Arthur Turney had, in fact, smashed it up and sold the wreckage, without telling Phillip, who had been fond of Arthur; now he replied to his cousin’s letter, saying he would see him if he would agree to send the £20 he owed for the bike to the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund. Arthur agreed.
That evening Phillip met him at his club, and found him looking to be almost the same—his hair only slightly greying at the temples —and slim as all those years ago. Over dinner Arthur told him that he had a girl-friend who would soon be conscripted into the Forces, unless she went to work on the land. He wanted to find a farm within reasonable travelling distance of London, he said, where he could visit her during week-ends.
“I hope to marry her—if my wife will consent to divorce me.”
His marriage was not happy, he said. His wife had long refused to have a child, but after many refusals, had at last consented to allow him to adopt one.
“I loved that child, but after a year of trial my wife insisted the boy be returned to the Orphanage because, she said, he might have in him the seeds of dishonesty.”
“The seeds?” said Phillip. “Or the seed-bed?”
“Well, there’s no need to quibble. Anyway, I took him, in tears, back to the home. You see, he’d learned to call me Daddy. He cried for me at the Orphanage. So my wife agreed to re-adopt him. After another year she insisted that he be sent back again. Later still, I met this girl, and we fell in love. She wants children.”
“Ah.”
Phillip spent a night at Arthur’s flat—part of the girl’s married sister’s home in a village off the Great West Road. The sister’s husband was with the Eighth Army, having served all through the North Africa campaign. Both girls had their parents living with them, in another flat of the house.
The father had been a business man in India, of the sort called a T.G.—Trading Gent—by Rudyard Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills. Among other things he said to Phillip that he regretted that the Communists marching to Downing Street, during the past winter, ‘didn’t get their hand on Sir Hereward Birkin’. “He should have been lynched, the dirty traitor.”
“He’s not a traitor, and he’s a friend of mine, sir.”
“Then I don’t think much of your judgment.”
Later, when they were alone, Arthur told Phillip that he had slept with this soldier’s wife until he had met her younger sister.
“I’ll be glad to get Alice away from her parents. She’s ready to come, if you will accept her on your farm.”
In the morning Phillip asked him if he had sent the £20 cheque to the R.A.F. Benevolent Fund.
“Well, to be frank, I was going to send it after I’d heard from you that you would take Alice.” When Phillip said nothing, he went on, “So I may as well tell you that her parents don’t feel altogether happy about her going to your farm. You see, she’s only eighteen. And as her father told you, her brother-in-law’s now with the Eighth Army in Italy. I wish you hadn’t contradicted what he said about Birkin. It would have been more tactful not to have replied. You see, your reputation is not altogether in your favour, people know all about you, and how you’re overworking your children on your farm, and—other things, such as, to be frank, that illegitimate son of yours, by your one-time secretary.”
Well, that was cousin Arthur, true to his own character. I was glad to be on my own again; and arriving back at my club, found a message awaiting me from the painter Riversmill, whom I had met in East Anglia. Would I care to go to the private view of the Royal Academy—a ticket awaited me at the turnstile entrance.
Ivan Maisky, the distinguished Bolshevist, is now an honorary member of my club, an eminence shared with Royalty; while to go from the sublime to the gorblime, almost the only remaining adherents of liberalism and Free Trade in England now are the black marketeers. Even they have their worries, mainly through the masses of paper money they are forced by Income Tax fears to carry in rolls about their persons, to the embarrassment of Bond Street jewellers when those individuals who oil the wheels of democracy enter their shops to turn into jewellery bundles smelling not of Mr. Churchill’s ‘tears or sweat or blood’, borrowed from John Donne the poet, but of fish-and-chips.
How strange it seemed—and what a relief in shabby, broken London—that there should be a Royal Academy in war-time! Now that fear had partly gone from faces, as the fall of Germany was inevitable, perhaps it was not so strange. Surely it was not only himself alone who felt the strangeness, the semi-freedom, the semiease upon the sunlit pavements of London once again?
