Wild Geese Overhead (7 page)

On the street his eyes brightened in still laughter. That's another one who'll think me daft!

But his own girl wasn't on the bus. There were many buses and she would work in a shift anyway.

He checked his laugh, for this daft aspect of life would have to be watched. All it meant was that the ego was enjoying itself to the exclusion of all else and every one else. And every one else didn't like it.

Astonishing how it hurt a fellow like Mac. To be gay and cheerful—not superficially, not in the usual cackling social way, but inwardly and deeply—it was an affront, an insult.

Was life, our modern life, getting like that? Full of such torturing realities and fears that it was disloyal to move outside them, outside their groups and philosophies and strenuous aspirations? Would it yet become a crime to be secretly happy?

Hell's bells and it's beginning to look like it! he thought.

The shades of evening were falling fast. Over the crest, he paused. A blue dimness was far away upon the land, and in the woods, and purple-dark on the remote mountains. Here and there a bird sang its last song. He was prepared to bet they had had a great day.

Oh God, I don't care what you say, he muttered aloud suddenly, head up, as he strode on. I don't care! I don't care! Life is a lovely thing! Not my life, or your life, but all life interpenetrating on this lovely earth!

A small cold shiver of delight went over his skin.

In the middle of the avenue of trees, he paused. A last few reflective notes fell from the branches. What was this thing the birds had given him, like a jewel in a box?

Should he throw the box away from him now—or hold it tight shut in his fist?

Cunning! for if he threw it away it was in the hope that he might thereby more surely retain it! And if he held it fast and strongly—he would retain it, too!

His hands opened of their own accord and he smiled, listened for a moment, and went on.

Next morning he awoke to his chorus at the same time. There it was, waiting for him, creation's dawn! Its urgency, its tempestuous delight, filled all the world, and pervaded his mind in the darkness of his room with a quiet mirth, a darkness growing grey in the window blind, a greyness spreading its presence as he looked, the grey slow-moving cloaked and gentle figure of the deep twilight.

He knew the “technique or ritual” for getting that “heightening effect” all right! But cunningly let it be done, unobtrusively, as if one were not doing it. The gods of the deep twilight are shy gods. Not to be hailed or spoken to.

Slowly he stretched out his legs and his arms, lying over on his back, and let his head fall sideways slightly as if he were going to sleep. All very lightly so that the enchantment might work.

But what was this? Instead of rising, he was sinking, and sinking so deliciously that he knew he was letting go, and that no vision of morning light and freedom could be tempting enough to stop him. Sleep! Sleep had him, sinking him in its soft wool, drowsing him with its warm fume. He knew he was going, letting go, drowning, aware of it as a most exquisite sensuous sensation.

All expression faded from his face leaving it very calm.

When the landlady knocked him into consciousness, he immediately answered. For a few moments his features were very still. He looked at the bed-clothes, about the room—and at the window. Then he lay back.

He had an impulse to chuckle, out of a sheer irrational gaiety, as if some one had played a joke on him, some one he cared for.

The joke accompanied him on the way to the bus-stop. For “they” had fairly done it on him in the grey light! If it's sleep you want, why, you'll get it! As easy as that—and as miraculous. For insomnia is no laughing matter. One of hell's more subtle brands of torture, it feeds on itself. How priceless would escape from it be to many!

Had he ever before been so conscious of sheer physical well-being? The mere asking of the question increased the well-being. In a moment, consciousness of it could mount to ecstasy. He actually had to take hold of himself, or he might go dribbling a stone up the roadway, slipping past an opponent, and laughing in glee. His old love of athletics brought an itch to his toes. And once he ran, for about fifty yards. They'll think I'm hurrying for the bus! he reckoned, and then had to pause to keep his laughter in.

Spring madness! Only that? God knows! he thought. And it was a momentarily sobering thought. For all that he knew, the mass of people might often feel as he felt now. He couldn't swear they didn't—however unlikely it was! But he kept his laughter in. Take Jenny—when she would come out to-morrow and see her special daffodils, would she get a thrill? Not a mere surface pleasure, but something deep enough to weaken her joints in wonder?

Why not? Who was he to say she wouldn't? And others, too. But each secretly. There was the point! A little ashamed of it, in this sane world. This sane world of intellectual values, of business, of economics, of politics, of all the real things—unemployment and international crises and bloody wars.
Life is real
,
life is earnest
. He paused involuntarily and said: What a blasphemy!

Life is not earnest, he cried inwardly: life is delight, life is ecstasy, and when you lose that you lose the whole bag of tricks.

Well, it was worth saying! he concluded, amused again. But with a lingering animosity against those who took life's central purpose of delight and smothered it, out of fear and self-importance and egotism, and the devil's thrill of power over others. Each manifestation a form of perversion of the impulse. Therein lay its blasted cunning and appeal. With a swift penetrating insight, he saw how it worked. Even his animosity felt like a snake-bite.

Don't talk about sobriety to me! he said. I know every tool in your kit-bag and every trick in your hat!

But he smoothed his face gravely as he got into the bus. “Good morning,” he greeted his conductress in cold tones. She looked at his eyes as though they surprised her. His left eyelid quivered. “Nice morning, isn't it?”

“Yes,” she said, turning half away to smother her amusement.

“You finish in the afternoon?”

“On this shift, yes.”

“I thought you must.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't see you in the evening.”

There was nothing she could say to that.

“Bit of a corker, isn't it?”

“What's that?” She lowered her ear.

“I said you had nothing to say to that.”

“To what?”

“To the fact that I don't see you in the evening.”

“Oh go on!” she said.

“Go on where? I mean is there a place where…?”

“Come off it!”

“You ask me to go on and then you ask me to come off. You would have to provide me with a bus all to myself where I could practise.”

