*
“Any post, Mrs. Valiant?”
“Nothing since this morning, sir.”
Both were waiting for a telegram: Mrs. Valiant, with hope to hear that her son James was safe in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp: Phillip, with the same concealed anguish, but no hope.
Chapter 33
FINIS DECLARAT OPUS
At night he saw the stars in their westward sweep across the hemisphere as he lay on his couch against the wall. Searchlights no longer pierced the skies. No flares burned above the airfield beyond the wooded horizon of the Home Hills. No engines were heard in the upper air, by night or by day.
During the past six years he had almost forgotten the stars. Night had been an occasion for pulling the black curtains across the window, and shutting himself away from the reality of living. Now the sky was clear, the stars began to have meaning, as in his youth.
And as though Nature, outraged and occluded for so long, wished to make the eternal truths unmistakably clear to man, suddenly he found himself marvelling at the colours of the late April day as he sat by the open window.
Why was the blossom of the pear-tree, its branches almost touching the pantiles of the roof of the woodshed below his window-sill, so white and so thick? And the colours of the bullfinch on a twig amidst the blossoms—black of head, breast of burnt red earth, grey of back—why were they so startlingly sharp, as though new?
Was it similar to the mental relief a patient felt as, the crisis past, suddenly he saw with exceptional clarity the primary virtues and colours of the world as in the rising of the sun?
I do not remember such a sky, such a clear atmosphere, such a crystalline flow and ambience of light as now fills the late April days of this island from sea to sea as the war in Europe is moving to its end.
Were leaves of oak, coming before the ash, ever so ruddy, so bronze? And the little cherry-tree down in the garden, planted two years ago, and now scarcely four feet high, is a pyramid of massed white.
Across the valley I see the dark green of oats on the steep slopes of the Home Hills I ploughed. On the skyline two partridges are walking side by side. Nearer the wood a hare is feeding. His ears are floppy, he is at peace, for the breezes of the hill tell him that no enemy is near, and from where he squats he can see all around him.
Timid Wat must be five hundred yards away, but I can see one ear up and one down. There is a magnifying quality in the air, in the heated air ascending without tremor or crinkle, without the mirage-effect of July and August. Nibble in peace, Timid Wat, we shall not disturb you. Love one another, little brown partridges of the Home Hills, in the safety of the corn.
Lilac scents the air, and from the bushes hiding the draw-well there steal the first low notes of the nightingale, come once again from across the deserts of North Africa, and through the mountain passes of the Alps, where upon crag and massif and precipice, according to the news of the B.B.C. this morning, the tattered shreds of parachutes are hanging.
As Lucy passed the casement window of the farmhouse parlour, on her return from taking rose-hip syrup to those cottages which had small children, she saw Phillip standing by the radio in the alcove of the north wall, where dusty latticed windows were before he took them out and set them to widen the southern window, afterwards bricking up the spaces in the wall adjoining the road.
Quietly she opened the parlour door, lest she disturb him; for music, which she recognised, and did not much care for, was coming from the radio. She recognised it from Act III of Tristan und Isolde, for Phillip had gramophone records of pre-war recordings made at the Bayreuth Festival. Quietly she opened her boudoir door, where the children, home for the holidays, were sitting. Lucy was pale. She told herself she must keep calm. She was afraid of what Phillip might do to himself, and perhaps to the family. He had, more than once in the past, threatened what he might do. If only Tim were nearer.
The children’s eyes were red with weeping. That morning a letter had arrived from the R.A.F. station in Lincolnshire with the news of Billy’s death while returning from an operation over East Germany.
