Free Wild Geese Overhead by Neil M. Gunn

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.
2
    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