Wild Geese Overhead (6 page)

“You're a philosopher, Mac,” said Rob.

“That's something higher than a wit,” Don explained.

“Oh?” said Mac, looking at him.

“The difficulty about being a philosopher”, said Will, “is the difficulty of knowing when you're a philosopher or merely a comic turn.”

Rob let out his guffaw. Don glanced quickly at Mac. Will saw the red-eyed weasel in Mac's eyes and continued: “And at least we know you're not a comic turn.”

“That's it. Rub it in!” said Rob, laughing huskily. The more one hit off the other, the more Rob enjoyed things.

“You're a bloody——,” said Mac directly to Will, using an ugly word.

“Oh come now, Mac,” said Don quickly. “Play the old game. That's bordering on the personal. Besides—I think his aunt must have died.”

“What aunt?” asked Rob.

“The wealthy one. How could he be so cheerful else?” Will recognized that Don was giving Mac time to get over his momentary spleen. “You'll be able to touch him for a bit, Mac.”

“I would not touch him with the muddy end of a barge pole.”

Will smiled sarcastically and presently, as they went out, Don gave him a wink. Will nodded acknowledgment. One must understand the morning after the night before.

But that evening, as Will was leaving the building, he came on Mac buttoning his coat.

“Hurrying home to your farm?” inquired Mac satirically.

“Well—yes, I am.”

“Not even time for a small one?”

Will looked at his watch. “It would mean missing the next bus—unless we made it a quick one.”

“Come on, then,” said Mac grumpily. So they went into the usual office pub, and, when the drinks were served, sat down. Mac had hardly looked at Will and now remarked: “You were trying to be pretty smart this morning.”

“Was I? I didn't notice it.”

“You were. You can be damned irritating when you are like that.”

“Is that so? You used a stinking word yourself.”

“Hurt, did it?”

“Not noticeably. Still—if we can't keep things within bounds they've got to stop.”

Mac was looking at the glass his fist gripped on the table. Will saw the internal struggle and knew that Mac had deliberately waylaid him. Mac was sorry now he had used the word but could not bring himself to apologize. He would prefer to jockey Will into the position where an apology would be unnecessary and he would still dominate.

“They've got to stop, have they?” Mac asked.

Will felt himself weakening. He hated to push a man against his nature. “Let us forget it,” he said. “Doesn't matter anyway.”

“Doesn't matter, doesn't it?”

“No,” said Will.

“Oh, all right,” said Mac, as if he were being choked off. “So long as you say so.”

“Right,” said Will. “Same again?”

“Dammit, you can”, said Mac, accepting his drink with a softening satire, “be—sort of—complacent or superior or something. It does irritate a fellow before he knows where he is.”

“I'm sorry, I'm sure.”

“There you go!” said Mac, with a snort of laughter. “Can't help yourself.” But the tone was more human. He was becoming friendly, and Will felt himself weakening still more.

“When it comes to being complacent and cocksure, you take a lot of beating yourself,” Will said. “The hell of a lot.”

“Do I?” wondered Mac.

“You do. Yours is the most destructive annihilating mind I know.”

“Is it?” With a vague smile towards his fingers, Mac revolved the glass on the table.

“There's no ‘is it?' about it. And I'll tell you some more.” And Will went on and told it. For he knew that Mac, in his present mood, was accepting the denunciation like flattery. The more oaths in the language, the better Mac liked it. I'm toadying to him now! thought Will. I hate this language. It's fake; it's weakness. And all to put him right with himself, to warm him. Deeper than that, too: he is dimly aware in his cunning animal part that I am being weak; that I am not strong on my own plain where I could defy him, madly irritate him, but being weak on his plain, and therefore weak all over, and fit, in a final thought, for the snort of contempt that is comforting.

He withdrew his eyes from Mac to his own glass.

“Perhaps you're right,” said Mac. “God knows, perhaps you're right.”

Will lit a cigarette and said nothing.

