Wild Geese Overhead (16 page)

Queer, this detached and friendly liking one could get for humanity. Sly dog that he was! for he was all the time keeping the same distance behind the girl in front. The fair neck, disappearing under the simple, fashionable curls, was ravishingly cool. What a boon her very existence conferred on humanity in general! What a distinguished privilege, what a gift from life, to be able to look at her as he was looking, with an inexplicable, amused, lustless, detached, and yet intimate delight!

All he had got to do, of course, was to quicken his step and glance at her face and find that the impersonal body was too gracious for the personal face. She simply couldn't have a face that would naturally crown that body. So why do it and dispel the illusion? So he did it, and when with a side glance he caught the face, he dropped behind at once, swerving towards what happened to be the window of a book-seller's shop. “Well, I'm damned!” he muttered, under his breath. He stared at the books without seeing them, his heart in a race.

The girl was Jenny.

And now for the first time in years he deliberately evaded a personal question. He began to concentrate on the books, while this completely absurd and irrational action of the muscle in his breast slowly subsided. Amusing, too, that he should find himself staring at a book on
How to Make a Rock Garden
. That brought back his normal good humour and he thought suddenly, Why not? and entered the shop before he could think any more.

Last night he had been up in the garden, looking at what was to be seen. To him came his landlady, asking the time. Her clock which usually gained only ten minutes a day had “gone off its rocker altogether” and gained an hour. The little black French clock—as he knew himself—had a quite ungallic habit of suddenly becoming silent. They got chatting about Jenny's work in the garden. A bank in the top corner was the despair of Jenny's life, she declared. She really must get one of the farm men to dig it up. “But this is their busy time. It's bishopweed it is. It invades her, she says, like an army! What she really wants to do, I know fine, is not only to have the place cleaned up, but also to have some stones put in and turn it into a rockery. It's her secret passion just now!” She laughed. “Oh, I know fine, but I appear not to let on!”

As Will came out of the bookshop he looked along the street. Obviously Jenny had been heading for an appointment and, judging from the pains she must have taken with her outfit, the appointment was with Philip. She knew him! And my word, wouldn't Philip say just the right thing! Not really say it, not anyway until he had first said it silently with his eyes and acted his admiration, in slight little offhand yet intimate ways!

He didn't want to run into them. Anything but that! A small ironic gleam shot from his eyes. And there they were, at the corner of the street, waiting to cross! He turned his face to the shop windows. He paused opposite a watchmaker's shop. She had been facing his way; must have seen him. He went into the shop. Five minutes later, when he came out, they were gone. From their office, they would have come different ways, of course!

When at last he shoved his head round the door of the small back saloon where the boys were gathered, he was greeted variously:

“Come on! What's kept you? Where you been? What is it?”

“A small one,” said Will against their quizzing eyes. “The Scots are a satiric, ruthless, rowdy crowd of grotesques,” and he sat down.

They shouted the warmest hah-haws—all except Mac, who grinned. Don, Rob, Jackie, and Jackie's friend Harry from another evening paper—they had consumed their pies and beer, and were now drinking in the merriest mood. The evening was before them, and fun, the warm arguments and entanglements of sheer fun—oh, full of the most profound thought concerning the nature of God, Tamerlane, political ideology or—oh, shut up!

That was the atmosphere and he liked it. It was honest, and no club in the city could provide such complete male freedom, free in its essence, charged with mirth and irony and ribaldry, swift convictions hotly maintained, good-naturedly shied at, hit and counter-hit and come again. Nothing finally mattered but the jet of life that spirted up out of a fellow's head, with its tumbling coloured ball, and when the ball was knocked off its jet, they tumbled with it into laughter.

“Don't let any one in here, Dan,” they said to the barman.

“No? Why?” asked satiric Dan.

“Because this is the moment”, said Will solemnly, “in which we burst our balloons.”

It was going to be a good night! For Will was obviously in a serene mood, and that was enough for Mac at any time.

