Wild Geese Overhead (8 page)

“What about getting home?”

“There's a bus after eleven. It's barely nine. So long as I catch that, I don't mind.”

They buttoned their coats up round their throats and set out.

“Jamie's had bad luck,” said Joe. “He's a carpenter by trade and about three months ago he lost his right arm. We're fighting his case for compensation, but the circumstances were unusual and the outcome is pretty uncertain. His employer is quite a decent fellow, not in a very big way, but he has to contest the case, because of course the insurance company are not going to stump up unless they have to. The point at issue is: did Jamie lose his arm while genuinely working on his job, or did he lose it in his spare time while working for himself? If for himself, then no workman's compensation automatically. Apparently there was some old rotten scaffolding that the boss told them they could have for firewood and put on the saw merely for the taking down. Now two or three of them set about doing this immediately after they had finished their normal day's work. An apprentice, a nice lad but a daring young devil, began a bit of trapeze work that burst a rotten dook. Jamie rushed in and broke the lad's fall. They say he undoubtedly saved his life, but in the hearing of the case in court the point was ruled out as irrelevant. As it was, of course. Jamie, however, in this irrelevant process of saving the lad's life, was sent spinning round and on to his back. The released beam nose-dived and got him just below the shoulder here, ripping off the flesh and smashing the bone. All they could do in the infirmary was cut the mess away. And then the nice point arose as to whether Jamie had been working for his boss or for himself.”

“What happened in court?”

“The sheriff took it to avizandum. The good point is this. The boss stuck to his statements that the scaffolding by his orders had to come down, that there was no particular hurry about it, and that they could have it to themselves. Fortunately the cross-examining solicitor got his goat a bit and the boss stuck doggedly to his statements. He had not mentioned any hour for the job, he had merely said that the scaffolding had to come down. The men were not paid extra time for taking it down. But on the other hand, they were paid by being given the wood. And so on and so forth. Hours and hours of it.”

“The human factor doesn't get much of a show.”

“Purely irrelevant.”

They walked on for a little in silence.

“Must have been a terrible shock for his wife in her condition.”

“It was,” said Joe. “She's only twenty-one. They got married about a couple of years ago and have a little girl about a year old. This is the second. He's no more than twenty-four himself. A harum-scarum warm-hearted fellow, who completely reformed when he got married. Used to drink, and get into a scrape now and then. But he put all that away when he married Ettie. She's a pretty, pale, dark-haired girl; but rather simple, soft, affectionate type; feckless a bit perhaps, but attractive in her way. Anyhow, she was all that Jamie wanted. And then this happened to him. They hadn't saved a half-penny, of course, and now here's a new youngster. Ettie is anything but strong—and they've been on short commons. I hope they take her to the infirmary.”

Joe spoke quite dispassionately, as if this were no more than a typical case. Will felt the solid confident bulk of this young man walking beside him. A strong presence, something hidden and fine in it, assured, austere.

They turned a corner and, all in a moment, were shut off from the town he knew. The change was dramatic, and Will experienced a sensitive half-shrinking fear, as if he were intruding into a region, another dimension of life, where he had no right to be. The gusts of wind blew bits of paper and refuse along the pavement, into the street, about his feet. The men were undersized and thin, and, with hunched shoulders, seemed to move along on stealthy business; the women were blowzy, with slumped bodies, and stared at them from close-entrance or other point of gossip. Will could not look directly at them, could not give them more than a glance, lest his prying should justly provoke them.

The bright lights of the great thoroughfares were gone. Here was only a darkling light; and presently, as they passed a street entrance on their left and Will looked down it, his heart constricted. The electric globes went into the distance, one after another, balls of bluish light, suspended in impenetrable gloom. The balls hardly lit the air about them. No traffic. No headlights. Involuntarily Will stopped, but went on again at once.

“I had thought I had visualized the thoroughfare to the underworld,” he said to Joe, with an effort at light irony, “but I was wrong.”

