As he awoke he heard the bird-singing and cunningly tried not to hear it, not to get exasperated by it, so that he could go to sleep again. He did his best; breathed deeply, made his brain dull, let his head fall inert. When his cunning was being defeated, he raised up his will. In the effort of keeping his mind a blank, he became wide awake.
It was very maddening. He needed sleep. Now he would toss and turn and wear himself out before the day started. From the riot of the singing, he knew his watch would show five o’clock. He had been in bed little more than four hours.
How one grew tired and tossed one’s legs and turned over—and back, with what increasing torment of anger and bad temper and spasms of violence to coverlet and pillow! So utterly futile the whole affair—particularly the bird-singing. The same things went round and round in the mind; and, behind them, in the most momentary pause—that storm of singing. No good shutting the window with a bang and placing a pillow upon the upper ear. Nothing was any good, for there was nothing he had not tried except tears of vexation, and they had come fairly close to him more than once.
Well, I may as well give in! he thought. Oh, pipe on! he suggested; pipe up your ditties of no tone! Don’t mind me. I’ll listen. That’s precisely, he said, fisting a pillow, what I’m here for.
Then, for the first time, he deliberately listened to the singing that broke out each morning in the grey of the dawn.
And there was truly an astonishing volume of it. The main wood began at the back of the farm steading and the singing receded with it to what seemed an immense distance. It was in fact a sea of multitudinous sound. No individual song emerged. Individual notes—yes, if the ear listened acutely, but in the very act of listening, the individual notes were lost, fell like little jets of water back into the main tumult. It was the whole throbbing vibrant sea that lived, writhing and interwoven. An ecstatic creative sea.…
That beginning of symbolic thought revolted him, and in a sudden calm moment it was not a sea at all but a plain, an immense prairie, where the notes of individual songs, previously like tiny fountains, were now grasses, sticking up here and there, and fronded, in the way one might see them when lying flat to the earth as they bow against a remote horizon. This was a perfectly clear image after that vagueness of a sea. Precise, with a fine morning light over the prairie and above the horizon. And cool, too, so that one could look at it and almost smile, feeling the cool morning breath of it on the sticky sweatiness of the body. Besides——
All at once, it was the real sea, advancing upon him with the sounds of its green waters smashing over rocks and boulders, advancing up the valley from the shore which was miles away. For several moments the illusion was absolute, and he caught the crying of the gulls, with the cavernous echoes acquired from cliff walls. The cries were smothered every now and then in the spume of the advancing waters. Advancing upon him…up the valley…tumbling over, sweeping on, growing louder, near at hand…until he suddenly realized that the crying was the crying of gulls.
He remembered having seen a company of them on the field below the house the other day. At last, his smile emerged. For the space of five seconds he had completely forgotten himself in wonder—evoked out of the vision of himself as a small city boy on a stormy shore.
The vision had arisen in a magical transparency superimposed like a film.…
What was that? The short sharp cries of terns, ripping the air with their narrow beaks, right above him, over the house.…
His smile, with its faint irony, faded out and left him listening more acutely than ever.
An iron gate creaked over in the farm steading. Or was it? Again—and again: Honk! Honk! And then suddenly happened the miracle that transformed his life and he felt himself lifting on the wings of wild geese.
Just a year ago, he had been here in the spring. An afternoon it was, and, standing not far from this house, he had heard that rusty honk! honk! and wondered—and then, strung out in an irregular arc, he had seen the geese. At first he had thought they were swinging to the south, and that had vaguely disturbed him, for he had the notion that they should go north to nest. As they continued to swing round, a deep pleasure and reassurance had flooded in upon him, and when they assumed their arrow formation and headed a little west of north, he had watched them enthralled. One barb of the arrow was much longer than the other and, going away from him, it undulated slowly like a ribbon drawn through the still air. Where had they come from? And whither bound? Watching, he was invaded by the feeling that he was seeing something which it was hardly right he should see, something out of occult books, out of magic. He should have been better prepared. It was going from him; and he had not got it all. He had missed something. What he had missed, he wondered over.
This wonder in one form or another had worked in him through the gritty summer days in the city, and during the winter time he had found himself inclined to a greater conviviality than ever. Not that he was exactly drinking too much, but still he was perhaps drinking more than was good for him, enough anyway to make him swear many a time that he was a fool and that it was high time he chucked it. His thirtieth birthday, falling on the first Sunday in March, he left the city by bus, and, from the bus-stop, set out on foot for the place where he had seen the geese.
It was undulating farming country, lowland country, for when he turned to look northward he saw a remote dark-purple rampart circling slowly against a pale-blue sky, like the contour of a strange land seen from a ship. The sunlight glittered in his eyes, so that they grew smaller and, breaking their stare, glanced hither and thither, as if they had emerged from a winter sleep and were not to be taken unawares. His face was pale and thin, his hair mouse-coloured, and his eyes a flecked brown. His body was thin and tall, but walked with an easy light footfall. He looked at everything near and far with pleasure, yet also with the unconscious air of a nimble animal making sure of its environment, a rather graceful animal, if grace rises from supple joints and sensitive responses.
Touched with a knowingness that was something more than irony, his eyes glimmered, good-naturedly amused. Already his body was feeling the weight of his heavy dark-brown overcoat for it was very susceptible to change of temperature. The narrow country road wandered its way up the slow incline.
He took off his gloves and stuffed them in a coat pocket. A farm steading a hundred yards off the road drew his attention. It was an old steading, badly needing some whitewash, and stood surrounded on three sides by churned-up mud and an uncertain scum of grass that was very green compared with the grass in the pasture fields. Broken-down farm implements and the rusting chassis of an abandoned car gave the whole place, with its begrimed outside walls, a forbidding, even a sordid air. Life could not be comfortable there, but always a little raw, and dirty, and in winter cold to the marrow. Yet it fascinated him. For he was haunted by the notion never to forget the fundamentals. And for the animal part of living, every occupation or preoccupation of man could be dispensed with—except this fundamental one of growing food out of the earth.
