The eternal moment, and other stories

and Other Stories
By E. M. FORSTER
New York
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC. RAHWAY, N. J.
To T. E. IN THE ABSENCE OF ANYTHING ELSE
These stories were written at various dates previous to 1914, and represent, together with those in the CELESTIAL OMNIBUS volume, all that I am likely to accomplish in a particular line. Much has happened since; transport has been disorganised, frontiers rectified on the map and in the spirit, and under the mass-shock of facts Fantasy has tended to retreat or at all events to dig herself in. She can be caught in the open here by those who care to catch her. She flits over the scenes of Italian and English holidays, or wings her way with even less justification towards the countries of the future. She or he. For Fantasy, though often a lady, sometimes resembles a man, and even functions for Hermes who used to do the smaller behests of the gods—messenger, machine-breaker, and conductor of souls to a not too terrible hereafter.
One of the stories appeared in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY and is reprinted by courtesy of its editor; the rest, as far as I know, have never been published in America.
Part I
THE AIR-SHIP
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An arm-chair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk—that is all the furniture. And in the arm-chair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.