Wild Geese Overhead (25 page)

For one moment Will was tempted to ask if his presence here annoyed Jenny, and, if so.… But he suppressed the temptation. For suddenly he realized that he would leave this place, and it would be mean to put the blame on Jenny.

After supper, he tried to go on with his reading, but dropped the book with a dry smile. The glory had departed from it and the illumination! He went walking up the avenue of trees, where, in the dusk, the birds were singing. He felt quite drained of any feeling, almost pleasantly lifeless. Well, that was that! There was no more to it! His face was pale, his eyes bright and inclined to stare. He would be sorry leaving this place. He had grown genuinely fond of Mrs. Armstrong. There was a deep generous woman-warmth in her.

The interesting thing about women was that they had no morals at all; did not, at least, subscribe to any ethical code. They had their own sort of morals, of course, based on their instinct, and they would break any code to satisfy such instinct. Which was profoundly right. When code and instinct coincided they were, of course, superb moralists! Uhm.

Jenny was right. He was glad she had the courage—to be right.

Felicity, now—the trouble with Felicity was that she had half sterilized the root of her instinct. She did not know this or admit it to herself, but she felt uneasy. That time when he had brought it to a point and called her excitement in the crisis the sensationalism of sex, it had suddenly pierced her like a knife. She had very cleverly turned it off by saying that she had been upset by finding him cleverer than herself. But her woman's instinct had been hit. And for a woman to lose the potency of her instinct is her first and last sin to herself, whether she can admit it or not.

All this was clear to Will and seemed to be produced in his mind without any effort, without any stress, in that inner light of the mind that was rather like the gloaming about him.

And he saw Felicity, as he had seen her already, her head poised above her blue dressing-gown, a flame over the barricade, a flower springing out of the sensationalism of sex. A vivid bright flower.
All
flower.

Whisky had something to do with his behaviour, yes. Puritanism, no doubt. Lack of use and wont, possibly. But—there should be more than the sensationalism of sex, that lovely and exciting fun; there should also be the fulfilment and peace of sex, deep and silent as the gloaming, with the singing of birds that you hardly hear.

Had it been Jenny?

Had it been Jenny—he would have crawled to Jenny.

His head drooped, he stood still, and even thinking ceased in him. When he lifted his head, he saw Jenny coming up the road towards him, a brown-paper parcel under her arm, her shoes. He wondered what he would do and remembered he had seen some nests being built in the hedge on his right. He studied the hedge, and, while Jenny was yet a few yards from him, he calmly, unostentatiously, turned and stepped over the ditch and began separating small branches. He thought he heard her footsteps pause, but he did not look round until he was sure she was gone.

When he faced the road, he hung on to a branch. The sederunt in the Blue Club had taken the guts out of him all right! He blew a slow deep breath, and, feeling very exhausted, sat down and lay back and closed his eyes.

The following afternoon, Friday, he had promised to ring up Felicity. This worried him while he was working in the office but only vaguely. It had been her final instruction. He had said he had a meeting to go to, but had agreed that he would ring up anyway and, if they could not meet, they could at least arrange for the Saturday. I can ring her up later, or even to-morrow morning, he thought. At the moment he did not feel in the mood, but later on he might want to see her, might want to see her quite urgently.

The dull drained mood was still upon him. It was not unpleasant, and pervaded him with an almost extreme feeling of tolerance or good nature. He did not want to break it. Let it carry him along. He could always make an excuse. Could say—let him see—that he had been trying to get a fellow who would let him off going to the meeting, and did not want to ring her up until he had got him. Something like that. But it worried him slightly, for not to meet an obligation was against his nature.

He hung behind talking to Don until Mac had gone. Then they went out and had a couple of drinks.

“And how are things in Europe?”

“Pretty bad,” said Don. “It seems to be coming all right. And I'm beginning to doubt if the only thing I was vaguely banking on can stop it.”

“What was that?”

“The fact that the peoples themselves don't want war, and that they know that all of them don't want war.”

“They don't want war. Do they want peace?”