His mind, from that simple point, adventured into speculation so that for a hundred yards the country was not within his focus of attention, even though his eyes were continuously alive and might not have been surprised. He removed his dark-grey felt hat and wiped his forehead with an open palm. Then he unbuttoned his overcoat but did not take it off, because there was a cold nip in the air, made all the more treacherous by the thin sunshine, and he had been laid up twice during the winter with feverish chills that he had found difficulty in shaking off. The cool air now penetrated his clothes to his hot skin and he began to cough. When the spasm passed, his face was left with the watery pallor of a plant grown in a cellar or under a stone.
As he began to approach the crest, excitement crept into his skin. Soon he would come in sight of the next valley and see the farm-house with the dark plantation stretching away behind—the house had stuck in his mind with a remarkable visual solidity—and stand on the spot where he had watched the geese head north by west towards regions where, if he listened, he could hear icicles tinkle in vast desolate noondays.
Some such element of faery had hung about the valley itself, which was no more than a fold in the rolling land, and when at last he looked down upon it he found that the element of remembered intimacy had, if anything, increased. This was a pleasant surprise, and it made him hold his breath a little, until he realized that the effect was due to the strong sunlight on the bare lands. Under that light the earth and all it contained lay utterly dead. In December and January the sodden earth is a drowned body, but by the beginning of March it is blown dry as a skeleton. Towards the sun, the bark on the old gnarled trees was not the pale gold of winter but white as bleached bone. Far out over a grey-green pasture field, birds heeled and tumbled, swooped up and fell, like tatters and fragments tossed by a storm. But the farm-house itself, on which his gaze lingered, was more still than the land, and, where the land was strong and austere, it was roofed and lonely.
Bracing and poignant and a little frightening! Though where this thin harmony of emotion came from, heaven alone knew. From more than a few thousand years back in time, he reckoned. That at least was certain! No childhood memory could evoke this adult shudder of white light and bleached bone. His mind’s eye saw the face of a primeval hunter on the edge of a wood, and at once he moved on to the place where he had watched the geese.
But the sky was empty, and the blue, irradiated by light, of a remarkable tenderness. Remote, certainly, and cold if one let oneself be influenced by the moving air—but summer tender in fact and full surely of divine promise. He stood in a chilly trance, till the sound of a footstep fell on his heart and made him start like an animal.
When he saw that it was only a young woman he experienced the spirt of anger that nearly always follows a foolish fright. He stared at her for no more than a second, before turning back again, his heart thudding from the anger.
Yet in that second he had seen her coming walking down upon him with the calm of Primavera, the Lady Spring! Her incurious blue eyes had looked at him as if he were a tree! A calmness remarkable enough to increase his irritation and then to relieve it with swift derision.
He studied her back and knew the type of city girl she was quite well. Her blue-shot-with-grey tweed coat, with its simple sportswoman’s collar, was the sort of thing one saw advertised “for country wear” at seven guineas. She exactly suited the fashionable illustration! And her shoes were really sensible—a quiet brown brogue with a single strap; and her hat, a blue felt that covered her head, had a brim outline of cunning simplicity; style, without obtrusive fashion, for the country!
Tall, without being too tall, and slim without being too slim! he thought, as he watched her moving easily down the road and disappearing beyond a belt of trees. Then a cold crepitation went over his skin and he sneezed violently three times and blew his nose. “Blast!” he said, and wiped his eyes. For it was not so much that he was frightened of getting a cold as unutterably weary of the very thought of it. He had got heated coming up the hill and then had stood too long. He must keep moving. It was too soon to go back, so he went on—with reluctance, because it was the way the girl had gone.
When he came to the belt of trees, he saw the private road going into the farm. It sloped gently down through the narrow belt, mostly thorn on the right, but on the left quite a tongue of deciduous trees, and a few Scots firs. Not a wood so much as a shelter; yet it seemed to withdraw the farm from the main valley road into a measure of privacy. Usually a farm-house, it seemed, was little more than an extension of the steading, one with the mud and the manure and the cold gape, unless, of course, it was big enough to have given the farmer in the old days a tall Sunday hat and a high-stepping horse, to have made of him a little laird; then the farm-house might be separated from the steading by a bank of thorn or privet hedge, and might even come within measurable distance of being as comfortable as a manse, though never with the manse garden.
Would he go and ask for a drink? He was shy of intruding on the privacy of any house even to ask for a glass of water, but still.… His feet, however, had begun taking him along the farm road, which was quite dry, if badly rutted by cartwheels. He could see an uprising grazing field through the bank of scrubby blackthorn. On his left, the trees, not very large, were huddling together. Birds flitted across the road, very active little birds, shedding quick notes. Finches or linnets, possibly, for some of them were beautifully coloured. He knew next to nothing about birds, and certainly could not have told a chaffinch from a greenfinch or either from a tit. But he liked their swift ways and bright notes. Notes of coloured sunlight, he thought. Quick-darting little shuttles, weaving their bright invisible threads—about the grey bone! It was warmer in here. He looked about him. Nothing was watching him. He was still alone, could still go back. On his right, the hedge made a small bay, with a wooden gate in the middle giving on the upland pasture. His feet took him a few yards farther before they were suddenly held.
Crocuses, yellow and purple, in hundreds, and clumps of snowdrops with drooping heads. He glanced up swiftly from this unexpected sight to the farm-house. Grey stone, plain front door shut, window each side, two windows above, eaved, out of a blue slate roof. Back to those crocuses, hundreds of yellow and purple lights, all about the grass, running out of sight over the shallow bank, circling round the cherry-tree, moving in single file up the hollows between the grass-covered roots to the very base of the great elm. No garden; just plain grass. And below the bank, a pasture field, with sheep and broken turnips. Straight across, through an iron gate, he saw one side of the steading with its red doors. He could not see the rest of it because up from the gate, separating the house from the steading, ran a stone wall, banked with earth on the near side out of which grew a line of low heavy-foliaged evergreen trees. He went up the gravel path to the door, looked at the black iron knocker, raised it on its stiff hinge, and knocked twice.
“Excuse me,” he said to the elderly woman who appeared, “but would you mind giving me a glass of water?”
