He slept until his landlady knocked him and then awoke quickly with the feeling that this was a holiday or some “free” occasion of the kind that he could not recollect. As he remembered, a slow humour spread over his face. He looked up at the ceiling. It was just the ceiling. But as he kept looking the ghost of his experience rose in a faraway brightness beyond the house-top. Very visionary indeed! Very flimsy!
It was a good joke! He could not “rise” now if he wanted to. Did he want to? Not he!
He threw the clothes off with a swoop and leapt to his feet. A good sleep was a blessed thing. He hummed a snatch of jazz and chuckled at the dancing movement of his feet. Carry on! he said. But it was fine to have the feeling of life, of being alive in a living world. Yes, a fine day. He stooped and sniffed the air through the bottom half of the window (the top half was permanently fixed). Spring was coming in and no doubt about it.
“You look nice and cheerful this morning!” said Mrs. Armstrong, as she tugged the cosy with the green leaves and pink buds down over the tea-pot. It was a close fit, with a hole for the spout, like an old maid’s mitten. Last night he had very nearly told her not to do it, on the principle that stewed tea was an abomination. He must have been pretty low!
How many persons living in town knew what a fresh egg was? White curd and vivid yolk. “I had a grand sleep,” he said. “It’s a nice morning, too.”
“Yes. You can smell the spring in the air to-day. Jenny will be getting quite excited.”
“Why?”
“So many of her things coming up. There are two of her special daffodils out to-day. Whenever she arrives she makes a dive for the garden. And then it’s look at this and look at that! You would think Santa Claus had brought them.”
He laughed so spontaneously that Mrs. Armstrong’s smile broke into a husky note or two on its own.
Santa Claus! he thought, going up the avenue. The birds were extremely busy. Not one of them rested a moment. A flash—and gone. His sight was so keen that more than once it caught dark-beaded eyes. And one blackbird, wings lowered and tail flicking, suddenly kicked up an extraordinary row. A blacker blackbird swooped swiftly down and up and into the hedge in front without a wing-beat in the loveliest curve he had ever seen. Spring magic! Or just plain love? It sure quickened their pulses! Green shoots from Santa Claus: O.K., boys, let it ride—right through to the end.
Here now was the public road. Country faces might poke up and behold his mirth. Or lean over a gate and wonder.
Lean over a gate and wonder!
Words were haunted. Lightning-sketch artists of the haunted chamber. All alive like birds—or dead as a pile of counters.
We’re all dead! said Will. And I’ll probably be dead again to-night, but what the hell does that matter? To-night will then be now, and unborn to-morrow will be now, and—you can smell the spring in the air. Oh, dear God, you could, but don’t smell it too strongly, not too strongly, not this scent of paradisial promise, not this memory of primordial mornings, not this freshness of creation’s dawn, not—not too much of it, anyway. Just a little in the by-going, as much as you have a head to carry. Only a fool, who has lost his cunning, gets drunk.
A good sleep did make a difference. It cleansed the sight in so remarkable a way that it caught birds’ eyes and unbroken hawthorn buds in a side-glance.
And then the wind—not much of it but soft, soft. He once knew a man—an electrical engineer from Lancashire—who told him he stopped being a spiritualist when he began to see the wind. It had the loveliest curves, he said in a morose tone. So you stopped?… I got frightened, he said.
If he had gone on until he was able to see spring’s scent in the wind as well! But probably it was no laughing matter.…
The bus—with the girl herself! “Good morning,” he greeted her normally, squatting down on the rear seat instead of going forward, as usual. “And how’s life?”
She gave him a quick astonished glance (it was the first time he had been personal), then smiled, reassured by his eyes. “Oh, not too bad.” A soft friendly honest country girl. “And how’s it with yourself?” she ventured.
“Champion!” he said.
She smothered a laugh.
“You don’t live in the town?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“Come on, now—I know you don’t.”
“How do you know?”
“You’re real.”
“You’re fresh, for so early in the morning.”
“Because I live in the country—like you.”
That fairly amused her, and she turned her back to the interior of the bus.
“Do you like living in the country?” he asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I merely asked. But, look here, I’ll tell you something. You wouldn’t mind living in the town except for one thing.”
“What thing?” She looked at him, and her soft eyes were shrewd enough.
“Because he doesn’t live there.”
“Are you trying to be personal or what?” But her cheeks caught a slight flush.
“Sorry if I’m personal. Did not mean to be. Say you forgive me.”
“I don’t think you’re so simple as you look.”
“Compliments are fairly flying.”
“Yes, aren’t they?”
He lit a cigarette. “No good offering you one, I suppose—now that you’re on duty?”
“No. Thanks all the same.”
It was not very easy to out-talk the rumble without raising his voice, and as she swayed expertly with the motion of the bus he sometimes had to lift his face slightly and she to lower her ear. It bred a kind of conspiracy, for they had to watch that the performance was not too obvious to the passengers.
“Tell me,” he said. “What does a shy fellow do when he wants—when he doesn’t know how to go about it?”
“Wants what? When I want anything I ask for it.”
“Do you? That’s an idea.” he nodded solemnly. “But tell me—who do you ask?”
“Santa Claus,” she said.
He laughed abruptly so that several of the passengers turned round. She began to check her tickets. The bus stopped and more passengers came in.…
As the bus drew into the terminus he got up and hung on, standing beside her. As the brakes were applied, he swayed and murmured in her ear: “Any good hanging up my stocking?”
“You’re daft,” she said.
The street itself was a wide grin as he went down it. The chimney pots—had he ever seen the chimney pots of this street before? He felt so friendly to her in the end, so excited by her warm presence, that he could have kissed her!
Though the street went downhill, not one of the endless crowd looked any way but straight ahead on the human level. Bowler hats, neatly rolled umbrellas, felt hats, handbags, all ages, with tweed caps and workmen’s dungarees here and there in small coveys. A double stream each side the street flowing on to an endless destination, while in between roared cataracts of traffic.
Was the “endless destination” achieved by the streams going both ways at the same time? Was this an illustration of the mathematician’s three-dimensional world moving up a stationary fourth-dimensional block? It probably wouldn’t be. It so rarely was! But in heaven’s name don’t smile on the street to yourself. Smile in a church to yourself, but not on a street. See how solemn these business men are, solemn and correct. And those eyes, myriads of eyes, looking ahead, straight into nothing—concerned, weary, glittering, expressionless, with something vaguely combatant, in their vaguely intolerant reserve.
And all fundamentally concerned with making nests like blackbirds, only bigger and better nests.
And what things to make nests out of in the shop windows! What lovely things, what cunning gadgets, what beauty of line and brilliance of colour! All for making nests. Bedroom suites, evening dresses, marble baths.…
But the songs, the tumultuous singing? Here, in the radio shop, next door to the plumber’s shining display of lavatory pans. Everything you want for everything. The civilized man puts it over on the blackbird by turning a knob and getting some one else to do it for him.
It’s all been said so often, thought Will, that it means nothing. Beyond the chimney pots the sky was spring’s own blue with little angel clouds puffed out in light. Let us sing!
You’re daft! she said.
He saw the policeman on the kerb glance at him. Out of curiosity, when he had gone on twenty yards, he looked back—and saw the policeman’s face still gazing after him. I must have smiled! I’d better be careful! This is the eternal city.
And here, his own place—with the latest photographs of the international situation in the window, flanked by sporting events and personages. Now for the thick of it, now for the whirling hub of the universe!
Past the long mahogany public counter of births, marriages, deaths and advertisements—and up in the lift. “Fine day, Jim.” “Ay, it seems more settled like.” Crash of the gate and along the corridor. Before a dark door, on impulse he knocked. “Come in!” He entered, hat in hand. “Could you tell me, please, if Mr. David Macgregor is supposed to work here?”
Mac turned his back. “Jesus, he thinks that a joke,” he muttered to no one.
Don gave Will a wink. Mr. David Macgregor was in bad form.
In between the rush hours they managed a bit of fun now and then. Will was the rugby expert, but he knew the soccer lingo inside out. Boxers, footballers, racers—their own personal stories or expert criticisms written while they waited. Don had a native flair for international affairs. His Highland guile! It was in constant demand those days and famous international names were tossed about the room with a freedom of jocose epithet denied to footballers. The soft black pencil cut, shaped, completed—or conjured—marvels to be shouted along the street. Decisive strokes—right, let it go! There were fellows who, though regularly cut to bits, would keep on sending in screeds.
The peak of the forenoon rush was got over. Mac was up in the case-room seeing the first edition through. He was really first-rate at his job; thorough and incisive, from makeup to bill captions.
“He must have been on the skite last night,” said Don.
Will nodded. “Fairly late—by the threads in his eyeballs.”
There were about a dozen of them in the long room with its long desk. Next door the news phones were trickling the sap from the world tree, main trunk and branches.
The old Ygdrasil for the modern myth.
But Will would not let his mind function all out. Clamp it down. Hang up its receivers. And a fellow could be decently normal, if only his eyes behaved. They were the very devil. For the worst of eyes is that when they see a new thing—or an old thing plain—they look at it. He did not look directly at Don, but smiled as they chatted, tapping the wall behind him with the butt of his pencil. Don’s black hair was luxuriant, rising resiliently from the main shed and brushed over into the suavity of an advertisement for hair cream. A slim handsome fellow, his own height. But his skin was a little raw and grey to-day. The city product—the Highlands drained out of him—yet not and never of the city, like the city born. A practical fellow, knowing the right side of a good time. The bleak Highlands behind him, thank God. Reading French and German at night—sporadically, with no method. The foreign correspondent. The adventurer. Destined never to adventure.
You could not look at him—and see his essential ghost.
So he looked at the others and saw the envelopes their minds put around them, saw each moving about in his own, carrying everywhere his invisible balloon!
Nothing could ever break this integument. Like the lens of the human eye, it would thicken with time.
In due course those of them who wanted a drink went out and had it. The majority preferred coffee. Mac wanted a pint whoever else wanted anything. Don and Rob and Will went with him. As dry ground sucks in water, Mac’s flesh sucked in the draught beer. It watered him and did him good.
“A thick night?” said Don.
“Oh, so so,” said Mac. “What’s this stunt on gardening that’s biting Tamerlane?”
“Bungaloid growth and popularity of BBC gardening hints,” explained Don. “He’ll give Lady Burly-Motley the push, and get some one who’ll really do it—and spread herself on it.”
Mac turned to Will. “Why don’t you apply for the job?”
Will looked at him and kept looking, thoughtfully. “That’s an idea,” he said.
“What the hell you looking at?”
“The idea,” said Will. “I wonder if you would be kind enough to put in a good word for me with Tamerlane? You’re his white-haired laddie and I might make it worth your while.”
Mac exploded in one word and pushed his glass away from him. The others laughed. Then he turned back to Will. “Know what’s wrong with you?”
“No?”
“Protracted adolescence.”
Rob guffawed. But Will appeared to take it thoughtfully. “I don’t think you’re right,” he said.
“No?” Mac showed the three satiric upper teeth.
Will shook his head. “I think it’s protracted childhood.”