The personal hunt started over a reference by Jackie to original innocence when he meant original sin. Mac,
via
a farm that he called the Garden of Allah, came down heavily on the side of sin.

“I disagree,” said Will. “For example, most of our present entertaining discourse would be unprintable, but fundamentally it's innocent; and the natures of most—not all—of those taking part in it are moved to the fun like sportive lambs.”

“So you have started leading yourself up the garden path of wisdom? Huh?”

“That's clever of you, Mac,” said Will. “Only, tell me—how could you know—unless the garden path is in your own mind? You cannot leave my farm alone. Why? Am I doing what you had not the courage to do? If not, what exactly are you trying to define?”

“Does one require to be a lunatic to define lunacy?”

“No. But one requires to be a poet to define poetry. And the trouble with you would appear to be that you can't leave poetry alone?”

“As a terrier can't leave a rat?”

“Or a child its rattle.”

“Hurrah!” cried Jackie. “Here, Don——”

“You're getting drunk,” said Harry, a slim youth like himself. “Better put on your bowler,” and he stuck Rob's bowler down over his eyes.

“Very good,” said Jackie, raising the headgear with difficulty to all present. “Mac: you have caught my eye.”

But Mac was not amused; not nearly so amused as he was by Will, whom he now began to hunt with a vindictive malice, laughing harshly when he felt he had scored a point.

Until Don interfered, with the tone of a referee. “Mac, you're offside. That's personal.”

“Personal bedamned. Aren't we all personal? Are you afraid to be personal? Beyond the personal—what is there?”

“Mathematically,” said Don, “everything, every blessed sweet thing, except the personal, thank heaven.”

“You're merely frightened of the mud,” said Mac, “while all the time it's obvious to the meanest intelligence that what some of you need is a mud bath. Cakes of it to suck your lovey-dovey clogged pores open. Your so-called innocence is unclean, stinks. There is an innocence that is offensive, that is rank, like a skunk's smell.”

“I presume you mean it is to you?” said Will. “And if so—quite. But it is a considerable assumption to assume that you hold the governing condition for everybody.”

“You think I don't?”

“I am quite sure you don't.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. You don't hold it for me, for example.”

They were all listening now, awaiting the explosion.

“By God, you're a cocksure bastard, aren't you?”

“Stick to the argument,” said Will. “Don't run away.”

“Run away!” cried Mac. “Who? From you?”

“No, not from me.”

“You said run away.”

“I said don't run away.”

“He said you ran away from the argument,” explained Rob.

“We ran and they ran and we a' ran awa' man—or how goes it?” asked Jackie.

“Do you mean”, said Mac, with a loose thrust of his lips, “
only
that I ran away from the argument?”

“I admit”, Will answered quietly, “that I meant more than that.”

“Well?” demanded Mac.

Will met his eyes in a silence that affected them all with a keen discomfort, and yet that none of them could break. There was something new in Will's quiet penetrating look. And when the words came they were slow and distinct, more penetrating than the eyes, and charged with incredible meaning:

“
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
 I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
        Of my own mind.…
”

Mac suddenly threw his head back and gave way to raucous laughter. The strings of his throat whipped taut. They had never seen him give way so completely.

Will took up his glass with a slow smile. “I knew that would get him,” he said.

The others were at once released, and Jackie and Harry went noisily to their coats for more cigarettes.

At last Mac gasped, wiping his eyes. “Holy God—kindergarten!” He would have started laughing again if Jackie hadn't whistled. “Boys, will you look at this?” for he had gone into one of Will's pockets by mistake and produced a book with a paper jacket and the title,
How to Make a Rock Garden
. The jacket was a brilliant show of colour supported at one side by the gable end of a cottage with tall hollyhocks.

“Here——” began Will.

“So it's yours?” said Jackie.

“I move”, said Harry, “that this document lies on the table.”