*
Phillip had not moved since going to stand by the wireless set nearly half an hour earlier. For days, weeks, months, ever since the failure of the Ardennes offensive in the snow and fog of Christmas—when, Billy had told him, the half-trained pilots of the Luftwaffe of sixteen and seventeen years of age flew over the Allied airfields in straight flight, while the experienced pilots of the R.A.F. shouted from doorways of mess and cubicle, ‘Weave, you bloody fools, weave!’ as one Focke-Wulf after another ran into Chicago pianos or multiple pom-pom fire—he had known that one day he would hear the music of the Death-Devoted heart, Love-Devoted Head theme of Wagner’s Tristan. And that would be followed by the music of the finale of Götterdämmerung—Valhalla of the gods wrecked and in flames, the world of men drowning in the rising waters of the Rhine.
Wagner had seen it all, with the clairvoyance of genius: Siegfried, the pure hero, had, through arrogance, betrayed himself, and all about him.
*
Edward Roderick Dietze, speaking from Kiel, the last resort. His voice said that as a small boy, with a German father and English mother, he had lived in London. In August 1914 his father left to return to Germany, while mother and son remained in England. Soon Edward Roderick Dietze’s small English friend was no longer allowed to talk to the boy whose father was a German. For two decades after the war he had thought and worked so that there might be friendship between Germany and England, where before there had been hostility. “Goodbye, my English friends.”
*
Silence, and the hissing of space.
Another voice, harsher, as though from a self-compressed body.
“Stand by for an important announcement!”
*
England must be about the only place where a man might listen to a broadcast from the other side and not be thrown to death by typhus into a concentration camp. Those camps—each one held enough political prisoners from the Eastern camps to fill it a dozen times over. And, supreme in the air, the victors’ aircraft had destroyed all sewerage and water systems, all transport by road and by rail, so that for weeks hundreds of thousands of men and women had been starving, and without medical supplies.
*
“Stand by for an important announcement.”
*
Russia was over the Elbe, and was it henceforward to be not so-much the Decline of the West as the Renaissance of the East,, according to the prophesy of Oswald Spengler in his book written in 1911?
*
“Stand by for an important announcement.”
*
The barrier against the East is down. Of the European-cousin nations locked in a death-struggle for so long, one is dead, the other bled pallid. The hopes that have animated, or agitated my living during the past thirty years and four months are dead. Yet the artist in me must, with his last breath, strive for equipoise.
*
“Stand by for an important announcement.”
*
Truth is relative. The horror of innumerable civilians burning in coke ovens called crematoria is the horror of hundreds of thousands of civilians burning in Hamburg, Breslau and other German towns set on fire by the phosphorus bombs of the Royal Air Force, following a policy inspired by Churchill’s ‘grey eminence’, that while a factory could be rebuilt in eighteen months after destruction, it would take eighteen years to replace a factory worker.
La balance, la balance, toujours la balance! My poor Philippe Pétain. It was your mistake not to have remained on the battlefield of Verdun.
*
“Stand by for an important announcement.”
*
The horror of Japanese soldiers bayoneting helpless prisoners-of-war kneeling with their arms bound is the horror of Japanese soldiers being roasted alive by U.S.A. flame-throwers directed into their foxholes.
Men are killed deliberately by cold-water douches, and deliberate
ly by the breaking of reservoir dams. The old world of partisanship is no good. Had ‘the last Christian died on the Cross’?
*
“Stand by for an important announcement.”
*
Still no words followed. Instead, a record of Siegfried’s Funeral March.
Silence.
Whisperings.
“Here is Grand-Admiral Karl Doenitz to say a few words!”
Doenitz announces that the Führer is fallen.
And at once the thought in Phillip—This lets me out.
“Germany will fight on!”
What eke can he say? He is a dead man speaking for a dying nation.
The loud-speaker hissing, the broadcast from Kiel finished.
Silence, and the faint scratches of space.
*
The yellow panel of the radio still glowed. A turn of the switch and the alcove was in shadow.
Behind the shut door of the adjoining room Phillip heard the subdued voices of children. Lucy was with them. He recalled her saying once, ‘The children are all my life.’ What constant thought, care, and labour for her family that dove-like woman had borne during the years, what work she had done for the village, which respected and loved her. That was her world.
