Wild Geese Overhead (11 page)

He was ashamed of the wild geese incident, of the bird-singing, and of all the easy emotion that had been born from them. Bitterly ashamed, so that he would hide from the memory of it, if he could; from its weakness and egotism and poetic echoes. He pressed his palms into his forehead like a man driving out the memory of an uneasy sin. No wonder Mac had got the grue! That glory, that elation, that appalling self-hypnosis. Talk of narcissism! The individual, with his holy-glory little heaven all about him. Not that the miserable little affection would have mattered, in a world where things were humanly decent.
For Christ's sake
,
let me back!
Will crushed his forehead between his palms.

Jamie had seen the wild geese in his eyes—and hated and loathed him. He had seen the self-assurance, the superiority, all the stronger for being instinctive, unconscious.…

He got up and went on. The key was under the grey stone. The lamp was turned low down and he left it as it was, lying slumped in his chair.

As thought got at him, he moved uneasily. His face in the dim light was pale as death. Suddenly his eyes opened wide and black, with intense pin-points of light.

Malnutrition
. Nothing else had killed Ettie.

He got up. All along, it was Ettie he had been frightened to think of. He did not want to think about her now. He could not trust his mind. Whether the bird experiences were to blame or not, something had thinned inside him somewhere so that he could be more easily pierced. The exposed skin of the mind felt the slightest impact, felt it coming.

He blew out the lamp suddenly, before he could think of stopping himself. Slowly he began to unlace his shoes, staring at the red flameless crumbling fire. His slippers were ready for him on the hearthrug; the glass of milk with the saucer on top he ignored. He took his shoes off without removing his eyes from the fire. His hands fell idle.

The wind blew in the elm-tree beyond the window. Right in the core of the sound the wind made, there was a separate and very thin sound, like the whine of a spirit.

He deliberately concentrated on the fire, on the red core of warmth; without physically doing it, he slid to the hearthrug and spread his hands. This is what man had done through the ages; their hands to the fire, in little earth houses, in snow houses, in tents, in open desert places, in beehive huts, in forest clearings—spreading their hands to life, with death in the shadows around. Now and then looking over a shoulder.…

He looked towards the blinded window. The bare branches and thin twigs of the elm made a great harp for the wind which was rising. He turned his head to the door behind him.

The small tick of the French clock grew noisy and rapid.
Tik-tik-tik-tik
…very swift. Speeding up; the mechanization of time! It went straight on, on and out—out into the night, into the void beyond the night.…

Illusion, for it was ticking inside the brain, its tiny hammer beating a taut surface.
Tik-tik-tik-tik
—on a ganglion centre. With French precision.

He got up and shoved his feet into his slippers. Things could get the better of you, even though you were watching them and could command them. When you stare, your defences are open.

As he had blown out the lamp, so he turned for the door, before thought could question or order him. He was going to bed. Hurriedly he fumbled in his pockets for matches, struck one, and made for the stairs, concentrating on lighting one match to another and causing no noise. A lit match stung him and he dropped it with a whispered oath before the candle caught fire in his bedroom. The candle seemed malignant, as if it did not want a flame; and when he forced it to accept the match, it died down and took a long time to come up again.

But now here was the flame, showing him his face in the mirror, his disembodied face. He turned away and began to undress. As he slipped his braces over his shoulders he sat down heavily on the bed. Lord, I am tired! he muttered. And like an echo, from the outer void:
I am very tired!

In his pyjamas, he brought the candle to the small table by his bedside, placed his wound watch beside it, saw the box of matches was handy, and blew out the flame. He tucked the bedclothes round him snugly and disposed himself for immediate sleep. A man could only do his best and then prepare to sleep.

