As the sun dipped below the horizon, bathing my backyard in hues of pink and gold, I sat there clutching my hand-made device that was supposed to give me wings. All around were the remnants of my earlier inventions: a big table made of boxes, a couple of chairs, and some odds and ends that caught my eye whenever I happened to pass my father’s workshop.
So far, I had failed; together with the eagerly watching kiddies of the neighborhood, I felt that they were getting weary of the long delays, and, worse, of the repeated accidents and failures which I met on the way.
And so, instead of working in silence and self-communing with my failed mechanical efforts; instead of private and tearful meditation, I presented a jovial front. I opened the experiment with a speech of bright and sparkling remarks snatched from Mother’s make-believe songs about the nursery cat.
And when my cheerful appearance failed of reviving interest, and the mountaineering kids began to pair off to go home, I took some shavings from the wood safely guarded in a corner, and made them a bonfire, with which, after saying I was sure the balloons would work all right, as soon as the glue with which I had put a set of paper ones together was really dry, I bade them good-night.
The fourth balloon was still hanging just a little above the table. The remaking of the third had pressed the hour a little too near bedtime.
At first I thought of waiting vaguely till it had grown quite dark, but when I began to arrange scraps of this and that to imitate balloons on a tight rope, by raising their elastic tethers, I heard tea rapidly approaching with Mother Busby’s short, hard cough, and drew my strap up to a point just below the attic window-sill by a block I had borrowed for the occasion, and with the last touch discovered that, to reach home in proper time, I should have to make a start even before my comparatively recent tea.
The black clouds came also, and when once the roof was deserted and quiet where I went alone, and whither no one above seemed to think of following me, the night wind grew plaintive, and the rain dripped from the roof in large drops that splashed on the beds where father and Mother had slept together the happy honeymoon time.
I climbed into my small bed at last with a kind of despairing, wearied, dream-disliking longing for something, and no one in the whole happy world knew where to find me. And when at length slender, taloned puppets of sleep come tripping, half hidden, up the dark winding staircase of the spirit’s home; light and childish in their fancied turquoise and dazzling white attire, and ghostlike as vapours gushing away from my orifice of bodily entrance, I then seemed to know that a battle must be fought to the end.
My dreams out of the fights were as different as possible. When things internal only frightened me, I got my shot or bomb thrown or yellow and white pinweed wedged so tightly that it was quite impossible not to be touched.
And each time I awoke I was necessarily stirred enough to come a little more to myself; and at last, when all my absorption was reduced to a calm surface freckled like a skin perforated thinly with small seals by my die, I fancied that by thus raising my I command could help it on its way up to—and, I am obliged to say, I was forced by the force of actual observation to see that I was quite right as to her place being under that happy-nowhere-feeling space between the higher peaks of the Temple of the Terrible and Magnificent to the—et voilà!—only half a page was then left for the good people below.
Soon a clever staircase which shot assimulated cuts in the fabric of space compelled the tender and a little smile of release that was on the lips of Faience, my wife, to split her face as much as it could round into revolving sun mill-like wheels, and go rapidly up and down, down and up, over and over and over again.
All staid spirits laughed as they felt they could give my muses the slip; all loitering spirits over the sun shone more brightly than any they had yet met out of the many I needed to help a twin to refresh.
But Tommy, I heard you say, “Only say the word, and several other masters shall help.” And, moreover, with the decorum befitting a Triple-eyed Eleight, they set my raised spirits flying as in so many solemn, sacred, wood-cover-like skeps or bees’-nests before the wind.
“Three cheers wherever there are not spectators,” I found myself mechanically saying, half awake all the time.