But so well had he been merged in the corporate being of his crew that, far from breaking away, he became the link by which the whole sevenfold spirit of that crew found community with all those among the killed who had willed a new world.

The individuals and corporate beings in this company of all the killed seethed like bubbles on the surface of boiling water, appearing, vanishing, merging, separating; or like the ever-shifting patterns of wrinkles on the skin of heated milk.

But one at least among those killed, being of far finer temper than the rest, had a different fate. Like all, she suffered annihilation of her earthly self; but since, even in her earthly self, she had been so little blinded by worldliness, the spirit which woke in her death could pass easily and swiftly through all the strange forms of being which most others must so laboriously climb.

She was a saint of the City. Born to luxury, but also to sincerity, and schooled in the best temper of the old religion, she had early broken with the easeful and gilded life of her own class. She looked for friendliness with the poor. For years they had rejected her; but in the end their hearts were won by her service and her need of them. When the tyranny broke upon the City, she with modest daring, and the formidable prestige of her integrity, had defended the persecuted and rescued the hunted.

Eagerly she reached always outward in friendliness and service; yet the source of all her warmth and strength lay in her inner life of contemplation. She praised the spirit in such forms as were known to her, in field and wood and sky, in human grace and the significance of human words, but above all in human loving. Not for her the subtleties, of the theologians, nor the equal subtleties of the sceptics. For her the perception of love's divinity, and the steep and excellent way.

When death destroyed her, then in virtue of her life's devotion the spirit that awoke in her dying soared on strong wings; until she seemed, she seemed, to be gathered up in exquisite communion with the very God whom all her life had praised. But her true and ultimate fate cannot yet fittingly be told.

This saint, alone among all the dead of that battle, sprang straight to bliss; or if not she, then the being that in her dying woke and struck free. Some few others, airmen, citizens and gunners, were gathered quickly into the common being of some church or party or other storied or passionate group. But most remained for long in tumultuous intercourse with their fellow dead.

This merging and union among the spirits of the killed was never painless. For although what drew the spirits into union was always some deep identity of will, yet also, no sooner were they forced into thorough and respiteless intimacy than in sudden revulsion they strained apart.

Agonizingly the massed experience of all these lives was thrust upon each spirit, so that at first their only wish was to avoid the intolerable stress of conflicting opinions and desires. For among these dead were young and old, men and women, masterful and submissive, simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, knaves and heroes and saints. Moreover there were the raiders and their enemies, the attacking airmen and the citizens.

Not only were there antagonists from both sides of the battle, now tortured to find their minds poured together and subtly interfused with enemy minds, and their most sacred values spurned seemingly in the very sanctuary of their own souls; not only so, but worse, for there were many who, though on the same side of the battle, now with horror discovered one another to be at heart poles asunder in temper and ideals. For deeper far than the cleavage of the war was the difference between those who rendered ultimate allegiance to the very essence of spirit, to reason, love and creativity, and those whose hearts were secretly given mainly to personal or tribal power or to any other of the thousand phantasms that distract men. On both sides of the battle many simple spirits were in a confused way sincerely loyal to the light, and on both sides many were secretly wedded to darkness. But in the City the miasma of tribal doctrine grievously blinded even those who were for the spirit.

One thing alone, it seemed, the whole company of the spirits emergent from the killed had in common. All were the issue of lives cut short by violence. Unlike the members of a crew, no common purpose united them. Only death, violent and untimely, held them together as a single company.

But since all these beings, though hampered by the ignorances and prejudices of their mortal progenitors, were beings of lucid nature, their common tragedy of lives cut short was enough to form a stepping-stone to full mutual insight. Little by little, through what seemed to these spirits an age-long lifetime or remaking, though physically all happened within the spell of that brief battle, community triumphed over conflict. All came to appreciate under their many errors the identical truth in all. Conflicts still perplexed them, but now only as differences among friends united in trust, and pressing eagerly toward full mutual insight.

Presently they cried out together, 'Had those poor mortals who generated us been able to see into one another's hearts and minds as we now see, strife would have been less Common on earth, happiness less rare. But we, possessing fully our common inheritance of experience, can create together a true fellowship of spirits, can be translated, each one of us, into the richer, ampler being of our union.'

But no sooner did they rise into this ecstasy of mutual insight than all felt themselves reeling, swooning, into unconsciousness. For in their communion they doomed themselves as individuals to extinction. Together they became the parents, or perhaps rather the midwives, of a single being. Each one of all this company died utterly, but his experience was gathered up into a single, ampler spirit, in whom they as conscious individuals had no part.

THE SPIRIT OF SOME WHO WERE KILLED

This spirit, who was born or who was wakened in the annihilation of all the heterogeneous company of the killed, possessed the pasts of all. He remembered, for instance, how a certain rear-gunner was kissed by a certain moth. And he remembered the composite spirit of that crew.