Wild Geese Overhead (4 page)

In their position he would feel exactly like them and would brighten up at the same moment.

Inside the bus, the damp air made the atmosphere fuggy. Smelling of stale tobacco smoke and sweaty clothes. The bodies swayed and jerked at the same time; then off again in the incessant rumble that seemed to judder the bowels.

His thought continued of its own volition with the queer effect of a cinema inside a moving vacuum. It lifted up a recent book on Iceland by some young London poets that he had been given to review. Entertaining—but not a book on Iceland. Iceland—a new exotic background against which to place Byron, the civilization and culture of London—and themselves. Iceland for them meant death. Their book's real message. Honest in its modern fashion and (had there been anything to fear) fearless. Another young poet of the same school had characterized a fine peasant woman profoundly portrayed by a northland writer as “a primitive creature”. Something of pleasant condescension in the phrase had made Will call the poet a pup. But there it was! And if he took his own landlady—well, in the hands of a great writer she might be a remarkable figure, a sort of universal mother or universal provider—she certainly had many admirable human qualities—but as far as interesting or attracting him was concerned she was his particular interpretation of the odious phrase “a primitive creature”. It was no good pretending otherwise. The poet's country was an ideal country, “remembered” for the most part within four walls. In direct contact with the real country, a thinker found it full of distracting discomforts, and a poet abstracted from its harsh realities notions for verses, not only according to his gifts but also to suit the sentimental bourgeois illusion of being free, of glorious freedom. Objectively it was impossible, but subjectively quite a lot could be made of it.

That was the game. His colleagues did not need to be thinkers or poets to come to the same conclusion. He must be writing a book, or wenching, or doing something equally daft, before he would hide like this! They knew about it all, they knew!

The bodies swayed back and then jerked forward like corpses. He got up. The bus conductor was a girl with a soft skin and dark eyes, and dark leather straps. She returned his smile of good-night. She had been kissed often, he could see. She would make a lingering kiss. The bus roared away, and the wind and the rain got him. He hoped his landlady was in bed. He was weary and wanted to tumble into sleep.

For there was one thing he could do in the country: he could sleep. If he lost that gift.…

And then he lost it.

It happened one night when coming back from the last bus, he found that a small rain had taken all the winter out of the air and he smelt the new life in the earth.

His landlady was in bed and as usual had left a tumbler of milk, with a saucer on top, not far from the fire. The thought of what the boys would say if they saw him now drinking this strange liquor made him smile. He must order it sometime in the Press Club!

The enlivening touch in the atmosphere had freshened and slightly excited his mind. Turning up the wick of the Aladdin lamp, he decided he would try a few minutes' serious reading.

And what could be more apt than an essay on
The Modern Mind
, by T. S. Eliot? For the interesting thing about Mr. Eliot was that, though regarded as the most revolutionary force in modern poetry, yet no man in his essays put up a finer case for orthodoxy and tradition.

Will found himself, for the first time since coming to the country, reading with close attention, indeed with almost a full measure of the excitement fine literary criticism usually raised in him, and this highly pleased him. He could see the author thinking out his subject not pedantically but with wisdom. The inclusiveness and precision of his definitions acted like a stimulant; and when suddenly he came upon Mr. Eliot exhibiting not only, as it seemed to him, a doubtful wisdom but—what he would have betted was quite impossible—a questionable taste, his enjoyment was quickened.

Mr. Eliot was discussing the work of the distinguished scholar and critic, Mr. I. A. Richards, for whom he explicitly entertained a great respect. Mr. Richards had been trying to come to grips with the very difficult matter of how properly to appreciate or respond to poetry, and in this connexion was inclined to believe that “something like a technique or ritual for heightening sincerity might well be worked out”. For sometimes after one's best efforts, response to a poem remained uncertain. When that happened, and in order to get the heightening of sincerity necessary to penetrate and dispel the uncertainty, Mr. Richards suggested one should “sit by the fire (with eyes shut and fingers pressed firmly on the eyeballs) and consider with as full ‘realization' as possible:

(1)
Man's loneliness (the isolation of the human situation)
.”

