Wild Geese Overhead (12 page)

Will's eyes concentrated and gleamed.

“Oh, very well,” said Don, “keep it to yourself. I don't give a damn, I'm sure. Come on.” He set down his glass with a firm bang and got up and walked out.

Will followed him. The drink had done him good. How fine it would be now to lie back in a deep chair in the dim lounge of some luxurious hotel and talk and drink till physical life was trussed hand and foot in arabesques of gleaming wire and dropped discreetly out of sight!

In the height of the afternoon rush, with the football results streaming in, he felt light-headed and gay. As a rugby player, he had always, out of some odd sympathy for the amateur, been a supporter of Queen's Park, who were struggling as usual to retain their position in the first division. And Queen's Park won. He saluted them, and Mac turned so dark and satiric a glance upon him that he sat down abruptly on his stool and began weakly to laugh.

But he was glad when at last the strenuous day was over. It was food he needed, yet he had no great inclination to eat. He should take Don out and stand him one and be humanly reasonable, to make up for that egotistic interlude of the forenoon. However, he allowed himself to drift out of the building without being embroiled by any one and in a nearby pub stood himself a large whisky.

For all day he knew that some time he must see Joe Wilson. All day the figures of last night were at the back of his mind, visibly or invisibly, like phantoms. They did not touch him at all. But they were there, and he must speak to them before the day was dead.

He sat for a long time with himself, staring at the people who came in and out. For the most part the sheer fleshiness of the faces was a revelation. He had never before seen the outside of faces so vividly. He did not look inside them at all, had no desire to, did not care what was inside. A face here and there was so extraordinarily gross that it fascinated him. The bulge of a neck, the lumps of a forehead, the acuteness of small eyes, the glass at the mouth, the dribble at the corner of the lips that pursed in a swinish way as the back of the red hand wiped them. Not surely because the man was merely fat. Fat men were jolly men. There was quite a lot of jollity, of whisperings and leanings-back, and tilting of bowler hats.

Will lowered his eyes to his own thin hand on the table and stared at it. Flesh is opaque; it lets no light through. And when no light comes through, outside flesh slithers against outside flesh in a dreadful promiscuity.

He got up and moved along the street to an eating-place. When the waitress came along and raised her eyebrows, he suddenly thought: If I don't go immediately to Joe's home he'll have eaten and gone out for the night. So with a smile he excused himself to the waitress, who smelt the whisky in his breath, and put on his coat. At the door, as he half-swung round, he saw that she was looking after him. She immediately turned her head away.

That strange penetrating human thing, a woman's sympathy! However gross a woman was—and heavens! women could be gross enough—she never lost the capacity for an eyeflash in which there was light, good or evil!

Joe's folk lived in a real petty bourgeois street. The sight of its trim little decencies made Will smile. This was the sort of street poor but aspiring women put up as a barricade against the drunken horrors of early industrialism. Back here they hauled their men from the promiscuity of the gross all-levelling pubs, whose promise was a fiery freedom, and whose fulfilment was a vomit. Here in this quiet, rather dirty, rather mean little street, with its lack of spaciousness, its suggestions of faint smells, its ardent respectabilities, its flowers behind closed windows and its sunning cats, the great drama that Joe knew so well had been fought—and was still being fought. The new public school poet-communists did not understand that. The petty bourgeoisie to them was anathema. They wanted in their imaginations to be warmed by the great army of the toilers. Quite! quite! said Will.

He paused and, as he lit a cigarette, treated himself to a husky laugh. For he was now trying to banish the smell of whisky from his breath, lest Joe's mother come to the door! The ritual and the discipline.

Lord, what a history was behind that! What realism and tragedy and horror and aspiration and courage, indomitable courage! Did any city in the world ever put up such a fight for workers' rights as this city did? Perhaps, but surely never with so prolonged and bitter an intensity, with so much fury, that strange historic fury of the Scots.

Will felt this fury far back in his mind, like an echo of trumpets. He drew in a last deep breath of smoke, slowly let it out through mouth and nostrils, and climbed the three steps to the door.