This was carried, and Mac got hold of it. “Flowers!” he cried. “Hollyhocks! Sweet peas!” His voice was a riot of malice. “She moves amid the hollyhocks and peas.” He could hardly open the book. “Kindergarten, did I say? Infantile bloody paralysis!”

“Please give me that book.”

Mac ignored him. Mac had a demoniac account to settle. But Jackie was now crying to them to shut up. They screwed themselves round to look at him. He was standing, swaying very slightly, and apparently listening.

In an appalled voice, Harry said: “He's got 'em.” He went to Jackie and asked gently: “What is it, Jackie?”

“Shut up,” said Jackie, “and listen. Do you hear that sort of ticking sound?”

Harry could genuinely hear nothing. “Feeling queer a bit, are you?”

Jackie swiped him with an arm and Harry grabbed at Will's coat as he was going down and brought it with him. Winded, he sat, head over it; until his head jerked up as if it had been stung. He looked at the coat. “The damn thing's beating,” he said. “It's alive.” He began to push it from him. Then, overcoming the instinctive serpent fear, he inserted his hand into a pocket and produced a ball of brown paper, with prongs sticking through. “Hell,” he cried, in real panic, “it's a time bomb!” He dropped it on the coat and retreated in a rush.

“If you're quite finished with my coat,” Will began, getting up, when Jackie to cover his own instinctive recoil stooped and lifted a small blue-enamelled alarm-clock from the brown paper that had merely been loosely wrapped round it.

“Please leave that alone,” said Will.

“But, look here——” began Jackie.

Will advanced upon him, and now Harry, anxious to avoid comment on his panic, neatly fielded the clock from Jackie and brought it to the table before Will could grab him.

Mac immediately took possession of it. “Exhibit number two.”

“Give me that clock!” Will demanded.

“Sit down,” ordered Mac.

“Give me that clock!”

“Hold the prisoner at the bar.”

The two boys held him, with Rob ready. “And they brought him”, said Jackie, “before Pontius Pilate.”

“Will you explain”, asked the judge, “why you bought this clock?” and he set it on the table before him.

“I bought it”, said Will, standing calm and straight, “in the hope that it might explain the meaning of time.”

“Haven't you a landlady?”

“I have.”

“Well?”

“I will tell the whole truth. I have recently attempted to awake in the grey of the dawn to hear the birds sing, but without success. Hence the need for an alarm—to awaken me at that timeless hour.”

They laughed thickly, for they were tired of laughing. Will
had
a fantastic touch. Lately he had developed the habit of saying impromptu the wildest nonsense with the probability in it of the fairy-story. And they liked it. It appealed to something ungoverned or grotesque in themselves or in their tradition.

But Mac was looking at him, trying to fathom him.

And Will, looking back at Mac with a gentle expression, shook his head. “It's no use, Mac.”

“What's no use?”

“Trying to escape.”

“Escape?”

“The poet, who fled God down the arches of the years——”

“Christ and him crucified!” cried Mac. He lifted the book and brought it down with such violence on the table that it slid forward and shot the little blue clock on to the floor. The glass face smashed and the small bell tinkled.

There was a startled silence. But Will, the gentle expression on his face, stooped and lifted the clock and listened to it.

“It's still going,” he said, and placed it carefully on the table. Then he picked up the book. The coloured wrapper was sopping with beer. He dropped it on the floor and wiped the covers of the book with his handkerchief. “She'll never know”, he said, “that it knocked time sideways.”

They cheered him for his good nature. And at that instant the alarm bell of the little clock joined in with such a ringing triumphant loudness that they lost their balance completely and Dan came in to see what was wrong.

Later, after parting, Will turned and looked back and saw Mac pursuing his solitary way down the arches of the streets.

Where am I now? he asked as he pursued his own country road, and whither am I going? The arch of the dark was lit by the stars. One cannot look long at stars, he decided. Not too long.

Laughter was inside him, and occasionally it came out to have a look around.

This liberation that came with the drug of drink! This irresponsibility! This starry freedom!