Mac drew his hand over his face as if Will’s eyes were giving it an itch, and wrung his mouth. Then he cleared his throat, and, going to the fire, spat in it.
“You would know,” he said.
They all laughed at that.
“Yours”, continued Mac, looking distastefully at his empty glass, “is the sort of cheerful morning face that gives a fellow a pain in the guts.”
“Perhaps you had a cheerful face last night,” Will suggested, “though no one might guess it. Another pint?”
“Where were you last night, Mac?” Rob asked.
“Where wasn’t I?”
“Actually, he means,” said Don.
“You trying to be clever, too? What a bunch of wits has Tamerlane! You’ll be going to London next.”
“You’re a philosopher, Mac,” said Rob.
“That’s something higher than a wit,” Don explained.
“Oh?” said Mac, looking at him.
“The difficulty about being a philosopher”, said Will, “is the difficulty of knowing when you’re a philosopher or merely a comic turn.”
Rob let out his guffaw. Don glanced quickly at Mac. Will saw the red-eyed weasel in Mac’s eyes and continued: “And at least we know you’re not a comic turn.”
“That’s it. Rub it in!” said Rob, laughing huskily. The more one hit off the other, the more Rob enjoyed things.
“You’re a bloody——,” said Mac directly to Will, using an ugly word.
“Oh come now, Mac,” said Don quickly. “Play the old game. That’s bordering on the personal. Besides—I think his aunt must have died.”
“What aunt?” asked Rob.
“The wealthy one. How could he be so cheerful else?” Will recognized that Don was giving Mac time to get over his momentary spleen. “You’ll be able to touch him for a bit, Mac.”
“I would not touch him with the muddy end of a barge pole.”
Will smiled sarcastically and presently, as they went out, Don gave him a wink. Will nodded acknowledgment. One must understand the morning after the night before.
But that evening, as Will was leaving the building, he came on Mac buttoning his coat.
“Hurrying home to your farm?” inquired Mac satirically.
“Well—yes, I am.”
“Not even time for a small one?”
Will looked at his watch. “It would mean missing the next bus—unless we made it a quick one.”
“Come on, then,” said Mac grumpily. So they went into the usual office pub, and, when the drinks were served, sat down. Mac had hardly looked at Will and now remarked: “You were trying to be pretty smart this morning.”
“Was I? I didn’t notice it.”
“You were. You can be damned irritating when you are like that.”
“Is that so? You used a stinking word yourself.”
“Hurt, did it?”
“Not noticeably. Still—if we can’t keep things within bounds they’ve got to stop.”
Mac was looking at the glass his fist gripped on the table. Will saw the internal struggle and knew that Mac had deliberately waylaid him. Mac was sorry now he had used the word but could not bring himself to apologize. He would prefer to jockey Will into the position where an apology would be unnecessary and he would still dominate.
“They’ve got to stop, have they?” Mac asked.
Will felt himself weakening. He hated to push a man against his nature. “Let us forget it,” he said. “Doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter, doesn’t it?”
“No,” said Will.
“Oh, all right,” said Mac, as if he were being choked off. “So long as you say so.”
“Right,” said Will. “Same again?”
“Dammit, you can”, said Mac, accepting his drink with a softening satire, “be—sort of—complacent or superior or something. It does irritate a fellow before he knows where he is.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sure.”
“There you go!” said Mac, with a snort of laughter. “Can’t help yourself.” But the tone was more human. He was becoming friendly, and Will felt himself weakening still more.
“When it comes to being complacent and cocksure, you take a lot of beating yourself,” Will said. “The hell of a lot.”
“Do I?” wondered Mac.
“You do. Yours is the most destructive annihilating mind I know.”
“Is it?” With a vague smile towards his fingers, Mac revolved the glass on the table.
“There’s no ‘is it?’ about it. And I’ll tell you some more.” And Will went on and told it. For he knew that Mac, in his present mood, was accepting the denunciation like flattery. The more oaths in the language, the better Mac liked it. I’m toadying to him now! thought Will. I hate this language. It’s fake; it’s weakness. And all to put him right with himself, to warm him. Deeper than that, too: he is dimly aware in his cunning animal part that I am being weak; that I am not strong on my own plain where I could defy him, madly irritate him, but being weak on his plain, and therefore weak all over, and fit, in a final thought, for the snort of contempt that is comforting.
He withdrew his eyes from Mac to his own glass.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Mac. “God knows, perhaps you’re right.”
Will lit a cigarette and said nothing.
“It’s all bloody show anyway—this whole nightmare we call civilization. What’s it all getting at? God, think of us in our daily round, think of Tamerlane and his cock-eyed stunts. Muck—slush and muck. Each trying to be a bit superior to the other. Each sure in his own rat-infested mind that he is clever enough to put it over on some one else. Toadying to this one, toadying to that, toadying to Tamerlane, toadying to the Lord God Almighty. The whole thing is a vomit.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“No? You think you can put it right with your socialism! Or by living in the country! Socialism—what’s that but something to get a kick out of? When some one stands up in a blind alley and spouts like a diarrhetic fountain, why do you think he’s doing it? For love of his fellow man? Listen to him. The pure fire-eater. The fighter with his mouth. The hater. Have you ever heard Christ’s humility there? He wants to kill half humanity for a kick-off, the half that doesn’t agree with him. Love of his fellow man? Jesus! The only man he loves is himself. And when he hears his own voice, he is the most thrilled person in the bunch. You can see it warm him. The warmth the actor gets, the exhibitionist. And then—the sense of power. Power over his fellow men. Not love of them. Power over them, until his bowels move with his own importance—or such tripes as he may have for bowels.”
Will gave a soft laugh. “There may be instances, but——”
“I’m not speaking instances. I’m generalizing from experience and an elementary knowledge of normal psychology. Have you ever stood up at a street corner and spoken? No. Why? As a blessed socialist your love of humanity is no less, I assume, than the fellow who does. You don’t do it because it doesn’t take you that way. You would get no kick out of it. Which is my point. You belong to the crowd who have in them the instinct of escape. So you escape—to a farm in the country.”
“And you?”
“I take my stand in the only reality I know—the mud. And be damned! The rest is all sickening egotism and fake.”
Will looked with a start at his watch. “Heavens!” he said, getting up. “I’ll have to do the escape trick pretty smartly.”
“Hey, you’re not going?”
“Sorry, Mac, I must. I warned you.”
Mac’s brows lowered darkly. “What the hell are you going for? Isn’t there the whole night?”
“Not to-night. And I’ve got to run. So long!”
“Here!”
But Will was out the door. He had already missed his bus by ten minutes, he knew, but if he had admitted that to Mac, he would have found it difficult to break away an hour later. Mac was obviously prepared to make a night of it. He was still decidedly under the alcoholic weather, or he would not have spoken at such length. Mac wanted to have him, to take him, step by step, down into the pit of the night.…
How furious he would now be, how darkly he would curse and hate him!
Will felt himself drift along the street like a tall leaf. When virtue was taken out of him in this way, his body became light and evasive as his mind. People and objects, the street itself, also became slightly detached from normal reality.
When they had mentioned his aunt, the idea had flashed through his mind that he would visit her, and he had actually been leaving the office with that intention when he had met Mac. But Mac had been too strong for him, and now there would be a smell of whisky off his breath. He could not visit her now. Did not want to. He had better go and have some tea.
He drifted on, straight ahead, and almost collided with Philip Manson, who was standing gaily chatting to a young woman while consulting his small diary.
“Pardon——” muttered Will, before the two men recognized each other.
“Hal-lo!” Philip all but laughed. “We don’t often barge into each other!” He turned to the girl. “Talk about the devil!” he said. “This is the friend of mine I was telling you about who went to live on a farm.” Will had already seen that the girl was Jenny. “May I introduce Mr. Will Montgomery—Miss Baird.”
“How d’you do?” said Will pleasantly and naturally as if he had never seen her in his life, then turned to Philip. “I must have been coming along half-dreaming——”
“It’s his normal condition,” Philip explained. She had flushed slightly, for she had involuntarily been about to recognize Will. “He generally has some strange theory or other—and in argument is more slippery than any eel.”
“See how cleverly he destroys any argument I might have before I open my mouth? He was always like that.”
“Don’t believe him!” Philip was in good form. “You know the awful sort of person who says something to you, almost negligently—and you’re still wondering about it a week afterwards? That’s him.”
Miss Baird smiled socially.
“I hope you can imagine him wondering a week afterwards about anything?”
“My dear fellow,” Philip said, “if I can remember a remark of yours for a week, I trust you can understand that there are other things which might stick in my mind more strongly and possibly even for a longer time.”
“My dear fellow,” replied Will in the same amusingly artificial tone, “you have hit the nail completely on the head with, if I may be allowed to say so, your usual gallantry.”
Both men laughed, but the last word just managed to touch Philip on the cheek, and with the interchange of eyeflash, Will conveyed an extra small chuckle of triumph for luck.
“But I must be off,” Will said. “It’s all very well for you townspeople to dawdle about and enjoy the civilized amenities——”
“Quite!” Philip interrupted. “While you go to assume your arduous duties on your farm. By the way, it is only after you left that I remembered. Wait.… What is your country address?”
“A note to the office is the surest way of getting me. Goodbye.” He smiled to them both, raising his hat; turned and was gone.
I’m escaping all right! Will thought to himself. Nobody is getting me! Then he drifted along thinking no more, but amused in a vague bright way by the chance meeting. Philip and Jenny were of a kind. Her lips and nails had city paint they hadn’t had in the country—or hadn’t they? She had the brightness in her colouring of—daffodils.
He sat down at his tea table and looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it when he came in. Then he had a second look because he had missed the faces after all. There was no one he knew. The waitress came beside him and stood still.
“Anything you can suggest?” He glanced up with a smile.
Her face was pale and wearied and her smile was wan. Its waxen frailty stabbed his heart with its long-suffering. He dropped his head over the menu card, shutting his teeth, then glanced up with a still pleasanter smile. “A poached egg, please.”
“One poached egg, thank you.”
He looked at her dark-clad body as it moved away between the tables. His own body quickened in a spasm of pain.
“Thanks,” he said, when she had disposed his food before him. But he did not look at her this time. What right had he to introduce a winning smile, an easy sympathy, a hidden understanding? She asked for nothing. Got it. And kept her head up.
What more to be done?
What a plague of interference with the hidden lives of others! Winning smile?… No wonder Mac got the grue!
The poached egg was like her waxen cheek. What in the name of providence had made him ask for an egg? Reflex of the pre-farm era! Its smoothness tickled the roof of his mouth. It smelt faintly. The misbegotten thing was sick. Its pale yellow oozed over the wet toast. The taste was death on a bed of rotting straw. He stretched out knife and fork beside it, quietly shoved the plate aside, and, looking up, encountered the face of Jenny as she entered.
Jenny’s face passed over him in search of a vacant table. There was one immediately on his left. But she found another three tables away and went there. She had seen him all right, but had not allowed the smallest flicker of recognition or subsequent self-consciousness to show. Not even a flick of hauteur. Just nothing.
That definitely was something to her credit! He listened for her voice. “Mixed fruit.” He couldn’t have guessed better!
