Wild Geese Overhead (14 page)

But she clutched his hand. “You will come for me again?”

He looked at her and said slowly: “I think I will. Please go now.”

“Remember—you'll come.” Her eyes glittered deeply, then like a woman betrayed into a burning exposure of herself she turned and walked away. He watched her for a little while, then strolled back to Joe and the policeman.

“Where have you been all night?” he asked Joe.

“I should say it's much more to the point to ask where you have been. Don't you think so?” and Joe turned to the constable. His voice was hard and brittle.

“I agree with you fully,” said the constable.

Will laughed lightly. “I have had a very pleasant evening.”

“Manifestly,” said Joe. “Though socially it is not considered
de rigueur
to kiss a prostitute in a public thoroughfare. Ranald here has official instructions on the point.”

“If you were gentlemen, you wouldn't have seen it.”

“Will you answer me if it is necessary”, inquired Ranald, “for the purpose of your ‘copy', that you should go to such dubious lengths?”

“In my profession,” said Will, “the sky's the limit.”

“Indeed, I would have thought it was the other place,” said Ranald. “At least—it was looking that way.” It was a dry and friendly humour. “However, as they go, Ivy is not the worst of them. Though she has a temper when she's roused. She has that.”

“Really?” Will looked at him.

Ranald nodded. “It's my colleague was telling me. It was in another pub farther east there. There was a regular shindy. And do you know what her excuse was?”

“No.”

“‘He insulted me,' she said, pointing to a fellow.”

“Perhaps he had,” said Will.

Ranald laughed thickly. “I wouldn't put it past him.”

They all began to laugh, but Will took out his cigarette case, because in a moment, in the middle of laughing, last night's loneliness began to come at him. He shouldn't have looked at Ivy walking away. Suddenly he heard the inner sound of laughter, its hard obliterating cruelty.

“Did he lock her up?” he asked, to kill the sound.

“No, as it happened, he didn't. To tell the truth he didn't know what to do because there was a lot of them. But he had to do something, so he lifted the fellow who insulted her, and fortunately that fellow struck my colleague and that made things easy for him.”

Will began to laugh again. The effect of all the drinks he had had was beginning to take the disconcerting form of a cold sobriety. He felt the coldness on his brow. He did not want to lose the mood he had been in all night.

As Joe and he walked away, a certain restraint at once became manifest and Will tried to defeat it by commenting on the human decency of the policeman they had just left (the man who had marched Jamie to the cells last night). Joe agreed.

Will went on to tell how he had called at Joe's home. “I wanted to see you to find out what had happened to Jamie. It would have dogged me in the country over the week-end.”

“I think he'll come all right,” said Joe in cool practical tones. “I bailed him out this morning. He'll plead drunk and disorderly and be fined five bob—or perhaps merely be given a warning, because Ranald will put in a good word for him. A clean record and exceptional circumstances. That's not the real worry.”

“Having been locked up, you mean, won't do him any harm?”

“I hope not.”

“I can understand that. It will probably do him good.”

“You mean?”

“The humiliation may be a certain payment on account.”

“I don't—quite see—what you mean?” Joe's tone was precise and cool.

“A bit fanciful, probably, but the punishment, the abasement, the suffering—a form of tribute to the dead Ettie for her tragedy. His recognition.”

Joe walked on steadily and said nothing.

“You think that a bit highfalutin; that a fellow like Jamie could not come near the conception of sacrifice?”

“I couldn't say, I'm sure,” Joe answered. “But it seems to me a bit vague. It certainly would never dawn on him that being imprisoned was a spiritual sacrifice.”

“Naturally,” said Will.

They walked on in silence, and now Will felt quite certain that Joe had been deeply upset by the recent scene before the pub. There, the very foundation of their friendship had been struck at. Joe had kept face before Ranald and supported the idea of “copy”. But now they were alone, and he knew that “copy” was a myth. To Joe it would not merely be drink and immorality of the lowest because most calculated kind; but, deeper than that, a betrayal of the proletarian faith that was Joe's religion and his life. Will now understood the hard note in Joe's voice. The understanding so appalled him, that a slow smile twisted his face.

