He now appeared to his six companions almost as a member of a strange barbarian tribe, or a creature of another world, never explored by any of the six. They, haling from little surburban villas and secondary schools, felt themselves to be integral to society. They regarded the policeman not indeed as their servant but at least as the necessary defender of orderly and decent living. But this other, nurtured in a northern work-town where work had formerly come almost to a standstill, where the common fate was hunger, sickness and social impotence, saw the whole convention of society's Structure as a device of the prosperous to keep the poor in subjection. Every policeman was for him an enemy. Looking down the vista of his days and nights, this seventh member saw, and his six companions saw with him, a filthy urchin sitting on the kerb-stone playing with a broken bottle in the gutter; while in the six other lifetimes all observed nice children sitting on suburban grass-plots. They watched the schoolboy in a crowded classroom discovering his native power, but constantly hampering himself by rebellious acts and consequent punishments. They saw the young man unemployed, gripped in that steel trap of privation and futility, listening to angry speeches at street comers and in shabby halls, poring over revolutionary tracts, and presently himself making earnestly subversive speeches, or skirmishing with policemen. They saw not only these distressing events but also the inner passion exfoliating day by day in the young man's heart, the passion of the iconoclast and the revolutionary. And they were outraged. For it seemed to these others, who, for all their man-of-the-world cynicism, had never really questioned the fundamental integrity of their society, that this passion sprang merely from self-pride and envy.

But the young revolutionary, looking into the lives of these sons of business men, clerks, shop assistants, mechanics, was amazed. Their parents, one and all, had been compelled by social circumstance to fight for a living against innumerable competitors, all seeking desperately for some foothold on the slope that leads up to affluence but down to penury; yet, these fathers and these sons, though they had been nearly always discontented and harassed, blamed merely their bad luck, or the state of trade, or bolshevik machinations, or the Jews, or the inveterate evil in man's heart. They never had any thought that their troubles were in fact the issue of some deep-lying social disease, and that they were poor little infected cells in the social body. But, to the seventh member of the crew, the engineer, it seemed that for such as these, and indeed for all men, there could never be any hope unless they could learn to understand the great social forces which had produced all this frustration and misery. And understanding would surely drive them to take action together about it.

All seven were plunged into revulsion and protest, long-enduring (so it seemed to them) as a lifetime of painful learning; but, measured in physical time, it happened in the instant. Little by little, yet in the instant, after the spell of bewilderment and horror a change came over the seven emergent spirits of the crew. For each of these beings, who had been through that strange remaking which had befallen the rear-gunner, were now apt for learning. They were no longer simply boys who had died. They were the beings that had been obscurely born of those seven, and had awakened into clear awareness in the extinction of those mortal seven. Therefore, after the first revulsion, they yearned together, each saluting the other's individuality with respect, and seeking mutual insight. The pilot and the rear-gunner laughingly forgave each other. The bomb-aimer's obsession was seen by all no longer as a devilish lust but as a psychical scar left by misfortune. The revolutionary was no longer spurned. For now the six saw that their condemnation of him was less moral than snobbish, a mere unthinking rejection of standards alien to the tribe. They reminded themselves that this seeming enemy of society, whose energy appeared to be sheer hate, had been also their own trusted companion in the crew, one who in action had been well-integrated with them, one to whom all had paid a special though none an intimate admiration.

Eager to do justice, they looked with clearer vision. They saw the schoolboy in his bare home struggling with his homework, while the mother soothed a crying baby. They saw the parents daily trying to conceal mutual irritation under their sorely tried affection. They saw the lad himself noting day by day that the source of all their distress was poverty. And they saw him conceiving through suffering and mutual aid a passion of comradeship for certain schoolmates and young fellow gangsters, and a growing need to give himself in corporate and comradely activity.

They savoured more intelligently the lad's frustration in unemployment; and his induction into the corporate life of the revolutionary Party, where at last he found peace in self-dedication to the revolution. With curiosity, with growing interest, and then with warm accord, they watched the young man's mind form itself by reading and the experience of social action, until he was fully disciplined to a commanding idea, the conception of mankind as something of high promise but of crippled actuality.

Through his fervour the six themselves now for the first time felt the power of this human gospel.