And for a little while the flame in his mind kept dying down. Down, down—it was going softly, warmly out—divinely smothering itself. He kept his thought from it, kept everything from it, so that he would fade with it into its sweet death. It got so low that it was no more than pin-point bright…like the pin-points in Jamie's eyes.… That extraordinary concentration, that dark electrical charge, ready to leap across at him. Immediate destruction in it. Murder or killing would not be enough; it would have to rend asunder; to tear him bit from bit.… It was not the wild geese in his eyes that Jamie had seen. What Jamie had seen was his disgust. But any one would have shown it. Yes—but not in my way, not that instinctive, that fierce disgust, that awful sickening horror, that recoil from him as from a leper.…

The flame inside had now got a grip and was beginning to burn up. Will groaned and, turning over, smothered his mouth in the pillow. The pillow, pressing into his eyes, induced an extra darkness. He might evade the light and slip into forgetfulness through the dark. This darkness had faint spangles in it like a memory of dim lights in a dark street.…

Tall dark tenement walls.… Cliffs, canyon walls. Bodies appearing and disappearing, in a furtive inimical secrecy. A long street, blue-dark, lit by blue globes.…

A besieged, a beleaguered town, seen from above, like a Cretan maze.

They would never find their way out.

Even if they wanted to find their way out.

Did they? Did they?

Why should they? What was there outside? What, in very fact, was there outside but the nothingness of outside, the void?

But that word void was the one word Will wanted to evade. As he had come down the road, the wind with its cold spitting rain, with its ravening cry in the branches, had made him think of it as hurrying into the void, as if the void were the space behind the rushing sphere of the earth, the final lost place, the outer darkness. He had immediately shut off the thought.

He shut it off now, but an extra blast of wind in the elm startled him into listening. There was the inner thin cry, like the whine of a spirit, rising, holding, but not able to hold, falling back, falling away behind the rush of the earth, into the outer darkness.

The
outer
darkness. Its appalling meaning had never even touched him before. The rush of wind—the void, cold and sleet-bitten, and the spirit-face trying to keep up but being defeated, Ettie's face, lost in the icy winds of the formless abyss of the outer darkness.

Jesus Christ! moaned Will. But no invocation could now smother the horror that was come upon him.

It was the horror of the
outer
loneliness, a fear so intense that it curdled away the flesh from the cold bone. He felt himself disintegrating, and fought to keep the strands of his body together. He spoke to himself with cunning. He deflected his thought from Ettie and Jamie so that they became apparitions for which he no longer had any feeling. He held himself still, very very still—and was succeeding, until his head began to go round. Round, slowly round, sickeningly.…

He gripped the bedclothes, the bed, and pushed himself up. He saw for the first time that he might be beaten, that the forces of the outer darkness might in very fact destroy him.

As he made for the ewer of water, he staggered, hitting into the chair that held his clothes and upsetting it. But he now did not care about the noise. He would not have cared if his landlady had come in, or Mac, or the whole world. His fear had to be kept down, his panic conquered, the wild desire to shout defiance had to be smothered. He sluiced water on to his face, drank the ewer water; and at last stood back panting on the floor. Breathing heavily but with the giddiness gone, he found and lit his candle. His legs now started trembling so violently that he had to get back into bed. There was a real sickness at the pit of his stomach. But he was not going to lie down. So he put the pillow behind his back and sat upright, leaving the candle burning. As he began to shiver, he pulled the clothes up around his shoulders. The breast of his pyjama jacket was wet. He stared into the room, commanding it, a relentless expression on his drawn face. He would fight the cruelty, the evil, of the outer darkness, until the last shred of will was sucked in by death.

His head leaned back, and his eyes closed; then leaned forward and the eyes looked slowly about the room. His breath presently grew stertorous. His head sagged against the wooden back of the bed. The candle made skeleton hollows in his face. Outside the wind in its rhythm rose to the shrill whine, the defeated wild cry, in the heart of the elm. Will looked like a dead man keeping watch.