In Burlington House Phillip met a young West Country writer, whose farming journal he had read, with delight in its wit, when the book had been published a year or so previously. The young poet farmed upon a promontory at the verge of the battering Atlantic, and appeared, from his talk, to have had more adventures than were recorded in the book. His appearance and mind and outspoken remarks had inevitably suggested to some of the more active insensitives in his district that he must be a spy. Below his farmlands was a cove between rocky outcrops, whereon much flotsam become jetsam when flung up his beach by grey snarling combers. Tins of coffee in boxes had been relict there; barrels of red wine trundled up the beach of stones, to stagger down again after each retreating wave, liquid calling to liquid until a rope held the barrel gurgling. Bits of balloon fabric like fish-skin floated in with a forty-gallon drum of petrol. Wine in England when the restaurant cellars held only beds! Petrol when nearly all the rubber wheels had ceased upon the roads of the Island Fortress! The poet drank the hogshead, while his tractor drank the petrol, and for this the farmer-poet was reported, brought to court and sent to prison, where he wrote a ballad which later Phillip read in The New English Weekly‚ and thought much of, with special reference to ‘my dear Mauberley’ who also had been in prison.
The two amateur farmers had arranged to meet in London at the Academy. The spring sun was shining in the streets and through the glass in the roof of Burlington House as they shook hands.
“How’s your farm?” said Hare No.1.
“Taken over by the local Agricultural Committee. My wife fell ill with tuberculosis, and is in hospital—my only labourer,” replied Hare No. 2.
The farmer-poet appeared to have something else on his mind, beyond a wife’s haemorrhage and lost land. “Can you tell me how to get money to Mauberley?”
“Mauberley?”
“You know. One never knows where hidden microphones are. He is very ill, in prison.”
Phillip was wondering why Birkin needed money in prison. Then he noticed an old man with a small microphone in his ear looking at a picture. At the mention of the name ‘Mauberley’ he appeared to edge back from the picture and move nearer to where they stood. By this time in the war Phillip had come to be unsure of everything concerning himself. When people occasionally asked leading questions about his ideas on the war, latent hostility in their voices, he did not reply because he could not, like the dead, reply.
“Haven’t you any ideas about how to get money out of the country?”
Could this poet be an agent provocateur, an M.I.5 man fixing his arrest? A stool pigeon?
“I don’t think I have any ideas.”
“I must find a way to send him money.”
Why, Phillip thought again, money to ‘Mauberley’ when Birkin was still in Britain? He had been released from prison some months before, and now was under house-arrest somewhere. Just before he had left gaol Phillip had had a card thanking him for ‘steady courage’—a misappraisal, he thought, for he thought of himself by nature timid, like a hare; and at times, no doubt, as ineffectual and silly.
“Are you sure ‘he’ is abroad?”
“Yes. He’s in an open-air prison, guarded by Negroes. Frozen by night, scorched by day. In chains.”
It seemed stranger than ever. The man with the ear-microphone moved nearer. Phillip led the way out of the Academy; they went to sit in St. James’s Park. The new leaves of the plane trees rustled. Water g
littered. Bomber aircraft resounded in the sky. When they had gone Phillip said, “Are we talking of the same man?”
“I was wondering if we were.”
“Who is ‘Mauberley’?”
“I thought you knew Mauberley is the hero of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. He is Pound himself. Ezra is in prison at Pisa. His new Canto has been smuggled to me. Here is the manuscript.” He showed Phillip a large envelope filled with pages scribbled in pencil.
“They may hang Ezra. I must help him. Dollars, if possible.”
How ironic that dollars were required to rescue the poet who had damned Money, or usury, as the source of all human ills. A superficial thought, he knew; but O, brave Ezra Pound!
*
Before Phillip went down to the West Country he called to see his sister Elizabeth at her office in the City. She was pale and had a harassed look. He wished he had brought some eggs with him, and butter; for, she said, she was lucky to get one egg a month on her ration card, and the butter ration was only two ounces a week.