“It's all bloody show anyway—this whole nightmare we call civilization. What's it all getting at? God, think of us in our daily round, think of Tamerlane and his cock-eyed stunts. Muck—slush and muck. Each trying to be a bit superior to the other. Each sure in his own rat-infested mind that he is clever enough to put it over on some one else. Toadying to this one, toadying to that, toadying to Tamerlane, toadying to the Lord God Almighty. The whole thing is a vomit.”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“No? You think you can put it right with your socialism! Or by living in the country! Socialism—what's that but something to get a kick out of? When some one stands up in a blind alley and spouts like a diarrhetic fountain, why do you think he's doing it? For love of his fellow man? Listen to him. The pure fire-eater. The fighter with his mouth. The hater. Have you ever heard Christ's humility there? He wants to kill half humanity for a kick-off, the half that doesn't agree with him. Love of his fellow man? Jesus! The only man he loves is himself. And when he hears his own voice, he is the most thrilled person in the bunch. You can see it warm him. The warmth the actor gets, the exhibitionist. And then—the sense of power. Power over his fellow men. Not love of them. Power over them, until his bowels move with his own importance—or such tripes as he may have for bowels.”

Will gave a soft laugh. “There may be instances, but——”

“I'm not speaking instances. I'm generalizing from experience and an elementary knowledge of normal psychology. Have you ever stood up at a street corner and spoken? No. Why? As a blessed socialist your love of humanity is no less, I assume, than the fellow who does. You don't do it because it doesn't take you that way. You would get no kick out of it. Which is my point. You belong to the crowd who have in them the instinct of escape. So you escape—to a farm in the country.”

“And you?”

“I take my stand in the only reality I know—the mud. And be damned! The rest is all sickening egotism and fake.”

Will looked with a start at his watch. “Heavens!” he said, getting up. “I'll have to do the escape trick pretty smartly.”

“Hey, you're not going?”

“Sorry, Mac, I must. I warned you.”

Mac's brows lowered darkly. “What the hell are you going for? Isn't there the whole night?”

“Not to-night. And I've got to run. So long!”

“Here!”

But Will was out the door. He had already missed his bus by ten minutes, he knew, but if he had admitted that to Mac, he would have found it difficult to break away an hour later. Mac was obviously prepared to make a night of it. He was still decidedly under the alcoholic weather, or he would not have spoken at such length. Mac wanted to have him, to take him, step by step, down into the pit of the night.…

How furious he would now be, how darkly he would curse and hate him!

Will felt himself drift along the street like a tall leaf. When virtue was taken out of him in this way, his body became light and evasive as his mind. People and objects, the street itself, also became slightly detached from normal reality.

When they had mentioned his aunt, the idea had flashed through his mind that he would visit her, and he had actually been leaving the office with that intention when he had met Mac. But Mac had been too strong for him, and now there would be a smell of whisky off his breath. He could not visit her now. Did not want to. He had better go and have some tea.

He drifted on, straight ahead, and almost collided with Philip Manson, who was standing gaily chatting to a young woman while consulting his small diary.

“Pardon——” muttered Will, before the two men recognized each other.

“Hal-lo!” Philip all but laughed. “We don't often barge into each other!” He turned to the girl. “Talk about the devil!” he said. “This is the friend of mine I was telling you about who went to live on a farm.” Will had already seen that the girl was Jenny. “May I introduce Mr. Will Montgomery—Miss Baird.”

“How d'you do?” said Will pleasantly and naturally as if he had never seen her in his life, then turned to Philip. “I must have been coming along half-dreaming——”

“It's his normal condition,” Philip explained. She had flushed slightly, for she had involuntarily been about to recognize Will. “He generally has some strange theory or other—and in argument is more slippery than any eel.”

“See how cleverly he destroys any argument I might have before I open my mouth? He was always like that.”

“Don't believe him!” Philip was in good form. “You know the awful sort of person who says something to you, almost negligently—and you're still wondering about it a week afterwards? That's him.”

Miss Baird smiled socially.

