Wild Geese Overhead (28 page)

Oh, he knew all right what was happening; he knew the paraphernalia of the business, but presently his mind lost interest even in that, for it entered the confused but at times intensely vivid world of delirium.

In this world there came upon him a compelling conviction. The straight lines, the whiteness, the dim night light, the high-up window showing but shutting out the sky (night and daylight at the same time) became a prison, and not a stable prison, for sometimes the white lines, the solid edges of the rectangular beds, could tilt up threateningly against his desire to escape.

The more he was defeated in this way the fiercer his conviction became. And his conviction was simply this: that if he could get to the place where he saw the wild geese, all would be well with him again. He did not think of being bodily well in life. He thought of bright ease and peace and light, kindly light, glistening with the singing of birds, and an air cool, cool, cool on his face and along the skin of his body and cool to the sky. A divine loveliness of being, slyly and laughingly aware, and free.

Now he realized, in his delirium, that his resources were slight, that the prison was strong, and that his only chance lay in cunning. Once or twice, however, his conviction grew so overpowering that he threw caution aside and started up swiftly…but at once the forces in the prison gripped him and pushed him back.

As with a sea-anemone that has been roughly touched, his resources drew inward, to protect the core of his being. For he realized quite clearly that it was a very small core, about the size of a nut, and now he had to defend it lest, of itself, it should pass into nothingness.

The extremities of his physical body, left unprotected, were growing cold. He could hardly feel the doctor's hands on his feet. The doctor was deeply interested in his case, because it baffled him and he did not like to be baffled.

But now he could not afford to think of the doctor, for the core of his being was losing its stability, its central assurance, was wanting to float away…

And presently Will did in fact have the perfectly clear and delightful feeling of floating out of his body, floating above it, and looking down on it. He saw the doctor's tense puzzled attitude, his bluff shoulders, as he stood upright staring down at Will's face. Sister drew back from the bed. It was all over. Nurse Macleod was silently affected. As the deathscreen was set up, the doctor turned away.

And now Nurse Macleod approached to pull the sheet up over his face. Will gathered all his resources and sent them to his face, but he could not move a muscle. With an energy that to him was herculean, blinding, he tried to move an eyelid. And faintly, but yet perceptibly, to the tender human eyes of the girl from Lewis, the right eyelid quivered. The sheet dropped from her hand and she involuntarily called out: “Doctor!”

The doctor came back.

An hour later the doctor was able to inform Mrs. Montgomery that her nephew had got over the crisis and that there was a fair chance now of a complete recovery. “Although”, he added, “I can guarantee nothing, for the case is a very complicated one.”

She was moved in a way that made her look heavy and stupid.

“I hope you will consider, doctor, that this is your private case. As for the infirmary, I hope that I know my duty.”

He glanced at her closely, for she had spoken with dignity; then he accompanied her to the outer door.

When he came back, he said lightly to the sister: “The human mind is a profound mystery.”

The sister answered: “She wouldn't miss an odd thousand anyway.”

The doctor smiled. He was feeling tired.

W
ill lay in his deck-chair, “floated” by rugs and cushions from the deft hands of Mrs. Armstrong, and looked at the elm-tree.

Was there anything in the world as lovely as a tree? A yacht in full sail? A woman walking down the world? The silence of a mountain? A symphony? A host of golden daffodils? The essence of Leonardo's mind smiling through paint?…

Lovely was the wrong adjective, but it served, for it had something in it of light and grace.…

And a tree was grace and ease, deep-rooted, deep- and wide-rooted in the earth, the black earth, under the vivid grass, and wide-branched above the earth, under the sky. It gave a voice to the invisible wind from regions behind the world, from desolate sea inlets, from prairies awaiting in grey silver the rising of the sun, from wastes of seas that know no land horizons, from the down-rush of mountains, from beleaguered cities, from battlefields, from the back courts of tenements where it whirled the children's pagan fires.…

There in the branches it sighed more gently than any woman's mouth; or shrieked in the night like all the lost souls in hell.

But now—the calm, the dignity, the poise, that incomparable effect of ease, of breadth, of balance. In the gloaming its myriad twigs and branches, gone black, were a necromantic etching against the sky. In the sunlight they lifted the light up, lifted it up on the air, as they lifted the singing of birds.

Wise and ancient and wrinkled, with a listening silence, like the silence in the heart of a harp—ah, more than that.…

The twigs bowed and rose again.…

Dear lovely elm-tree!

This was the time of convalescence, when he should outdo the poets! And the poets were right; not the poets who thought, but the poets who, having thought, listened.

This, this was at the back of
everything
.