She would probably be going somewhere this evening with Philip. But why, then, had she not gone home to change? Home? Digs?…
What was Philip doing with her anyway? A startling thought came into his mind. Was he the partner in the firm of exporters and she the “private secretary”? Was Philip, to put it normally, running his typist?
Philip would enjoy that quite all right. He always had had some one or other. But he never got embroiled. He was never silly about a thing like that. He always, in course of time, contrived to make it clear with his candid eyes that of course it is up to each individual to look after his or her destiny without encroaching upon the destiny of her or him respectively. That understood, well——!
Jenny had better mind her step! It wouldn’t do her any good falling head over heels in love with Philip Manson, however much she thought of herself. For Philip was a man apart and dedicated to the high calling and social suavities of money as power.
However, she could always have her fling!
And she wouldn’t have to call—like him—for the bill!
He put something beside his plate for the waitress, got up and into his overcoat, and, about to move out, moved instead to Jenny’s table.
“Pardon me,” he said quietly. “Mrs. Armstrong asked me to inform you that two special daffodils are out this morning in the garden.” He bowed very slightly to this stranger and immediately turned away.
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.”
“What about getting home?”
“There’s a bus after eleven. It’s barely nine. So long as I catch that, I don’t mind.”
They buttoned their coats up round their throats and set out.
“Jamie’s had bad luck,” said Joe. “He’s a carpenter by trade and about three months ago he lost his right arm. We’re fighting his case for compensation, but the circumstances were unusual and the outcome is pretty uncertain. His employer is quite a decent fellow, not in a very big way, but he has to contest the case, because of course the insurance company are not going to stump up unless they have to. The point at issue is: did Jamie lose his arm while genuinely working on his job, or did he lose it in his spare time while working for himself? If for himself, then no workman’s compensation automatically. Apparently there was some old rotten scaffolding that the boss told them they could have for firewood and put on the saw merely for the taking down. Now two or three of them set about doing this immediately after they had finished their normal day’s work. An apprentice, a nice lad but a daring young devil, began a bit of trapeze work that burst a rotten dook. Jamie rushed in and broke the lad’s fall. They say he undoubtedly saved his life, but in the hearing of the case in court the point was ruled out as irrelevant. As it was, of course. Jamie, however, in this irrelevant process of saving the lad’s life, was sent spinning round and on to his back. The released beam nose-dived and got him just below the shoulder here, ripping off the flesh and smashing the bone. All they could do in the infirmary was cut the mess away. And then the nice point arose as to whether Jamie had been working for his boss or for himself.”
“What happened in court?”
“The sheriff took it to avizandum. The good point is this. The boss stuck to his statements that the scaffolding by his orders had to come down, that there was no particular hurry about it, and that they could have it to themselves. Fortunately the cross-examining solicitor got his goat a bit and the boss stuck doggedly to his statements. He had not mentioned any hour for the job, he had merely said that the scaffolding had to come down. The men were not paid extra time for taking it down. But on the other hand, they were paid by being given the wood. And so on and so forth. Hours and hours of it.”
“The human factor doesn’t get much of a show.”
“Purely irrelevant.”
They walked on for a little in silence.
“Must have been a terrible shock for his wife in her condition.”
“It was,” said Joe. “She’s only twenty-one. They got married about a couple of years ago and have a little girl about a year old. This is the second. He’s no more than twenty-four himself. A harum-scarum warm-hearted fellow, who completely reformed when he got married. Used to drink, and get into a scrape now and then. But he put all that away when he married Ettie. She’s a pretty, pale, dark-haired girl; but rather simple, soft, affectionate type; feckless a bit perhaps, but attractive in her way. Anyhow, she was all that Jamie wanted. And then this happened to him. They hadn’t saved a half-penny, of course, and now here’s a new youngster. Ettie is anything but strong—and they’ve been on short commons. I hope they take her to the infirmary.”
Joe spoke quite dispassionately, as if this were no more than a typical case. Will felt the solid confident bulk of this young man walking beside him. A strong presence, something hidden and fine in it, assured, austere.
They turned a corner and, all in a moment, were shut off from the town he knew. The change was dramatic, and Will experienced a sensitive half-shrinking fear, as if he were intruding into a region, another dimension of life, where he had no right to be. The gusts of wind blew bits of paper and refuse along the pavement, into the street, about his feet. The men were undersized and thin, and, with hunched shoulders, seemed to move along on stealthy business; the women were blowzy, with slumped bodies, and stared at them from close-entrance or other point of gossip. Will could not look directly at them, could not give them more than a glance, lest his prying should justly provoke them.
The bright lights of the great thoroughfares were gone. Here was only a darkling light; and presently, as they passed a street entrance on their left and Will looked down it, his heart constricted. The electric globes went into the distance, one after another, balls of bluish light, suspended in impenetrable gloom. The balls hardly lit the air about them. No traffic. No headlights. Involuntarily Will stopped, but went on again at once.
“I had thought I had visualized the thoroughfare to the underworld,” he said to Joe, with an effort at light irony, “but I was wrong.”
Joe glanced at him. “You mean?”
“The classical conception provided a certain measure of drama. That was not drama. The gloom of a terrifying nihilism, hung with balls of incandescent steel.”
The streets they traversed had more light and a number of little shops. Children seemed to be everywhere, ragged urchins, holding a moment in groups, before darting away. They paid no attention whatsoever to the two men. When they disappeared, Will got the impression that they went underground and not into the tall tenement walls with their scatter of window lights.
He had seen all this before, but never for long enough at any one time to get used to it, to dissipate the feeling of unease, of half-nightmare. And the smell, the pervasive smell that dried up the back of the nostrils, held something more than squalor, something vaguely threatening. The whole body went on the defensive, sensitive to the atmosphere, as the ear-drum to a threatened sound.
And there was one well-defined smell: fish and chip shop! Dogfish. Dogfish from the Arctic.… Trawler-men, working like galley-slaves, in tempestuous icy seas. The dogfish that fishermen loathe.
Some children had their noses glued to the window pane. A man in a greasy apron came to the door to see about custom or take a breath of the night. He told the children to run away. The glass might be less strong than their noses. They shouted at him and ran.
To them the smell would be delicious, exciting. They would burrow into the long-dead dogfish like eels. Grab from one another, fight.
A covey of them suddenly alighted at their feet in a whirling rough-and-tumble. There was a blow, and a challenging voice whipping out a mouthful of sexual filth. The game little orator couldn’t be more than ten.
“Now boys!” said Joe.
The little orator swung round on him, his ginger hair over his eyes. “You go and…yourself, mister.”
Joe looked at him and then took a step forward. They scattered like rats.
Will would not have interfered; knew he could not have dominated them so completely. Joe gave a quiet laugh. Will experienced the sensation of a wild outward humour but inwardly he shrank.
“It’s perhaps not so depraved as it sounds,” said Joe, “though actually there is an alarming amount of precocious sex about. But then—where isn’t there? Here you merely hear it, one remove from the drunkard’s mouth. We go in here.”
It was the usual narrow close to a “backland” house—a house built on the small back green of an earlier house. All the back greens here were now slum tenements. The area was extremely congested.
They went up the close and into the narrow back court where children were playing a wild rushing game with pieces of burning newspaper. Smoke with an acrid smell belched from the midden. The sight of the children in the gloom, weaving their whirling fantastic patterns of fire, affected Will strongly. It was pagan, the response of their young hearts to the spring, the same response that at this very time was moving country boys to burn whins and heather. The small darting black bodies, like tiny demons, ecstatic in their fire worship, paid no slightest attention to the two tall men who moved through their whirling circles.
The stone stair wound upward, like a turret stair in an ancient keep. At each landing the stair opened into the night, the orifice in the outside wall being protected by a grille of pointed rusty iron spikes. At the second landing they paused, while Will stared between and over the spikes at the great back wall of another tenement beyond the yard. One or two unblinded windows were so near that he could see intimately what was going on and felt he was prying. He sniffed. “What door is this?” he asked Joe.
“It’s the common lavatory,” said Joe.
Jamie’s door was on the third landing, and as they ascended Joe said: “Jamie had a better place than this but of course he couldn’t keep it. That embittered him a bit. However, he’s all right. So long as Ettie needs him he’ll be all right.”
Presently Joe knocked and in a little while the door was opened by a young woman.
“That you, Mary? How’s Ettie?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“No.”
“She’s dead.”
“Christ!” said Joe.
They all stood still for a moment, then Mary said: “Come in.”
For one wild instant Will wondered if he could mutter an excuse and turn and fly. But Joe had forgotten him and was following Mary. Will shut the door and the still inside atmosphere pressed against him like a wall. He walked into it, his nostrils—as always at such a moment—intolerably sensitive. The oppressiveness blinded him. He could smell death. Sheer animal fear and horror of death assailed him. The atmosphere of the room was thick with the damp scorched fug from a man’s shirt and underclothes drying before a small dull fire. It was a smell that in any circumstances brought upon him the tremor of sickness. He stood behind Joe, knowing the bed was to the left. Joe turned slowly round and Will had to do the same. The bed was empty.
Mary was clearing two wooden chairs for them, and Will was glad to sit down. She looked a woman over thirty, though she was no more than twenty-four. Her face had the pallor of a face drained of blood, wrung dry. Her eyes accordingly seemed enlarged and dark and tragic. But there was a stubborn meeting-place between her black eyebrows, a furrow of dull endurance. She was the dead girl’s sister.
Will looked away from her to the wall. The small gaunt room was half-clothed in a tawdry way. The cheap discoloured paper had unframed calendar prints stuck here and there upon it. Two great horses drawing a plough over the crest of a field against the sky, gulls wheeling and the ploughman taking the pressure with his right shoulder. Full of vigour. Photographs of women film stars, in a group, covering a black splotch. A sheer note of colour, like a cry, from a print of gentians, intensely blue. Cut out of an American magazine probably, by the dead girl. Joe’s previous description of her now brought her into the room and Will felt he knew her as well as he had ever known anybody in his life. If not better, for he knew her now with a strange intolerable ache of the spirit.
“They took her to the infirmary the day before yesterday. She was not strong enough to give birth herself, the doctor said, so they took her away,” Mary was explaining to Joe in a voice pale and dry as her face.
“We were expecting that,” said Joe.
“Yes,” said Mary. “She was not strong enough. She was not strong enough to do it herself, so they did an operation on her and took it out through her side.”
“What they call a Caesarean operation,” said Joe.
“Yes, that was the name. The young surgeon was nice. Every one was kind. And the operation was successful. It was quite successful, they said. Everything looked as if it was going to be all right. The child was fine. It’s a girl. Still fine and going on. I saw Ettie myself.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. She was glad to see me but——”
“Of course she would be pretty weak,” Joe helped her.
“She was. Yes. Only I did not like the look of her. It’s not that her colour was—oh I don’t know what it was. She smiled sort of faraway—as though—as though she had no interest.” She started slowly pressing and chafing her fingers as if to warm them. Joe said nothing.