After a moment’s frank pause, she said: “Certainly.”
“I have been walking”, he explained, “and am very dry.”
Her round grey eyes smiled and she nodded. A comfortable, energetic woman, with a kind full face and strong greying hair. “Just wait a minute.” But she had no sooner turned away than she turned back. Perhaps it was the way he raised his hat; or perhaps the pallor of his face touched her heart; she asked him: “Would you like a glass of milk?”
“Well——” he paused, his expression deepening, “that would be too much.”
“Not at all.” She was quite herself now. “Come in.”
“With a vague word or two of protest, he followed her and was shown into the parlour on the left. She said she was sorry there was no fire, but if he took a chair she would not be a moment, and in a swirl of air she closed the door upon him.
Quick work! He smiled, looking about him. There was a china dolphin on each end of the pitchpine mantelshelf. There was an enlarged solemn photograph of a man in the prime of life, with a heavy moustache, hanging above the small black marble French clock on the centre of the shelf. Other photographs. A wedding group. A young man of to-day. Black hair-bottomed arm-chairs, male and female. An oak table, laden with ornaments and one or two more photographs in upright silver-bright frames. A slightly stuffy smell, preserved by camphor balls. Very clean. And silent—the clock was stopped. Sunday in a Scots farm parlour!
The window drew him and he went and looked out. The brightness of that bare world was even more silent than the room—but how wide and immensely high! And the light on the trunk of the elm-tree picked out its wrinkles. Like an elephant’s hide. What a world! And the crocuses, the amazing crocuses, tiny yellow and purple lights for a fête—come up at the wrong time or left over from some wild night revel. The clumps of snowdrops—drooping arc lights with the inner radiance dimmed in the cold daylight. He held his breath and listened, and everything listened with him—until he heard her footsteps and turned towards the door.
She brought the glass on a little tray. A kind-hearted woman, with a warm bustling manner. “Not at all,” she said. “It’s nothing.” He saw the marriage ring and took a mouthful of the milk. Lord, it was cold! He was not used to drinking cold “dead” stuff and had better go canny. “This is delicious milk. I have come out from the city, and the walking, with this heavy coat!…”
She understood. “Having a day in the country? Well, it’s a pleasant day, but the country is not at its best just now, is it?”
The milk was delicious, but its coldness anaesthetized his gums. In his stomach, he could feel a few alcoholic microbes getting the fright of their lives!
“It’s so quiet out here—after the rush of the city. I work in a newspaper office where things keep going.”
“Do you?” She obviously had never looked at a pressman before. “You’ll be up most of the night?”
“Well, no. As it happens I am on an evening paper, so I don’t have to work late.”
“Oh?”
“I could wish we had some of this quiet occasionally.” He took a mouthful and held it a moment thoughtfully before letting it down, then he turned his face to the window. As he looked out, he felt the sensation of what he was going to say coming over him in an odd hush. “I don’t suppose there is any one hereabouts who would take a fellow like myself as a lodger?”
A minute ago the question would have surprised him even more than it now surprised her. His expression, however, was almost casual in its friendly way. “I had a beastly cold this winter—twice, in fact—and I feel some time in the country might do me good. You don’t actually know of any one?” And he looked into her eyes.
“No. No, I don’t know of any one,” she answered slowly, her head tilted upward, thoughtfully. “No. We’re all so far away from anywhere.”
“Quite.” He nodded.
Then there was silence, and she knew he was too polite to put the personal question direct.
“As for myself,” she added, in a constrained way, “I’m afraid I had never thought of such a thing.”
“You wouldn’t care to think about it?”
“Well—no. I—my husband died three years ago. I am keeping the place going for my son. He’s in East Lothian, where my husband’s brother has two farms. He’s learning dairying in particular. He’s studying to take his B.Sc. in agriculture. In less than two years he should be home and then he will run this place himself.”
But he could see, while she was speaking, that she was really thinking of his offer, that it excited her, that she was tempted.
Her expression caught a self-conscious warmth. “In any case,” she concluded, “I don’t know anything about keeping a lodger.”
“Oh, that’s quite easy,” he answered, glancing at the table. “A boiled egg in the morning and anything handy you might have for supper at night. I wouldn’t be home for lunch except on Sundays. I would pay thirty-five shillings a week—if that wouldn’t be too little.” His eye was caught by a photograph in a small silver frame. It was the photograph of a girl he had met somewhere.
“I don’t know,” she replied, agitated by the temptation. It would be “found money”. She did not know what to do. “Would you excuse me,” she asked, “till I—till I go and see——”
“No, never mind just now,” he answered. “I want you to think it over. Here’s my card.” As he was withdrawing it from his pocket book, he “placed” the photograph as that of the girl he had encountered up the road. “Now I’ll come along and see you this day week. That will give you plenty of time to think it over. And please don’t feel that I shall be disappointed if you cannot take me. I mean—I will be disappointed—but——” They both smiled.
“All right,” she said.
He finished the milk. “That was grand. Thank you very much indeed.”
“Would you like——”
“No, thank you. I’ve been admiring your many photographs. Members of the family?”
“No, just friends—apart from our son there, our only child. And, of course, my husband.” The man with the moustache.
He nodded and they were silent a moment. “Well—goodbye. Whatever happens, this has been very pleasant!” They shook hands warmly.
Lord, that was a narrow squeak! he thought, as he went up through the trees. What on earth possessed me? And he had all the relief of having escaped from a trap. The whole incident brightened him up wonderfully.
For the idea of coming and lodging in a place like this had, after all, its exciting side. He could stop lodging in it at a day’s notice. It wasn’t really a trap. Something bright behind the idea prompted him to laugh; something behind and above the idea, reaching up to the radiant blue sky. His eyelids crinkled in humour as the sky acknowledged his confidence.
And then the sub-editors’ room—if he did come and live here! It would almost be worth doing it for the comment. Bulls, cocks, hens’ food, rats, and the servant girl—the going would be pretty bawdy now and then! A chuckle came in soft gusts through his nostrils.