And since my world for so long has existed only within the turbulence of an idea, how could there be harmony between turtle dove and a vehicle of phantasy called by the Greeks, phoinix: a vehicle now locked in stone?
*
He knocked on the door. There was silence. He knocked again. Lucy’s voice said “Come in, my dear. I was just going to lay the table for tea.”
He went to Lucy and kissed her gently. Then he kissed the children.
“I’m just going into the Studio.”
“I’ll bring your tea there, Phillip.”
He saw fear in her eyes. “I’ll just write some notes in my journal, then may I join you for tea with my chookies?”
“Please do, Dad,” said David. “We all want you, really we do.”
The scapegoat of so much negative living, so much active frustration, is dead. The phoenix of the frozen battlefield of Christmas 1914 is, despite all, infirmity. For on that day, so long ago, the men of the volunteer battalion, in which cousin Willie served, fraternised with the volunteer battalion in which Hitler served, under Messines hill. The friendliness of the Germans, to Willie and myself, was the most radiant memory of our post-war life—perhaps that part of our living that was unnatural.
And memory recalls, with irony, the remark of the Chief Constable of the county, whom I liked for his decency and detached judgment, which at that time was great kindliness, when he decided to let this shambles of myself return to the farm, in 1940. He said, “You know, your name in this county is Mud.” Yes, I knew it: I was the mud: and the propagated stream of human consciousness about me ran clear and limpid from its source, not in mammon, but in God, So I turned to the brook that moved below my garden, and set about clearing up its broken bottles and rusty iron, its deadly black silt wherein lay the green skulls and bones of animals, trying not to see that it was, like Blake’s Garden of Love, ‘filled with graves,’ my own among them the most prominent.
Now I am, by the grace of God, reprieved.
Alone in her bedroom, Lucy was crying—for the third time in her life. The first time was when her mother had died, in 1917 when she was still at school. She had left for home at once, to comfort Pa and Tim who were alone in the house.
She cried the second time when, deeply in love with Phillip, she thought she had let him down, by forgetting to say ‘How do you do?’ to the cottage woman who was looking after his meals, when she had first gone with him to the cottage.
Now she cried for the third time, because she knew she must leave Phillip, because she would not be able to help him any longer; and he must have his freedom. But she kept this determination to herself for the moment.
From the Home Hills, as the great porcelain bowl of the sky absorbs colour, I watch Lucifer shining with a more intense glow. As the dawn spreads up over the rim of ocean, so the planet is diminished to a mere point of light. And as the war of universal misery seems almost to have expended itself upon the bodies of those who helped to make it, I accept the historical truth that men of genius, with spiritual power to bring clarity to human beings who are not cynical, must avoid direct action upon the souls of their fellow-men, and be artists in detachment, to shine upon the world as the sun which sees no shadows: whether of the Jew on the Cross upon the Place of Skulls or upon the smoking corpse lying in the shattered garden of the Berlin Chancery.
Chapter 34
SUN IN LEO
Phillip went to South Devon, thinking that only one course was open to him, to go out with the ebb-tide while bathing. The spring tide had pressed high up the shore, and was lapsing as swiftly, leaving deep, irregular pits where more than one summer visitor before the war had suddenly found himself out of his depth and carried seawards.
Field above Malandine.
One thought recurring through the years has run something like this:—To arrange my death so that the body is never found; to be forgotten by family, relations, friends. My lungs quiescent after sighs: a vacuum in which forever I am lost: but a dim light to the living?
Billy in the bomber over Germany at night.
The pocked, spattering, luminous-spotted pus opening on the earth below thousand-bomber raids. Strings of flak rising up like threads of
virus from the shining pus of hate; hate of the old for the new, of decadence for resurgence. Death, torture, the Black Plague became phosphorescent in the 20th century, A.D.
Billy over the Alps.