“Then she began to weaken. She never picked up. They sent for Jamie early this morning, but she was dead before he got there.” Without any movement, she began to weep in dry sniffs that left her face staring and solemn. Every now and then she took deep breaths. Finally she filled her lungs to the full, held the pressure, and let it go. After that she breathed quickly for a little, and then became quiescent as before.
“What went wrong?” asked Joe, who had made no effort to comfort Mary. His tone was gentle, but matter-of-fact.
“I saw the matron this afternoon. She was quite kind. I asked her. She said Ettie had let her strength down by not taking enough nourishing food. You needn’t tell Jamie that. She said the best skill in the world couldn’t have done anything for her. She had no strength to help herself. Her strength was all drained away.” She added dully again: “Don’t tell Jamie that.”
“Where is he?”
“When he came back, he sat over the fire all morning. He was terrible hard hit. He asked the matron if Ettie left any message for him or said anything before she died. The matron told him no. She did not ask for any one. She told him that the last words Ettie said were: ‘I am very tired.’ After that, she died.”
They sat quite still.
“You haven’t seen Jamie since?” Joe asked at last.
“No. He hasn’t come back.”
“You don’t know where he’ll be?”
“No. I couldn’t go out because of the bairn here.”
Joe looked round, and Will now saw the low crib in the dark shadows by the head of the bed.
“Are you staying the night?”
“Yes,” said Mary. “I’ll have to. Some one must. Who else is there?”
There was silence for a few moments. “You’re not afraid?” Joe asked.
“No,” she said. Then a dry hopeless expression came over her face. “It would hardly matter whether I was or not anyway.”
Joe got up. “We’ll have a look round to see if we can find Jamie. I’ll look in again to see you, Mary, before I go home.”
“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 C3 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.
He slowly straightened up. “Sorry, constable.” He gasped, for some bitter stuff had got into his wind-pipe.
The policeman stooped and looked into his face. “Who are you?” The voice was gruff and suspicious.
Will did not answer. Deeper than his human sense of shame, than his hatred of the animal mess, was this feeling that he was coming all right. For there had been one terrible drawn-out moment when he had felt himself shooting into a black abyss. The policeman shook him. His strong fingers bit the shoulder bone. Will lost his balance, but the policeman held him upright. “Come on!” The policeman began to drag him away.
“One minute,” said Will. “For God’s sake, listen.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not drunk. There’s something wrong. Listen to me.”
The policeman was all attention now and looked shrewdly into Will’s face.
“Give me a minute,” said Will. “Let me lean against the wall.” The policeman helped him to the wall. Will shut his teeth against an overpowering desire to sit down. “It happened in there. I have only had one drink to-night. You know I’m quite sober.” Any one could see he was sober. “Only one drink. I was in there. The atmosphere—cut it with a knife. I went into the lavatory. A fellow spewed over me. It turned my stomach.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“My job. I’m a journalist.”
“Oh, a journalist, are you?”
“Yes. I work on the Evening Star. Special articles—social conditions. You know. God, I’m feeling sick yet.”
“So you’re a journalist?”
“Yes. Give you my card.” A weak smile came to his face. “I thought I was tougher. It was the way the stuff—oh heavens!” Will had brought his hand up to open his coat and now began brushing the breast of it with sickening distaste.
“It isn’t a very nice thing to do on the street,” said the constable in a mollified tone.
“Don’t rub it in! I’ll make a contribution—to the scavenging department.” The weary humour was a friendly effort.
“How would you like, if you were living here, and came out in the morning, and slid on that?”
“Hush—or I’ll do it again.”
“You better not,” said the constable.
Will felt assailed by a humour wild and fantastic as the night, the black convoluting horror of the night. Something in the policeman’s voice was faintly reminiscent of Don, too. The Highland accent! The tangle of the Isles! The cheekbones protruded like stem or sternpost of a small boat. Smashing green seas and white spray.
He had got hold of his pocket-book, when an uproar arose from the pub. “Come along,” said the policeman, taking Will in tow.
As they reached the spot, Joe and Jamie came clattering through the doors, as if they had been forcibly ejected. Some men followed, but when they saw the policemen they backed away. Joe seemed to be doing his best to hold a one-armed maniac, whose language was foul. It was a strange, terrifying, agonizing foulness. Some youngsters, who had been following Will and the policeman, listened to it with frightened faces. Normally they would have listened like connoisseurs, with the general assessment: “Jesus, hasn’t he got a—skinful!” But now they were silent, the eyes in the pale faces glistening with a queer dread. Nothing on the normal plane of social horror was strange to them; but this was pushed off that plane into the abyss where there is no footing, only the cry coming back.
Joe had said a few hurried words to the policeman, who was now helping him, and both of them began dragging Jamie away. The constable, who was with Will, strode forward, had a word or two with his colleague, and turned back, meeting Will.
“Good night, constable—and thanks,” said Will.
Their eyes met. In a slow grim way the policeman nodded. “Good night.”
But Jamie wasn’t beaten yet. For he wanted back. He wanted back to the warmth of the pub; to the light and the warmth, to the obliterating crush of bodies, drinking, drinking, all drinking. He wanted back. The children at a little distance heard him cry: “For Christ’s sake, let me back! Let me back! Let me back!” his voice rising to a roar, then choking in his throat as he dug his heels in. It looked as if his captors were taking him to torture, not ordinary bodily torture, but some other hellish and unthinkable torture. It was this note that troubled the children.
Will followed a few yards behind, as if he were leading the children. After a time, unable to stand this isolation, he quickened his pace and came beside Joe. “Can I help?”
“No,” said Joe. “It’s all right.” Every now and then Jamie roared aloud and struggled, fighting drunk. But Joe and the policeman had him firmly. The children were darting about now in their excitement. They were getting used to the underlying terror, as they would get used to the sight of a mad young bull, roped, being led to the shambles. Their instinctive fear made them more active than birds. Grownups, back against the walls, stood and stared.
When they came to the corner of the street where his home was, Jamie made his great struggle. The policeman, losing patience, told him to shut up or he would bash him. He manhandled him a little and a thin screaming note pierced through Jamie’s harsh throat.
“It’s no use,” said the policeman, who apparently knew Joe. “I’ll have to lock him up.”
“We can’t do that,” said Joe. “It’ll ruin him for good.”
“Not a bit of it. It’s what he damned well needs.”
“But, man, can’t you see——”
“All I can see is he’s dangerous. I can’t take the responsibility of letting a man in his condition near a woman or a child. He’s capable of anything. Can’t you see he’s fighting mad?” The Highland accent was very strong.
But Jamie had gone suddenly still and silent. He was staring at Will. Hatred focused to torture points. He let out a low throaty growl and, if the policeman had not had a lock on his arm, he would have broken free.
The impetus of Jamie’s rush started them up the street. Will fell behind, his heart beating in a suffocating way. A deep bitter shame, a self-shame, overcame him, a conviction of worthlessness drawn out and lost in the outer dark of the night.
Opposite the close leading to Jamie’s home, Joe paused and made his desperate appeal. But Jamie did not listen, and it became very clear that this close was for him the gangway to his final torture.
Joe could do no more, and actually as they went up the street Jamie grew much quieter. By the time they reached the police office, he was walking silently between them. Will saw him enter without offering any resistance. The three of them disappeared, and he was standing alone on the street.
Not a soul on the street but himself, no darting children here or staring men and women, as if all the world avoided this office. A profound sensation of the emptiness of the world, of life, of himself, came upon Will. Like a plague street in a dim-dark foreign town under an empty sky. All dead—except for that office, where Jamie was being charged. He moved slowly down the street, turned, and came back. A tall dark helmeted figure came out of the police office, looked at him with slow deliberation, and walked quietly away.
Will went along the pavement again, saw a tall dark figure coming towards him, and turned back. The figure came up behind. Will could feel it looking at him. It did look at him, slowly round and into his face, as it passed on, with quiet strides, and entered under the solitary light above the doorway.
The dark upright watchers of night in the underworld. Islesmen, cheek-bones like blunt timber-ends, straight-stemmed, unyielding, going out into the dark, returning from the dark’s dark fishing with catches of strange tragedies. How fantastic the drama of destiny!
Will felt a cold bodiless fantasy getting hold of him. This touched him with fear, as though his normal mind were slipping. At last Joe came out.
“Still here?” he said, in his usual voice. But there was a quietness about him now, and he stood silent for a little while. “It’s a pity,” he added, “but there seemed nothing else for it.”
“No.”
“I couldn’t take him home. And, anyway, he wouldn’t have come.”
“No. He wouldn’t want to be with friends.”
“Suppose not.”
They were silent again. In view of the accomplished fact of Jamie’s imprisonment, there was nothing to say. The weight of it pressed down on them. Nothing to say—or too much; too much, in anger and bitterness and defeat.
“What about your bus?”
Will tried to read his watch.
“About a quarter to eleven,” said Joe.
“I could just make it.”
“Right. I’ll go back and have a few words with Mary.” He spoke quietly.
“Don’t suppose I could be of any use?”
“No. You get home. I told the sergeant I’d be here before eight in the morning. I’ll see then how Jamie is taking things. We’ll straighten him up somehow. Well, thanks for your company. Good night.”
“Good night, Joe.”
They parted, but after twenty yards, Will swung round and called: “Joe!” Joe came to meet him.
“What about ready cash? Will Mary have anything?”
“She can’t have much,” said Joe.
From his pocket-book, Will took out a pound note. “Would that be any use?”
“It’s far too much.”
“Good,” said Will, handing it to him.
“Thanks very much,” said Joe.
“Needn’t say it’s from me.”
“All right. Sometimes you have to make an excuse or other. I can honestly say it’s not mine!” He smiled in friendly weary irony.
Will smiled back, and they said good night again.
Joe always made Will think of the brotherhood of man. In his large strong body, in his forbearance, his capable handling of any event, his quiet understanding, his tendency always to act rather than to talk, Joe was the brotherhood of man. And to-night, too, in this matter of feeling, of sympathy, Joe had been subtle. It was as if he had learned the need for feeling with his head. Having work to do, he could not let anything touch him too closely. He thereby not only kept action intact but assisted those who had lost hold on action.
A deep admiration for him flowed over Will, and he felt Joe walking back…through the streets of the ages…forward into streets with the dawn breaking. Joe—the figure that has never failed to appear, the solitary figure—here, there—down the streets of time, down the streets of men—the figure that bears all the tragedy, the sorrows that are beauty’s inverted dreams, the bitter anguish.…
Will had to move his head from side to side to get a proper feel of his body. The Figure had come before him very distinctly. Not the face, not the expression, but the body, with its grey coat or cloak about it, standing a little way off, solitary.
This tendency to fantasy—he must watch it. But in a moment he cried against himself: It’s not fantasy, it’s truth, and you know it! Don’t be a coward. You know it!
Had he let his voice escape then? Had it cried sharply in the street? He looked from side to side with furtive eyes.
As he passed one close-entrance, Will was pierced by terror exactly as if he had been stabbed by a knife. It was something that came out of the close. He did not see or imagine anything. The intense sensation of an act of horror being committed clung to him.
