There was but one other set of chain-knives they knew of, and they belonged to a rum feller who not only would not have the weeds cut, but would as likely as not mob them if they went to him and tried to borrow his knives to cut the weeds. Nevertheless to Phillip they came, and learned to their surprise and even dismay that it was he who had specially asked that the weeds be cut.
“Blast, that’s a rum’n!”
“Well, the main thing is to get the spoil pulled out.”
“See you here, master, we dursen’t ask you for the loan of yar knives. Yar’ll mob us if we do, woan yew?”
Without further words Billy poured out five pint-mugs of cider from the barrel in the Studio—Herefordshire cider. Healths were drunk. The sack holding the chain-knives was on the floor. Cider is a loosening drink.
“Now, ’bor, take you these knives, oh, I can’t talk East Anglian. Gordarn, ‘ave zum more o’ thaccy cider, ’tis proper tangliligs stuff, and then take they bliddy knives and cut the flamin’ weeds, but leave zum for th’ faish tew bide in, yew! And that’s a bit of B.B.C. Dummersetshire talk.”
Did the head man (the cantankerous foreman had died)—who must have pulled more than a million times his own weight from water to land in his time—think this was talking Jarman? He looked up at Phillip as though he were thinking. Ah, there’s a catch in it somewhere, be sure of that! And as they went away Lucy heard him repeating, “That Phillip be a rum fellow, ’bor. First he woan’t hev them weeds cut, and now he say ‘Cut you them flamin’ weeds!’ What dew yew make of that, ’bor? Blast, Phillip’s a rum’n!”
“They call you Phillip among themselves, my dear. They’ve accepted you, don’t look so sad.”
“That’s right,” said Billy. “They think you’re okay, Dad.”
Appreciation—fame—how fortunate I am to have been ‘neglected’ by the world—a ‘neglect’ that has enabled me to remain, like a mole, underground. Or, to vary the simile, mushrooms at midnight grow best in heat and darkness.
The moles and mushrooms—Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room, withdrawn from the social round; Tolstoi in peasant garb, self-reduced to the safe level of the soil (the ‘marther’, or mother, of the East Anglian peasant before mechanisation, or the robot, took over); D. H. Lawrence in the open hurrying away, away, all his life; Conrad and ‘the cries of pain’ in his letters to Edward Garnett; Turgenev, in exile, dreaming of the land of his heart amidst the alien streets of Paris and London.
One of my favourite quotations comes from Conrad’s letters—not a cry of pain this time—to Edward Garnett, in 1917.
‘I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives, and the peace of his conscience—no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionaries went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy—and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer.’
The chief character of my novel-series will be a man deprived and insecure, having suffered in childhood from his father, and the consequent leaching away of courage. He will grow to boyhood revealing, in the eyes of his elders, traits which are the reverse of virtuous—mendacity, cowardice, constant tearfulness, and mischievousness at times near-criminal. The boy sets fire to dry grass in summer, fires corks from a loaded horse-pistol at the neighbours’ windows. In truth, as a human personality he was nearly destroyed before he arrived at puberty. But these signs, to his father, of degeneracy, of his son being ‘a throwback’, are but the unsunned side of the moon which, with the innocence of the dead, turns a bright face to a sister planet.
His face, its light generally obscured in his home, shows gleams during the Great War. There the loveless youth, the solitary under-aged soldier, will carry the weights of war alone, and break, not away, but into another dimension of the mind. In 1914 and 1915 his feelings are displaced; but when, later on in the war, he finds himself accepted in his Regiment, he begins to live for others, for his men, and thereby evades the agitations of solitary fear.
Thus the war on the Western Front becomes for him the Greater Love War,—with its never-to-be-forgotten generosities and comradeship with the Germans during the 1914 Christmas truce in Noman’s land.
And after the war, when the battlefields are silent by day, and lightless by night, he finds himself back where he started; but with a burning desire for a new and better world.
There was no place for such men among the victors, the old men who carved up Europe north of the Rhine, land of the conquered. After the signing of the dictat at Versailles, did not Marshal Foch point, on the new map, at Danzig on the Baltic and prophesy, “There the next war will begin!”
And there indeed it did begin; and all that was learned on the Western Front, like the virtues of Turgenev, during his lifetime, might never have been.
*
Did he once write a book about a water wanderer, in those remote days of ambition following a war to end all wars? It belonged to that time when a man could say what he thought without arrest, when cities were lit by night, houses were painted; when clocks hanging above London streets told the time, and newspapers carried advertisements of firms wanting to sell their goods. Nowadays firms advertised in newspapers, asking the public not to ask for their products.
He determined to bring down his two-ounce split-cane rod, and fish for trout there; but when he got home and opened his cedarwood box of artificial flies he saw the mummies of several moths within. There they lay, amidst the wreckage of their victims—Pale Watery, Olive Dun, Alexander, Blue Upright, Pheasant Tail, Greenwell’s Glory, Fiery Forbes, Black Gnat, Red Spinner; but all the silk, cotton, and worsted bodies, together with wings and whisks, were dust.