“However,” Will went on, “as you suggest, these rather mystical conceptions probably don't matter. You said that was not the main worry. What is the worry, then?”

“The difficulty of getting him to settle down again.”

“Why?”

“Well, naturally, he's going to be upset for a bit.”

“Of course. But you think he'll settle down?”

“I hope so.”

“Was he at home to-day?”

“For a time, yes.”

“You've seen Mary?”

“Yes. Fortunately she has sense.”

“She'll give him rope. Are you going back to-night again?”

“No, I'm going home. I've done what I could.”

“That's wise,” said Will. “It'll come all right.”

“You think so?” There was a harsh dryness in Joe's voice now.

“I think so,” Will answered. Then prompted by a queer malice out of the cold white world of his unnatural sobriety, he went on in a conversational voice: “That close, that room of his, is to Jamie just now what a slaughter-house is to a young bull. He cannot face it. It cries out against him. He could roar when he comes near it. But he knows he has to face it. He can turn and twist on himself as he likes, strain at the halter madly, but face it he must, and he knows it. And to-night, or to-morrow night, or the next night, he'll drag himself back. And Mary will be there. And she'll give him food in silence. And time will go on. The minutes will group together, and the hours, and they'll break him. He'll weep. And for a time she will listen and do nothing; but then, moved, she will go to him and comfort him; and that will soften the hard core of bitterness, and he will cling to her and find comfort in her; self-pity will be upon him now and will deepen his emotions; and he will ask much comfort from her; and in the strange frenzy of life that comes upon a man then, under the absolving hands of a woman, he will ask from her the ultimate comfort her body can give—and she will give him that.”

Joe stopped abruptly.

“In this way,” Will concluded, standing still also, “they will begin to build a new life relation on the tragedy of the dead Ettie. For days, months, it may go on, but how far into the future, will depend—on circumstance, yes, but, more inscrutably, on the stuff their souls are made of.”

Joe looked at him coldly. “You believe that?”

“It is probable. Already in her heart Mary knows it's highly probable. She can look after herself, as you say. And she knows she can. She knows nothing can defeat her—until she defeats herself. But things will happen, in that room between them, so and so. They are not bourgeois. With them artifice or social law will go down before reality, particularly the sweeping force of emotional reality. It may be the greatness of your proletariat that in that desperate hour they will defeat sterile suffering in the deepest mutual warmth. I cannot judge those things. I can only feel their impact.”

“You seem to have a deep knowledge of those things.”

“Do you mean experience?” asked Will.

Joe walked on. Will glanced sideways at him and saw his face staring straight ahead. He was hurt, he was angry, he was bitterly disillusioned, but deeper than all that, Will saw that he suffered.

But he could not help him; and, in his strange mood of detachment, he had no desire to help him. They were drawing near the wheels of the trams and the brighter lights of the centre of the city. At the end of the street, they were now walking up, they would part.

“I have no wish to intrude on your private life,” Joe said at last, “and you do not need to answer. Were you going home with that girl—when you saw me?”

“Yes,” said Will.

“I see. I just didn't know you were like that.”

Then out of a final perversity, that yet seemed implicit in the need of this bitter moment, Will added almost casually: “I had had a few drinks by myself. There didn't seem much else to do.”

They came to the corner of the street. “Well, I suppose we part here,” Joe said in his quiet matter-of-fact voice. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said Will.

Joe swung across the street, his tall broad figure powerful and undeviating. Will looked after him until he had disappeared, then turned the corner to a tram-stop.

H
is bedroom was full of light when he awoke. Against the pale blind, the shadows of twigs of the elm-tree moved slightly. All was quietude and slow bright ease.

He listened for noises in the house, but heard nothing except the faint sigh of the wind and here and there the singing of a bird through a nearer chattering of sparrows.