Mrs. Wilson herself answered his ring and, after greetings, for they knew each other quite well, said that Joe had gone out after his tea, half an hour ago. She had at once a sweet and a hard face, her smile being slight but very attractive. The smile centred in the eyes, filling them with a light that was, however, steady and penetrating, so that a sensitive person felt measured by the smile. Her smooth hair, though greying, was still predominantly dark. She stood quite still and asked Will if he would care to come in.

Will thanked her and said no. Turning his face over his shoulder thoughtfully (but actually so that she might not smell his breath), he said that he had been with Joe last night and wanted to get certain information from him. “You don't know where he has gone?”

“He has gone to some meeting or other, but where I can't say.”

“All right, thank you. I may run into him. I have an idea where I might find him.” He was backing away and smiled to her. She smiled, with a small nod, and closed the door slowly upon their good-byes.

He breathed heavily for a little, feeling quite weak again, and when at last he got to an eating-house, ordered an underdone fillet steak with chips.

Joe, in physical appearance, took to his father rather than his mother, but the mother was the power behind him. During the ten minutes required to grill the steak, Will sat vaguely dreaming of that very distinctive phenomenon, the Scots mother. Scotland herself, known as The Auld Mither. On the surface sentimental, but beneath—was there something powerful and enduring, fantastic and strong, poverty and the barricades, eldritch and wise, steady, steady, steady—and unyielding? Or was this just the blood speaking, speaking out of an old myth?

When they brought home Joe's father dead, he was smelling of whisky. Nothing more dramatic than a Saturday night street accident which, had he been quite sober, he was almost bound to have avoided. Joe was a little lad then.

If it was fillet steak it wasn't very tender, though it was bloody enough. That fresh thirsty taste of blood. He had got this carnivorous flavour before. Somebody had told him that it did not matter really whether you chewed meat or not, because the juices of the mouth did not help the digestion of meat. So he left the matter largely to the appropriate juices in the stomach.

All the same, it was really difficult for him to have a sound opinion on this mother business, because he could not recollect his own mother. He did have a fairly distinct picture, embodying a sensation of warmth and a madonna face over him, but suspected that it was a later growth or construction of the imagination, for she had died when he was three.

His father had died eight years ago, actually at the moment during the graduation ceremony when Will was being capped.

So he was an orphan, and, as he sat on, drinking coffee, he felt glad that in this world of human relations he was quite free.

Some time during the night, in a stupor of turmoil and nightmare, a moment had come when all was stilled and before him appeared a figure. And the figure raised his face and looked at him, and the figure was himself.

That terrible clairvoyant moment, that light of understanding, of pity, in the eyes, that look of sad unearthly humour, committing them both irrevocably.

“Will that be all, sir?”

He looked at the waiter for a moment. “Yes,” he answered.

Joe wasn't in the Labour rooms, and Will turned his steps through the gathering dark towards the lower part of the town.

It was the elfin time of innocence and the old poet's lamplighter. A quiet still evening, overcast but not gloomy. The steak and coffee gave Will a centre knot of stability, dissipated the physical tremors that flush the brain. He walked with a slow quiet pleasure, observing without being touched; observing consciously the twilight within the streets.

A rare detachment came to him—from somewhere, he felt, immensely remote; as remote as this grey light that came from springtimes in the beginning of the world. The grey magic half-light that haunted the poets.

Fashions change and magic comes under the ban. But dear God, this grey light smiles! A transitory, evanescent smile, down the streets and round the corners. So it played down forest clearings and alleyways of standing stones, seashores and the shadows of mountains on moors. The meeting of light and darkness, love's exquisite foreplay, its delicious fun.

The children were playing not now like rats but like sparrows. And here and there a grown-up face carried a faintly reflected light. But mostly the faces were without light, were dead. And now and then, Will saw faces that wanted this light to pass into the covering comfort of darkness and coloured electric signs. Folk in the sitting-rooms or kitchens of streets immediately switched on their lamps as the twilight entered.