So Phillip wrote off for one of his special game-cock hackle flies to the little shop near the end of the High Street in Colham, where the taxidermist still tied flies, as his father before him and his grandmother before that.
Colham! Memories of my boyhood with cousin Willie: memories overlaid, and fretted as my trout-flies, by details of ordinary living called time. Today I revisited in time the remote dead who presented themselves to me, in swift erasable glimpses, with strange insistence all through the afternoon and evening, after I had seen myself—as a figure before me—standing by the tractor house adjoining the seventeenth-century farm premises. I saw that figure as one who had gone the way of all feeble, self-built men who had tried to be better than themselves; and thereby were strained, and finally, estranged. That figure remained still, facing away from me, while I stood motionless after the shock.
It wore my old khaki trench-coat, which I bought in 1915 from Thresher & Glenny’s, and still had when I rode my Norton motor-bicycle after the war.
Was this a projection of a tired brain? My left eye has been aching for days, from writing by candle-light sometimes long after midnight; also it was injured, I think, when Billy and I had that row on the Higher Brock
Hanger.
My thoughts tormented me. My mind churned over past failures, culminating at the moment when, knowing that the midwife attending Barley was stupid, I did nothing, while knowing that I should have remained there in that cottage; and Barley died of an uterine haemorrhage because I, like Peter the Apostle, had denied the truth, my intuition.
Everything I had undertaken, it seemed, had failed; and been foredoomed to fail, because of the setting-aside of qualities inherited from my mother. Now, aware of some portending doom, I wandered on the meadow, before returning to the pond between the premises and the river, and sat on a log. Near me, on a mole-hill, stood the diminutive bantam cock I call the Phantom.
I was akin to that feeble little scare-nought which, for months, has strutted, alone with its shadow, towards me from the stables whenever it saw me. It was the remnant of the original pride of a pair of pure-bred bantams that arrived before the war, gift of Lady Breckland, a member of Birkin’s Imperial Socialist Party. The two birds made a brave and gay little couple, which founded a family upon their own particular territory under the elms before the Corn Barn.
By a coincidence, the elms are now dead. Disease has smitten them, so that leafless against the spring sky they arose above me as I sat on the log, under a dark tangle of twigs and branches deserted by jackdaw and woodpecker alike.
Under their stillness, towards me, moved the Phantom, last of his race, come to see if I had anything to give—or perhaps even for company?
When it rains he does not move to shelter, but stands shivering at the foot of the largest elm, from a lower bough of which hangs in decay a broken swing of the children. Now, as I sat on the log, the bird scrambled up, with thrusts of ancient wings, upon the seat of the swing, while from his open beak came a thin, near-lost screech, a mere whisper of defiance of his fate.
Was he, too, haunted by memory? Had inbreeding—for he was the son of his great-grandfather and his mother was his deceased wife’s sister’s daughter’s aunt by incest—or something like that—had this given him a fatal sense of time’s continuity? Their bones lie among the nettles round the pond. He is all mixed-up, like his discoloured feathers when it rains. Seeing me looking at him, he flapped his ruinous wings and his crow—as he toppled off the swing—was little more than an itch of sound, a jitter, a jix, a bit of old hay from which the mould has dried. Such is the end of an empire, the collapse of pedigree, when the hand of God is removed.
Now he was, poor little symbol of all that was decadent of my farm standing beside me and looking up into my face. For food? Companionship? A new covey of little chicks to get him out of his Faustian despairs? I put out my tongue at him. He jerked his head, regarded me with distaste, and silently crowed.
I said to him, “Really, old cock, I cannot see how ever it could have been otherwise, for all of us are what we were, don’t you agree?” He looked weary, he walked close to my legs, his eye closed, he was going to sleep beside my warmth.
I picked him up and enclosed him in my jacket. We put him in the hot cupboard, next to the floor, in a basket of hay, but he was dead the next morning. Pneumonia, probably.
The water in the dykes trembled and shivered as the white glints moved slowly eastward in the height of the sky, one chequered pattern succeeding another seemingly from pole to pole. When the air was clear, only the scattering gossamers of vapour remaining, Phillip heard the song of the willow wren in the River wood.
Walking behind Sheba and Toby as he harrowed the wheat on the ploughed meadow, he felt the heat of the sun being absorbed by the plants of the wheat. The radial heat of the sun was drawing life from the earth. The leaves of the plants had a gleam on them.
As the harrows rattled over the flints laid in an old levelled drain Timid Wat the hare, distant from Phillip by a dozen paces, started from his day-dream behind one of the many tussocks of old turf which lay among the plants. He dashed through the hedge and up over the slope of the Scalt. Phillip knew he would stop on the summit, to watch him with his great eyes held in backward glance, though his head was pointing away from him. He stopped the horses. At once Timid Wat fled, the very spirit of fear. Hares on the adjacent airfield had been shot at by day and by night, and he might have come from there.