What a sleep I have had! he thought. Gratitude touched his heart with the gaiety that stills itself in wonder; so that he kept on listening as if he might hear something that would explain more closely the world beyond his window; catch the unheard note; detect the hidden movement.

Such a listening brings an exquisite panic, that resolves itself in a moment into a delicious sense of security and well-being.

He had been so tired last night that when his foot struck a stone or lump in the road, the percussion had been soft, as if the sole were padded. He had been beyond all feeling, and staggered lightly and not unpleasantly. Even the intricate problems of Joe and Ivy and the strange evening he had spent in the slums had become an abstract play, to which he attributed qualities that were clear but without emotion.

And now here was the morning—and his mind washed and refreshed. Was it not something to thank whatever gods? Not to think, not to become embroiled in thought, in emotion, not to let human relations take hold of you with their sticky sweaty fingers, but simply to open the mind to thankfulness, as the wise old elm to sun and wind?

But stop! he would be thinking in a moment, if he wasn't careful!

He smiled and closed his eyes. What time was it? But he had left his watch on the dressing-table, and at once he got up. Half-past eight! He nearly laughed aloud. Over eight solid hours! He drew up the blind, faced a far blue sky with white clouds sailing, felt a cool but soft wind from the open window, and saw the wide bright world.

The beauty touched him for a moment too closely, but also so deeply that he could hardly let it go. Dear God, he thought, how lovely! and his hands moved as if they would take it and offer it. He stood and stared until the sharpness of the emotion would pass, together with its burden, and leave only its sunny memory behind.

Jenny came walking across the lawn below, the sun in her hair. She was looking about the grass and stooped to a bunch of heavily budded daffodils, two of which were breaking—he could see the touch of yellow against the pale fingers that so gently lifted the heads—then let them drop, while the round golden head above considered them.

Golden head and green dress and the figure of Primavera! Jenny grew her own flowers; sowed the seeds or split up the bulb clusters; dug the earth and stamped it.

Tribute to her for that!

As he looked down on her, he smiled, knowing, because of Philip, that she was completely detached from him—which meant that he was from her! A woman is an oddly incalculable animal, until she is fixed in that way! It was a humour that he wouldn't have minded trying to share with her! But she wouldn't look up. If she had even been capable of looking up, he would at once have mistrusted her. She had other concerns and wandered after them round the house towards the garden.

He went back to bed and lay dreamily gazing at the twigs that moved with so slow and lovely a grace, sometimes remaining quite still, then stirring again, as if the heart of the tree were intermittently touched by half-formed memories.

The old tag was wrong. It was art that was short and life long. Art was momentary, evanescent. The pattern of the twigs moved and grace was born and passed away like the notes of a thrush. He could see the bright blue sky through and beyond the twigs and the white clouds swelling like sails.

The cawing of rooks came nearer; they crossed the window of his vision at some distance; a few tattered old fellows, full of a grotesque humour.

Keep hold of the outside lovely things. Don't get embroiled. Don't interfere. He began to study the effect of the light on articles on his dressing-table, the mirror, the roses on the wall, until he fell into a state that was mostly sleep, but also a something which, when his landlady knocked, he could not remember but knew it had been utterly delightful.

When he had bathed and dressed, chatted with Mrs. Armstrong and eaten his breakfast, he felt fit for the country. He wondered whether he would stay away the whole day, but decided not to. If this sun kept up he might find a sheltered spot in which to lie and read in the afternoon. It would be a way of breaking himself into reading again. There was that column on T. S. Eliot he must do soon.

He started off in good style, until he came to the spot where he had seen the wild geese, and at once the brightness of his morning began to pass. His cunning inner mind put up a fight for the brightness, but, however he tried to think or not to think, it dimmed.

He grew vaguely resentful, resentful of figures like Joe or Jamie, of slums, of economic conditions. After all, he was an ordinary fellow who did what he could. They were not going to suck his whole life away. Within an hour, he felt depressed and in the grip of misery.