And promptly underneath it came Mr. Eliot's comment: “Loneliness is a frequent attitude in contemporary lyrics known as ‘the blues'.…”

Will laughed, as if he could hardly believe it!

Restless, he laid the book aside and lit a cigarette. Was he going to get a slant on Eliot's vulnerability through his blind spot (even if deliberately blind)?…

It was two o'clock before he got to bed, and it was his belief that he had never properly fallen asleep, his mind remaining active below a thin skin of sleep, when all at once he found himself wide awake, listening for the first time to that full chorus of bird-singing in the dawn.

For a few moments it was as if he had awoke in another and more innocent world, and he held his breath. The music of the dawn!

Yes, there was the poet's chorus! Marvelling, he continued to listen.…

He was glad he had heard it.… However, he must get some sleep.

He turned round and snuggled his head and lay still—and found himself thinking. So he turned round the other way.

The chorus continued, grew deeper in power, more compelling. His brain began carrying on last night's debate from
The Modern Mind
. When he shut out any one particular thought, another immediately entered, until his brain was like a seething dormitory inhabited by Mac, Mr. Eliot, Jenny, the office, the staff, the city, the whole blasted world that he had ever seen, thought, hated, craved, or imagined in any form whatsoever!

And all with an etched intensity. It's this cursed mind of mine! he cried. It's lain fallow so long that now it's all naked and white and fierce as ten thousand devils! He banished them with a stupendous effort—to discover himself in a moment looking at Mac's face, Mac's satiric face, now openly sneering and disintegrating. Yes, he knew that face, he knew what it was after. It was the face of a man, thwarted himself, warped and thwarted in his spirit, pursuing him, Will, slowly, remorsely, until he would break his resistance, bit by bit, get him down to his own level and then dominate him with a devil's satisfaction.

Will turned over and groaned. He hated that picture. It was like treachery. It was filthy. And then another mind, remorseless in its inescapable insight, regarded him with still irony: it was his own mind.

The dawn-chorus continued.…

He had just fallen, not into sleep so much as into a state of exhaustion, when his landlady knocked. He did not answer. She knocked again. He had to make a real effort to subdue a blind wrath and answer in his normal voice.

That day he was lunching with his school and college friend, Philip Manson, already a junior partner in an old-established shipping concern. They had packed a few scrums in their time, arms round each other's neck, and, when they happened to meet, they would finish up: “What about lunch sometime?” Philip would consult his diary and a day be fixed. After lunch and a few drinks, they would agree that it was a mistake they didn't meet oftener, life was short and.… The intervals grew longer.

“Here, don't you find the roosters troublesome in the morning?” Philip asked.

“No; can't say I have.”

“You must be a good sleeper for a townsman. You should thank your stars!”

“I've heard a few birds singing,” said Will.

“Oh, that's all right. That would suit your literary tastes! But when a couple of roosters get answering each other—you could twist their necks off. Fearful racket. And then you sort of begin to look for it; waken up at three or four at their clarion shrill!” He smiled reminiscently. “It was an extraordinary spring that. You remember it? I was fourteen.”

“You were sent to the country to recover from that spell of diphtheria, wasn't it?”

“Yes. The most remarkable thing I remember—sex
would
impress at that age—were the cows; it must have been late April. They were all mad and bellowed with incredible ferocity. In my bed, I could hear them being let out into the field in the early morning. And when a cow was well away with it, she would bellow even when she was drawing in her breath. I used to get up and steal to the window and watch the bull go through his mystic rights.” He laughed pleasantly. “But of course it's too early in the year for that yet. And you'll miss the day-long racket because you'll be in town. But you'll always have the week-ends—and the early mornings, of course!”

“It's all right pulling my leg—but consider what it's meant to you.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, wouldn't your life have been thinner without that experience?”

“Oh, I see!” He thought for a moment. “Do you know, it would,” he confessed. “It's like something that happened very long ago and—and——”

“And not quite in this life.”