Joe glanced at him. “You mean?”

“The classical conception provided a certain measure of drama. That was not drama. The gloom of a terrifying nihilism, hung with balls of incandescent steel.”

The streets they traversed had more light and a number of little shops. Children seemed to be everywhere, ragged urchins, holding a moment in groups, before darting away. They paid no attention whatsoever to the two men. When they disappeared, Will got the impression that they went underground and not into the tall tenement walls with their scatter of window lights.

He had seen all this before, but never for long enough at any one time to get used to it, to dissipate the feeling of unease, of half-nightmare. And the smell, the pervasive smell that dried up the back of the nostrils, held something more than squalor, something vaguely threatening. The whole body went on the defensive, sensitive to the atmosphere, as the ear-drum to a threatened sound.

And
there
was one well-defined smell: fish and chip shop! Dogfish. Dogfish from the Arctic.… Trawler-men, working like galley-slaves, in tempestuous icy seas. The dogfish that fishermen loathe.

Some children had their noses glued to the window pane. A man in a greasy apron came to the door to see about custom or take a breath of the night. He told the children to run away. The glass might be less strong than their noses. They shouted at him and ran.

To them the smell would be delicious, exciting. They would burrow into the long-dead dogfish like eels. Grab from one another, fight.

A covey of them suddenly alighted at their feet in a whirling rough-and-tumble. There was a blow, and a challenging voice whipping out a mouthful of sexual filth. The game little orator couldn't be more than ten.

“Now boys!” said Joe.

The little orator swung round on him, his ginger hair over his eyes. “You go and…yourself, mister.”

Joe looked at him and then took a step forward. They scattered like rats.

Will would not have interfered; knew he could not have dominated them so completely. Joe gave a quiet laugh. Will experienced the sensation of a wild outward humour but inwardly he shrank.

“It's perhaps not so depraved as it sounds,” said Joe, “though actually there is an alarming amount of precocious sex about. But then—where isn't there? Here you merely hear it, one remove from the drunkard's mouth. We go in here.”

It was the usual narrow close to a “backland” house—a house built on the small back green of an earlier house. All the back greens here were now slum tenements. The area was extremely congested.

They went up the close and into the narrow back court where children were playing a wild rushing game with pieces of burning newspaper. Smoke with an acrid smell belched from the midden. The sight of the children in the gloom, weaving their whirling fantastic patterns of fire, affected Will strongly. It was pagan, the response of their young hearts to the spring, the same response that at this very time was moving country boys to burn whins and heather. The small darting black bodies, like tiny demons, ecstatic in their fire worship, paid no slightest attention to the two tall men who moved through their whirling circles.

The stone stair wound upward, like a turret stair in an ancient keep. At each landing the stair opened into the night, the orifice in the outside wall being protected by a grille of pointed rusty iron spikes. At the second landing they paused, while Will stared between and over the spikes at the great back wall of another tenement beyond the yard. One or two unblinded windows were so near that he could see intimately what was going on and felt he was prying. He sniffed. “What door is this?” he asked Joe.

“It's the common lavatory,” said Joe.

Jamie's door was on the third landing, and as they ascended Joe said: “Jamie had a better place than this but of course he couldn't keep it. That embittered him a bit. However, he's all right. So long as Ettie needs him he'll be all right.”

Presently Joe knocked and in a little while the door was opened by a young woman.

“That you, Mary? How's Ettie?”

“You didn't hear?”

“No.”

“She's dead.”

“Christ!” said Joe.

They all stood still for a moment, then Mary said: “Come in.”

For one wild instant Will wondered if he could mutter an excuse and turn and fly. But Joe had forgotten him and was following Mary. Will shut the door and the still inside atmosphere pressed against him like a wall. He walked into it, his nostrils—as always at such a moment—intolerably sensitive. The oppressiveness blinded him. He could smell death. Sheer animal fear and horror of death assailed him. The atmosphere of the room was thick with the damp scorched fug from a man's shirt and underclothes drying before a small dull fire. It was a smell that in any circumstances brought upon him the tremor of sickness. He stood behind Joe, knowing the bed was to the left. Joe turned slowly round and Will had to do the same. The bed was empty.