He would do it! Even if it would mean a lot of drink. He looked around on the bare lands. A lovely economy in their austere lines. Lovely! lovely! he thought, and his bright humour moved in his head like a song.
It meant even more drink than he had imagined. But his wit served him well enough, for there was a sense of freedom in the project that gave him unexpected power. He had thought that he would have to be on the defensive. Whereas he found he could even afford to say nothing and merely look in a certain way, the way that implies a fool’s confidence. Or laugh with the laugh against himself.
On the Monday afternoon, between five and six, when the usual three or four of them were having a parting drink, Mac, out of a lengthy silence, nodded. He had got it at last! “It’s none of all that,” he said, referring to innuendo about “the simple life” on a farm. “After all, that sort of thing requires a certain amount of guts. In this specific instance, they don’t apply.” His lips pursed tight and he nodded slowly. He was a man of forty-three with a sandy face and a satiric disintegrating manner. As he regarded his glass, his lips moved leftwards into a fleshy opening that exposed three strong upper teeth, and a heavy sniff moved brown hairs in his nostrils. The four of them waited as they generally did for Mac. He looked up. “Remember Tommy Stink?”
Don and Rob burst into laughter.
“Who was Tommy Stink?” asked Jackie, the youngest, a slight nondescript Glasgow boy, full of the bright camaraderie of his native streets.
“He was a man,” said Mac, “or at least, he was a sub-editor, who went to the country, to write a book!”
“A book?” said Jackie. “A book!!”
Mac’s head went up and then down like the head of an old brown horse. Laughter warmed them.
“If you weren’t all so preoccupied with intestinal matters——” began Will.
“Guts got him!” cried Don, a quick-thoughted black Highlander.
Mac nodded.
“——You would have tumbled to that long ago.” Will’s calm judicious manner was expected of him. “However, you have sure got it now. But of one thing you can be certain: in my book I shall do the decent by you. I’ll draw each of you to the life. I’ll shirk nothing. Everything will go in—everything. And even you, Jackie, who are so astonished at the thought of a book, will not be forgotten.”
“You make me blush,” said Jackie with ironic modesty.
“I shall not forget the secret dreams you drew from Rupert Brooke, the verses you made in emulation, and hid, and secretly re-read; the ambition that walked with you at night down quiet streets, from one island lamp-post to another—for we are all lonely dogs after our fashion—the ambition that saw itself in the world-renowned glory of a book, not of verse, but of poetry.”
“Oh, dry up!” cried Jackie, boisterously.
Will dipped a forefinger in the spilt beer and began drawing a pattern on the table. “No need to blush, for yours is the ambition that’s launched ten thousand subs. Take Mac here. What would you say now is the secret ambition of Mac’s soul?”
“You’ll know, I suppose?” said Mac.
Will tilted his head and looked at the pattern, then resumed his drawing. “Lost dreams looped out in lewd jest, in the mirthful sarcasms of the damned, bedewed with Scotch, soddened with beer, irrigated with coffee. Looped round and round by this octopus till all the blood and juice has oozed out——”
Don tilted Will’s mug and drowned the pattern.
“Yes?” said Mac.
“Slàinte!” said Will, lifting his mug.
“Clever, what?” Mac looked at him with his iceblue, unrelenting eyes.
“No,” said Will, “merely descriptive. You don’t like it?” The way he raised his eyebrows in a casual smile set the others laughing, for they felt that between these two men, so opposed in temperament, there was a latent hostility, and it was as well to keep it within bounds.
They were not wholly right in this, for Will had a curious regard for Mac’s strong character. And he was aware that Mac responded to his presence more than to that of any of the others though the response was almost always satiric, as if his was the type of mind that Mac must hunt and worry.
The hunt was on.
By the end of the week, he felt compelled to visit the farm in sheer self-defence.
So on Sunday off he set. There was a touch of dry spite in his going, an uneasiness. It was a fool’s business. He was inclined to drift into things in a vague intuitive way. He needed more character, more certainty of aim in life.…
He got off the bus. The day was dry but overcast. No radiant blue to herald his approach! The farm steading on the right was more squalid than ever. But as the road rose to the crest he found his spirits rising with it. There was something in a wide expanse that either frightened you or let you take wing.
And if there were no geese, at least there was no city female either! A peewit blew up from the roadside with noisy wings and a sharp crying. He stood and watched it circle and tumble. His new friends!
The crocuses were still alight, but the snowdrops were burning low. The lady of the farm answered the knocker with a welcoming smile. There was a fire in the sitting-room!
“I’ve been thinking it over,” she said. “I don’t know, but I thought if you cared to chance it we—we could see in a week or two if we suited each other. I mean I have never done this before and—and I’m not sure if——”
She was nervous over so extraordinary an undertaking! “I’m very glad,” he said. “And then if you find in a week or two that it’s awkward or difficult, why, I’ll perfectly understand. And if I should have to leave for any reason, you’ll understand.” When he smiled in spontaneous friendliness, his face was very attractive.
“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes—that will do fine. I’m glad you understand.” She hesitated, then went on: “This will be your sitting-room. Will it be all right?”
“Couldn’t be better. Ideal.”
“Would you like to see your bedroom?”
“Well, all right.” He followed her up the rather narrow steps of the stairs to a brown-linoleumed landing. “It’s a bigger house than I thought.”
“You don’t see this back part from the front. But this would be your room.”
It was a clean room, aired, with a slope on the roof in front towards an out-jutting peaked window. There was a faint autumn fragrance of apple that made him involuntarily pause and sniff.
“I had some apples spread out on the floor,” she explained. “I thought the smell would have gone by now.”
“I think it’s exciting,” he answered. “I’m trying to remember where I got it before.” But he was quite sure he had never got that scent before, not in such a place. Whence this vivid memory? But he turned his face aside to hide his wonder and saw the flat window in the gable wall to his right. He went over to it and exclaimed: “Why, a garden!”
“Yes, the garden is to the side of the house.”
“I did not think”, he tried to explain, “that you would have much time for a garden. Shows all I know!”
“Well, indeed I don’t, but I get one of the men to do the heavy digging, and then my niece comes at the week-ends and looks after it when the time comes.”
