Wild Geese Overhead (9 page)

“Thank you,” said Mary. “It's very kind of you. I'm glad you came in.”

Will could feel Joe's quiet strength; could see Mary heartened by it.

“This is a friend of mine,” Joe explained, as she followed them to the door.

“Ay,” she said indifferently.

When they were out of the darkness of the close, Joe said: “She's stunned a bit.”

“Not much more in the way of misery for her to find out.” Will was beginning to feel drained and arid himself.
I am very tired!
It had pierced him to the quick of the heart, where the last impulse lives before it shoots in agony and dies.

Joe paused. “I wonder where Jamie has gone?”

“Drink?”

“If it is, he's sunk. This finishes him. Only, I don't think he'd likely go to the pubs where he'd be known. However, we'll try one or two round about first.”

“Just the one room they have?”

“Single end. Yes.” As they came to a pub door, Joe said: “You needn't come in.”

Will understood Joe and waited. Two of them going in and searching around might rouse attention.

After the third pub, Joe started out for a fourth. “I met a pal of his in there. Jamie used to frequent, he said, the Red House.”

But the Red House and two more pubs held no trace of Jamie. Will could see that Joe was now getting alarmed. They walked along the river, but they could not see it. Why shouldn't they be able to see it? Why should it be banked in, shut away? Why should there not be boulevards along it? He was going to ask Joe, but had not the energy, and also he suspected that Joe would blame a capitalism that cared nothing for the well-being of the folk and less for the beauty of their town; and at the moment Will did not care even about capitalism. The night was damp and raw, with gusts of wind that set misery creeping along the bone. A figure started away in front of them. Joe increased his pace. The figure broke into a run, head down. Joe stopped. “He has two arms, that fellow.” He stood quite still. “I hope to God he hasn't gone and done anything desperate.”

He started walking purposefully. After some time, he turned off a wide thoroughfare, and all at once they were in a place of spacious peace, with a great steamer's black and red hull towering above them. The city of contrasts! Will half turned, glanced upward at the city, and saw the vast dark wall, burrowed with lights, of a tenement slum. Between him and that gaunt wall, a tramcar, tall as a ship and all a mass of light, went gliding swiftly and noiselessly by.

What an animal was man! How brilliant in his gifts, how ruthless in his greed!

Not a soul moved about the dock. Will read the name on the steamer; read the name on a large sign-board of a famous shipping firm. There were other steamers beyond. And cranes, queer-shaped cranes, like giants with bandy legs thrusting an arm at the sky. And peace; and strength.

Joe went and spoke to a policeman standing in the open doorway of a vast shed.

Will looked at the black water, which glittered here and there, and thought of Jamie. Beyond the dock, the river slid past. Will imagined its slow, drowning, rat-coloured swirls, its choking smoothness.

Down past the building yards, where carpenters and riveters, dockers and dredgers, worked, where his comrades worked, where all the men worked whose forefathers had made the river, the river of sea-borne traffic, the wonder river, bearing Jamie's body, the one arm turning over, not in salute, not in under-water farewell, not in bitter irony, but in filth and grime. Food for the eels.

“Come on!” Joe called.

He had not noticed that Joe had gone on.

“I was feeling a bit romantic,” he explained, “thinking of the river.”

Joe glanced at him but said nothing.

They left the dock and came to a street, a cul-de-sac, and in the mouth of it was a meeting. “He certainly won't be here,” said Joe, “but we'll have a look.”

The speaker stood in the middle of the deep ring of listeners. He had a walking-stick and used it like a sabre, holding them spellbound. When he took a stride or two, he limped. He was a man of about fifty, squat, wearing an old bowler hat over a full bluish face. Will involuntarily stopped and watched him, his height giving him a clear view.

