Wild Geese Overhead (5 page)

While the enchantment—a convenient word—lasted he was not excited or deeply moved. If the term “moved” may be used at all—and it is heavy—then, in the literal meaning, he was highly moved. It was a still, freed, high-up delight, in the sense that the light and horizons of the morning were about him. The hemisphere over his flat world opened out like a bright fan—though fan implies something opaque, when the experience was essentially and indeed precisely a removal of the opaque. More than that—though this is difficult—he not only experienced this delight in himself, as an intensely personal realization, but also he was part of all that was about him. Was this the final problem of “identification with the object” that so troubled his professor when expounding Hindu thought? Will did not “think” the question. The question and its answer were the one flash of light.

How long the experience lasted he could not tell, though he would be prepared to say not more than a few moments. For here time obviously did not matter, except perhaps in its implication that the nature of his experience was timeless. He let it pass without any desire to hang on to it. In fact when he felt it sinking down with him into sleep, he thought to himself, How delicious this is! drawing out the thought through a lingering lovely triumph that left him breathing lightly in a sleep that might have made curious eyes imagine he was listening somewhere.

H
e slept until his landlady knocked him and then awoke quickly with the feeling that this was a holiday or some “free” occasion of the kind that he could not recollect. As he remembered, a slow humour spread over his face. He looked up at the ceiling. It was just the ceiling. But as he kept looking the ghost of his experience rose in a faraway brightness beyond the house-top. Very visionary indeed! Very flimsy!

It was a good joke! He could not “rise” now if he wanted to. Did he want to? Not he!

He threw the clothes off with a swoop and leapt to his feet. A good sleep was a blessed thing. He hummed a snatch of jazz and chuckled at the dancing movement of his feet. Carry on! he said. But it was fine to have the feeling of life, of being alive in a living world. Yes, a fine day. He stooped and sniffed the air through the bottom half of the window (the top half was permanently fixed). Spring was coming in and no doubt about it.

“You look nice and cheerful this morning!” said Mrs. Armstrong, as she tugged the cosy with the green leaves and pink buds down over the tea-pot. It was a close fit, with a hole for the spout, like an old maid's mitten. Last night he had very nearly told her not to do it, on the principle that stewed tea was an abomination. He must have been pretty low!

How many persons living in town knew what a fresh egg was? White curd and vivid yolk. “I had a grand sleep,” he said. “It's a nice morning, too.”

“Yes. You can smell the spring in the air to-day. Jenny will be getting quite excited.”

“Why?”

“So many of her things coming up. There are two of her special daffodils out to-day. Whenever she arrives she makes a dive for the garden. And then it's look at this and look at that! You would think Santa Claus had brought them.”

He laughed so spontaneously that Mrs. Armstrong's smile broke into a husky note or two on its own.

Santa Claus! he thought, going up the avenue. The birds were extremely busy. Not one of them rested a moment. A flash—and gone. His sight was so keen that more than once it caught dark-beaded eyes. And one blackbird, wings lowered and tail flicking, suddenly kicked up an extraordinary row. A blacker blackbird swooped swiftly down and up and into the hedge in front without a wing-beat in the loveliest curve he had ever seen. Spring magic! Or just plain love? It sure quickened their pulses!
Green shoots from Santa Claus
: O.K., boys, let it ride—right through to the end.

Here now was the public road. Country faces might poke up and behold his mirth. Or lean over a gate and wonder.

Lean over a gate and wonder!

Words were haunted. Lightning-sketch artists of the haunted chamber. All alive like birds—or dead as a pile of counters.

We're all dead! said Will. And I'll probably be dead again to-night, but what the hell does that matter? To-night will then be now, and unborn to-morrow will be now, and—you can smell the spring in the air. Oh, dear God, you could, but don't smell it too strongly, not too strongly, not this scent of paradisial promise, not this memory of primordial mornings, not this freshness of creation's dawn, not—not too much of it, anyway. Just a little in the by-going, as much as you have a head to carry. Only a fool, who has lost his cunning, gets drunk.

A good sleep did make a difference. It cleansed the sight in so remarkable a way that it caught birds' eyes and unbroken hawthorn buds in a side-glance.

And then the wind—not much of it but soft, soft. He once knew a man—an electrical engineer from Lancashire—who told him he stopped being a spiritualist when he began to see the wind. It had the loveliest curves, he said in a morose tone. So you stopped?… I got frightened, he said.