“Is that the girl in the photograph on the table downstairs?”
She looked at him, astonished. “Yes.”
“I just happened to glance at it,” he said. “I think she passed me on the road last Sunday. What a bright airy room!”
“I’m glad you like it.”
There was a pause.
“Well—is that all right, then?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“I think so, too,” he said.
There was a moment’s awkward hesitation, then they both laughed and shook hands.
The following Saturday afternoon, he moved in.
That was three weeks ago, and he had stuck it out manfully. For the first week there was the novelty of the situation, particularly the incredible quiet of the evening, so that sometimes it made him listen with breath held, caught him out of his chair to walk about and stand and listen again. Once or twice he experienced an almost ominous tension in the quiet, as if space or time were made of an invisible glass about to crash in on him. Occasionally he caught himself all taut by the closed door hearkening for the slightest sound from the kitchen premises. The farm cottages were on the other side of the steading, below the edge of the wood.
His landlady had even improved on acquaintance. A mothering women, with bright greetings and a warm husky laugh. Her eyes would move over the supper table even while she was speaking to him, anxious that everything should be there. He had already developed the habit of bringing home the last edition of his paper and any special tit-bit of city news. She loved this and he knew she looked forward to it. Yet though she would stand talking in the friendliest way, she was never obtrusive and always withdrew at the right moment. She respected his privacy and he hers; and it was as well perhaps to keep that up, for a time anyway. Besides, he wanted to do some reading, quiet reading in which he might gather some ideas to turn over and feed on.
His reviewing for the parent daily often dissatisfied him, because he was conscious of using ready-made, if high, standards. Academic and correct, rather than fresh and pungent. There was a sense in which even the best of his reviews were almost automatic. He knew at once when to apply Aristotle!
He got his deepest interest out of books of literary criticism. They excited him more than any other kind of book, certainly more than the usual modern novel, play, or even poetry. He saw the obvious weakness in this for it implied greater interest in the criticism of a thing than in the thing itself. But the implication was only half true. Great literature did not excite him: it quietened him, gathered all his warring parts into a harmony that was self-illumined. But criticism excited him. A Communist turning the Marxian dialectic on H. G. Wells or on Surrealists or on Ezra Pound was enough to whet his mind to a cunning edge. A point for analysis and challenge on every page! For he abhorred a special or propagandist pleading that blurred exact analysis by inexact or partial definition, and none the less because he might agree with the essayist’s main position. For his one birthright that he was not going to sell to any one, or to any cause however he might believe in it, was that ultimate apprehension of truth which brought illumination and, in the complete suspension of disbelief, the spirit’s clear freedom. It was a fundamental of the spiritual life of man as a farm was a fundamental of his economic life. If ever he did write a book, it would probably be a long essay with some such title as Definitions. And with luck it might show a passion for fineness of thought rather than a pedantic appreciation of lucidity!
Yet though here he was in the right spot, with whole long evenings to himself and a quietness he could feel—surely the perfect environment for careful thinking—he found he could hardly even read! This astonished him. And when he tried to think it out, his mind fumbled. Even simple issues slid away unresolved as if his mind were in fact going vague and woolly. The vacant earth! Or the bovine stare!—out of which he had already wakened himself more than once.
True, in that first week a certain positive value did accrue; the morning walk to the bus-stop, the evening walk back, the regular hours and the quiet living—particularly the cutting down of drink—did have a beneficial effect on his health. Imperceptibly his reservoirs began to fill with energy. The coughing that had troubled him on going to bed had diminished to a few dry hacks quite free of discomfort. (After his first night’s performance his landlady, in deep concern, had put a fire in his bedroom. She would lose money on him yet!) More than once when walking to the bus-stop in the morning, he had been invaded by a feeling of physical well-being. It would suddenly come over him, send his eyes happily questing around and his legs in long spanking strides down the road. He had time for a walk in the gloaming, too, and went up through the farm fields, into the wood, and generally explored his immediate environment. Twice, before going to bed, he had had short walks in the moonlight and had heard the owls hooting in the wood.
But the one thing he could not do was concentrate.
The more he recognized the fact, the more restless he became. He could listen, he could “stand and stare”, but he got none of the poet’s sensation of pleasure or fulfilment. On the contrary he was merely pervaded by a feeling of personal futility that, dwelt upon, rapidly mounted into irritation. He found he could do nothing with his physical well-being in the country. There was no way of spending it. Deep in him he began to realize by the end of that first week that the country was of no use to him—apart of course from the animal matter of physical health. He could now understand the gold-diggers who came back to the nearest town to squander their “dust” in a glorious blow-out. One endured in the country for specific reasons.
Deeper than all that, too, lay this thought—the only one he found no difficulty in sustaining. It was a thought or theory that had begun to divide the whole modern world. It dealt with the conception or nature of freedom. Hitherto we had believed that a man could not be absolutely free until he found himself independent of his fellows, with the power to go where he liked and do what he liked. No one man must have dominion over another. So feudalism was fought and conquered and man became free. But soon it was found that man was not free, that he was still everywhere in chains, and more inhuman chains, because they tied him to machines rather than to other human beings. And the results were certainly more inhuman than the world had yet known, in the form of slums, unemployment, poverty, and wars of a brutality and magnitude beyond any medieval dream.
So there arose in the modern age the new school of thought which said that man does not attain freedom by being able to break away from society, but, on the contrary, attains freedom only in and through society itself. Only in a community working, not for the profit of a few but for the good of the whole, does man really become free. For he is a social animal and without his social inheritance would be no more than a beast of the jungle. The old bourgeois conception of the freedom of the individual apart from society was a pretty myth with a hellish inheritance.
So the opposition went. And Will had to admit to himself that, as far as his little effort to attain solitary freedom in the country was concerned, the new school of thought won hands down!