“I live with an old couple in Highgate who won’t allow me to hear Beethoven on the wireless. It’s their set, you see, and so I can’t take it to my room and hear music by myself.”
As always when in Elizabeth’s company, Phillip felt himself to be diminished to the old nervous state he had known, and escaped from, in his parents’ home before he left to live in Malandine after the first war.
“I’m going down to South Devon now,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t stay to take you out to lunch. The train leaves in less than half an hour from Paddington.”
“Oh, aren’t you lucky! I pine for the country. I used to get away nearly every week-end to Sussex,” she went on in a strained voice. “I stayed with a farmer and his sister, but she was jealous of me, afraid that he wanted to marry me, you see! But she needn’t have worried. When I told him that Aunt Belle had left me four thousand pounds, and he said I could invest it in his farm if I liked, I knew at once that all he cared about was my money! And I had thought he was keen on me, I was very fond of him, too—and all the time it was my money he wanted!”
“Well, I understand how you feel, but if you really care for him——”
“I did, until he wanted my money! So I’ve never been back there, no fear!”
“Your money invested in a sound farm would bring in a good yield nowadays, Elizabeth.”
“So that’s it! I suppose you want my money to bolster up your old farm?”
He said patiently, “Farmers are in clover now, Elizabeth, with guaranteed prices.”
“That’s what my friend tried to tell me, but I’m too old a bird to be caught with salt on its tail!”
Phillip thought that he hadn’t heard that remark since he was a small boy. It had been one of his father’s sayings, extended to all kinds of occasions, including his excuses—falsehoods as he called them—before punishment with the cane.
The idea, or thought of Father, seemed to raise his image, for Elizabeth said “Have you heard about Father’s goings-on? He thinks he’s going to marry a young girl, he’s waiting for her to grow up!” Dry laughter. “Aunt Vicky wrote to me, saying this girl has the run of his house, he even allows her to play his radiogram! And you know how particular he is! No one was allowed to play his records when we were children! Yes, Vicky is quite disturbed. She says Father will marry this girl when she is eighteen, and then she’ll get all his money!”
“Have you seen Doris lately?”
“Not for some time. She doesn’t know about Father. She did ask me down to Cross Aulton, but I don’t want to hear her talk about Bob Willoughby. Why doesn’t she divorce that awful husband of hers? I knew there was something wrong with him the first time I heard that awful stutter. I knew the marriage would fail, and told Doris so, but she wouldn’t listen!”
“Bob had a bad time on the Somme, you know, when cousin Percy was killed beside him.”
“Oh, I don’t believe all those stories about the last war being responsible for this and that long afterwards! Look at you! You had a good time, really, you told me so yourself, taking things all round. I suppose you’ve forgotten?”
“Well, I must not keep you, Elizabeth. I hope things improve for you—but we’re all in it—these are the dark days.”
“You can say that, when you’re going down to Devon!”
*
Beyond the village of Malandine, notice boards with red-painted lettering declared it was a Forbidden Area. Unexploded mines, grenades, and shells were lying about. Phillip had, some time before, received notice that his field was commandeered by the War Department, and had assumed that this was because he was an ex-18b detainee. What he had not realised was that a considerable area west of Malandine, and the foreshore below the village, had been used for some time as a practice battle-ground for the much-advertised invasion of Europe.
He went into the Ring of Bells, which was just outside the forbidden area, and had a pint of beer. There was a new landlord, who told him that the soldiers had gone. Phillip asked no questions, but mentioned that he was the owner of a field on the hill-line, below a spinney of beech-trees.
“The one with the German strong-point in it?” he was asked.
“Well, I called it that. It’s a converted cattle-shed, really.”
“Is? Don’t you mean, was?”
“Why, what’s happened?”
“Better see for yourself.”
Phillip left soon afterwards, and walked up the lane to a ragged sky-line where the spinney had stood. When he reached the field, he saw that of the trees he had planted fourteen years before only one solitary pine remained, with a wildling thorn bush, below the burst and scattered remains of the Gartenfeste.