The streets were menacingly empty, and when two or three figures suddenly appeared and disappeared, he stiffened all over. Once a young woman’s voice screamed out, screamed again and again; then there was a gabble of voices, followed by complete silence.
He was reacting too vividly, of course. And actually the vast majority must be law-abiding folk, tolerant and obviously slow to wrath. Decent people, like those he had met, Mary and——
He shuddered and began to hurry. He would have to hurry, anyway, if he was going to catch his bus. But he was frightened to run. That turn in the pub had given his muscles an odd jumpiness. They felt weak. He felt extremely weak, too, about the pit of the stomach. Afflicted the whole body with a sensation of unreality.
Ah, but here were bright lights again and here a taxi! Empty, too!
The taxi sped upward swiftly through the thoroughfares he knew. The theatre crowds were fading out. He lay back and looked out of the windows at the lights, the figures, the tram-cars. Bright lights and gleaming rails. Well-dressed people, the lifting of hats, laughter and good-bye. Two women wrapped in furs, their thin dresses about their ankles, and two men, getting into a car. Home! A drink, or a cup of something hot? Whisky, or sherry—there’s beer if you really want a drink?
Will closed his eyes, exhausted, and felt himself being borne backward. It’s back I should go, he thought. Back there. I should live it out there, live it into and out of my system, so that, like Joe——
The taxi delivered him at the bus terminus only just in time. “You cut that fine,” said the driver. “Thank you, sir. Thank you.”
The bus moved off as he sat down. He hadn’t minded really whether he caught the bus or not. If he had missed it—he would have wandered back—perhaps met Joe again—or Bill Bailey. It would be an experience, dossing with Bill Bailey! Sleep was a thousand miles away from him, but he was very weary.
The cold dampness of the night was working up into a spitting rain out here in the country. For a little while after leaving the bus, Will had to search for the side of his road with his foot. But after a time, its brown surface became vaguely discernible. There seemed to be neither stars nor moon about. But he did not search for either because he had not the energy, he did not care.
He went long distances without much thought or feeling of any kind. Then he came to the place where he had seen the wild geese. This moment had been waiting for him. He knew that.
His knees got a little out of control and he staggered. Blast it! he said, and sat down by the roadside on the wet grass. Oh God, I’m ashamed! He rested his forehead on his palms.
He was ashamed of the wild geese incident, of the bird-singing, and of all the easy emotion that had been born from them. Bitterly ashamed, so that he would hide from the memory of it, if he could; from its weakness and egotism and poetic echoes. He pressed his palms into his forehead like a man driving out the memory of an uneasy sin. No wonder Mac had got the grue! That glory, that elation, that appalling self-hypnosis. Talk of narcissism! The individual, with his holy-glory little heaven all about him. Not that the miserable little affection would have mattered, in a world where things were humanly decent. For Christ’s sake, let me back! Will crushed his forehead between his palms.
Jamie had seen the wild geese in his eyes—and hated and loathed him. He had seen the self-assurance, the superiority, all the stronger for being instinctive, unconscious.…
He got up and went on. The key was under the grey stone. The lamp was turned low down and he left it as it was, lying slumped in his chair.
As thought got at him, he moved uneasily. His face in the dim light was pale as death. Suddenly his eyes opened wide and black, with intense pin-points of light.
Malnutrition. Nothing else had killed Ettie.
He got up. All along, it was Ettie he had been frightened to think of. He did not want to think about her now. He could not trust his mind. Whether the bird experiences were to blame or not, something had thinned inside him somewhere so that he could be more easily pierced. The exposed skin of the mind felt the slightest impact, felt it coming.
He blew out the lamp suddenly, before he could think of stopping himself. Slowly he began to unlace his shoes, staring at the red flameless crumbling fire. His slippers were ready for him on the hearthrug; the glass of milk with the saucer on top he ignored. He took his shoes off without removing his eyes from the fire. His hands fell idle.
The wind blew in the elm-tree beyond the window. Right in the core of the sound the wind made, there was a separate and very thin sound, like the whine of a spirit.
He deliberately concentrated on the fire, on the red core of warmth; without physically doing it, he slid to the hearthrug and spread his hands. This is what man had done through the ages; their hands to the fire, in little earth houses, in snow houses, in tents, in open desert places, in beehive huts, in forest clearings—spreading their hands to life, with death in the shadows around. Now and then looking over a shoulder.…
He looked towards the blinded window. The bare branches and thin twigs of the elm made a great harp for the wind which was rising. He turned his head to the door behind him.
The small tick of the French clock grew noisy and rapid. Tik-tik-tik-tik…very swift. Speeding up; the mechanization of time! It went straight on, on and out—out into the night, into the void beyond the night.…
Illusion, for it was ticking inside the brain, its tiny hammer beating a taut surface. Tik-tik-tik-tik—on a ganglion centre. With French precision.
He got up and shoved his feet into his slippers. Things could get the better of you, even though you were watching them and could command them. When you stare, your defences are open.
As he had blown out the lamp, so he turned for the door, before thought could question or order him. He was going to bed. Hurriedly he fumbled in his pockets for matches, struck one, and made for the stairs, concentrating on lighting one match to another and causing no noise. A lit match stung him and he dropped it with a whispered oath before the candle caught fire in his bedroom. The candle seemed malignant, as if it did not want a flame; and when he forced it to accept the match, it died down and took a long time to come up again.
But now here was the flame, showing him his face in the mirror, his disembodied face. He turned away and began to undress. As he slipped his braces over his shoulders he sat down heavily on the bed. Lord, I am tired! he muttered. And like an echo, from the outer void: I am very tired!
In his pyjamas, he brought the candle to the small table by his bedside, placed his wound watch beside it, saw the box of matches was handy, and blew out the flame. He tucked the bedclothes round him snugly and disposed himself for immediate sleep. A man could only do his best and then prepare to sleep.
And for a little while the flame in his mind kept dying down. Down, down—it was going softly, warmly out—divinely smothering itself. He kept his thought from it, kept everything from it, so that he would fade with it into its sweet death. It got so low that it was no more than pin-point bright…like the pin-points in Jamie’s eyes.… That extraordinary concentration, that dark electrical charge, ready to leap across at him. Immediate destruction in it. Murder or killing would not be enough; it would have to rend asunder; to tear him bit from bit.… It was not the wild geese in his eyes that Jamie had seen. What Jamie had seen was his disgust. But any one would have shown it. Yes—but not in my way, not that instinctive, that fierce disgust, that awful sickening horror, that recoil from him as from a leper.…
The flame inside had now got a grip and was beginning to burn up. Will groaned and, turning over, smothered his mouth in the pillow. The pillow, pressing into his eyes, induced an extra darkness. He might evade the light and slip into forgetfulness through the dark. This darkness had faint spangles in it like a memory of dim lights in a dark street.…
Tall dark tenement walls.… Cliffs, canyon walls. Bodies appearing and disappearing, in a furtive inimical secrecy. A long street, blue-dark, lit by blue globes.…
A besieged, a beleaguered town, seen from above, like a Cretan maze.
They would never find their way out.
Even if they wanted to find their way out.
Did they? Did they?
Why should they? What was there outside? What, in very fact, was there outside but the nothingness of outside, the void?
But that word void was the one word Will wanted to evade. As he had come down the road, the wind with its cold spitting rain, with its ravening cry in the branches, had made him think of it as hurrying into the void, as if the void were the space behind the rushing sphere of the earth, the final lost place, the outer darkness. He had immediately shut off the thought.
He shut it off now, but an extra blast of wind in the elm startled him into listening. There was the inner thin cry, like the whine of a spirit, rising, holding, but not able to hold, falling back, falling away behind the rush of the earth, into the outer darkness.
The outer darkness. Its appalling meaning had never even touched him before. The rush of wind—the void, cold and sleet-bitten, and the spirit-face trying to keep up but being defeated, Ettie’s face, lost in the icy winds of the formless abyss of the outer darkness.
Jesus Christ! moaned Will. But no invocation could now smother the horror that was come upon him.
It was the horror of the outer loneliness, a fear so intense that it curdled away the flesh from the cold bone. He felt himself disintegrating, and fought to keep the strands of his body together. He spoke to himself with cunning. He deflected his thought from Ettie and Jamie so that they became apparitions for which he no longer had any feeling. He held himself still, very very still—and was succeeding, until his head began to go round. Round, slowly round, sickeningly.…
He gripped the bedclothes, the bed, and pushed himself up. He saw for the first time that he might be beaten, that the forces of the outer darkness might in very fact destroy him.
As he made for the ewer of water, he staggered, hitting into the chair that held his clothes and upsetting it. But he now did not care about the noise. He would not have cared if his landlady had come in, or Mac, or the whole world. His fear had to be kept down, his panic conquered, the wild desire to shout defiance had to be smothered. He sluiced water on to his face, drank the ewer water; and at last stood back panting on the floor. Breathing heavily but with the giddiness gone, he found and lit his candle. His legs now started trembling so violently that he had to get back into bed. There was a real sickness at the pit of his stomach. But he was not going to lie down. So he put the pillow behind his back and sat upright, leaving the candle burning. As he began to shiver, he pulled the clothes up around his shoulders. The breast of his pyjama jacket was wet. He stared into the room, commanding it, a relentless expression on his drawn face. He would fight the cruelty, the evil, of the outer darkness, until the last shred of will was sucked in by death.
His head leaned back, and his eyes closed; then leaned forward and the eyes looked slowly about the room. His breath presently grew stertorous. His head sagged against the wooden back of the bed. The candle made skeleton hollows in his face. Outside the wind in its rhythm rose to the shrill whine, the defeated wild cry, in the heart of the elm. Will looked like a dead man keeping watch.
On the way to the bus the following morning, he thought: Dammit, there’s that girl I’ll have to chaff! There was no reason why he need do it, of course. He could just simply pass up to a forward seat as he used to do. It was at a moment like this that one saw how silly it was to form warm human relations. The thought of it made him tired, and if he could have taken the next bus he would, just to save bother. But this was Saturday, his busiest day of the week. He looked at his watch. He would have to step out. As he increased his pace, his heart began to beat. That strange orgy of feeling last night had taken it out of him. God, what a night! he thought, with a humour dry rather than bitter, for he felt himself curiously detached from life this morning. Even the bird-singing when he had wakened to it, shivering with cold, had not affected him much. He had thought it might have been an irritation, a renewed agony. But he had not cared very much really, and for the most part had dozed through it in a sort of half-drunken stupor.
The bus drew up. “Good morning,” she said, with a smile.
“Good morning,” he answered and passed up to a vacant seat.
She did not follow him at once, and he sat conscious of the back of his head being towards her. She came at last and, before punching his ticket, looked at him. He nodded. She punched and he paid. Then she retired without a word.
This is silly, he thought, but I haven’t the energy. He began to feel vaguely miserable and resented it. But the touch of emotion passed quickly.
As the bus drew up at the terminus, he swayed, standing beside her, and gave her a vague smile. “I had bad news last night.”
He saw her brown eyes darken with feeling as they looked at him frankly and yet as it were from under their lashes. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
He nodded, looking away. “We’ll get over it,” and he swung down from the bus, turning to give her a wry glance and meeting her eyes once more. She smiled with a curious, steady, shy tenderness.