If he had gone on until he was able to see spring's scent in the wind as well! But probably it was no laughing matter.…

The bus—with the girl herself! “Good morning,” he greeted her normally, squatting down on the rear seat instead of going forward, as usual. “And how's life?”

She gave him a quick astonished glance (it was the first time he had been personal), then smiled, reassured by his eyes. “Oh, not too bad.” A soft friendly honest country girl. “And how's it with yourself?” she ventured.

“Champion!” he said.

She smothered a laugh.

“You don't live in the town?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Come on, now—I know you don't.”

“How do you know?”

“You're real.”

“You're fresh, for so early in the morning.”

“Because I live in the country—like you.”

That fairly amused her, and she turned her back to the interior of the bus.

“Do you like living in the country?” he asked.

“Why shouldn't I?”

“I merely asked. But, look here, I'll tell you something. You wouldn't mind living in the town except for one thing.”

“What thing?” She looked at him, and her soft eyes were shrewd enough.

“Because he doesn't live there.”

“Are you trying to be personal or what?” But her cheeks caught a slight flush.

“Sorry if I'm personal. Did not mean to be. Say you forgive me.”

“I don't think you're so simple as you look.”

“Compliments are fairly flying.”

“Yes, aren't they?”

He lit a cigarette. “No good offering you one, I suppose—now that you're on duty?”

“No. Thanks all the same.”

It was not very easy to out-talk the rumble without raising his voice, and as she swayed expertly with the motion of the bus he sometimes had to lift his face slightly and she to lower her ear. It bred a kind of conspiracy, for they had to watch that the performance was not too obvious to the passengers.

“Tell me,” he said. “What does a shy fellow do when he wants—when he doesn't know how to go about it?”

“Wants what? When I want anything I ask for it.”

“Do you? That's an idea.” he nodded solemnly. “But tell me—who do you ask?”

“Santa Claus,” she said.

He laughed abruptly so that several of the passengers turned round. She began to check her tickets. The bus stopped and more passengers came in.…

As the bus drew into the terminus he got up and hung on, standing beside her. As the brakes were applied, he swayed and murmured in her ear: “Any good hanging up my stocking?”

“You're daft,” she said.

The street itself was a wide grin as he went down it. The chimney pots—had he ever seen the chimney pots of this street before? He felt so friendly to her in the end, so excited by her warm presence, that he could have kissed her!

Though the street went downhill, not one of the endless crowd looked any way but straight ahead on the human level. Bowler hats, neatly rolled umbrellas, felt hats, handbags, all ages, with tweed caps and workmen's dungarees here and there in small coveys. A double stream each side the street flowing on to an endless destination, while in between roared cataracts of traffic.

Was the “endless destination” achieved by the streams going both ways at the same time? Was this an illustration of the mathematician's three-dimensional world moving up a stationary fourth-dimensional block? It probably wouldn't be. It so rarely was! But in heaven's name don't smile on the street to yourself. Smile in a church to yourself, but not on a street. See how solemn these business men are, solemn and correct. And those eyes, myriads of eyes, looking ahead, straight into nothing—concerned, weary, glittering, expressionless, with something vaguely combatant, in their vaguely intolerant reserve.

And all fundamentally concerned with making nests like blackbirds, only bigger and better nests.

And what things to make nests out of in the shop windows! What lovely things, what cunning gadgets, what beauty of line and brilliance of colour! All for making nests. Bedroom suites, evening dresses, marble baths.…

But the songs, the tumultuous singing? Here, in the radio shop, next door to the plumber's shining display of lavatory pans. Everything you want for everything. The civilized man puts it over on the blackbird by turning a knob and getting some one else to do it for him.

It's all been said so often, thought Will, that it means nothing. Beyond the chimney pots the sky was spring's own blue with little angel clouds puffed out in light. Let us sing!

You're daft! she said.

He saw the policeman on the kerb glance at him. Out of curiosity, when he had gone on twenty yards, he looked back—and saw the policeman's face still gazing after him. I must have smiled! I'd better be careful! This is the eternal city.

And here, his own place—with the latest photographs of the international situation in the window, flanked by sporting events and personages. Now for the thick of it, now for the whirling hub of the universe!