On the way to the bus the following morning, he thought: Dammit, there's that girl I'll have to chaff! There was no reason why he need do it, of course. He could just simply pass up to a forward seat as he used to do. It was at a moment like this that one saw how silly it was to form warm human relations. The thought of it made him tired, and if he could have taken the next bus he would, just to save bother. But this was Saturday, his busiest day of the week. He looked at his watch. He would have to step out. As he increased his pace, his heart began to beat. That strange orgy of feeling last night had taken it out of him. God, what a night! he thought, with a humour dry rather than bitter, for he felt himself curiously detached from life this morning. Even the bird-singing when he had wakened to it, shivering with cold, had not affected him much. He had thought it might have been an irritation, a renewed agony. But he had not cared very much really, and for the most part had dozed through it in a sort of half-drunken stupor.

The bus drew up. “Good morning,” she said, with a smile.

“Good morning,” he answered and passed up to a vacant seat.

She did not follow him at once, and he sat conscious of the back of his head being towards her. She came at last and, before punching his ticket, looked at him. He nodded. She punched and he paid. Then she retired without a word.

This is silly, he thought, but I haven't the energy. He began to feel vaguely miserable and resented it. But the touch of emotion passed quickly.

As the bus drew up at the terminus, he swayed, standing beside her, and gave her a vague smile. “I had bad news last night.”

He saw her brown eyes darken with feeling as they looked at him frankly and yet as it were from under their lashes. “I'm sorry to hear that,” she said.

He nodded, looking away. “We'll get over it,” and he swung down from the bus, turning to give her a wry glance and meeting her eyes once more. She smiled with a curious, steady, shy tenderness.

The streets or the people or the chimney pots had no slightest interest for him, and the thought of the office held no concern. Mac's obvious back he ignored, and when the rush of the first edition was over Don and he had a drink.

“Looking somewhat grey about the gills this morning.”

“Had a bit of a night,” Will confessed. “Nothing deadly.”

“Up to some mysterious game in the country—or what?” Don's eyes tried to penetrate.

“Mysterious is the word.” Will's mind was just as subtle as the black Highlander's.

“Oh, all right,” said Don.

“Have another?” said Will.

“Don't think so.”

“Well, I'd like one. Better join me.”

“You'll be going like Mac, if you don't watch.”

Out of a speculative humour, Will said: “I wonder. I wonder exactly what put Mac off on that tack of his. It's a thought!” He ordered two drinks. “Some strange twist of defeatism—in love, or religion, or ambition, or vanity, or—fear? What do you think?”

“I'm sure I don't know,” said Don indifferently, because he was vaguely uneasy.

“An extraordinary thing to think that it may be religion, inverted religion; that Mac is haunted by the hounds of hell; that he has made the great denial, and into the empty place of the denial has brought home nothing. Stranger still—that he does not know it is that; that he thinks it is the state of the world, the worthlessness of the ambitions of the world; even that it is Tamerlane.”

“I don't think Mac is the religious type. I should say he is the very opposite. Obviously. My God, yes.” Don gave a small harsh laugh.

“Perhaps you're right,” said Will.

“But you don't think so?”

Will looked into his eyes. “I don't know.”

Don lifted his glass and drank, checking his haste midway.

“You see,” said Will lazily, “it's an extraordinary thing, the mind. I don't mean in neurotic or psychopathic manifestations, but in the case of the most normal of us. There are moments when it becomes skinned, becomes superbly sensitive. When it is attacked in that condition—and it has to be attacked to be in that condition.…” He went on talking for quite a time, with a slow but fluent certainty, that was quite flawless and slightly inhuman. Don felt himself more than once being got at, but Will's apparent innocence, his good nature, was too profound a mask to penetrate.

“This is an extraordinary way”, said Don, “to suffer from a hangover.”

Will laughed softly.

“Come on!” said Don. “We must go.”

“Why all the hurry? Time enough.”

“You want to go on talking?”

“You've said it.” Will nodded. “But I don't know why. To indulge in arabesques of talk, arabesques that have no beginning and no end, that go on coiling on themselves like slow snakes, too tired to bite, too weary for poison, but loving the slither of their skins and the beauty of the patterns they make without conscious effort, and so——”

“Look here,” interrupted Don abruptly. “Have you been taking drugs?”