The streets or the people or the chimney pots had no slightest interest for him, and the thought of the office held no concern. Mac’s obvious back he ignored, and when the rush of the first edition was over Don and he had a drink.
“Looking somewhat grey about the gills this morning.”
“Had a bit of a night,” Will confessed. “Nothing deadly.”
“Up to some mysterious game in the country—or what?” Don’s eyes tried to penetrate.
“Mysterious is the word.” Will’s mind was just as subtle as the black Highlander’s.
“Oh, all right,” said Don.
“Have another?” said Will.
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, I’d like one. Better join me.”
“You’ll be going like Mac, if you don’t watch.”
Out of a speculative humour, Will said: “I wonder. I wonder exactly what put Mac off on that tack of his. It’s a thought!” He ordered two drinks. “Some strange twist of defeatism—in love, or religion, or ambition, or vanity, or—fear? What do you think?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Don indifferently, because he was vaguely uneasy.
“An extraordinary thing to think that it may be religion, inverted religion; that Mac is haunted by the hounds of hell; that he has made the great denial, and into the empty place of the denial has brought home nothing. Stranger still—that he does not know it is that; that he thinks it is the state of the world, the worthlessness of the ambitions of the world; even that it is Tamerlane.”
“I don’t think Mac is the religious type. I should say he is the very opposite. Obviously. My God, yes.” Don gave a small harsh laugh.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Will.
“But you don’t think so?”
Will looked into his eyes. “I don’t know.”
Don lifted his glass and drank, checking his haste midway.
“You see,” said Will lazily, “it’s an extraordinary thing, the mind. I don’t mean in neurotic or psychopathic manifestations, but in the case of the most normal of us. There are moments when it becomes skinned, becomes superbly sensitive. When it is attacked in that condition—and it has to be attacked to be in that condition.…” He went on talking for quite a time, with a slow but fluent certainty, that was quite flawless and slightly inhuman. Don felt himself more than once being got at, but Will’s apparent innocence, his good nature, was too profound a mask to penetrate.
“This is an extraordinary way”, said Don, “to suffer from a hangover.”
Will laughed softly.
“Come on!” said Don. “We must go.”
“Why all the hurry? Time enough.”
“You want to go on talking?”
“You’ve said it.” Will nodded. “But I don’t know why. To indulge in arabesques of talk, arabesques that have no beginning and no end, that go on coiling on themselves like slow snakes, too tired to bite, too weary for poison, but loving the slither of their skins and the beauty of the patterns they make without conscious effort, and so——”
“Look here,” interrupted Don abruptly. “Have you been taking drugs?”
Will’s eyes concentrated and gleamed.
“Oh, very well,” said Don, “keep it to yourself. I don’t give a damn, I’m sure. Come on.” He set down his glass with a firm bang and got up and walked out.
Will followed him. The drink had done him good. How fine it would be now to lie back in a deep chair in the dim lounge of some luxurious hotel and talk and drink till physical life was trussed hand and foot in arabesques of gleaming wire and dropped discreetly out of sight!
In the height of the afternoon rush, with the football results streaming in, he felt light-headed and gay. As a rugby player, he had always, out of some odd sympathy for the amateur, been a supporter of Queen’s Park, who were struggling as usual to retain their position in the first division. And Queen’s Park won. He saluted them, and Mac turned so dark and satiric a glance upon him that he sat down abruptly on his stool and began weakly to laugh.
But he was glad when at last the strenuous day was over. It was food he needed, yet he had no great inclination to eat. He should take Don out and stand him one and be humanly reasonable, to make up for that egotistic interlude of the forenoon. However, he allowed himself to drift out of the building without being embroiled by any one and in a nearby pub stood himself a large whisky.
For all day he knew that some time he must see Joe Wilson. All day the figures of last night were at the back of his mind, visibly or invisibly, like phantoms. They did not touch him at all. But they were there, and he must speak to them before the day was dead.
He sat for a long time with himself, staring at the people who came in and out. For the most part the sheer fleshiness of the faces was a revelation. He had never before seen the outside of faces so vividly. He did not look inside them at all, had no desire to, did not care what was inside. A face here and there was so extraordinarily gross that it fascinated him. The bulge of a neck, the lumps of a forehead, the acuteness of small eyes, the glass at the mouth, the dribble at the corner of the lips that pursed in a swinish way as the back of the red hand wiped them. Not surely because the man was merely fat. Fat men were jolly men. There was quite a lot of jollity, of whisperings and leanings-back, and tilting of bowler hats.
Will lowered his eyes to his own thin hand on the table and stared at it. Flesh is opaque; it lets no light through. And when no light comes through, outside flesh slithers against outside flesh in a dreadful promiscuity.
He got up and moved along the street to an eating-place. When the waitress came along and raised her eyebrows, he suddenly thought: If I don’t go immediately to Joe’s home he’ll have eaten and gone out for the night. So with a smile he excused himself to the waitress, who smelt the whisky in his breath, and put on his coat. At the door, as he half-swung round, he saw that she was looking after him. She immediately turned her head away.
That strange penetrating human thing, a woman’s sympathy! However gross a woman was—and heavens! women could be gross enough—she never lost the capacity for an eyeflash in which there was light, good or evil!
Joe’s folk lived in a real petty bourgeois street. The sight of its trim little decencies made Will smile. This was the sort of street poor but aspiring women put up as a barricade against the drunken horrors of early industrialism. Back here they hauled their men from the promiscuity of the gross all-levelling pubs, whose promise was a fiery freedom, and whose fulfilment was a vomit. Here in this quiet, rather dirty, rather mean little street, with its lack of spaciousness, its suggestions of faint smells, its ardent respectabilities, its flowers behind closed windows and its sunning cats, the great drama that Joe knew so well had been fought—and was still being fought. The new public school poet-communists did not understand that. The petty bourgeoisie to them was anathema. They wanted in their imaginations to be warmed by the great army of the toilers. Quite! quite! said Will.
He paused and, as he lit a cigarette, treated himself to a husky laugh. For he was now trying to banish the smell of whisky from his breath, lest Joe’s mother come to the door! The ritual and the discipline.
Lord, what a history was behind that! What realism and tragedy and horror and aspiration and courage, indomitable courage! Did any city in the world ever put up such a fight for workers’ rights as this city did? Perhaps, but surely never with so prolonged and bitter an intensity, with so much fury, that strange historic fury of the Scots.
Will felt this fury far back in his mind, like an echo of trumpets. He drew in a last deep breath of smoke, slowly let it out through mouth and nostrils, and climbed the three steps to the door.
Mrs. Wilson herself answered his ring and, after greetings, for they knew each other quite well, said that Joe had gone out after his tea, half an hour ago. She had at once a sweet and a hard face, her smile being slight but very attractive. The smile centred in the eyes, filling them with a light that was, however, steady and penetrating, so that a sensitive person felt measured by the smile. Her smooth hair, though greying, was still predominantly dark. She stood quite still and asked Will if he would care to come in.
Will thanked her and said no. Turning his face over his shoulder thoughtfully (but actually so that she might not smell his breath), he said that he had been with Joe last night and wanted to get certain information from him. “You don’t know where he has gone?”
“He has gone to some meeting or other, but where I can’t say.”
“All right, thank you. I may run into him. I have an idea where I might find him.” He was backing away and smiled to her. She smiled, with a small nod, and closed the door slowly upon their good-byes.
He breathed heavily for a little, feeling quite weak again, and when at last he got to an eating-house, ordered an underdone fillet steak with chips.
Joe, in physical appearance, took to his father rather than his mother, but the mother was the power behind him. During the ten minutes required to grill the steak, Will sat vaguely dreaming of that very distinctive phenomenon, the Scots mother. Scotland herself, known as The Auld Mither. On the surface sentimental, but beneath—was there something powerful and enduring, fantastic and strong, poverty and the barricades, eldritch and wise, steady, steady, steady—and unyielding? Or was this just the blood speaking, speaking out of an old myth?
When they brought home Joe’s father dead, he was smelling of whisky. Nothing more dramatic than a Saturday night street accident which, had he been quite sober, he was almost bound to have avoided. Joe was a little lad then.
If it was fillet steak it wasn’t very tender, though it was bloody enough. That fresh thirsty taste of blood. He had got this carnivorous flavour before. Somebody had told him that it did not matter really whether you chewed meat or not, because the juices of the mouth did not help the digestion of meat. So he left the matter largely to the appropriate juices in the stomach.
All the same, it was really difficult for him to have a sound opinion on this mother business, because he could not recollect his own mother. He did have a fairly distinct picture, embodying a sensation of warmth and a madonna face over him, but suspected that it was a later growth or construction of the imagination, for she had died when he was three.
His father had died eight years ago, actually at the moment during the graduation ceremony when Will was being capped.
So he was an orphan, and, as he sat on, drinking coffee, he felt glad that in this world of human relations he was quite free.
Some time during the night, in a stupor of turmoil and nightmare, a moment had come when all was stilled and before him appeared a figure. And the figure raised his face and looked at him, and the figure was himself.
That terrible clairvoyant moment, that light of understanding, of pity, in the eyes, that look of sad unearthly humour, committing them both irrevocably.
“Will that be all, sir?”
He looked at the waiter for a moment. “Yes,” he answered.
Joe wasn’t in the Labour rooms, and Will turned his steps through the gathering dark towards the lower part of the town.
It was the elfin time of innocence and the old poet’s lamplighter. A quiet still evening, overcast but not gloomy. The steak and coffee gave Will a centre knot of stability, dissipated the physical tremors that flush the brain. He walked with a slow quiet pleasure, observing without being touched; observing consciously the twilight within the streets.
A rare detachment came to him—from somewhere, he felt, immensely remote; as remote as this grey light that came from springtimes in the beginning of the world. The grey magic half-light that haunted the poets.
Fashions change and magic comes under the ban. But dear God, this grey light smiles! A transitory, evanescent smile, down the streets and round the corners. So it played down forest clearings and alleyways of standing stones, seashores and the shadows of mountains on moors. The meeting of light and darkness, love’s exquisite foreplay, its delicious fun.
The children were playing not now like rats but like sparrows. And here and there a grown-up face carried a faintly reflected light. But mostly the faces were without light, were dead. And now and then, Will saw faces that wanted this light to pass into the covering comfort of darkness and coloured electric signs. Folk in the sitting-rooms or kitchens of streets immediately switched on their lamps as the twilight entered.
He remembered the Sunday twilight at the farm when he could not bring himself to put the light on. But that had been rather uncanny, and he would not let himself think it out even now.