“Take your river here. Two yards out of every three idle—and the third yard busy on what? Warships! War! Most of you are unemployed, some of you have never been employed—but all of you will be employed in war. Don't worry about that. You'll get your bellyful of employment then. They'll employ you all right. For however they've warped your bodies, however they've underfed you, whatever pitiful C
₃
specimens of humanity they've made you, you'll do all right as bomb and cannon fodder. You've still got a modicum of guts and blood to be scattered about. Or have you?” He paused. He limped a couple of steps and turned round swiftly. “Or have you?” he shouted. Then quietly: “Honest to God, men, forgive me, but I sometimes wonder if you and I have blood and guts. For if we had, how could we endure this nightmare they call civilization? Think of the wealth of the world, the brimming bursting wealth of the world, wealth created by the workers of the world—yet wealth which you can't touch, wealth which is destroyed; fish dumped into the sea, wheat burnt as fuel, tea and coffee and rubber and cotton—all the things you need, that you and your wives and your children could have in abundance, all kept from you, for the profit of the few. Your hands are idle. Your hands could build ships, not death ships, but merchant ships, ships to carry the goods the workers need to all the ports of the world. Your hands are eager to build them, proud to build them, your hands—the finest craftsmen's hands in the world—are unemployed, are idle, are rotting. How long——”

Joe plucked Will's sleeve. “Come on. He's not here.”

“Do you know him?” Will nodded back towards the speaker.

“Oh yes,” said Joe, as they moved off. “Bill Beaton—sometimes called Bill Bailey. An extraordinary fellow. Has had an incredible life. I'll tell you about him sometime.” Joe stopped, looked to left and right, then stared straight towards the river. He obviously did not know where to go next.

“Let's go on this way,” said Will.

Joe went with him, but with the air of disliking doing a vague thing, as though time must always mean something, have a purpose.

“If he's in a pub,” said Will, “it's unlikely we'll find him until the pubs close. We might then run into him coming back.”

“Something in that.”

“Tell me this,” said Will. “Does that sort of stuff have any effect on these men?”

“I used to worry about that. If it had an effect, you think they'd have risen in revolution long ago?”

“Yes.”

“And they haven't. So what? I know. It's difficult. You can only have a theory about it. My own is that it is having an effect, a delayed effect. There just is no doubt in my mind that it will tell in the end. In its simplest elements, it's a form of education in economics and sociology—the only form these men are directly taught. Now it's extremely complicated, the whole thing, because of human nature. And the human nature of these down-and-outs is more intricate than yours or mine. You believe, for example, that the world is a fine and simple place when things are going well with you. Birds singing and flowers growing and music and art and books and pretty women and good food and so on. But when things are not going well with you, when you are a down-andout and live in one room, then life is not a lovely thing. You become suspicious. You trust no one. You are like a cornered animal. You don't even trust Bill Bailey. He's getting money, you suspect, from some source to come and do his stuff. You listen to him—if you haven't the money to be in the pub. You agree with him. And the more your hatred grows, and your rancour, and your madness—the more oh what the hell's the good of spouting? You have heard all that before. You have heard all about the bursting wealth of the world. You have heard it, and your fathers have heard it, and your sons are hearing it.” Joe paused. “Think of yourself as Jamie Melvin listening to that. Look through Jamie's eyes at Bill Bailey doing his dramatic stuff. It does not help that Bill Bailey's stuff may be right. The rightness is merely an added poison. You don't say, Yes, I'll help to organize. You hate. You could act, you could throw bombs, but you're not allowed to act
now.
What'll we do? you cry to Bill Bailey. Join the socialist party, answers Bill. Jesus! So you laugh and hate. They have lost faith.” Joe added after a moment, “Not all of them. There's the continuous trickle that join up and work. But many of these become so ruthless in their logic that they lose their common humanity. They gather the irreconcilables around them. But the great bulk want kindness and decency and humour—the old human nature—and when they don't get it, they go sour.”

They found themselves by the river again.

“Let's get back,” said Joe.

Will saw the illuminated sign of a pub up a street. “Come on and have a drink.”

“Feel you need one?”

“Yes.” Will looked at the glowing red and gold sign in the street's dark tunnel. “Underground to Fairyland.”

Joe followed him in.

There was a crush of men standing deep round a curving mahogany counter, with two young barmen serving, and one older man serving also but quiet and watchful. After the misery of the night outside, the place was a gabble of sound, a crush of warmth, a thick stench of tobacco smoke, beer, and old clothes. Will began to cough, and coughed till the tears came into his eyes. “Damnation!” he said, his face holding its pallor, his eyes glittering. “What's yours?”