Philip smiled thoughtfully, then looked at Will. “You don't change much! You are still—you still get that queer slant on things.”

“As if I hadn't grown up!”

“Honestly, I don't know. You are the only fellow who ever contrived to make me feel I missed something. And yet at the same time did not arouse envy. It's difficult to explain.”

“That sort of thought does tie the mind up in knots.”

“It does rather,” said Philip, with the characteristic self-assurance that permitted him to continue being interested in his own thought.

His clothes had always been distinguished by quality and personal taste; a tie, a shirt, a new texture or colouring, something that attracted the eye without being obtrusive; a man's clothes. His manners had always been easy and good; the brown note less evident now perhaps in his dark hair; his eyes dark-blue and prepared to remain upon one with the same old candour. From the beginning he had been cut out for a directorship, for he had restraint and tact and inspired a friendly confidence. A managing director, a chairman! Already, at thirty-one, he could afford to look back on the more curious aspects of life with a natural self-possession.

He now wanted to pursue this elusive quality in life which he must have got, he said, that time in the country.

“No, not then,” said Will. “You didn't get it then. You never got it until just now.”

Philip deliberated. “You think so? But how, then, could I know about it?”

“Let us start at the beginning. What exactly is
it
?”

Philip's brows gathered. “I'm hanged if I know,” he said, and laughed candidly. “Let's have another drink. I'd like to get down to this.”

Will was still feeling a bit wretched, and now up over him crept a premonition of awful boredom. But he liked Philip. Had always liked him.

The talk went on. But it was Will who had to define; who had to entertain Philip with the thought he did not normally encounter. Will felt himself being drained, and finally said he had to get back to the office.

“I really have enjoyed this.” Philip got up. “Couldn't you come out some evening.… Not at all. The bill is mine. I asked you. Look here, what about.…”

Will spoke to his landlady at supper.

“We did have two roosters,” she replied, “but just before you came one killed the other in a fight, and then some one left the door into the old pigsty open and he went in and pecked the bait on a rat-trap. But I'm getting one on Saturday, I hope, and he'll have to do until our own grow up.”

Tired as he was, he took a walk in the dark, stumbling here and there, so that he should sleep soundly. He left all essayists severely alone. Once or twice, after an illness, he had had a spell of sleepless early mornings, and knew the devilish accuracy with which the mind delighted in awaking at the same hour. If such a habit were to be formed here, life would become finally intolerable.

He awoke at the dawn chorus.

The following morning he awoke at the same time.

And now here he was awake again. The habit had been well and truly formed!

The making up of his mind deliberately to listen to the singing was something more than a gesture of despair. It was, at the root of his being, a cold and bitter defiance. If he had to listen, then listen he would in a detachment so complete that he would conquer the singing, master it, withdraw from it, and so, as far as he was concerned, annihilate it.

He lay flat on his back, his arms extended by his side, his legs slightly apart and at full stretch. His breathing came evenly and lightly through his nostrils. His mouth and eyes were shut, his head sideways.

He listened.

For a time the underlying hatred kept him from anything like detachment. But little by little as the dramatic varieties in the presentation of the chorus claimed his attention, the hatred began to sink down, to seep away, and the feeling of exhaustion, freed from emotional enravelment, brought to his body a certain cool ease.

This in itself was a great relief, as if his drained flesh had grown lighter. That thick congestion of the brain, charged with obscuring pulsing blood, that followed the intense visualizations of sleeplessness, was thinning away at the same time; was thus no doubt the real cause of the lightness and ease. So that the vision of the prairie in the thin but clear morning light came not only upon his mind but also upon his body, filtering in a cool air through the bedclothes. As the advancing gulls brought the sea, his body began to lose its corporeal feel altogether and to float in a still wonder. This wonder quickened with the short sharp cries that he thought were the cries of terns. Then all in a moment, before his body could ground again, the wild geese opened the world above his closed eyes and in a movement of sheer enchantment his spirit, his own most intimate self, rose up and experienced such a sensation of freedom as he had never known in his life.