He knew them only in so far as they were intimate with each other. But now in their death and mutual insight he became fully possessed of all their experience.

In life, each one of them had been an individual boy fleetingly possessed by the crew's unity. Moreover each had been a member also of other communal beings. For each had shared in other groupings, in family, school, team, working gang and innumerable other less durable associations. Looking back into the earlier lives of the seven, the spirit of the crew told himself that in the time before ever they came together as a crew he could have had no part in any of them at all. Indeed in those days, seemingly (though somehow he could not believe it) he had no being anywhere. And even later, in the time of the crew, one or other of his precious members was often possessed for a while by sheer self-concern, or by interest in some corporate being other than the crew. And indeed the young revolutionary, though of all the seven he had been the most self-disciplined to the crew in action, was also in his heart aloof, because dedicated ultimately to a loftier loyalty.

'But I, I, who am I?' questioned the crew's spirit. 'Am I really no more than the ephemeral community of the seven in whose lives I was conceived, and in whose death I discovered myself? And what future, if any, lies before me? In what world can I take action to express my nature more fully than my seven members could ever do?'

For as the crew's simple spirit brooded over the lives of his seven members, all their diverse individualities became absorbed into himself. His nature deepened to include the whole wealth of all their being.

Further, it seemed to him that, though his contact with the world was limited to the experience of his seven members, yet in some manner he was indeed far more than those seven. Though they were in a sense his parents, yet it now seemed to him most insistently that throughout all their lives, and not merely since the forming of the crew, he had always been present within each one of them, feeding on the diversity of the experience of those young human persons, and always an identical spirit in them all. But always, until their death, he had been a sleep-walker.

Nay more. It seemed to him that not only in the seven but in all those whom the seven had ever known, in their lovers, friends, colleagues, enemies, a spirit lived which, if only he could reach out to it, would prove to be himself, or, if not himself, then perhaps some more lucid spirit, that he, like all those others, strangely harboured.

Intently brooding on those seven lives, assessing the quality of their fumbling commerce with their fellow mortals and with the world, this being who seemingly had been born of the seven as the starkly simple spirit of their vivid community in action, now seemed to himself far older than the seven, seemed indeed primeval, perhaps eternal, seemed also to be of umplumbed depth, and subtlety. And now he was possessed by an obscure but passionate longing to be more fully, more lucidly himself, and to come into active commerce and communion with a world. As a sleeper may sometimes struggle vainly and in terror to spring from sleeping into waking, while his limbs remain paralysed, his eyes shut, and his mind crushed down as though under a great weight of water, so this being struggled to wake and be fully himself, and greet the unknown world, the great reality beyond himself.

THE COMPANY OF SOME WHO WERE KILLED

Suddenly the spirit of that crew with whom a moth had been imprisoned became aware of the cloudy moonlit sky and of the burning city, far below. The sirens were sounding to proclaim untranquil and unlasting peace.

He became aware also of a host of presences, bodiless like himself. It was as though a babel of voices deafened him with incoherent clamour; but these were in fact a swarm of spirits shifting, vanishing and reappearing, impinging directly upon his mind with violent conflict and intermittent sweet accord.

After a spell of bewilderment, he discovered that these beings with whom he was in such overwhelming contact were the spirits that had awakened in the final instants of all the killed in that battle, both in the air and on the ground. There were individual beings, and there were composite beings like himself. There were spirits emergent from those isolated killed who had not at the moment of death been deeply absorbed in the common life of any group; the spirits of particular airmen, firemen, soldiers, gunners, citizens. And there were those composite spirits that had awakened in the sudden destruction of whole close-knit crews of aeroplanes and anti-aircraft guns.

The spirit of that moth-accompanied crew found this new experience painful. The tumult and conflict of all these beings entered deeply into his own personality. For, under the stress of these new attractions and repulsions, one or other of his own seven members, who had seemed so well integrated into his own single being, would wake again into individuality and strain away from him. Indeed the whole company of spirits was a strange quivering flux, criss-crossed by ever-changing new patterns of individuality and communion. Individuals coalesced with one another or broke apart to merge themselves in new corporate beings, which might presently be once more disintegrated, or engulfed in greater beings.

An electron within an atom, they say, has no distinct individuality at all. It is a mere factor pervading the whole atom. So, equally, with these disembodied individual spirits, dissolved in corporate beings. But the electron may recover its individuality and leap free from the atom, to join perhaps with some other atom and once more die from individuality into a new corporate being. So also with these spirits. Or again electrons may become links binding atoms together in larger wholes of individuality. So also these spirits.

For instance, the revolutionary member of that crew which had died when a moth died now woke once more into individuality through the influence of other spirits of his temper.