“A lemon squash,” said Joe.

“A lemon squash and a large whisky.”

Joe began quietly to look around. Will also saw the faces but he couldn't look at them, couldn't think about them. They hurt him. Each lineament, the look in an eye, the twist of a mouth, discoloured teeth, a snigger, a laugh, a strong vindictive face, a furtive face, a lost face—instantaneously conveyed the inner story. He did not want the story. His mind felt skinned, sensitive as a raw wound. He knew their lives, how the weaklings amongst them shuffled and slept; even their secret incontinences came at him. It was too much. “Here's how!” he said to Joe, and drank his whisky in a gulp.

“He's not here,” said Joe.

The general topic of conversation was football. Different teams, different views, different sides. He knew the whole lingo. Hit and come again. But the talk here had an aim, an object. For here was the real home of the football coupon. The penny, the tuppenny bet. Normally he might have seen this as the poor man's gamble, his pennyworth of fun.

To-night, Friday night, it had a heat, an earnestness, a wild sarcasm, a lust. Hunger and greed at the core of it.

They were drinking draught beer with thin frothy bubbles on top. But just behind his right shoulder were three or four fellows drinking wine. Will blew out a long stream of smoke from his newly lit cigarette and gave them a side glance.

Dark heavy Empire wine, full of alcohol, four-pence a large glass. The stuff that, with a dash of meth., was called Red Biddy. One of these, with a chaser of beer, and a fellow could be well on. They were not having chasers. They were sticking to the wine. Taking it in little mouthfuls, and discussing—film stars. Will could not believe his ears. Not young lads. Men of over thirty, over forty. Yes, they were discussing a film that had been, a film that was coming, and the stars concerned. “Ay, she's grand.” “I'll tell you what I thought was awful good. Remember that time when he came in and she was——” Pale-faced, bright-eyed film-addicts, living a dream-life on the dole, with sixpence twice a week for the pictures and a little more for Empire wine.

A buzzing of blood went into Will's ears. Never in his life had he been assailed by the pathetic in this frightening way. In comparison, Bill Bailey and his listeners were he-men.

“Want another?” Joe asked.

“One minute,” said Will and he looked around. “Where's the lavatory?” he asked the barman.

“Through that way.”

Will edged his way through, was involuntarily stopped by his nostrils on the threshold, held his breath, and went into the latrine. Men's backs and shoulders; one or two swaying in their drink. The fellow next to him was leaning forward, supported by the forehead which pressed against the flag-stone wall. All at once the horizontal pipe a few inches above the man's head noisily gushed out water through its small perforations. The water descended upon his cap, soaked it, and trickled down his face. His whole body convulsed and his mouth ejected a violent gush of vomit, which hit the flag-stone and spat back upon Will's clothes. Will let out a harsh grunt of disgust and began wildly brushing the stuff off with his naked hand. Slowly the face twisted round at him. Black burning eyes. The eyes held him, torture drawn to fine points. The face drew back from the wall, slowly, and steadied, concentrating on Will in a demoniacal satire and hatred. Only as the body squared up did Will notice that the right arm was missing.

Before he could be assaulted, Will turned away, re-entered the bar, and went up to Joe. “He's in there,” he said.

“Who? Jamie?”

“Yes.”

Joe looked at him. “Feeling sick?”

“Yes.” Will kept wiping his left side. “Must get some fresh air.” He turned abruptly and pushed his way out. The cold raw night hit him in the face. Two policemen were standing on the opposite pavement a few yards down. It was near closing time. He turned up the side street hurriedly. One policeman slowly moved up after him. He strove to keep his sickness down, going on blindly. He could not keep it down. He moaned aloud in agony and the sickness came in a spate through his teeth. He groped for the wall and steadied himself. His legs began to tremble; his head went icy cold. A hand with metal fingers gripped his shoulder. “What's this?” But he could not get breath. His legs were giving way. He got breath and moaned: “Leave me.” The policeman shook him and said roughly: “Come on!” He did not mind the policeman, because now the fainting sensation was ebbing, casting the thing that was himself high and dry again.