It was annoying, maddening; he rebelled, but it was of no use.

This was really an extraordinary state of affairs! He wasn't an emotional person, a moody person. Never had been; in any case, not beyond the normal.

What was happening to him now?

And his eyes—his damned eyes saw the hard machinery of the sunlight on the bare earth, a real Sunday sunlight, too! He grew satiric about it, and in the process all life became satire. In fact, hardly even that; little more than stones and earth and sap that sucked itself up to buds and fungoid growths all with a dull stupid terrifying endurance.

He walked miles and then lay down on his coat.

No doubt life was an affair of ups and downs. And he had experienced so much so swiftly lately that he must expect disillusion to tread on the heels of illusion. For everything was illusion, the illusion the personal eye puts about the stones and the sap and the buds—and what
they
were it was heaven alone knew.

Extraordinary, all the same, the lengths to which this illusion would go, how it would guy a fellow into abysmal fatuities. There was last night—he had to face it—what did it all boil down to?

Mystical! There was no other word.

It had all been a form of mystical communion with the downtrodden or outcast section of society. This communion had in some esoteric way become necessary in order that he might find freedom within himself. And while the process had lasted—there was no good blinking the fact—he had found this freedom; not only freedom within himself but freedom from himself.

And the amazing thing was that in the whole process the mystical was not something vague and woolly, dimly poetic, but, on the contrary, so precise and factual, that it was in the most practical sense more real than any normal state. It had been accompanied, for example, by a penetrating insight and an absence of all those trumpery irritations and moods that so frequently obscure a face, a living issue, a simple scene. He had felt a real access of good nature, a deeper humour, a wider understanding. It had not been solemn. Solemnity or self-importance could not live in its simple air. It had—let the word come!—been rather divine.

Even that parting with Ivy, when he had suddenly stooped and kissed her, had been an impulse from the heart. No one, seeing it, could be expected to understand it. It was not even a kiss to a prostitute out of divine pity! Nothing grandiose in the real mysticism! It was a simple—ah God, it was one of the simplest and sweetest things he had ever done, and that's all about it.

And you can take it or lump it, Joe!

Ivy understood, too. All her soul came up into her eyes, all her defeated craving for completion and peace. It did her good. Just as it did him good. Whatever should follow after.

Strange, too, that Joe would have every sympathy for Ivy in her profession, would befriend her and help her, just as he had helped Jamie, if circumstances so decreed, and yet have this unrelenting attitude to Will's action that evening. It was perhaps not altogether an incapacity in Joe to understand. It went deeper than that.

He, Will, was moved by the personal experience only. Joe was moved by the personal experience as an element in the greater social experience. Joe was the saviour of society, and to be a saviour you must have your code of behaviour, your system of ethics.

Joe was a force gathering things and humans together towards a higher integration. And Joe's fundamental quarrel with Will was that he, Will, should at least be an assistant saviour, not one of the irresponsible humans, one of the waifs. Ah, more than that. For in Joe's eyes, whereas Ivy was the waif of circumstance, Will was, could only be—the deliberate destroyer.

And to think how calmly I did it! How casually, as if it were an everynight affair! No wonder Ranald only half believed I was after “copy”!

Will lit a cigarette. The smoke had a bitter flavour in his mouth. Once or twice before he had noticed this bitter flavour. He suddenly threw the cigarette away, turned over on his hip, and then lay on his face.

There came into his mind that aerial picture he had had of the city the other night—that sensation of flying over it and seeing it below him like a maze. It was more like a model of the city than the city itself, and as a model it seemed to have walls and ramparts. A deep-dark clay model, sinking in a curve from its suburban hills with their wash of space and light to the intricate walled gloom by the river. The inhabitants were not seen but imagined like minute specks; in processional movement over the suburban hills; grouping and scurrying in the endless bolt-hole corridors by the river. Whenever the eye settled on any portion, that portion swelled to life size, gathering light as from an immense lens.