Bomber exploding amidst roar of flames out of which pop cannon shells and flares, streaming up and curving away from calcined bones glowing amidst fluttering flames gnawing away powdered white metal somewhere in those stony places just below the snow-line, where gentians are springing; but no longer for me in the footsteps of Proserpine.
When he reached the shore he saw two people in the sea. One was waving her arms while standing in water to her waist. The other was farther out in tumbling white surges. The woman cried, “My husband is drowning, please help him! I can’t swim!”
Phillip swam out. Waves were breaking and pounding at shoulder height. The sand below was pitted. One moment he could stand, another moment he was swept off his feet. Never a strong swimmer, he kicked out towards the man. Reached him, shouted to him to hold his hand, and remain still. “Float upright!” Then he tried to tow the man in. The back-wash bore him under. He held to the hand by a climbing-grip, curved fingers to curved fingers. Wave after wave washed them under; then a large ninth wave tumbled them towards the shore. Phillip managed to stand up; and, bearing against an ebbing wash, and moving on with its bouncing successor, to come to shallow water.
While I was running into the sea I saw the face of ‘Spectre’ West before me. Was it my subconscious mind presenting a picture at that moment of shock? (for I thought I might be drowned, being a poor swimmer—I wasn’t in the least afraid, one isn’t when self is forgotten for others). The picture was of an incident in the spring of 1918, when our hospital ship Persia struck a mine. Westie gave his life-jacket to O’Gorman, my batman. His shattered leg was in a wooden cage and while floating, his head went under. He was drowned. I was blinded by mustard gas, and didn’t see anything. For months I thought it was my fault, because I’d told O’Gorman to remove all his equipment; but later I learned that O’Gorman never had a cork jacket in the first place.
I believe that Westie is saying to me, Hold on.
His new friends walked with him upon the cliffs he called Valhalla.
They sat with him in his field. With their help he began to tidy up the rubble of the Gartenfeste.
“You’ll get compensation, Phillip. Only put it in the hands of a good lawyer. See you tomorrow. And I can never thank you enough …”
That night he lay contented under the stars, on a groundshee
t, in blankets. A rosy mist of dewy grasses and wildflowers outside the shelter, beyond the embers of his fire. He had the dark lantern beside him, where he could touch it; on top of the pile of his journals, faithful sentry. Lantern and journals—he was safe!
The bell notes of the church clock in the village floated over moonlit mist. He lay there between sleeping and waking, feeling the ache of failure lapsing from his bones. It was midnight by Greenwich time, two o’clock by Double Summer Time which had ruled the Island Fortress in war.
How fortunate he was, indeed! Most people had suffered more than he had, during the past six years. He had the dark lantern, the journals. He would be seeing his friends on the morrow. And with Joe the Dunkirk man as steward, and a milking herd under ‘Ackers’, the farm would pay well.
He drifted through Time. The reeling song of a nightjar threaded the earth’s white cloak. Billy wandered into his thoughts, his love went out to the quiet, still figure lying on the snow-line below the Alpine precipice, baptising it anew in tears. ‘When we cease to weep, we cease to live.’
O God, help me to do the right thing.
He touched the lantern; he would see his new friends soon.
The abyss receded: death-wish wherein Billy was lost. God help me to do the right thing.
Sometime later he left the shelter and watched the moon hanging in the land-drifted vapours of the Channel, thinking it was slightly pink, like a great salmon-egg. Those tall fronds of bracken on the incult sandy waste above the high tide; the peace of the summer day, filling the vacant places of the heart. The pale face of the over-worked, over-strained man whose strength had run out in the white water beyond the shallows, a manufacturer of coal-mine equipment in Yorkshire. The darkness would pass from the world. Dolor decrescit—all grief passes. The old clichès were true. Lighthouses were flashing on ocean’s rim: along the far coast of France, from the headlands of England. The war in the western hemisphere was over; lights were appearing, hesitantly, in the villages and towns of England, France, Germany …
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 58