He remembered the Sunday twilight at the farm when he could not bring himself to put the light on. But that had been rather uncanny, and he would not let himself think it out even now.

As he penetrated deeper into the lower parts of the town, this calm assurance began to be invaded by the gathering darkness, by the gloom of the steel-blue lights, by the tenement squalor, the dim entrances to closes, and, above all, by that faint pervasive smell to which his nostrils were so sensitive. A carry-over from the evolutionary process? Stags sniffing the air, wild dogs on the trail.…

Did the nostrils convey to the wary brain the warnings of danger and disease and brutality and all evil? Irrational, as he knew. Who could know better? for it was his political concern to produce at a moment's notice exact figures regarding unemployment, housing, and overcrowding in the very area through which he was passing. More than that, he could tell of the occasional single room inhabited by father, mother, adolescent son and daughter into which a total wage of eight pounds came weekly, yet without son or daughter making any effort to clear out of the stifling den. He could tell of the kindness of the poor to the poor, of self-sacrifice, of household decencies and social conventions more rigid than might be encountered in many houses of the rich quarter of the town. Yet though he could have filled pamphlets with exact knowledge, that fact in no way interfered with his nostrils now. His reaction was completely instinctive, and on that reaction he knew it was necessary that he should act until he died.

He knew approximately where the close was in which Jamie lived and he wanted to pass it but not to go in. He had a quite certain feeling that he was going to run into Joe soon. But he could not find the close and presently entered a pub. He had difficulty in pushing his way to the counter, but ultimately managed to get a small whisky. There were far more people about to-night, and more gaiety and boisterous fun. There would be an odd fight later on and some drunken jollity. Great leg-pulling about busted coupons. And arguments over Jimmy or Bobby, over centre forwards and inside rights and referees; with a virulent discussion going on just behind him about “a pure bloody offside goal if ever there was one”. This opinion was equally strongly resisted. The language became more pointed. The two favourite sexual words were used with increasing directness and with a penetrating rhythm. Overwork did not dull their variety or scatter their strength. On the contrary, all other oaths were sucked into them. And to bear witness to so strange a fecundity the protagonists called upon Jesus Christ.

“Now! now!” cried the barman. “You just chuck that stuff, will you?”

“Chuck my bloody backside. Were you there?”

“I'll chuck your backside outside pretty smart,” said the barman, “if you come any more of that.” Then he smiled slowly, if with a glint, and they all got back to the argument again.

A good-natured crowd, except for the occasional thin weedy type that could only make itself important by working up to a clamour. There was more money about to-night, more of the real workmen out for their couple of well-earned pints. Saturday night and the missus away shopping.

Will became aware of a fellow beside him of perhaps his own age. He could see at a glance that he had never worked. He was a head smaller, thin, with nondescript hair growing raggedly down past the ears, and a twist to the body as if it had got used to hunching itself against its own clothes for warmth. He had been struck by the pallor of this type. But now he saw that the fellow was not pale but grey, with the greyness of lice. There would be lice on his shirt. The hunching movement of the shoulders was not altogether an effort to gather warmth.

There was a shifty acuteness in the face as Will accidently met it.

“Were ye at the match th'-day, mister?”

“No,” said Will. “Were you?”

“Na. Ah coudny manage to ge' awa',” The singsong rhythm of the district was strong in his voice. “They say it wis a great match.” There was an inch of thin beer left in his glass. He was obviously saving it.

Will finished his whisky. “Have a pint?”

The eyes gleamed and glanced at Will's glass. “Could ye make it a wee hauf?”

Will ordered two small whiskies and offered his companion a cigarette. There were others like him in the pub. In fact humanity was graded in virility right up to an Irishman with a tongue of fair hair sweeping across his forehead from under a tilted sweat-stained felt hat; a big untidy man, with a throaty brogue and rather small blue eyes that seemed in their wary steadiness to listen to remarks behind him while he himself was speaking; a large, good-hearted, rather vain countryman, obviously very fond of hearing himself talk. Will liked him. He had strength and warmth and all a countryman's simple cunning.