She enjoyed this fooling. It was all in the flash of the eye, the sway of the body, the surprise of the blood in the skin. And the rumbling bus was a chariot.

Soon he would tell her where he lived, and ask her where she lived, and they would talk simply in a friendly way. For they were simple ordinary folk, he felt, glad to be alive and to call the warmth out of each other, and particularly this strange exciting mirth that was more exhilarating than any wine.

“So long!” he said, swinging off the bus. She gave him a smile and his fingers went to his buttonhole as if he were going to wear the smile there.

The streets had not quite the same freshness and wonder they had had yesterday, and in due course Mac paid no attention to him at all. He was aware of a hardening within himself, of a certain cool craftiness. He was not going to be robbed by any one of the jewel smothered in its box!

He had a glass of beer with Don before lunch. There was a native warmth in that Highlander which he liked. It showed itself at odd moments, particularly when they were together talking.

There was another international crisis on and Will asked him how he thought things were looking.

“Pretty bad,” said Don. “It'll pass, of course, but it brings the débâcle just one step nearer.”

“Would you be sorry?”

“Sometimes—personally—I think I shouldn't mind. You get worn down by this eternal mess. You begin to feel it would be a change, to do something, anything. Oh, I don't know. The only thing that sticks in my gizzard is the sheer illogicality of the business. It's a sort of mass-hypnosis of all the people in the world, a belief that what they all loathe is yet inevitable. It's a hell of a state.”

“Isn't it really implicit in the existing system?”

“Change the system and we'll all be nice fellows? If every country in the world was a true socialist state there would be no war? Quite. But first of all, our country isn't a socialist state. And secondly, the countries likely to win the war will be the best organized countries militarily. The strongest iron hand will rule the peace. What chance do you see of a true socialism emerging from a war between the present alignment of the ‘crisis' countries? In our time?”

“Doesn't look too promising.”

“Fundamentally again,” said Don, “it's the old socialist illustration of the haves and the have-nots and you can't get away from it. The other fellows want a share. We won't give it. Yet socialism demands common access to and ownership of the productive sources.”

“But that would mean international socialism first.”

“Well, are you working for it—on a realist basis? Isn't socialism in this country running down our potential war enemies more violently than toryism is? When logically what it should be doing is attacking the British Empire as a
have
concern and assuring our brothers, the enemy, that whenever socialism gets power here, the appropriate parts of the British Empire will be available on an equal basis and no exploitation to the have-nots? By thus dissipating haves and have-nots on the international plane, you dissipate war.”

“A bit too simple, you think?”

Don smiled, too.

“What I mean——” said Will.

“What you mean is that now we're going to have a slippery argument!”

They shrugged, Don giving a humoured nod. All their arguments finished much in the same way whoever were taking part. An indecision that left a momentary feeling of helplessness, of fatalism; a small dark cloud that had to be grinned away, because one had to live meantime anyhow; while the vague undercurrent of anger against something or some one flowed for a little time longer before it, too, appeared to fade out.

As it was Friday, he had to attend his socialist committee meeting at eight o'clock. His official job was looking after the publicity; which always meant finding out what public meetings were about to be held where heckling, distribution of leaflets, and similar propaganda might usefully be carried on.

It was a damp raw night and the bare dingy room was cold. The chairman had not turned up and without his strong quiet personality there was a feeling of incompleteness. During the quarter of an hour they waited, Will realized how much they depended on the one absent man. Without him there was lack of cohesion, sporadic grouping here and there, a tendency for the emotional extremist to raise his voice and lay down the law. One or two of the women began to chatter in an induced excitement, and under their tweed coats gave little noisy shudders of cold. “I think we'd better start the meeting,” he said to the vice-chairman.

So the vice-chairman raised his voice and suggested that they should perhaps get on with the business.

The faces gathered together and the minutes were solemnly read.

The new religious meeting. It took the place of his parents' church; supplied the doctrines of brotherhood and universal peace; made possible the bearing of present economic ills in the certainty of future equality and justice.

He withdrew his eyes from the faces. He did not want to see the rawness of flesh, the bone underneath the sinew, the skeleton. He did not want to look through the glass of the eyes. Wasn't he one with them, of the same flesh and bone and eye—and far less than many who did such unselfish work for the cause?

But this cry of a natural humility made no difference. He saw them better when he was not looking at them. And their voices completed the revelation.

He knew all the words beforehand, all of them, the shibboleths and inane suggestions, the interruptions, the cross talk, the denials, the affirmations, the tiresome eternal repetitions of intolerant certainties.

A pitiless cold insight, that he had warmth in him to hate. Not for a moment could it make him lose faith in the ideal. On the contrary, it could make him more ruthless, make him contemplate revolutionary acts with a steadfast fury, reconcile him to dictatorships through transition eras of indefinite length. Its very bafflement urged him to the drastic and final.

Then the chairman came in and said in his quiet voice that he was sorry he had been held up.

He was a young man, two years younger than Will, tall, broad-shouldered, with a full pale face, blue eyes, and a quiet confident manner. Good looking, with a reserved friendly smile, he must, Will felt, be attractive to women.

They now drew more together as if renewed purpose and direction had been given them, and the meeting proceeded.

It was no good asking the chairman, Joe Wilson, out for a drink. He neither drank nor smoked, but as Will chatted with him after the meeting—for they often worked out difficult points or drew up schemes before bringing them to the committee—Joe asked: “What are you doing?”

“Nothing, except that I've got to get home into the country.”

“Of course. I forgot.”

“Why?”

“I'm going down to see Jamie Melvin. His wife is expecting a youngster. She was in a pretty bad way and they were talking of taking her to the infirmary. I thought if you had nothing better to do we might look in and cheer him up.”

“Oh well,” said Will, “all right.”