'There is no need to wait; to wait shows incompetence!'
'Act instantly! Don't reason, calculate, think! Operate in a flash!'
He felt, that is, rather as a bird might feel. There was haste, yet no hurry, purpose yet leisure, delight without delay, spontaneity. So he got out of bed, put on dressing-gown and slippers, and went on tiptoe into the passage. Then, standing in the shaft of light from his room, the dark corridor in front of him, he realised that the entire flat—the furnished flat that Dizzy & Dizzy had let to him—was alive. The feathered arrows were not imagined, the voice was not a dream. Inanimate things stirred everywhere about him. He perceived their undersides and his own. Their apartness that so dislocated the upper, outer, surface-life was only apparent after all. Bars melted. He felt instantaneous. 'Wherever I am I go!' But objects shared the same illusion: wherever they were, they went! The sensations of a flock were in him. A new order of consciousness was close.
He paused and listened. No sound was audible. Mother's door was closed, but Joan's, he saw, just opposite, stood ajar. A draught blew coldly on him. He tapped gently and, receiving no reply, pushed the door wider and peeped through. The light from the corridor behind poured in. The room was empty, but the sheets, he saw, had not been lain in.
Recalling then her state of excitement when she went to bed, he searched the flat, peering cautiously even into Mother's room, but without result. The front door was bolted on the inner side. She had not left the building. He felt alarmed. Then a cold air stirred the hair of his head, and, looking up, he saw that the trap-door in the ceiling was open and that the ladder looked inviting. It 'jumped' at him, as he called it, that is it drew his attention as with meaning. So he snatched a rug from the shelf beneath the hat-rack, and, throwing it round his shoulders, clambered up on to the roof.
It was September and the sky was soft with haze, yet still empty and hungry for the swallows. Round balls of vapour pretending to be solid were being driven by an upper wind across the stars; but the stars were brilliant and shone through the edges of the vapour. And the night seemed in a glow. The wind did not come down, the roof was still; the mass of London lay like a smouldering furnace far below, bright patches alternating with deep continents of shadow. He heard the town booming in its sleep, a thick and heavy sound, yet resonant. And at first he saw only a confused forest of chimneys about him that rose somewhat ominously into the air, their crests invisible. Then, suddenly, one of them bent over in a curve, fell silently with marvellous grace upon the leaden covering; and, fluttering towards him softly as an owl, came some one who had been standing against it—Joan.
This happened in the first few seconds; but even before she came he was aware that the strange stirring of inanimate nature in the room below had transferred its magic up here. It was not discontinuous, that is, but everywhere. It had come down into the flat, as from the outside world, but the singular rhythm emanated first from here—above. Joan had to do with it.
It was exquisite, this soft feathery way she came to him across the London roof, swooping low as with the flight of an owl, an owl that flies so easily and buoyantly, it seems it never could drop. It was lovely. In some such way a spirit, a disembodied life, might be expected to move. He listened with eager intensity for the first word she would utter.
'Father,' she whispered, 'it's the Bird!'
He felt his entire life leap out on wings into open space. He had asked no questions. She stood in front of him. Her voice, with its curious lilt, seemed on the verge of singing. It came from her lips, but it sounded everywhere about him, as though delivered by the air itself, as though it dropped from the unravelling clouds, as though it fell singing from the paling stars. Night breathed it. And it frightened him—for a moment—out of himself. His ordinary mind seemed loose, uprooted, floating away as though compelling music swayed it into great happiness. His stream of easy breath increased. He touched that indefinable ecstasy which is extension of consciousness, caused by what men call crudely Beauty. Joy flooded him.