I was glad that only the crows of the wilderness heard my impotent shouting. With my usual conceit I had assumed that the notice to remove household goods, personal belongings, etc., was similar to the order D. H. Lawrence had received in Cornwall during the Great War to quit the Duchy, since those idiots down there thought he was a spy, his wife being Freida von Richthofen, a cousin of the famous German ‘ace’. Now, not only was everything destroyed, but this everything included all the notes and synopses I have made for my novel series since 1919. Some were whole chapters of battle scenes, and especially one of the night of Hallowe’en of 1914, when I first went into action on Messines Hill and was shocked into another dimension of the mind.
Now all is lost—over a hundred thousand words—my true life—not this shambles of an alien body which has walked against the grain of ‘civilised’ living for so long. I struck my head again and again, for having been so utterly stupid as to leave them there.
While he had been dashing off this entry, a crow had been watching him from the one remaining pine left standing, at the south-western corner of the field. “La balance, toujour la balance!” Phillip shouted at the bird, which dived away from its look-out, uttering the rapid treble-croak of alarm to its mate. “Et tu, Brute?” Phillip yelled, “what are you, a disguised desk clot from M.I.5?”
He began to search in the ruins of the Gartenfeste. The note-books—over twenty volumes, one for every year since 1919—had been kept in an old oak chest, together with all the papers left by cousin Willie. He found part of the lid of the box, and began to dig frantically with his hands. At last the box! Within were the volumes, sodden and swelled, but all were there! The ink was smudged in places, but the text was decipherable. Among his own volumes were the note-books of cousin Willie. He opened one and saw the date, 1923, the place München.
‘The victorious Allies insisted on the Germans paying 50 million pounds in gold. The Germans had not this gold, so they sent an envoy called Dr. Fritz Mannheimer, of Mendelssohn’s bank, to London to borrow the money. The loan was for three months, when the German mark was 200 to the £. (It was 20 before 1914). The loan was repaid by selling marks down until it was 1,000 to the £. Then the French seized the Rhineland. Black Colonial troops were in occupation, there were constant affrays w
ith German youths, a few of them National Socialists, over the rape of German girls, some of them six and seven years old. Among a starving population, greatly upset (among other things because of the shortage of soap, which became currency for children among the black French troops, themselves uprooted and enslaved to the colonial system) the mark fell this winter to 20 million to the £. Farm labourers use wheel-barrows to bring their wages home, heavy wads of printed paper, almost the only value of which is for burning on hearths, to keep, warm.
This inflation has ruined all classes in Germany. Jews arrive daily from the ghettoes of Poland with a few roubles and become property owners of houses, streets of houses, small businesses and firms, almost overnight. The morale of a nation, depressed by defeat, is temporarily destroyed. A phrase used by Sir Eric Geddes, who at the outbreak of war was a railway manager in England and ended a Cabinet Minister, is often repeated in my hearing. ‘Germany is a lemon to be squeezed until the pips squeak.’
The pips are more than squeaking. They are shrieking. They shriek through one man’s voice. He has the truest eyes I have ever seen in a man’s face, he is an ex-corporal of the Linz Regiment, which opposed my regiment under Messines hill on Christmas Day, 1914. We made a truce then, which must never be broken.
He sat down and dashed off a letter to the image of his dead cousin. It would be a record for his novels one day.
Dearest Cousin Willie,
In the spring of 1923 you were walking alone through Germany. In the autumn of that year you were drowned in the estuary of the Two. Rivers in Devon. Have you found peace, now that the shells and bombs. in Europe are shrieking again; bomber crews shrieking as they burn; German workers and their children in the suburbs of their industrial town after industrial town shrieking, phosphorus-spattered; little Jewish children thrust head-first into coke-ovens shrieking into ash—perchance to arise again in the bearded wheat, Dinkelweizen, to dream upon some German field far from the waters of Jordan? For I have felt all this shrieking within myself, night after day and day after night, and others, have sometimes heard my voice, but I was not shrieking only for myself, I was shrieking for England, for Europe, for all the world.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 47