And the experience of being introduced to the landlady’s niece on his second Sunday on the farm did not disillusion him. He could see by an instinctive withdrawing movement the girl made on his unexpected approach that she would have avoided the introduction if she could. But that was now impossible for she and her aunt were standing on the grass in front of the house regarding the dying crocuses, and Mrs. Armstrong, turning round, greeted him, and could not but present “My niece, Jenny—at least I should say Miss Baird.” Her laughing words were a trifle self-conscious, for there was little natural guile in this warm-hearted woman. They bowed without shaking hands, and Mrs. Armstrong to cover her astonishment at such behaviour asked him where he had been and he told her, adding a question or two and being answered. Jenny showed no interest, and looked politely at her crocuses. She was without coat and hat and her hair had deep gold lights in it. There was admittedly a cool distinction in her face. Lifting her eyes unexpectedly, she met his—and did not waver—but calmly regarded him so that he got the impression of the eyes being set wide apart and so clearly blue as to seem translucent. He removed his own as if they had been contemplating her absentmindedly and had in no way been impressed.
He walked into the house chatting to Mrs. Armstrong and, without turning round to acknowledge Jenny, entered his room.
That should about suit her! he thought.
All the same, something in the encounter excited him and he felt acutely annoyed. He understood her attitude perfectly well. Like himself, she wished to be free of the city; had enough of its contacts during the week; did not want, in particular, to run into the city male type. And here she comes to her small estate in the country and finds it invaded by—of all things—a city lodger! It must be a bit galling to her, obviously. And she must have exercised restraint in not persuading her aunt to refuse him. Yet there again, restraint was palpably her most striking characteristic!
But, above all, what right had she to do the whole thing with so calm and untroubled a face? He could see the face still. Primavera in the picture! Her cool grace did not impress him, and if she was afraid he might claim her acquaintance, either here or in town, she was mistaken, vastly mistaken. The legend of her little country estate was safe enough as far as he was concerned!
Finding himself all worked up, he paused, contemplated himself, and began to chuckle.
His landlady came in to set the supper table. They talked about his walk again, where he had gone and the degree of less cold in the air. There was nothing else to talk about—except the new item, the niece.
“She works in town, but loves to come out here for the week-end. She’s been giving me my orders to-day about getting the garden dug and manured! She’s daft on flowers.”
“Is she?”
“Yes. Every week-end she’ll be out, after the next one. It’s a craze with her. And she knows every flower there is, I think—Latin names and all!”
“Really!”
“Oh, she’s a one! And very clever. She works in an office in town. She’s the private secretary to a partner in a big firm of exporters.”
“Very clever of her.”
“She had to know Spanish.”
“Oh!”
“Yes. She had to learn it specially.”
“She would, I’m sure. I mean you don’t usually get it at school.”
“No.” She was modestly proud of her niece. “Do you like this stew?”
“I think it’s delicious.”
“You are not difficult to please, I must say.”
“You don’t give me a chance to grumble. By the way, if I should be late any night getting home, for goodness’ sake don’t wait for me. If I’m not here at my usual supper time, you’ll know I’m eating in town.”
She paused. “I hope you’re not going to start working late. If you don’t mind me saying so, I think you’re looking better since you came. And that cough has got less a lot.”
He reassured her. It would only be occasionally. And if he was delayed beyond the last bus and didn’t turn up at all, she mustn’t worry.
When she had gone out he asked himself ironically: Paving the way for return to the fleshpots—already?
He was not blinding himself any more. The whole final truth of his retreat to the country was no more than an elaborate (and rather silly) pretence.
Then one morning, on the way to the bus, a cold morning of sleety rain, he got wet from the thighs down and spent a miserable day with a swelling throat, drank hot whisky toddy in a cosy corner with some of the boys, caught the last bus, and got soaked again on the mile-walk home. That weather kept up for several days. He bought waterproof leggings and a sou’wester.
With blind darkness and rain over the face of the country, Don asked him on the third night: “Honest to God, is it worth it?”
He got up and stretched himself before the fire in the saloon bar. He could not give in to them. That was his trouble now. The argument grew hot.
“All the same, that’s what gets you,” said Will. “You live in this fetid atmosphere, you crawl home through the streets, like rats through open sewers, and tumble, half-sodden, into your bunks——”
“And what do you do?” interrupted Mac.
“Ah—I stride through the country, wind and rain in my face, exhilarating, like a song. In fact, I often do sing. I arrive in a glow. I strip—and into a bath—and then——”
“You don’t sing again?” Jackie raised his eyebrows.
Rob intervened for the first time. He had been watching Will. “You’re all wrong. I know what it is. The dam’ fellow has got a woman.”
Light broke on their faces. There was a clamour.
Will glanced at his watch. “Good heavens! She’ll think I’ve got run over. I’ll have to sprint. So long, you bunch of soaks!” and he grabbed his hat.
“You dark horse!” cried Jackie. “So that’s why you have never invited us out!”
Now he had not invited them out because he dared not, because there was nothing to show them, nowhere to go. All he could do was to take them to the nearest country pub and that meant a walk of over two miles. He could not ask fellows, bright intelligent fellows, out to his place for the privilege of gazing at trees and hedges—all bare—in a cold wind and expect them to be excited! After the first few minutes, they would feel helpless, awkward, and would begin looking around for some way of escape. All that could possibly be done at such a moment was to put more coal on the fire and produce a bottle. They would then brighten up at once!
In their position he would feel exactly like them and would brighten up at the same moment.
Inside the bus, the damp air made the atmosphere fuggy. Smelling of stale tobacco smoke and sweaty clothes. The bodies swayed and jerked at the same time; then off again in the incessant rumble that seemed to judder the bowels.
His thought continued of its own volition with the queer effect of a cinema inside a moving vacuum. It lifted up a recent book on Iceland by some young London poets that he had been given to review. Entertaining—but not a book on Iceland. Iceland—a new exotic background against which to place Byron, the civilization and culture of London—and themselves. Iceland for them meant death. Their book’s real message. Honest in its modern fashion and (had there been anything to fear) fearless. Another young poet of the same school had characterized a fine peasant woman profoundly portrayed by a northland writer as “a primitive creature”. Something of pleasant condescension in the phrase had made Will call the poet a pup. But there it was! And if he took his own landlady—well, in the hands of a great writer she might be a remarkable figure, a sort of universal mother or universal provider—she certainly had many admirable human qualities—but as far as interesting or attracting him was concerned she was his particular interpretation of the odious phrase “a primitive creature”. It was no good pretending otherwise. The poet’s country was an ideal country, “remembered” for the most part within four walls. In direct contact with the real country, a thinker found it full of distracting discomforts, and a poet abstracted from its harsh realities notions for verses, not only according to his gifts but also to suit the sentimental bourgeois illusion of being free, of glorious freedom. Objectively it was impossible, but subjectively quite a lot could be made of it.
