Wild Geese Overhead by Neil M. Gunn Read Free Book Online

and now up over him crept a premonition of awful boredom. But he liked Philip. Had always liked him.
    The talk went on. But it was Will who had to define; who had to entertain Philip with the thought he did not normally encounter. Will felt himself being drained, and finally said he had to get back to the office.
    â€œI really have enjoyed this.” Philip got up. “Couldn’t you come out some evening.… Not at all. The bill is mine. I asked you. Look here, what about.…”
    Will spoke to his landlady at supper.
    â€œWe did have two roosters,” she replied, “but just before you came one killed the other in a fight, and then some one left the door into the old pigsty open and he went in and pecked the bait on a rat-trap. But I’m getting one on Saturday, I hope, and he’ll have to do until our own grow up.”
    Tired as he was, he took a walk in the dark, stumbling here and there, so that he should sleep soundly. He left all essayists severely alone. Once or twice, after an illness, he had had a spell of sleepless early mornings, and knew the devilish accuracy with which the mind delighted in awaking at the same hour. If such a habit were to be formed here, life would become finally intolerable.
    He awoke at the dawn chorus.
    The following morning he awoke at the same time.
    And now here he was awake again. The habit had been well and truly formed!
5
    The making up of his mind deliberately to listen to the singing was something more than a gesture of despair. It was, at the root of his being, a cold and bitter defiance. If he had to listen, then listen he would in a detachment so complete that he would conquer the singing, master it, withdraw from it, and so, as far as he was concerned, annihilate it.
    He lay flat on his back, his arms extended by his side, his legs slightly apart and at full stretch. His breathing came evenly and lightly through his nostrils. His mouth and eyes were shut, his head sideways.
    He listened.
    For a time the underlying hatred kept him from anything like detachment. But little by little as the dramatic varieties in the presentation of the chorus claimed his attention, the hatred began to sink down, to seep away, and the feeling of exhaustion, freed from emotional enravelment, brought to his body a certain cool ease.
    This in itself was a great relief, as if his drained flesh had grown lighter. That thick congestion of the brain, charged with obscuring pulsing blood, that followed the intense visualizations of sleeplessness, was thinning away at the same time; was thus no doubt the real cause of the lightness and ease. So that the vision of the prairie in the thin but clear morning light came not only upon his mind but also upon his body, filtering in a cool air through the bedclothes. As the advancing gulls brought the sea, his body began to lose its corporeal feel altogether and to float in a still wonder. This wonder quickened with the short sharp cries that he thought were the cries of terns. Then all in a moment, before his body could ground again, the wild geese opened the world above his closed eyes and in a movement of sheer enchantment his spirit, his own most intimate self, rose up and experienced such a sensation of freedom as he had never known in his life.
    While the enchantment—a convenient word—lasted he was not excited or deeply moved. If the term “moved” may be used at all—and it is heavy—then, in the literal meaning, he was highly moved. It was a still, freed, high-up delight, in the sense that the light and horizons of the morning were about him. The hemisphere over his flat world opened out like a bright fan—though fan implies something opaque, when the experience was essentially and indeed precisely a removal of the opaque. More than that—though this is difficult—he not only experienced this delight in himself, as an intensely personal realization, but also he was part of all that was about