CHAPTER III
THE BALLOON

I

Bert Smallways was a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert,
limited soul that the old civilisation of the early twentieth
century produced by the million in every country of the world.
He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean
houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas
from which there was no escape. He thought the whole duty of man
was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it,
"on the dibs," and have a good time. He was, in fact, the sort
of man who had made England and America what they were. The luck
had been against him so far, but that was by the way. He was a
mere aggressive and acquisitive individual with no sense of the
State, no habitual loyalty, no devotion, no code of honour, no
code even of courage. Now by a curious accident he found himself
lifted out of his marvellous modern world for a time, out of all
the rush and confused appeals of it, and floating like a thing
dead and disembodied between sea and sky. It was as if Heaven
was experimenting with him, had picked him out as a sample from
the English millions, to look at him more nearly, and to see what
was happening to the soul of man. But what Heaven made of him in
that case I cannot profess to imagine, for I have long since
abandoned all theories about the ideals and satisfactions of
Heaven.