As he penetrated deeper into the lower parts of the town, this calm assurance began to be invaded by the gathering darkness, by the gloom of the steel-blue lights, by the tenement squalor, the dim entrances to closes, and, above all, by that faint pervasive smell to which his nostrils were so sensitive. A carry-over from the evolutionary process? Stags sniffing the air, wild dogs on the trail.…
Did the nostrils convey to the wary brain the warnings of danger and disease and brutality and all evil? Irrational, as he knew. Who could know better? for it was his political concern to produce at a moment’s notice exact figures regarding unemployment, housing, and overcrowding in the very area through which he was passing. More than that, he could tell of the occasional single room inhabited by father, mother, adolescent son and daughter into which a total wage of eight pounds came weekly, yet without son or daughter making any effort to clear out of the stifling den. He could tell of the kindness of the poor to the poor, of self-sacrifice, of household decencies and social conventions more rigid than might be encountered in many houses of the rich quarter of the town. Yet though he could have filled pamphlets with exact knowledge, that fact in no way interfered with his nostrils now. His reaction was completely instinctive, and on that reaction he knew it was necessary that he should act until he died.
He knew approximately where the close was in which Jamie lived and he wanted to pass it but not to go in. He had a quite certain feeling that he was going to run into Joe soon. But he could not find the close and presently entered a pub. He had difficulty in pushing his way to the counter, but ultimately managed to get a small whisky. There were far more people about to-night, and more gaiety and boisterous fun. There would be an odd fight later on and some drunken jollity. Great leg-pulling about busted coupons. And arguments over Jimmy or Bobby, over centre forwards and inside rights and referees; with a virulent discussion going on just behind him about “a pure bloody offside goal if ever there was one”. This opinion was equally strongly resisted. The language became more pointed. The two favourite sexual words were used with increasing directness and with a penetrating rhythm. Overwork did not dull their variety or scatter their strength. On the contrary, all other oaths were sucked into them. And to bear witness to so strange a fecundity the protagonists called upon Jesus Christ.
“Now! now!” cried the barman. “You just chuck that stuff, will you?”
“Chuck my bloody backside. Were you there?”
“I’ll chuck your backside outside pretty smart,” said the barman, “if you come any more of that.” Then he smiled slowly, if with a glint, and they all got back to the argument again.
A good-natured crowd, except for the occasional thin weedy type that could only make itself important by working up to a clamour. There was more money about to-night, more of the real workmen out for their couple of well-earned pints. Saturday night and the missus away shopping.
Will became aware of a fellow beside him of perhaps his own age. He could see at a glance that he had never worked. He was a head smaller, thin, with nondescript hair growing raggedly down past the ears, and a twist to the body as if it had got used to hunching itself against its own clothes for warmth. He had been struck by the pallor of this type. But now he saw that the fellow was not pale but grey, with the greyness of lice. There would be lice on his shirt. The hunching movement of the shoulders was not altogether an effort to gather warmth.
There was a shifty acuteness in the face as Will accidently met it.
“Were ye at the match th’-day, mister?”
“No,” said Will. “Were you?”
“Na. Ah coudny manage to ge’ awa’,” The singsong rhythm of the district was strong in his voice. “They say it wis a great match.” There was an inch of thin beer left in his glass. He was obviously saving it.
Will finished his whisky. “Have a pint?”
The eyes gleamed and glanced at Will’s glass. “Could ye make it a wee hauf?”
Will ordered two small whiskies and offered his companion a cigarette. There were others like him in the pub. In fact humanity was graded in virility right up to an Irishman with a tongue of fair hair sweeping across his forehead from under a tilted sweat-stained felt hat; a big untidy man, with a throaty brogue and rather small blue eyes that seemed in their wary steadiness to listen to remarks behind him while he himself was speaking; a large, good-hearted, rather vain countryman, obviously very fond of hearing himself talk. Will liked him. He had strength and warmth and all a countryman’s simple cunning.
Warmth, life warmth: that’s what the grey men craved. That’s why they were here. Freedom from the burden of creeping misery. Warmth and light and a man speaking out of his own breast; a man uttering blasphemies in the certainty of himself; a man challenging, face to face, spitting oaths, and ready with the liberating blow. Close the pubs and you’ll have a revolution.
“So long!” said Will, as he gulped his drink and pushed his way out.
In the next pub he came to, he had only one drink. In the third, he had two drinks and a football argument. From the fourth pub, he wandered down by the river. He would meet Joe, but not just yet. As he lit a cigarette he smiled. “I’m beginning to feel at home,” he muttered, and a sensation of ease slowly pervaded him, as if in some queer unaccountable way he had come home to some one or something.
He saw the river through an iron railing, with gleams on its dark surface as if it were a dreaming forest pool. How remote from last night’s image of Jamie’s one-armed body and its convoy of eels! As he gazed upward, finding no star, he heard Ettie’s voice say from so far off that it was suddenly thin and near: I am very tired.
He stood quite still, and, instead of fear and rebellion, there came about his spirit an infinite pity.
It may be the whisky! he thought, as he turned his eyes away. But though he could still joke with a wry mouth, he knew that for these still moments he had penetrated near to the core of understanding. So near, that perhaps he had to break the contact.… Was it a real voice? He turned round. “I beg your pardon?”
“Hallo, dearie?”
His reaction was instinctive flight from being trapped, the first real personal anxiety he had felt that night. It died down in a moment. He stood looking at her, and, taking this as invitation, she came close up.
In the rather dim light, with her make-up, she looked about eighteen. As she spoke again to him endearingly, he shook his head. “I’m no use to you to-night.”
She began to exercise her art upon him, with the appropriate notes of endearment and gaiety.
He shook his head: “No use.”
“Ah, come on! Just for a little while. I know a place. If you don’t want to walk with me—you can follow me.”
That silenced him for a moment.
“A girl like you—surely you can get a fellow any time?”
“Yes, but—not one like you.”
“Why aren’t you in a better part of the town?”
“Now you’re asking, aren’t you?”
“I beg your pardon.”
She laughed, teasingly.
“I’m not feeling that way,” he persisted.
She tried to show him that he might change his mind, but he held her off. She was afraid of his detached manner and overacted.
“Have you nothing but questions? Besides,” she added lightly, “what’s half a dollar to you?”
“It wouldn’t break me. Still—that’s not the point.”
She was going to produce a witticism, but hesitated and went on another tack.
“What a lovely smell off your breath! You’re lucky!”
“Like me to stand you one?”
“You’re asking me!” Her eyes assessed him glitteringly.
“Well, I’ll stand you one. But remember that’s all there is to it. If you agree to that, then all right. Do you agree?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Well, where’ll we go?”
“This way.”
What astonished Will was the complete absence of any awkwardness in himself as he walked along with her. Had this happened a month ago, he would have been all conflicting emotions and furtive eyes. Now he felt a curious freedom, as if he were being liberated from a past self.
But he made no effort to understand this or even to wonder why. What he was wondering about was the girl herself, and now he felt that he had no right even to ask her personal questions. After all, the assumption that this girl was a social problem rather than a human being was a rather terrible comment on middle-class complacency. That he should get her “story” and “pass it on”, whether by way of ribaldry or an awful example—or, dear heaven, as a politico-economic illustration—seemed to him now so appalling an intrusion on that lonely entity called the human soul that it affected him with a sense of monstrous humour.
She was telling him about the place they were going to and he was interested because he wondered just where—short of the expensive lounges of the great hotels—in this holy city a fellow could take a girl like this. It turned out to be a quiet, rather dingy saloon bar down a side street, and as he passed the policeman at the corner, Will looked at the man and then smiled to himself.
“Does he know you?” the girl asked, with a quick note of mistrust.
“Yes. I met him last night. He obviously knows you, too.”
“Only by seeing me now and then.”
“Good. I feel as if we had gone up and duly registered.”
She did not know how to take him, but here was the door and she led him in.
The atmosphere of secret assignations struck Will so strongly that the undigested whisky turned over in his stomach. Two or three here plying their ancient trade; and a few men, too, committed and not yet committed. Meantime there were drinks anyhow. “What’s yours?” asked Will.
“Gin,” she said.
“A large gin,” said Will, “and a large whisky.” He turned to her. “A tonic?”
“All right.”
It was not a very big room and the corner tables were occupied, so Will accepted the small round vacant table in the middle of the floor and waved his companion to a chair. Raising his glass to her with a quiet smile, he drank.
“Ivy is my name,” she said in an undertone as the glass touched her lips.
He saw now that she was older than eighteen; probably twenty-five. She had quite good bone in her face but the features were thin. Her hair and eyebrows were naturally dark, and the colour on her cheeks and lips and the artificial glitter in her brown eyes consorted well enough with this darkness. She was quite good-looking, if in a rather hard way. Even though he did not regard her very directly, she knew he was appraising her.
“Your first to-day?” she asked, with an effort at humour.
“Not exactly,” he said. “Yours?”
“Actually, yes.” Her eyes were wondering what impression she made.
“Can you stand much of that stuff?”
“Why? Feel like trying me out?”
They chatted until they were accepted by the room and forgotten—except for a woman’s occasional straying eyes.
With her elbows on the little table, she murmured: “Why won’t you come?”
“I’m meeting a man down here to-night.” He smiled to her lifted eyes. “You think that’s an old one?”
“No, I believe you.”
“Don’t be personal,” he said. “Don’t soften me.”
“I wish I could.”
He looked at her thoughtfully, with a considering smile. She met his look, giving him her eyes. Her skin, he thought, judging perhaps from her mouth, had a curious elastic quality, as if it could be readily stretched. The colour was laid on with a thin fresh bloom. Her anxiety to get hold of him was palpable. And in this anxiety Will felt there was something more than cash, more than sex—of which, often enough, she must surely get sick—and he wondered vaguely if he were deluding himself.
“I have a room,” she said.
“Have you?”
She nodded.
“Share it with some one, or have it all to yourself?”
“Lily and me—we arrange that—when——”
“Quite.” He nodded. “And where does Lily go then, poor thing?”
“That’s all right,” she said.
“Tell me,” he asked. “Why exactly did you mention that just now?”
“Because you are the kind…who wants time.…”
He suddenly laughed, then begged her pardon. “I understand you.” He added: “Would you really like to spend the rest of the night with me?”
“Yes, of course!”
He shrugged, as if she had missed his meaning.
“You know I would,” she said, on a lower tone.
“I’m hanged if I can understand that—apart from the cash. Is that brutal?”
She considered him. “You’re queer.”
“For God’s sake, don’t say a thing like that.”
“I can’t make you out.”
“I’m too simple for you.”
She still looked at him, through the glitter of her trade and her hard mistrust, afraid to trust herself. He could see she had a considerable amount of experience and not a great deal of intellect. Her choice of profession, after an “accident” or two, had probably been deliberate. Not that that explained much, for inevitably such a choice must have been deliberate rebellion—against what?
She shook her head and said nothing.
“That’s clever of you,” he remarked of her silent gesture.
“What is?”
“Tell me this, Ivy. I want to be quite friendly with you. I do feel friendly, to tell the truth. You couldn’t forget yourself and just be friendly with me? As you know quite well already, I am not in the right mood for the lusts of the flesh. I could spend a few hours with you—but what am I saying? Have another drink?”
She nodded, watching him, the dark in her eyes flooding.
She took her drink but did not speak. He was silent, too.
“I would like that,” she said, looking at her glass.
“Sure?”
“Yes.” She rather spoilt the effect with the glitter of a quick professional glance, for she was anything but certain of him. She saw, too, that his own mind was rather startled, for he tended to stare.
