And the stars. D'you think they
swing on wires? What raised the enormous stones of ancient Egypt? D'you
really believe it was heaped-up sand and ropes and clumsy leverage
and all our weary and laborious mechanical contrivances? Bah! It was
levitation. It was the powers of the air. Believe in those powers,
and gravity becomes a mere nursery trick--true where it is, but true
nowhere else. To know the fourth dimension is to step out of a locked
room and appear instantly on the roof or in another country altogether. To know the powers of the air, similarly, is to annihilate what you
call weight--and fly." "Show us, show us!" they cried, roaring with delighted laughter. "It's a question of belief," he repeated, his tongue appearing and
disappearing like a pointed shadow. "It's in the heart; the power of
the air gets into your whole being. Why should I show you? Why should I
ask my deity to persuade your scoffing little minds by any miracle? For
it is deity, I tell you, and nothing else. I _know_ it. Follow one idea
like that, as I follow my bird idea--follow it with the impetus and
undeviating concentration of a projectile--and you arrive at power. You
know deity--the bird idea of deity, that is. _They_ knew that. The old
Egyptians knew it." "Oh, show us, show us!" they shouted impatiently, wearied of his
nonsense-talk. "Get up and fly! Levitate yourself, as they did! Become
a star!" Binovitch turned suddenly very pale, and an odd light shone in his keen
brown eyes. He rose slowly from the edge of the chair where he was
perched. Something about him changed. There was silence instantly. "I _will_ show you," he said calmly, to their intense amazement; "not
to convince your disbelief, but to prove it to myself. For the powers
of the air are with me here. I believe. And Horus, great falcon-headed
symbol, is my patron god." The suppressed energy in his voice and manner was indescribable. There
was a sense of lifting, upheaving power about him. He raised his arms;
his face turned upward; he inflated his lungs with a deep, long breath,
and his voice broke into a kind of singing cry, half prayer, half chant:

    "O Horus,
     Bright-eyed deity of wind,
  [1]Feather my soul
     Though earth's thick air,
     To know thy awful swiftness----"

  [1] The Russian is untranslatable. The phrase means, "Give my
      life wings." He broke off suddenly. He climbed lightly and swiftly upon the nearest
table--it was in a deserted card-room, after a game in which he had
lost more pounds than there are days in the year--and leaped into the
air. He hovered a second, spread his arms and legs in space, appeared
to float a moment, then buckled, rushed down and forward, and dropped
in a heap upon the floor, while every one roared with laughter. But the laughter died out quickly, for there was something in his wild
performance that was peculiar and unusual. It was uncanny, not quite
natural. His body had seemed, as with Mordkin and Nijinski, literally
to hang upon the air a moment. For a second he gave the distressing
impression of overcoming gravity. There was a touch in it of that faint
horror which appals by its very vagueness. He picked himself up unhurt,
and his face was as grave as a portrait in the academy, but with a new
expression in it that everybody noticed with this strange, half-shocked
amazement. And it was this expression that extinguished the claps of
laughter as wind that takes away the sound of bells. Like many ugly
men, he was an inimitable actor, and his facial repertory was endless
and incredible. But this was neither acting nor clever manipulation
of expressive features. There was something in his curious Russian
physiognomy that made the heart beat slower. And that was why the
laughter died away so suddenly. "You ought to have flown farther," cried some one. It expressed what
all had felt. "Icarus didn't drink champagne," another replied, with a laugh; but
nobody laughed with him. "You went too near to Vera," said Palazov, "and passion melted the
wax." But his face twitched oddly as he said it. There was something he
did not understand, and so heartily disliked. The strange expression on the features deepened. It was arresting
in a disagreeable, almost in a horrible, way. The talk stopped dead;
all stared; there was a feeling of dismay in everybody's heart,
yet unexplained. Some lowered their eyes, or else looked stupidly
elsewhere; but the women of the party felt a kind of fascination. Vera,
in particular, could not move her sight away. The joking reference to
his passionate admiration for her passed unnoticed. There was a general
and individual sense of shock. And a chorus of whispers rose instantly:

"Look at Binovitch! What's happened to his face?" "He's changed--he's changing!" "God! Why he looks like a--bird!" But no one laughed. Instead, they chose the names of birds--hawk,
eagle, even owl. The figure of a man leaning against the edge of the
door, watching them closely, they did not notice. He had been passing
down the corridor, had looked in unobserved, and then had paused. He
had seen the whole performance. He watched Binovitch narrowly, now with
calm, discerning eyes. It was Dr Plitzinger, the great psychiatrist. For Binovitch had picked himself up from the floor in a way that was
oddly self-possessed, and precluded the least possibility of the
ludicrous. He looked neither foolish nor abashed. He looked surprised,
but also he looked half angry and half frightened. As some one had
said, he "ought to have flown farther." That was the incredible
impression his acrobatics had produced--incredible, yet somehow actual. This uncanny idea prevailed, as at a séance where nothing genuine is
expected to happen, and something genuine, after all, does happen. There was no pretence in this: Binovitch had flown. And now he stood there, white in the face--with terror and with
anger white. He looked extraordinary, this little, neurasthenic
Russian, but he looked at the same time half terrific. Another thing,
not commonly experienced by men, was in him, breaking out of him,
affecting _directly_ the minds of his companions. His mouth opened;
blood and fury shone in his blazing eyes; his tongue shot out like an
ant-eater's, though even in that the comic had no place. His arms were
spread like flapping wings, and his voice rose dreadfully:

"He failed me, he failed me!" he tried to bellow. "Horus, my
falcon-headed deity, my power of the air, deserted me! Hell take him! Hell burn his wings and blast his piercing sight! Hell scorch him into
dust for his false prophecies! I curse him--I curse Horus!" The voice that should have roared across the silent room emitted,
instead, this high-pitched, bird-like scream. The added touch of sound,
the reality it lent, was ghastly. Yet it was marvellously done and
acted. The entire thing was a bit of instantaneous inspiration--his
voice, his words, his gestures, his whole wild appearance.