Mary was clearing two wooden chairs for them, and Will was glad to sit down. She looked a woman over thirty, though she was no more than twenty-four. Her face had the pallor of a face drained of blood, wrung dry. Her eyes accordingly seemed enlarged and dark and tragic. But there was a stubborn meeting-place between her black eyebrows, a furrow of dull endurance. She was the dead girl's sister.

Will looked away from her to the wall. The small gaunt room was half-clothed in a tawdry way. The cheap discoloured paper had unframed calendar prints stuck here and there upon it. Two great horses drawing a plough over the crest of a field against the sky, gulls wheeling and the ploughman taking the pressure with his right shoulder. Full of vigour. Photographs of women film stars, in a group, covering a black splotch. A sheer note of colour, like a cry, from a print of gentians, intensely blue. Cut out of an American magazine probably, by the dead girl. Joe's previous description of her now brought her into the room and Will felt he knew her as well as he had ever known anybody in his life. If not better, for he knew her now with a strange intolerable ache of the spirit.

“They took her to the infirmary the day before yesterday. She was not strong enough to give birth herself, the doctor said, so they took her away,” Mary was explaining to Joe in a voice pale and dry as her face.

“We were expecting that,” said Joe.

“Yes,” said Mary. “She was not strong enough. She was not strong enough to do it herself, so they did an operation on her and took it out through her side.”

“What they call a Caesarean operation,” said Joe.

“Yes, that was the name. The young surgeon was nice. Every one was kind. And the operation was successful. It was quite successful, they said. Everything looked as if it was going to be all right. The child was fine. It's a girl. Still fine and going on. I saw Ettie myself.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. She was glad to see me but——”

“Of course she would be pretty weak,” Joe helped her.

“She was. Yes. Only I did not like the look of her. It's not that her colour was—oh I don't know what it was. She smiled sort of faraway—as though—as though she had no interest.” She started slowly pressing and chafing her fingers as if to warm them. Joe said nothing.

“Then she began to weaken. She never picked up. They sent for Jamie early this morning, but she was dead before he got there.” Without any movement, she began to weep in dry sniffs that left her face staring and solemn. Every now and then she took deep breaths. Finally she filled her lungs to the full, held the pressure, and let it go. After that she breathed quickly for a little, and then became quiescent as before.

“What went wrong?” asked Joe, who had made no effort to comfort Mary. His tone was gentle, but matter-of-fact.

“I saw the matron this afternoon. She was quite kind. I asked her. She said Ettie had let her strength down by not taking enough nourishing food. You needn't tell Jamie that. She said the best skill in the world couldn't have done anything for her. She had no strength to help herself. Her strength was all drained away.” She added dully again: “Don't tell Jamie that.”

“Where is he?”

“When he came back, he sat over the fire all morning. He was terrible hard hit. He asked the matron if Ettie left any message for him or said anything before she died. The matron told him no. She did not ask for any one. She told him that the last words Ettie said were: ‘I am very tired.' After that, she died.”

They sat quite still.

“You haven't seen Jamie since?” Joe asked at last.

“No. He hasn't come back.”

“You don't know where he'll be?”

“No. I couldn't go out because of the bairn here.”

Joe looked round, and Will now saw the low crib in the dark shadows by the head of the bed.

“Are you staying the night?”

“Yes,” said Mary. “I'll have to. Some one must. Who else is there?”

There was silence for a few moments. “You're not afraid?” Joe asked.

“No,” she said. Then a dry hopeless expression came over her face. “It would hardly matter whether I was or not anyway.”

Joe got up. “We'll have a look round to see if we can find Jamie. I'll look in again to see you, Mary, before I go home.”