Free Wild Geese Overhead by Neil M. Gunn Page B

‘crisis’ countries? In our time?”
    â€œDoesn’t look too promising.”
    â€œFundamentally 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.”
    â€œBut that would mean international socialism first.”
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œA bit too simple, you think?”
    Don smiled, too.
    â€œWhat I mean——” said Will.
    â€œWhat 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