'We're flying,' she whispered, with a squeeze, as the penguins on the polar ice gave place to a scene of negroes sweating in the sun and munching sugarcane while they lazily picked the fluffy cotton. 'We're everywhere all-at-once, don't you see?' A moment later, as though to point her words, they looked down upon a mapped-out county from an aeroplane. The unimportance of earth was visible in the distance.
'You can't fly under water anyhow,' mumbled Wimble, as they left the air and flashed with a submarine upon sponges, coral, and inquisitive, perfectly poised fish. A black man was trying to knife a shark.
'I can see what they feel though,' was the whispered answer. 'Inside their watery minds, I mean.'
'Wherever I am I go,' he thought, but didn't say it, because by the time he had reflected how foolish it was to remain stuck only upon the minute point of his own tiny personal experience, they were climbing with a scientific Italian of eminence down a crater full of smoke and steam, and could almost hear the thunder of the explosions. But while they went down, everything else went up. Smoke, steam, masses of rock all trying to rise. 'Gravity is the devil,' he remembered; 'it keeps us from flying into the sun.'
The idea made him chuckle, and Joan pinched his arm, giggling too audibly in her excitement.
'Hush!' said Mother. They watched in silence then; a bird's-eye view of the planet was what they watched. With each picture they took part. Every corner of the globe, with its different activities, touched their hearts and minds with interest—busy, rushing life in various forms, and all going on simultaneously, at this very moment—now. Life obviously was one. The strange unity was convincing. Nothing they saw was alien to themselves, for they took part in it. In each picture they 'wondered what it felt like.' They took for an instant, longer or shorter, the point of view of a new aspect of life, of something as yet they had not actually experienced. They longed—or dreaded—to stand within that huge cavern of blue lonely ice and hear the waves of the Polar Sea lick up the snow; to taste that sugary cane with animal-white teeth, and feel the fluffy cotton between thick, lumpy fingers; to swim under water and look up instead of down; to crawl fearfully a little nearer to the molten centre of the planet through smoke and fire and awful thundering explosions. They longed or dreaded. Mentally, that is, they experienced a new relationship in each separate case, a relationship that stretched a suburban consciousness beyond its normal ken.
'It's very tiring,' mentioned Mother, during a brief interval of glaring light, 'and hurts my eyes. And I can't see why they want to show us those half-naked natives. I'm glad I'm English. Disgusting people, I call them.'
'They'll improve it, you know,' observed Tom; 'the flickering, I mean. It's a great invention. Somebody made a bit of cash there all right.'
One couple, at any rate, in the four-shilling seats felt the tie and knew their consciousness extended to include them all. They were engaged with all these various folk and multifarious activities. Humanity was one. The cinema shouted it aloud. The sense of collective consciousness was stirred.
'Well,' gasped Mother, blinking her eyes in the sudden light at the end, 'that was a show, wasn't it?' She seemed tired rather than exhilarated.