Don looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“The women are beginning to have fashions in gas perambulators. Quite a lark getting fitted on with that pig's-snout of a gasmask. Of course it has got to be done. Quite.”

“I don't get you.”

“There's nothing much to get,” said Will, “except perhaps the simple point that there's no peace in our hearts.
Au fond
, it's a spiritual affair.”

“Good God! You're not joining the crowd who say that we must have a change of heart!”

Will couldn't help laughing. “Hadn't thought of it,” he admitted, “and shouldn't join anything anyway. All the same, the heart is basic. At least, the spirit or the soul. However, it's a dull topic.”

“You mean humanity is not interested in it?”

“You have the subtle Highland mind!”

“The point is obvious, I agree. But you have to take humanity as you find it, and, that being so——”

“It's a poor show for Kirkcaldy? So it would seem.”

“I disagree. Humanity does want peace.”

“Of course. It's merely forgotten what it is and therefore how to get it. Though the use of that ‘it', of ‘humanity', is pretty bad. Vague. Instead of saying you and me, we say humanity. We're getting diseased with that spewing of our individual responsibilities and emotions upon some vague collective-mass. Same everywhere and in everything. For the most thrilling allurements of sex you go to the pictures, not to bed.”

Don laughed. “You for a socialist!”

“I'm a socialist all right, and a nationalist.”

“But not a bigoted one?”

“Sea-green and incorruptible to the end. But I cannot close my eyes to what's happening, even on the pictures.”

“There is something in what you said there about sex.” Don smiled, in a half personal way, looking at his glass. “It's all the trimmings that matter. I mean in all this hectic jazz-dancing business and so on. After all that glittering swimmyoozy stuff, the actual act itself is an anticlimax. Rather nasty. Disillusionment of the sweet young thing. Ugh!”

Will laughed. “Have a cigarette.”

They discussed sex and peace and similar public affairs for a time, then Don had to go.

Will went round to a pub-restaurant and ordered a steak. “Thick and underdone,” he said, “with chips.”

As eight o'clock drew near, he found he did not want to go to the meeting, did not want to talk to Joe or the rest of them. He decided, quite calmly, that he would not go. So he went out and began walking through the streets of the city.

The feed had given him ballast, and he walked with ease, looking at things and people with the detached eyes of an outcast or stranger. He felt the city about him, apprehended it again in that odd mythological way, which the newly lit lamps and coloured street signs made half gay and half terrifying—the giant story with the inner beat of panic. Felicity came into his mind and he smiled. “Sorry, Felicity,” he said, “but that's the way it is!” Then he thought of her more particularly and knew that it would be all right tomorrow night; it would be gay and splendid. For Felicity was civilized. And it was all very nice and large talking about sensationalism, but, after all, Felicity had been pierced that time. The root was still there! And oh she would know how to do it! The delicacy of her art! Dear Felicity!

He was walking towards the river now. He knew he had been heading for the river all the time. He wanted to get lost for a while, to lose his personal identity, or, at least, all personal urgency, in the human forest, in the jungle, in the swamps, where all sorts of odd creatures prowled, tarts and touts and bookies' runners and cut-throats and gangsters and razor-slashers, where the unemployed were as grey wilting trees but where the main forest itself was yet green, dark green, sombre. Night-fires in the darkness, pubs, warmth… and the river, the river, quietly flowing past, flowing on.

If there was any one anywhere he would like to meet this night it was Ivy. The thought of her was comforting. It would be no effort speaking to Ivy. His hand went up to his breast pocket and felt the bulk of his pocket-book. She would enjoy a generous hand. No haggling over half a dollar. A change for her! They could buy some grub—fruit, say, bright oranges, lashings of fruit—and some gin—and some whisky! Then he could lie back in that room and talk to her and see where her instinct had gone, and his own. They would discuss her professional life. She would see that there was no condescension, no prying, on his part. Only a deep fellow interest. And she was not a sentimentalist. She would not use the fake sentimental self-pity stuff. A tough root in Ivy. Strange how the prostitute had been sentimentalized in the world's literature. Some deep reason for that. Because mostly, of course, they were blowzy and weak and self-indulgent and vicious. How the strong clearheaded decent women despised them, not so much for trading their sex, as for being flabby vicious weaklings. Nice girl, Ivy! he thought, with a smile, and hoped for her company.