That was the game. His colleagues did not need to be thinkers or poets to come to the same conclusion. He must be writing a book, or wenching, or doing something equally daft, before he would hide like this! They knew about it all, they knew!
The bodies swayed back and then jerked forward like corpses. He got up. The bus conductor was a girl with a soft skin and dark eyes, and dark leather straps. She returned his smile of good-night. She had been kissed often, he could see. She would make a lingering kiss. The bus roared away, and the wind and the rain got him. He hoped his landlady was in bed. He was weary and wanted to tumble into sleep.
For there was one thing he could do in the country: he could sleep. If he lost that gift.…
And then he lost it.
It happened one night when coming back from the last bus, he found that a small rain had taken all the winter out of the air and he smelt the new life in the earth.
His landlady was in bed and as usual had left a tumbler of milk, with a saucer on top, not far from the fire. The thought of what the boys would say if they saw him now drinking this strange liquor made him smile. He must order it sometime in the Press Club!
The enlivening touch in the atmosphere had freshened and slightly excited his mind. Turning up the wick of the Aladdin lamp, he decided he would try a few minutes’ serious reading.
And what could be more apt than an essay on The Modern Mind, by T. S. Eliot? For the interesting thing about Mr. Eliot was that, though regarded as the most revolutionary force in modern poetry, yet no man in his essays put up a finer case for orthodoxy and tradition.
Will found himself, for the first time since coming to the country, reading with close attention, indeed with almost a full measure of the excitement fine literary criticism usually raised in him, and this highly pleased him. He could see the author thinking out his subject not pedantically but with wisdom. The inclusiveness and precision of his definitions acted like a stimulant; and when suddenly he came upon Mr. Eliot exhibiting not only, as it seemed to him, a doubtful wisdom but—what he would have betted was quite impossible—a questionable taste, his enjoyment was quickened.
Mr. Eliot was discussing the work of the distinguished scholar and critic, Mr. I. A. Richards, for whom he explicitly entertained a great respect. Mr. Richards had been trying to come to grips with the very difficult matter of how properly to appreciate or respond to poetry, and in this connexion was inclined to believe that “something like a technique or ritual for heightening sincerity might well be worked out”. For sometimes after one’s best efforts, response to a poem remained uncertain. When that happened, and in order to get the heightening of sincerity necessary to penetrate and dispel the uncertainty, Mr. Richards suggested one should “sit by the fire (with eyes shut and fingers pressed firmly on the eyeballs) and consider with as full ‘realization’ as possible:
(1) Man’s loneliness (the isolation of the human situation).”
And promptly underneath it came Mr. Eliot’s comment: “Loneliness is a frequent attitude in contemporary lyrics known as ‘the blues’.…”
Will laughed, as if he could hardly believe it!
Restless, he laid the book aside and lit a cigarette. Was he going to get a slant on Eliot’s vulnerability through his blind spot (even if deliberately blind)?…
It was two o’clock before he got to bed, and it was his belief that he had never properly fallen asleep, his mind remaining active below a thin skin of sleep, when all at once he found himself wide awake, listening for the first time to that full chorus of bird-singing in the dawn.
For a few moments it was as if he had awoke in another and more innocent world, and he held his breath. The music of the dawn!
Yes, there was the poet’s chorus! Marvelling, he continued to listen.…
He was glad he had heard it.… However, he must get some sleep.
He turned round and snuggled his head and lay still—and found himself thinking. So he turned round the other way.
The chorus continued, grew deeper in power, more compelling. His brain began carrying on last night’s debate from The Modern Mind. When he shut out any one particular thought, another immediately entered, until his brain was like a seething dormitory inhabited by Mac, Mr. Eliot, Jenny, the office, the staff, the city, the whole blasted world that he had ever seen, thought, hated, craved, or imagined in any form whatsoever!
And all with an etched intensity. It’s this cursed mind of mine! he cried. It’s lain fallow so long that now it’s all naked and white and fierce as ten thousand devils! He banished them with a stupendous effort—to discover himself in a moment looking at Mac’s face, Mac’s satiric face, now openly sneering and disintegrating. Yes, he knew that face, he knew what it was after. It was the face of a man, thwarted himself, warped and thwarted in his spirit, pursuing him, Will, slowly, remorsely, until he would break his resistance, bit by bit, get him down to his own level and then dominate him with a devil’s satisfaction.
Will turned over and groaned. He hated that picture. It was like treachery. It was filthy. And then another mind, remorseless in its inescapable insight, regarded him with still irony: it was his own mind.
The dawn-chorus continued.…
He had just fallen, not into sleep so much as into a state of exhaustion, when his landlady knocked. He did not answer. She knocked again. He had to make a real effort to subdue a blind wrath and answer in his normal voice.
That day he was lunching with his school and college friend, Philip Manson, already a junior partner in an old-established shipping concern. They had packed a few scrums in their time, arms round each other’s neck, and, when they happened to meet, they would finish up: “What about lunch sometime?” Philip would consult his diary and a day be fixed. After lunch and a few drinks, they would agree that it was a mistake they didn’t meet oftener, life was short and.… The intervals grew longer.
“Here, don’t you find the roosters troublesome in the morning?” Philip asked.
“No; can’t say I have.”
“You must be a good sleeper for a townsman. You should thank your stars!”
“I’ve heard a few birds singing,” said Will.