Past the long mahogany public counter of births, marriages, deaths and advertisements—and up in the lift. “Fine day, Jim.” “Ay, it seems more settled like.” Crash of the gate and along the corridor. Before a dark door, on impulse he knocked. “Come in!” He entered, hat in hand. “Could you tell me, please, if Mr. David Macgregor is supposed to work here?”

Mac turned his back. “Jesus, he thinks that a joke,” he muttered to no one.

Don gave Will a wink. Mr. David Macgregor was in bad form.

In between the rush hours they managed a bit of fun now and then. Will was the rugby expert, but he knew the soccer lingo inside out. Boxers, footballers, racers—their own personal stories or expert criticisms written while they waited. Don had a native flair for international affairs. His Highland guile! It was in constant demand those days and famous international names were tossed about the room with a freedom of jocose epithet denied to footballers. The soft black pencil cut, shaped, completed—or conjured—marvels to be shouted along the street. Decisive strokes—right, let it go! There were fellows who, though regularly cut to bits, would keep on sending in screeds.

The peak of the forenoon rush was got over. Mac was up in the case-room seeing the first edition through. He was really first-rate at his job; thorough and incisive, from makeup to bill captions.

“He must have been on the skite last night,” said Don.

Will nodded. “Fairly late—by the threads in his eyeballs.”

There were about a dozen of them in the long room with its long desk. Next door the news phones were trickling the sap from the world tree, main trunk and branches.

The old Ygdrasil for the modern myth.

But Will would not let his mind function all out. Clamp it down. Hang up its receivers. And a fellow could be decently normal, if only his eyes behaved. They were the very devil. For the worst of eyes is that when they see a new thing—or an old thing plain—they look at it. He did not look directly at Don, but smiled as they chatted, tapping the wall behind him with the butt of his pencil. Don's black hair was luxuriant, rising resiliently from the main shed and brushed over into the suavity of an advertisement for hair cream. A slim handsome fellow, his own height. But his skin was a little raw and grey to-day. The city product—the Highlands drained out of him—yet not and never of the city, like the city born. A practical fellow, knowing the right side of a good time. The bleak Highlands behind him, thank God. Reading French and German at night—sporadically, with no method. The foreign correspondent. The adventurer. Destined never to adventure.

You could not look at him—and see his essential ghost.

So he looked at the others and saw the envelopes their minds put around them, saw each moving about in his own, carrying everywhere his invisible balloon!

Nothing could ever break this integument. Like the lens of the human eye, it would thicken with time.

In due course those of them who wanted a drink went out and had it. The majority preferred coffee. Mac wanted a pint whoever else wanted anything. Don and Rob and Will went with him. As dry ground sucks in water, Mac's flesh sucked in the draught beer. It watered him and did him good.

“A thick night?” said Don.

“Oh, so so,” said Mac. “What's this stunt on gardening that's biting Tamerlane?”

“Bungaloid growth and popularity of BBC gardening hints,” explained Don. “He'll give Lady Burly-Motley the push, and get some one who'll really do it—and spread herself on it.”

Mac turned to Will. “Why don't you apply for the job?”

Will looked at him and kept looking, thoughtfully. “That's an idea,” he said.

“What the hell you looking at?”

“The idea,” said Will. “I wonder if you would be kind enough to put in a good word for me with Tamerlane? You're his white-haired laddie and I might make it worth your while.”

Mac exploded in one word and pushed his glass away from him. The others laughed. Then he turned back to Will. “Know what's wrong with you?”

“No?”

“Protracted adolescence.”

Rob guffawed. But Will appeared to take it thoughtfully. “I don't think you're right,” he said.

“No?” Mac showed the three satiric upper teeth.

Will shook his head. “I think it's protracted childhood.”

Mac drew his hand over his face as if Will's eyes were giving it an itch, and wrung his mouth. Then he cleared his throat, and, going to the fire, spat in it.

“You
would
know,” he said.

They all laughed at that.

“Yours”, continued Mac, looking distastefully at his empty glass, “is the sort of cheerful morning face that gives a fellow a pain in the guts.”

“Perhaps you had a cheerful face last night,” Will suggested, “though no one might guess it. Another pint?”

“Where were you last night, Mac?” Rob asked.

“Where wasn't I?”

“Actually, he means,” said Don.

“You trying to be clever, too? What a bunch of wits has Tamerlane! You'll be going to London next.”