Penetrating the worst slum-tenement part he knew, he was suddenly taken by a desire to go in through a dark narrow close, to stand in the inner narrow court and stare up. This he did. The midden smouldered. The acrid smell of garbage dried his nostrils. His whole body became extremely sensitive to attack. He was also shamed a little by the feeling that he was prying, and this shame seeped deeply into him with an occult sense of personal guilt. Then he became aware of the thin figure of a young man coming towards him, not directly, but cautiously, sideways. He turned at once and left, certain that the figure was following him.

He went into a pub two streets away, for he did not care to stand in a door to see if he were being followed. In any case, he wanted no trouble; he wanted to forget himself. He was not the fighting kind. But he stood sideways at the counter and saw a youth come in, slim, pale-faced, with the snout of his cap a little over his left temple. “Eight,” said the barman. Will's total change was fivepence, so he took out his pocket-book and tendered a pound note.

When he had put the change away, he lifted his glass, drank half of it, and as he was taking out a cigarette, glanced around. “A glass of bitter,” said the youth. He did not look at Will. There were quite a few in the pub, and when Will had smoked his cigarette and finished his drink, he turned and went out. The youth was talking to another of his own kind in a corner. They did not look at Will, who felt he had been a trifle over-sensitive.

All the same, he would go into another pub, for it was an odd sensation, this of being stalked. There was the recent case he had sub-edited of the fellow about his own age who had murdered the little girl he had lured from a close. And, anyway, he needed a drink or two to make him comfortably sober before he tried to get hold of Ivy. He got talking to a boilermaker, who had been on the dole for a month, and now was celebrating because he was starting on Monday. A decent kindly fellow, “hellish glad” over the new job. Will liked him and stood him a drink, and then the boilermaker insisted on standing Will one.

Will was moved by the quiet human pith of the man. He had found recently—another inheritance from the wild geese!—that he could be moved too easily by evidence of the fundamental or primordial human goodness in man. It affected him like a cry. It moved him to tenderness, urged him to a swift lavish generosity. He controlled the emotion, but he loved it, too, for show, or ostentation, was not of its nature. He forgot all about the two youths whom he had left drinking their bitter; and, in fact, they did not come in.

Presently he found himself by the river, moving past the spot where Ivy had first spoken to him. She was not there, and he realized it had been a bit foolish of him to expect that she would be.

There were no stars in the sky. There seemed indeed to be no sky, only a uniform lowering darkness. The river affected him in a sombre way, for he suddenly saw the glitter of its water through an iron railing about the size of the spiked railing in the tenement stairs. It provided the obvious parallel of life flowing inevitably, until it reached its sea, which is nirvana or death. Slowly, soundlessly, impure, confined within its prison walls, made to twist here, to deepen there, hammered at by myriads of human hands, overcoming the obstacles of mighty ships by floating them, crossed by bridges, traversed by ferries, dredged and banked and piled, this river, that was the destiny of generations of men, persisted in flowing slowly, dourly, invincibly, until it felt the first slow pulse of the sea.

The pulse of the sea; for the sea itself, what was it but a new kind of river, an endless river, taking its pulse from the sun and moon; the sun and moon that flowed themselves in a mighty river.…

Hardly worth man's while to bother with his bootless little savageries. The cry of his savageries would hardly carry as far as the ping of a gnat. But his understanding carried a long way, and was borne on the great rivers.…

Ettie came into his mind. And then Jamie, and he wondered about him. Would he still show that insensate hatred towards him? Strange bitter hurt you could do a man by recoiling instinctively from him. You cut deep at the root of his instinctive being, and that is a wound not readily forgotten or forgiven.