“Oh, that’s all right. That would suit your literary tastes! But when a couple of roosters get answering each other—you could twist their necks off. Fearful racket. And then you sort of begin to look for it; waken up at three or four at their clarion shrill!” He smiled reminiscently. “It was an extraordinary spring that. You remember it? I was fourteen.”
“You were sent to the country to recover from that spell of diphtheria, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. The most remarkable thing I remember—sex would impress at that age—were the cows; it must have been late April. They were all mad and bellowed with incredible ferocity. In my bed, I could hear them being let out into the field in the early morning. And when a cow was well away with it, she would bellow even when she was drawing in her breath. I used to get up and steal to the window and watch the bull go through his mystic rights.” He laughed pleasantly. “But of course it’s too early in the year for that yet. And you’ll miss the day-long racket because you’ll be in town. But you’ll always have the week-ends—and the early mornings, of course!”
“It’s all right pulling my leg—but consider what it’s meant to you.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, wouldn’t your life have been thinner without that experience?”
“Oh, I see!” He thought for a moment. “Do you know, it would,” he confessed. “It’s like something that happened very long ago and—and——”
“And not quite in this life.”
Philip smiled thoughtfully, then looked at Will. “You don’t change much! You are still—you still get that queer slant on things.”
“As if I hadn’t grown up!”
“Honestly, I don’t know. You are the only fellow who ever contrived to make me feel I missed something. And yet at the same time did not arouse envy. It’s difficult to explain.”
“That sort of thought does tie the mind up in knots.”
“It does rather,” said Philip, with the characteristic self-assurance that permitted him to continue being interested in his own thought.
His clothes had always been distinguished by quality and personal taste; a tie, a shirt, a new texture or colouring, something that attracted the eye without being obtrusive; a man’s clothes. His manners had always been easy and good; the brown note less evident now perhaps in his dark hair; his eyes dark-blue and prepared to remain upon one with the same old candour. From the beginning he had been cut out for a directorship, for he had restraint and tact and inspired a friendly confidence. A managing director, a chairman! Already, at thirty-one, he could afford to look back on the more curious aspects of life with a natural self-possession.
He now wanted to pursue this elusive quality in life which he must have got, he said, that time in the country.
“No, not then,” said Will. “You didn’t get it then. You never got it until just now.”
Philip deliberated. “You think so? But how, then, could I know about it?”
“Let us start at the beginning. What exactly is it?”
Philip’s brows gathered. “I’m hanged if I know,” he said, and laughed candidly. “Let’s have another drink. I’d like to get down to this.”
Will was still feeling a bit wretched, and now up over him crept a premonition of awful boredom. But he liked Philip. Had always liked him.
The talk went on. But it was Will who had to define; who had to entertain Philip with the thought he did not normally encounter. Will felt himself being drained, and finally said he had to get back to the office.
“I really have enjoyed this.” Philip got up. “Couldn’t you come out some evening.… Not at all. The bill is mine. I asked you. Look here, what about.…”
Will spoke to his landlady at supper.
“We did have two roosters,” she replied, “but just before you came one killed the other in a fight, and then some one left the door into the old pigsty open and he went in and pecked the bait on a rat-trap. But I’m getting one on Saturday, I hope, and he’ll have to do until our own grow up.”
Tired as he was, he took a walk in the dark, stumbling here and there, so that he should sleep soundly. He left all essayists severely alone. Once or twice, after an illness, he had had a spell of sleepless early mornings, and knew the devilish accuracy with which the mind delighted in awaking at the same hour. If such a habit were to be formed here, life would become finally intolerable.
He awoke at the dawn chorus.
The following morning he awoke at the same time.
And now here he was awake again. The habit had been well and truly formed!
The making up of his mind deliberately to listen to the singing was something more than a gesture of despair. It was, at the root of his being, a cold and bitter defiance. If he had to listen, then listen he would in a detachment so complete that he would conquer the singing, master it, withdraw from it, and so, as far as he was concerned, annihilate it.
He lay flat on his back, his arms extended by his side, his legs slightly apart and at full stretch. His breathing came evenly and lightly through his nostrils. His mouth and eyes were shut, his head sideways.
He listened.
For a time the underlying hatred kept him from anything like detachment. But little by little as the dramatic varieties in the presentation of the chorus claimed his attention, the hatred began to sink down, to seep away, and the feeling of exhaustion, freed from emotional enravelment, brought to his body a certain cool ease.
This in itself was a great relief, as if his drained flesh had grown lighter. That thick congestion of the brain, charged with obscuring pulsing blood, that followed the intense visualizations of sleeplessness, was thinning away at the same time; was thus no doubt the real cause of the lightness and ease. So that the vision of the prairie in the thin but clear morning light came not only upon his mind but also upon his body, filtering in a cool air through the bedclothes. As the advancing gulls brought the sea, his body began to lose its corporeal feel altogether and to float in a still wonder. This wonder quickened with the short sharp cries that he thought were the cries of terns. Then all in a moment, before his body could ground again, the wild geese opened the world above his closed eyes and in a movement of sheer enchantment his spirit, his own most intimate self, rose up and experienced such a sensation of freedom as he had never known in his life.
While the enchantment—a convenient word—lasted he was not excited or deeply moved. If the term “moved” may be used at all—and it is heavy—then, in the literal meaning, he was highly moved. It was a still, freed, high-up delight, in the sense that the light and horizons of the morning were about him. The hemisphere over his flat world opened out like a bright fan—though fan implies something opaque, when the experience was essentially and indeed precisely a removal of the opaque. More than that—though this is difficult—he not only experienced this delight in himself, as an intensely personal realization, but also he was part of all that was about him. Was this the final problem of “identification with the object” that so troubled his professor when expounding Hindu thought? Will did not “think” the question. The question and its answer were the one flash of light.
How long the experience lasted he could not tell, though he would be prepared to say not more than a few moments. For here time obviously did not matter, except perhaps in its implication that the nature of his experience was timeless. He let it pass without any desire to hang on to it. In fact when he felt it sinking down with him into sleep, he thought to himself, How delicious this is! drawing out the thought through a lingering lovely triumph that left him breathing lightly in a sleep that might have made curious eyes imagine he was listening somewhere.