“You needn’t be frightened of coming,” she suggested. “I’ll make you comfortable.”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I mightn’t”, he said slowly, “be such a saint as all that.”
Automatically she smiled her small knowing smile. He didn’t like it.
“There’s one thing,” she murmured.
“Yes?”
“I’m quite clean. I see to that.” This time her low voice went through his heart.
He nodded. “I had not thought of that.”
“Do come,” she said. Her darkness had gone into her voice and made it moody.
“All right, Ivy,” he said slowly, staring dreamily past her, “I’ll come.”
Mind and instinct concentrated in her eyes, but they could not read him. It was not desire, not despair, not sorrow, not any need for sympathy, it was nothing in all the world she knew. And she wondered if this slim good-looking educated fellow knew himself. He had such attractive eyes and a smile, when it came, that drowned the heart in a queer warmth.
His eyes came upon her face. “Will we go now?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Come, then.”
“You haven’t finished your drink.”
“Oh, haven’t I?” He settled down again, and appeared to smile at himself as he emptied his glass. But it was a good-natured smile, and as he set down his glass he looked at her humanly. “I warned you, of course, that I might meet my friend, and if we do—well, I’ll have to go with him.”
“Where were you to meet him?”
“We had no fixed appointment. I just came here to find him.”
She saw that he was speaking the truth and vaguely regretted having told him he hadn’t finished his drink.
“But—weren’t you to meet him some place?”
“No.” Her puzzled expression seemed to amuse him.
“Does he know you were coming here?”
“How could he, when I didn’t know myself? I should say he doesn’t even know of the existence of this place. And yet—he probably does. He knows most things—about how folk live.”
“Who is he?”
“I think—perhaps—he’s God.”
She couldn’t make a joke of it by asking him if he was loopy, because of the humour with which he watched her expression. So she tried to smile in the way he did. Her smile was not a success, for she was uncertain of herself, a little on edge.
“Are you trying to pull my leg?”
“No, Ivy. Not really. I just have the odd sort of feeling that he may be standing outside, talking to the policeman.”
She stared at him, a glint of fear in her eyes.
“Sorry, Ivy,” he said. He put his hand out over one of hers and pressed it. “You need have no fear of me. I am a wanderer, like yourself.” Fear of the trap vanished from her eyes in a restless confusion. She swallowed, and picked up her cheap gloves.
“Ready, then?” he asked.
She nodded and got up.
As they reached the door, a female voice cried: “Cheero, Ivy.”
By the little start which Ivy gave, it was clear that in these last minutes she had forgotten where she was. Will raised his hat and called: “Good night,” in a friendly voice, then followed Ivy through the doorway.
Across the narrow street, directly opposite, Joe was standing with the policeman.
“There he is,” said Will to Ivy. He saluted Joe and called: “Just a minute.” Then he walked on a few paces with Ivy.
“I told you it might happen like this,” he said.
“You knew!” she accused him in a low voice.
He shook his head. “You know I didn’t know. I just had a hunch. Sorry, but there it is.”
“But will you not come? Please. What has he got to do with it?…” The pleading note was deep in her voice. And it was genuine enough to affect her breathing.
From his pocket-book he took a pound note. “A small present for you.”
She kept looking at him. He shoved the note into her left hand which was against her breast. “You need it more than me. And I’ve enjoyed our talk.”
Her whole woman’s nature rose to him. There was no artifice now. There was something in him she did not want to lose, something she suddenly and desperately craved. And she had no words for it.
“Good night, Ivy,” he said tenderly, as he took her right hand and shook it; then, lifting his hat, he stooped and kissed her. Her lips remained quiet and cold.
But she clutched his hand. “You will come for me again?”
He looked at her and said slowly: “I think I will. Please go now.”
“Remember—you’ll come.” Her eyes glittered deeply, then like a woman betrayed into a burning exposure of herself she turned and walked away. He watched her for a little while, then strolled back to Joe and the policeman.
“Where have you been all night?” he asked Joe.
“I should say it’s much more to the point to ask where you have been. Don’t you think so?” and Joe turned to the constable. His voice was hard and brittle.
“I agree with you fully,” said the constable.
Will laughed lightly. “I have had a very pleasant evening.”
“Manifestly,” said Joe. “Though socially it is not considered de rigueur to kiss a prostitute in a public thoroughfare. Ranald here has official instructions on the point.”
“If you were gentlemen, you wouldn’t have seen it.”
“Will you answer me if it is necessary”, inquired Ranald, “for the purpose of your ‘copy’, that you should go to such dubious lengths?”
“In my profession,” said Will, “the sky’s the limit.”
“Indeed, I would have thought it was the other place,” said Ranald. “At least—it was looking that way.” It was a dry and friendly humour. “However, as they go, Ivy is not the worst of them. Though she has a temper when she’s roused. She has that.”
“Really?” Will looked at him.
Ranald nodded. “It’s my colleague was telling me. It was in another pub farther east there. There was a regular shindy. And do you know what her excuse was?”
“No.”
“‘He insulted me,’ she said, pointing to a fellow.”
“Perhaps he had,” said Will.
Ranald laughed thickly. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
They all began to laugh, but Will took out his cigarette case, because in a moment, in the middle of laughing, last night’s loneliness began to come at him. He shouldn’t have looked at Ivy walking away. Suddenly he heard the inner sound of laughter, its hard obliterating cruelty.
“Did he lock her up?” he asked, to kill the sound.
“No, as it happened, he didn’t. To tell the truth he didn’t know what to do because there was a lot of them. But he had to do something, so he lifted the fellow who insulted her, and fortunately that fellow struck my colleague and that made things easy for him.”
Will began to laugh again. The effect of all the drinks he had had was beginning to take the disconcerting form of a cold sobriety. He felt the coldness on his brow. He did not want to lose the mood he had been in all night.
As Joe and he walked away, a certain restraint at once became manifest and Will tried to defeat it by commenting on the human decency of the policeman they had just left (the man who had marched Jamie to the cells last night). Joe agreed.
Will went on to tell how he had called at Joe’s home. “I wanted to see you to find out what had happened to Jamie. It would have dogged me in the country over the week-end.”
“I think he’ll come all right,” said Joe in cool practical tones. “I bailed him out this morning. He’ll plead drunk and disorderly and be fined five bob—or perhaps merely be given a warning, because Ranald will put in a good word for him. A clean record and exceptional circumstances. That’s not the real worry.”
“Having been locked up, you mean, won’t do him any harm?”
“I hope not.”
“I can understand that. It will probably do him good.”
“You mean?”
“The humiliation may be a certain payment on account.”
“I don’t—quite see—what you mean?” Joe’s tone was precise and cool.
“A bit fanciful, probably, but the punishment, the abasement, the suffering—a form of tribute to the dead Ettie for her tragedy. His recognition.”
Joe walked on steadily and said nothing.
“You think that a bit highfalutin; that a fellow like Jamie could not come near the conception of sacrifice?”
“I couldn’t say, I’m sure,” Joe answered. “But it seems to me a bit vague. It certainly would never dawn on him that being imprisoned was a spiritual sacrifice.”
“Naturally,” said Will.
They walked on in silence, and now Will felt quite certain that Joe had been deeply upset by the recent scene before the pub. There, the very foundation of their friendship had been struck at. Joe had kept face before Ranald and supported the idea of “copy”. But now they were alone, and he knew that “copy” was a myth. To Joe it would not merely be drink and immorality of the lowest because most calculated kind; but, deeper than that, a betrayal of the proletarian faith that was Joe’s religion and his life. Will now understood the hard note in Joe’s voice. The understanding so appalled him, that a slow smile twisted his face.
“However,” Will went on, “as you suggest, these rather mystical conceptions probably don’t matter. You said that was not the main worry. What is the worry, then?”
“The difficulty of getting him to settle down again.”
“Why?”
“Well, naturally, he’s going to be upset for a bit.”
“Of course. But you think he’ll settle down?”
“I hope so.”
“Was he at home to-day?”
“For a time, yes.”
“You’ve seen Mary?”
“Yes. Fortunately she has sense.”
“She’ll give him rope. Are you going back to-night again?”
“No, I’m going home. I’ve done what I could.”
“That’s wise,” said Will. “It’ll come all right.”
“You think so?” There was a harsh dryness in Joe’s voice now.
“I think so,” Will answered. Then prompted by a queer malice out of the cold white world of his unnatural sobriety, he went on in a conversational voice: “That close, that room of his, is to Jamie just now what a slaughter-house is to a young bull. He cannot face it. It cries out against him. He could roar when he comes near it. But he knows he has to face it. He can turn and twist on himself as he likes, strain at the halter madly, but face it he must, and he knows it. And to-night, or to-morrow night, or the next night, he’ll drag himself back. And Mary will be there. And she’ll give him food in silence. And time will go on. The minutes will group together, and the hours, and they’ll break him. He’ll weep. And for a time she will listen and do nothing; but then, moved, she will go to him and comfort him; and that will soften the hard core of bitterness, and he will cling to her and find comfort in her; self-pity will be upon him now and will deepen his emotions; and he will ask much comfort from her; and in the strange frenzy of life that comes upon a man then, under the absolving hands of a woman, he will ask from her the ultimate comfort her body can give—and she will give him that.”
Joe stopped abruptly.
“In this way,” Will concluded, standing still also, “they will begin to build a new life relation on the tragedy of the dead Ettie. For days, months, it may go on, but how far into the future, will depend—on circumstance, yes, but, more inscrutably, on the stuff their souls are made of.”
Joe looked at him coldly. “You believe that?”
“It is probable. Already in her heart Mary knows it’s highly probable. She can look after herself, as you say. And she knows she can. She knows nothing can defeat her—until she defeats herself. But things will happen, in that room between them, so and so. They are not bourgeois. With them artifice or social law will go down before reality, particularly the sweeping force of emotional reality. It may be the greatness of your proletariat that in that desperate hour they will defeat sterile suffering in the deepest mutual warmth. I cannot judge those things. I can only feel their impact.”
“You seem to have a deep knowledge of those things.”
“Do you mean experience?” asked Will.
Joe walked on. Will glanced sideways at him and saw his face staring straight ahead. He was hurt, he was angry, he was bitterly disillusioned, but deeper than all that, Will saw that he suffered.
But he could not help him; and, in his strange mood of detachment, he had no desire to help him. They were drawing near the wheels of the trams and the brighter lights of the centre of the city. At the end of the street, they were now walking up, they would part.
“I have no wish to intrude on your private life,” Joe said at last, “and you do not need to answer. Were you going home with that girl—when you saw me?”
“Yes,” said Will.
“I see. I just didn’t know you were like that.”
Then out of a final perversity, that yet seemed implicit in the need of this bitter moment, Will added almost casually: “I had had a few drinks by myself. There didn’t seem much else to do.”
They came to the corner of the street. “Well, I suppose we part here,” Joe said in his quiet matter-of-fact voice. “Good night.”
“Good night,” said Will.
Joe swung across the street, his tall broad figure powerful and undeviating. Will looked after him until he had disappeared, then turned the corner to a tram-stop.