He had tried to make Joe understand something of this on the way hither. He had insisted on dismissing the taxi at the spot where he had seen the wild geese, and there had told Joe smilingly of the incident of the geese, had explained to him how he believed that the incident had saved his life. “You know how difficult it is to kill a cat or a weasel. Have you ever tried to drown kittens?” Joe hadn't. “Well, you've got to drown them a very long time. Once, as a boy, I helped at the drowning. It was in the country. We put them in a pail of water. You have to keep poking them down. At last we held them down with our hands. I hated doing it. So I made sure that there wasn't a single move left in them. I wanted them to be drowned utterly. Well, when it was all over we poured them out on the refuse heap. I wanted to bury them, but that was voted soft. An hour later I sneaked round to see them—and there was one, with its blind head, moving…I was that kitten, and the impulse to move was provided by the wild geese.”

Joe's eyes grew thoughtful.

Then Will told him, as they walked down to the farm, about the incident of the bird-singing in the dawn. He told it with the air of one telling an amusing fairy story, otherwise Joe might be embarrassed. And even as it was, Joe said little.

“An odd delusion, wasn't it?” Will remarked.

“It was,” said Joe.

Will laughed, and explained to Joe why he laughed, slyly pulling Joe's leg.

“You mistrust anything in the nature of the mystical! Anything that savours of the irrational, the religious, you at once are up against. You see it as the insidious enemy, the social dope?”

“Don't you think there's reason?” asked Joe.

“Of course! Yes!” But Will's laugh was full of gaiety.

He had tried to tell Joe that an experience of that sort did not make a man an apostle of its theory or creed or philosophy; what it did was to bring him into harmony with himself, to integrate him, and so make him a stronger force than ever for—well, for the help, say, he would now give to Joe.

But Joe was not too sure. Yet he was troubled also.

As if there was something that Joe had denied himself, a memory of an old childish indulgence, a private weakness not for the grim world of modern social relations!

It was going to require courage to be gay! Easy enough to be gay in company, laughing and drinking to all hours, in a positive orgy of escape. Escape from what? From oneself, of course. But it was another matter being gay
in oneself
. To look at a bunch of grass, a tree, the sky, to feel the wind, the rain, the light…ah, light, not only outside, in the air, on the body, but inside, behind the mind…to see, to feel, in the final core of oneself, and so to be whole—and therefore all the more game to break the fell clutch of circumstance, individual or social!

Hail, Felicity! Philip had told him she had very nearly chucked up her Paris job when she had learned the full details of his misadventures. In a long letter she had rallied him, asked him a score of questions, and begged him to come and see her. It was a thought! Why not? His convalescence would certainly run to three weeks. His eyelids quivered in a primordial humour. And this sun did stir the sluggish blood with snake-like thrills!

A voice called inside the house. The voice of Jenny. She had arrived!

Will's head fell back and he breathed heavily. It was going to take him a little while to get all his pith back.

Presently she appeared at the inner end of the house on the way to the garden, raised her hand in greeting, hesitated a moment, and then came walking along the grass towards him.

“Please!” she exclaimed, stopping him from getting up. “I'm just going into the garden. Mrs. Armstrong says you are getting on?”

They were now on easy speaking terms. Yet when she smiled, there was still that calm reserve of the features, mixture of reserve and wonder, that had affected him from the very beginning. She could look at a flower as if she were seeing it for the first time, he thought.

“You were longing to get at the garden?”

“I was,” she confessed.

“It's a great hobby.”

“Hobby?” She opened her eyes in a half-startled expression, half-assumed. Then she smiled as he smiled.

The trouble about her smile to Will, who was in a rather weak and therefore more readily excitable condition, was its contrast to her gravity. He withdrew his eyes.

He watched her move about the garden for a time and then closed his eyes. There was all this afternoon. But to-morrow, Sunday, Philip was coming, and perhaps some of the boys from the office.

He listened to the wind's quiet sigh in the elm; felt the sun; and slowly his mind lifted and floated. Delicious feeling. He was learning the trick of it all right! Nothing would ever deny it to him again. It was pagan and primordial. Or were these just words—for the earth-old inner rhythm of life itself?

Mrs. Armstrong brought out his tea-tray. “It's a poor old bachelor,” he said, “who has to feed by himself.”

She laughed and brought out a tray for Jenny and called her from the garden. “I have to see the grieve,” Will heard her shout. “You can pour the tea.”

And Jenny came and poured the tea, sitting on a rug in a friendly way.

“This is very kind of you,” Will acknowledged. “If I move too suddenly I still feel some of my bruises.”

She looked at him with troubled eyebrows, the clarity of her eyes hurt a little.

“Would you like to hear the real story?” he asked with quiet humour.

“I would,” she said naturally.

“I don't know if you know much about our slum regions? It's a long story. If I'm going to make it intelligible I'll have to tell you about Joe, and socialism, and Jamie Melvin, and his wife Ettie who died in childbirth, and Ivy, and that last strange night—when a bruiser and myself fought on the street and I was knocked down and trampled upon and successfully robbed. You wouldn't understand it otherwise; and I'm afraid it's too long a story.”

“No, I should like to hear it, but—just as you like.”

“I should like, frankly, to tell it to you,” said Will simply.

“Please do, then.”

