her hand upon his forehead, and he got up from his chair and faced her.
"I"ve made a discovery," he said, with exhilaration in his manner, "a great discovery." He looked triumphantly at her. "I am."
"What are you?" she asked, thinking he was joking, and his sentence left unfinished on purpose.
"I _am_," he repeated with emphasis. "I have discovered that I am, that I exist. Your question to that woman made me suddenly see it."
His wife looked fl.u.s.tered, and said vaguely, "What?" Wimble continued:
"As yet, I don"t know exactly what I am, but I mean to find out. Up till now I"ve been automatic, just doing things because other people do "em.
But I"ve discovered that"s not necessary. I"m going to do things in future because I want to. But first I must find out _why_ I am what I am.
Then the explanation"ll come--of everything. Do you see what I mean?
It"s a case of "Enquire within upon everything."" And he smiled.
His heart fluttered. He felt wings in it--again.
"Do you mean you"re going to start in the writing or publishing line, Joe?" It had always been her secret ambition.
"That may come later," he told her, "when I"ve something to say. For it"s really big, this discovery of mine. Most people never find it out at all.
She"--indicating with his thumb the direction Mrs. Marks had taken-- "hasn"t, for instance. She simply isn"t aware that she exists.
She isn"t."
"Isn"t what, dear?"
"She is _not_, I mean, because she doesn"t know she is," he said loudly.
"Oh, that way. I see." Mrs. Wimble looked a wee bit frightened. He had seen an animal, a rabbit for instance, look like that before it decided to plunge back into its hole for safety.
"There are strange, big things about these days, I know," she said after a pause, thinking of the books with queer t.i.tles his employers published.
"You have been reading too much, dear, thinking and----"
"Mother," he interrupted, instinctively omitting her name, and in a tone that convinced her his head was momentarily turned, "that"s the whole trouble. I"ve never thought in my life."
"But why should you, dear?" she soothed him, wondering if people who lost their memory and wandered off exhibited such symptoms first. "You always do your work splendidly. Don"t think too much, is what I say. It always leads to worrying----"
"Hardly ever--till this moment," he was saying in the grave, emphatic way that so alarmed her. "Not even when I asked you to marry me, when Tom was born, or Joan, or when we took this flat, or anything."
"You"ve made quite a success of your life without it anyhow, Joe dear.
And no woman could ask more than that. D"you feel poorly? Joan can fetch Dr. Monson in a moment." It was a variant of "What?"
"I feel better and bigger and stronger," he replied, "more real than ever in my life before. I have never been really alive till this moment.
I _am_--and for the first time I know it. I"m experiencing." He stopped short, as Joan went down the pa.s.sage singing, pausing a moment to look in, then tactfully going on her way again. The fluttering in his heart became more marked. Something was trying to escape. There was a whirr of wings again. "Mother," he said to his wife, as their heads turned back from the door together, "do you know what "experiencing" is? D"you realise what the word means?"
She sat down, resting her arms upon the table. She looked quietly into his eyes, as at one who is about to speak out of greater knowledge.
"Joe dear, I _have_ had experiences--experiences of my very own, you know."
"Yes, yes, I know, I know. But what I mean is--do you get the meaning, the real meaning of the word?"
She sighed audibly. "Not your meaning, perhaps," she meant. But she did not say it.
"It means," he said, delighted with her exquisite silence, "it means-- er----" He thought hard a moment. "Experience," he went on, "is that "something" which changes potatoes into nourishment, and so into emotion.
That"s it. Until you eat potatoes, you don"t exist. Until you have experiences, you don"t exist. When you have experiences and know that you have them, you--_per_sist."
She gasped aloud. She took his hand--very quietly.
"Joe dear," she said, softly as in their courtship days, "such ideas don"t come into your head from nowhere. Has some one been talking to you?
Have you been reading these books?"
His pulse was very quiet.
"Have you been reading the firm"s books, dear?" she repeated.
She asked it gently, forgivingly, as a mother might ask her boy, "Have you been tasting father"s whisky?" The books were meant to sell to booksellers, to the public, to people who needed that particular kind of excitement. Her husband was to be trusted. He was not supposed to know what they contained. His "line" of trade was chiefly medical, psychological, religious, philosophical. Fiction was another "line"--for the apprentice. Joe was an "expert" traveller. He was expected to talk about his wares, but not as one who read them. Merely their selling value was his strong point.
By the expression of his face she knew the answer.
He leaned back in his chair, just as he did sometimes when he asked what there was for dinner--the same real interest in his eyes--and he answered very calmly:
"My dear, I have--a bit. _Cogito ergo sum_. For the first time I understood, in theory, that I existed. My reading taught me that.
But I never knew it in practice until just now, when I heard you ask that question about the future Mrs. Fox: "Who _was_ she?" And then I knew also that you----"
"You what?" enquired Mrs. Wimble, bridling.
"Were unaware that you existed," he replied point blank.
"Aren"t you a little beside yourself, Joe--sort of excited, or something?
"she gasped, proud of her tact and self-control. "What else could I have said? How could I have put it different?"
"Joan," he answered gently, "you should have said, "What _is_ she?"
For that would have meant you thought for yourself. It would have meant that you knew you _were_, and that you knew she _was_."
"Original?" said Mrs. Wimble slowly, catching her husband"s meaning vaguely, but more than a little disturbed in her mind.
"No," he answered, "true. Just as when, years ago--the sunshine lovely and the fields full of b.u.t.tercups--you wore a yellow scarf, and a wagtail beside a willow pond came so near that----"
"Joe," she said with a slight flush that was half displeasure yet half flattered vanity," you needn"t bring up that again. We were a bit above ourselves, dear, when that happened. We lost our heads----"
"Above ourselves! Free and real and happy," he interrupted her, "that"s what we were then. We had wings. We"ve lost "em. We were in the air, I tell you." His voice grew louder. "And what"s more, we knew it."
He heard his daughter pa.s.s down the narrow pa.s.sage again, singing. He got up and seemed to shake himself. There was again a fluttering in him.
"We certainly were in the air," murmured his astonished wife.
"You were a glorious yellow wagtail," he went on, so that she didn"t know whether his laughter was in earnest or in play, "and we were rising--into flight. We"ve come down to earth since. We live in a hole, as it were.
I"m going to get out!"
Joan"s little song went past the door and died away towards the kitchen:
Flow, fly, flow, Wherever I _am_, I _go_.