He saw this light in the slums, and in Ivy's bedroom, a dry sabbatical light along the dead streets, where dustbins still stood about, haunted by mangy cats and sniffing dogs. The Sunday morning of the living dead.

He got up and went on and lit a cigarette again. Even if he turned back now, he would not be in time for lunch. That, anyway, was a relief! He drew a deep breath of smoke. It had the dry bitter taste of sickness in his mouth and scorched the membranes.

Nothing like a touch of Joe's discipline.

For he saw, with an equally dry bitter humour, that “the Scots metaphysical twist” had failed. The cunning inner mind, in its effort at analysis and explanation, had not only failed to free him but bogged him deeper than ever. That's probably where it put one over on the Slav, who wandered in his maze of gloom with the unreasoning apprehension of destiny that gave drama its high unconditional quality! Will called to his irony, in a sudden physical spasm, to shut up, and so blasted it out of his mind.

What he needed was a drink. He took his bearings and reckoned he could reach a certain pub that lay on the main road into town in less than an hour. Certainly no one there that day would have a greater right to register as a
bona fide
traveller!

Having an objective, his mind became easier. That's where Joe—oh damn Joe! He would have a small whisky and a long chaser of beer. Perhaps two chasers, and with the second one, the cigarette might taste better.

He sat for an hour over the drinks, with a plate of biscuits and cheese, of which he ate sparingly. His mind seemed to have become quite normal. Ordinary, rather, was the word. This ordinariness he hung on to. It accompanied him on foot for the next few hours. Until it, too, became a burden. As he repassed the spot where he had seen the wild geese, he said with a last spirt of weary humour, You've had your revenge!

From that point his mind became blank until he stood in the avenue of trees by the little bay with its gate giving on the upland pasture field. Round the corner was the house. He knew he could not speak to any one, could not waken out of this stupor of physical tiredness and brain weariness to greet Mrs. Armstrong, much less to encounter Jenny.

He looked vaguely about him and saw a step in the grassy bank by the gate post. Beside it, two primroses were out—the first of the year. He sat down on the step and leaned back. Lord, I'm tired! he thought, as he closed his eyes. He hardly heard the echo,
I'm very tired
, just as he could hardly think about the primroses—and did not care about them anyway.

It was a relief to let go, to let the mind fade out and the body slump into the bank. Remarkable how comfortable a seat like this could be, how cool the grass to warm limp hands.

As his mind slowly cleared of the congestion of its tiredness, the fingers of his left hand moved lightly over soft flat leaves, tender stalks, buds that the slightest pressure would crush, and—two open flowers. A faint smile came to his face.

There is a strange ringing quality in a thrush's song when heard at a little distance, particularly if the eyes are closed. An ardency that goes out over the world. The most wonderful manifestation of this Will had ever heard was on a cold day last month, with the ground wet and everything bare and uncomfortable, the sort of day when the purest snowdrops look bedraggled and cold, and crocuses a pathetic joke. The thrush's song had risen out of the miry background, out of the wintry twigs, with so fearless a challenge, that the very notes themselves seemed to glisten. But also—and this was so much more difficult to understand—with a power that went out over the world, and not merely in space but in time, so that they awoke past springs, remote springs, and stirred within the listening heart the subtle excitement of eternal promise or eternal youth.

It must be the same thrush that was singing now.

The urgent force of the song was more than strong enough to lift the mind on its cleaving wings. Don't hold the mind; don't let it feel this song is marvellous or magical; don't let it
feel
at all. Just let it go. Let the passionate wings bear the calm mind, as the throbbing aeroplane bears the calm body.

Pleasant to muse with oneself in a divine ease! And when the song ceased, his eyes opened. They directly focused on a small brownish bird—a willow warbler? he wondered, for he had bought his coloured bird book. Even while listening to the thrush, he had heard the small bird intermittently—though only now was he really conscious he had heard it. For in that sustained onrushing passion of the thrush, its little song had been like something left behind, left behind in a small, familiar and loved place.