Bim had seen in a forgotten flower-box in a corner of the court mould, gathered years before from a lost garden. That would do! He went to get some, while June stood on the flat parapet and looked on the court below.
Darkness, dirt, decay! How very like life in the town! She looked above at the wounded sky. Two planets and the moon shone dimly through London smoke. The fairy yearned to be above that cloud, to swim in the azure ocean of night, to be closer to the stars, nearer the ideals, farther from muck-raking men. Up, up, and up!
She spread wings and climbed the skylark's stairway. Up and up she went, deliriously happy now, thinking the thoughts the laverock sings. For a while she absolutely forgot weariness and heartache, and only knew gladness of life and the passion to be nearer the light.
Her wings did not cease their beating till she was out of the haze, breathing again the untroubled air which is, indeed, to men and to fairies, life. Then resting on wings outspread, she hung motionless, an atom of light potential, brooding over the miles of lurid city.
Her heart became heavy and sorry because of the burdens of men. To her sight, London was a ruined wilderness, lit here and there with yellow flares. Where the parks stretched was mere blackness, interspersed with dimly shining slabs of pond and lake as the shrouded moonshine happened to fall on them. The Thames, except for occasional gleams of reflected moonlight, was a grey ribbon, a wedge driven through luridness, a forbidding fact.
The red canopy of haze which in Elfdom had oppressed her stretched underneath. It was a barrier between man and the stars--heavy and palpable. The shining worlds which lend magic to the night are so potent an influence for mind-good, bringing exaltation and the high dreams, that what hindered their contemplation was an evil to be banished and destroyed. So June argued, puzzling how to end it. Fairy cogitation! Yet is it so futile?
She was glad to change her gaze and look above her. There it spread--star dust, the firmament, myriads of worlds and suns supremely magnificent, infinite, uplifting, yet, with all the stir of the soul it occasioned, bringing strengthening humility. If men used their eyes and minds and saw more of the shine of the universe; if they watched the constellations in their annual orbits, knew the unique Sirius as a friend, recognized Arcturus, greeted the Pleiades after their summer absence, would not ideals be nobler, hopes happier, tolerance of meanness in its many shapes impossible?
While the fairy rested in her blissful aerial loneliness, she became aware of a gradual gladness, an added sense of joy--more subtle than had blessed her spirits since her flight from the Violet Valley--visiting her. It roused her from reverie to realities.
Fairies--her own people--were approaching, calling her. Their voices and brilliance were better than pearls and wealth.
"June, our June, come back to us! Come back! Come back!"