“I hope you can imagine him wondering a week afterwards about anything?”

“My dear fellow,” Philip said, “if I can remember a remark of yours for a week, I trust you can understand that there are other things which might stick in my mind more strongly and possibly even for a longer time.”

“My dear fellow,” replied Will in the same amusingly artificial tone, “you have hit the nail completely on the head with, if I may be allowed to say so, your usual gallantry.”

Both men laughed, but the last word just managed to touch Philip on the cheek, and with the interchange of eyeflash, Will conveyed an extra small chuckle of triumph for luck.

“But I must be off,” Will said. “It's all very well for you townspeople to dawdle about and enjoy the civilized amenities——”

“Quite!” Philip interrupted. “While you go to assume your arduous duties on your farm. By the way, it is only after you left that I remembered. Wait.… What is your country address?”

“A note to the office is the surest way of getting me. Goodbye.” He smiled to them both, raising his hat; turned and was gone.

I'm escaping all right! Will thought to himself. Nobody is getting me! Then he drifted along thinking no more, but amused in a vague bright way by the chance meeting. Philip and Jenny were of a kind. Her lips and nails had city paint they hadn't had in the country—or hadn't they? She had the brightness in her colouring of—daffodils.

He sat down at his tea table and looked around the room as if he hadn't seen it when he came in. Then he had a second look because he had missed the faces after all. There was no one he knew. The waitress came beside him and stood still.

“Anything you can suggest?” He glanced up with a smile.

Her face was pale and wearied and her smile was wan. Its waxen frailty stabbed his heart with its long-suffering. He dropped his head over the menu card, shutting his teeth, then glanced up with a still pleasanter smile. “A poached egg, please.”

“One poached egg, thank you.”

He looked at her dark-clad body as it moved away between the tables. His own body quickened in a spasm of pain.

“Thanks,” he said, when she had disposed his food before him. But he did not look at her this time. What right had he to introduce a winning smile, an easy sympathy, a hidden understanding? She asked for nothing. Got it. And kept her head up.

What more to be done?

What a plague of interference with the hidden lives of others! Winning smile?… No wonder Mac got the grue!

The poached egg was like her waxen cheek. What in the name of providence had made him ask for an egg? Reflex of the pre-farm era! Its smoothness tickled the roof of his mouth. It smelt faintly. The misbegotten thing was sick. Its pale yellow oozed over the wet toast. The taste was death on a bed of rotting straw. He stretched out knife and fork beside it, quietly shoved the plate aside, and, looking up, encountered the face of Jenny as she entered.

Jenny's face passed over him in search of a vacant table. There was one immediately on his left. But she found another three tables away and went there. She had seen him all right, but had not allowed the smallest flicker of recognition or subsequent self-consciousness to show. Not even a flick of hauteur. Just nothing.

That definitely was something to her credit! He listened for her voice. “Mixed fruit.” He couldn't have guessed better!

She would probably be going somewhere this evening with Philip. But why, then, had she not gone home to change? Home? Digs?…

What was Philip doing with her anyway? A startling thought came into his mind. Was he the partner in the firm of exporters and she the “private secretary”? Was Philip, to put it normally, running his typist?

Philip would enjoy that quite all right. He always had had some one or other. But he never got embroiled. He was never silly about a thing like that. He always, in course of time, contrived to make it clear with his candid eyes that of course it is up to each individual to look after his or her destiny without encroaching upon the destiny of her or him respectively. That understood, well——!

Jenny had better mind her step! It wouldn't do her any good falling head over heels in love with Philip Manson, however much she thought of herself. For Philip was a man apart and dedicated to the high calling and social suavities of money as power.

However, she could always have her fling!

And she wouldn't have to call—like him—for the bill!

He put something beside his plate for the waitress, got up and into his overcoat, and, about to move out, moved instead to Jenny's table.

“Pardon me,” he said quietly. “Mrs. Armstrong asked me to inform you that two special daffodils are out this morning in the garden.” He bowed very slightly to this stranger and immediately turned away.