A lapwing was rising and tumbling over the irregular patches of the wheat-field. Soon the hen bird would be laying her eggs. He knew that, when he came to harrow the wheat again, it would be difficult to see them: and he must pick them up and set them down when the horses had passed. Yes; he must come down by way of the Scalt, the day before the next harrowing, and mark the place-with a stick. Then Peter, with tractor and roll following the harrows, would not crush them. If he marked the site now, the crows might mark it, too, and later get the eggs.
One of my clearest moments during the first year of my farming was when Luke told me that it was the local custom to care for lapwings’ nests. It meant a little trouble as one implement after another passed over the seed-bed; but the true countryman knew that, if he took away the eggs, or allowed his harrow to dash them to fragments, a sorrowing bird would stand about the grave of her young, day after day.
Now that the habit of patience, to follow horses day after day in one field after another had been formed the work gave its own satisfaction. Life for Phillip became simple, with that of the lapwing walking around her eggs while he passed on, and her mate stood as though in meditation beside a tussock of half-rotted turf. Then as the joy of spring surged in his being the bird ran with wings uplifted and arose into the sky to fall and wheel and roll and dive to earth while uttering the wildly sweet see-o-weet, see-ooo-weet! of happy release, while his mate, new rootlet or dried grass brought to the slight hollow, quatted to turn it in her beak, thus to restore the rough outline of her nest.
The blue and white days swept by, the four earth-coloured eggs were brooded with passion, tucked between her thighs while heat flowed into the life growing within the shells.
The male bird, ever on guard, dashed at other birds far superior to himself in strength and cunning—carrion crows, gulls, rooks, pies and daws which flew over, searching for an egg to snatch and take on a branch, there to hold it up in beak, and guzzel. A fury of righteousness possessed the lapwing, giving strength to buffet stronger birds. Up and down the field he flew, crying wildly and sweetly when danger was past; his note changing as another enemy approached, to be dived on from above and harassed from above, greenish-black, white-flashing pinions swishing angrily by corvine head.
It all came back to Phillip, there on Teal meadow: pew-it in Gaultshire, cousin Percy Pickering—lapwing in Kent, Desmond Neville, Bloodhound Patrol of Boy Scouts, the wonder of life before 1914. Now those days had come back with startling clearness, he had got back, O, he must begin his novel series; he must, he must, he must—or perish.
That night he had his second dream in the war.
Bodiless, a simple idea only, I was suspended in azure, soundlessly, looking down at a group of men standing below.
I was watching, without feeling of any kind, my own body. My body appeared to have fallen and was dead.
My thought, impersonal and calm as the azure in which I was merged, without form or substance, was Poor little body. The body was myself when younger.
While I looked down, serenely, it seemed that I was dissolving, to become a distillation of another thought, for the words I heard beside me were, I have come to fetch Billy.
When Phillip awakened he went at once to the farmhouse and stood trembling by Lucy’s bed, telling her of his dream while tears ran down his face. She invited him to share her warmth, holding him while he told her, in rapid, shaky voice, how his mother, when he was a small boy, had seen her dead mother and sister standing by her bed, and the words, We have come to fetch Hugh.
“My father scoffed at her belief that her brother Hugh, in a nursing home, was dead. Later that day my grandfather, who lived next door, had a telegram from the nursing home….” He cried out, “Billy is dead. I know it! I know it!�
�
“Don’t worry, Pip,” said Lucy, taking his head upon her breast. “I expect Billy is all right, the war is nearly over, you know.” He poured out his spirit before her, trusting himself to her.
*
The brilliant azure of the open sky illumined the mossy white blossoms of the pear-tree just outside Phillip’s bedroom window. He saw the same walls of cream distemper, blue Wilton carpet, couch, chest-of-drawers, open journal before him on the same three-legged table at which he had sat during the years behind the black-out curtains. Downstairs was still a store for seeds, tubs for pickling bacon, tools, spare wheels, balls of binder-twine, rubber boots, and tins of paint. Upstairs in his lighthouse room, the floorboards around the carpet were scrubbed by Mrs. Valiant like the deck of a wooden ship of olden time. Here he had found refuge when he should have been helping Billy, leading Billy, when he should have shouldered the main burden of the farm himself.
He thought of a friend, a painter of the East Anglian landscape, who had come to visit him during the summer. Humphrey Mariner was on leave from the front, he had been staying with a fellow-artist who was a soldier in Italy. Mariner had told Phillip that when he had suggested to his friend that he might find relaxation from a supreme military responsibility by taking an odd hour off occasionally to paint, the Field-Marshal’s reply had been, ‘My men in the line cannot paint, so I do not paint.’
That was the way to lead men, to inspire others—by personal example. And however much he might feel otherwise, in moments of self-indulgence, or weakness, the inner man insisted that he look at himself without pretence.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 57