He told it calmly, describing the characters and the places and the incidents with an interest that now and then drew her into the recital by such indirect questions as “But perhaps you don't know that…?” until the whole thing lived for her. His description of his meeting with Ivy had a cool detachment that made it very real.

“I don't regret any of it,” he concluded. “I blame no one—hardly even myself—for what happened to me. And I am very glad of one thing—that Jamie came to see me just before I left the infirmary. He had been greatly struck apparently by the way I did not hit back at him and yet let out at the boxer! Of course Joe told him a few things, too. He was also on edge that night, poor devil, because he knew that the decision about his compensation was just about due.”

“Did he get it?”

“Yes. About thirty shillings a week. Mary and he are hitting it off quite well, Joe says, and he's on the lookout for any sort of light job.”

“Must be dreadful—living down there in the slums.”

“No earth, no flowers…?” Will smiled. “But it's not really as bad as it sounds to us or as it is written about. Their reactions are not our reactions. Your garden here would bore them stiff. And the overwhelming mass of them are extraordinarily decent; the women caring for their room and kitchen, or even single end, their home, keeping it clean and tidy, concerned about the menfolk and children, putting up a magnificently stoic fight against a real or ever-threatening economic famine that is hellish because it shouldn't be. It's that awful greyness, gloom, that got me. Their lives are not dramatic. They are grey. But they don't feel that greyness as we would. To them the street noises and the grinding trams are their singingbirds. Well, all right. But for God's sake, keep them from fear, fear of want; let us—oh!” Will dropped his head back.

“I am glad you spoke to me like this,” said Jenny quietly.

Will lifted his head and shook it with a wry smile. “I did not tell it to you for nothing. You see, I feel guilty about having intruded on you personally.”

“Please, let us forget that.”

“It's not that: it's this. Philip Manson and I are old schoolboy friends. He wanted to come and see me to-morrow. How could I keep him back? I have never told him, of course, that you were here. I have always respected your—your obvious desire to have some corner all your own. Oh, I know. Please understand me. And perhaps”, concluded Will, who had not looked at Jenny, “he will bring my aunt.”

Upon his ears came a small, suppressed, and infectious laugh. It startled him like a blow, and he glanced at Jenny with an astonishment that in a moment became confused.

“It was—the lugubrious way—you mentioned your aunt,” she tried to explain, trembling on the verge of complete laughter.

Will looked away. “Oh Lord, that's divine of you,” he murmured, tremendously excited, because in the instant he saw what she would be like when she came from behind her reserve and spilled over in golden fun. Primavera might be solemn in the picture, but once on her toes in the wind.…

They were both awkward for a little, a trifle nervous, and suddenly Jenny asked solemnly:

“Why do you think I should mind about Philip Manson so much?”

Will gathered all his resources and looked at her. “Don't you?”

“Well,” she said, “I certainly like him very much.”

Will glanced away and wet his lips with his tongue.

“What have you on your mind?” she asked.

“That
would
be personal!”

“You have been very personal to me about yourself—in that story. That was nice of you. I liked your frankness.”

“And you would be frank in return?”

She looked away. “Yes.”

They were silent. At last he said: “He's coming about three to-morrow. If you're not in, I shan't mention that you're here.”

She turned her eyes on him, and, with that curious expression of troubled hurt, they accused him of being trivially evasive, of not saying what was really in his mind.

“How can I say it?” he asked.

“Is it about——” she paused.

“That week-end? Yes.”

“Did Philip tell you?”

“Oh no! Philip would never tell.”

“Who told you?”

“No one. I just—knew.”

She removed her eyes from his face and looked into the distance. “I felt that you knew,” she said.

“You didn't go?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I—it was dreadful.”

“Was it?”

“Yes. I found I didn't want to go—and felt horrible about it, and mean.”

He looked at her. “Why didn't you want to go?”

She shook her head. “I don't know.”

“Did you hate yourself for not going? Did you cry out inside yourself: ‘I must go! I must go!' and yet could not drag your feet to go?”

Her eyes came full upon him. “Why couldn't I go?”

“It's difficult. It goes pretty deep, I think.”

She was now all alive, sitting perfectly erect, her startled yet calm head rising up out of the earth.

The gate from the steading clicked and Mrs. Armstrong cried to them cheerfully as she approached.

Will lay in bed watching the shadows of the twigs of the elm-tree floating on the blind, and, thinking of last night, floated with them, and beyond them.

Jenny had said it would be a sunny morning, because of the slight touch of frost as they came down through the twilight and the red haze on the horizon. It was the most magical walk he had ever had. They were extremely friendly and full of quick laughing talk, but still shy and reserved. They did not carry on the conversation interrupted by Mrs. Armstrong. They made no effort to “explain” anything. There had been the living moment, each sensitively aware of the other, of bird-singing, the darkening trees, each finding out about the other in a thousand impersonal personal ways, and Jenny—he could see it in her—frightened that he might come too close too soon.