The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  “‘Electrifying Sydney’! It’s been electrified before they were born.”

  “Anyway, they’ve got good jobs connected with some temporary fair or other.”

  “‘Some fair or other’! Would you call the opening of Parliament, and the illuminations for the festivities, ‘some fair or other’?”

  *

  Hetty and Dora were sitting in the little breakfast room that faced the morning sun, waiting to walk with the others to the Hanger Coppice. Uncle John was to take them there, he was due at eleven o’clock. It was now a little after ten. A spirit of contentment filled the house.

  The scent of the joss-sticks still lingered, bringing back happy memories to Dora. Irene was in the garden with Billy, in flow of love to him; she had seen, for a moment, her darling girl in the little boy’s face.

  “It’s been an awfully nice visit,” said Hetty. Looking around to see if they were alone, she went on, “Well, dearest Dora, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in saying it now, but for a time I was very worried that Barley’s death might have intensified—how can I put it—Phillip’s tendency to live in the past.”

  “Yes, Hetty, my dear Father had that characteristic, which can so easily lead to an unawareness of the feelings of others. But it will not happen, I think, like that with Phillip, now that he is living an open-air life. If only my brother Dickie—— Tell me, Hetty, when is he due to retire?”

  “Dickie thinks when he is sixty-five. He was due to retire at sixty, but volunteered to stay on for a further period. Now he is talking of looking for a cottage, far away from London,” she sighed.

  Dora could see that she was troubled about leaving Doris and Elizabeth.

  “I’ve often wondered what is the real reason why my brother became so set against his daughters.”

  Hetty felt her strength ebbing. “I suppose it is the strains of City life; but I cannot understand him.” She smiled as though cheerfully. “Perhaps now that the time for his retirement is due, he will see matters a little differently. What then will become of Elizabeth—she no longer likes to be called Mavis—and Doris, I hardly like to think.”

  “I understand how you feel, Hetty. I have my ‘Babies’, and often I wonder what would happen to them if I fell ill, and could no longer be with them. So do not feel that you are alone—we have each other, and now that we have come together, we must not drift apart again.” She hesitated, and went on, “You know, I think sometimes that Dickie has fallen into the error of caring too much for his own. It is a paradox that love ceases to be love when we become too concerned in the lives of others. For a dominant concern leads us into trying to convert others into the image of our own righteous feelings, which arise not from love, but from fear.”

  Lucy came into the room and said, “Uncle John will be here in a minute or two, to take us to Hanger Coppice. Peter has gone to sleep, thank goodness, and Mrs. Rigg will look after him.”

  During the christening party, Dora had decided to stay an extra day, and return by train; while Hilary was leaving in the afternoon, after taking Hetty and Irene to the junction.

  *

  Hanger Coppice had been a favourite place for picnics when John and Richard and Hilary had been boys together. Hetty, seeing her son walking between his uncles, thought again what a pity it was that Dickie had not come down with her. The way led up the borstal, branching off along a foot-path below the beech hanger. There, in a fold of land at the foot of the down, were a couple of acres of hazel and sweet-chestnut, the greater part of which had been cut to the stoles during the past February. The sounds of knocking came from the far end, where hurdles were lying in heaps, with cords of cut stakes.

  Wood smoke arose through the remaining trees and bushes, in whose green shade nightingales, now voiceless except for harsh notes of warning, were leading their fledged young.

  For Hetty the walk around the Coppice was one of enchantment. Her country-bred eye, dulled for so long among bricks and mortar, saw again dry skeleton leaves on the woodland floor; the few late blooms of primroses, blue-bells making their green seed-cases, the blue-and-white feather of a jay hanging in a spider’s web. And from afar, from beyond the skyline of the downs, came the sound of sheep-bells.

  “The rotation is usually twelve years between cutting,” said Phillip, returning to them. “This season the coppice-wood was sold for a shilling the lugg, otherwise the jolly old rod, pole, or perch of our schoolroom days,” as he took her arm, to lead her to the brothers who were making the hurdles.

  Hetty and Dora shook hands with them after he had introduced the brothers. “They make the best hurdles in the district,” went on Phillip, as he left them to their work, which was done fast, since they were their own masters. “While one cuts out rods, the other stacks them ready for the making of hurdles after the pheasants have hatched off their eggs. The keeper doesn’t like the hurdle-makers on principle, but it’s been done by the same family for nearly a century, isn’t that right, Uncle John?”

  “Probably longer, Phillip.”

  “They make them in shape moulds, here’s one,” went on Phillip, pointing to a heavy length of oak with a slight bend in it. “The uprights, or sails, are knocked into those holes to keep them steady while rods, which have to be split first, are woven in and out of the sails. A good man can make one in an hour. The trouble is that most farmers use wire netting now. The best is hand-woven, made in Scotland.”

  “You seem to have acquired a countryman’s knowledge very quickly, Boy,” said Dora.

  He felt he was back in her good books again; but could not resist saying, “Yes, I remembered your words about ‘treading the primrose path’, and changed direction in time! By the way, I realize now that, speaking only from a writing point of view, the entry in my note-book was superficial and worthless. Such a superficial portrait is no good because it implies mere indignation, and does not truly divine. There is no difference, really, between Billy and your Babies. Put at its simplest, life without love is lost life.”

  He looked at his mother’s face; he thought of Barley, while his hollow middle seemed to fill with blackness; he wanted to move away from them, swiftly—but where could he go? He stood there without moving, a smile on his lips, his eyes on the ground, waiting for them to move along the footpath to the spring-head, and then back beside the Longpond.

  Chapter 7

  SECRET WORLD

  Hilary was due to leave in the early afternoon for Wales; he had arranged to take Hetty and Irene to the junction and leave them there to await the Penzance train to London. Dora was staying on for another day, before going back by train; and while she was resting with Hetty in the garden before lunch, Lucy walked to where the two elderly women were sitting in the shade of the mulberry tree and said, “Irene thinks she would like to go on to South Devon, and visit Malandine while she is down here, and Uncle Hilary says he will drive her there immediately after lunch. He proposes to telephone for a taxi to take us to the afternoon London train, so dear Mother, I’ll come with you, and shall we take Billy with us? Aunt Dora, would you care to come too? The train doesn’t leave until five this afternoon, so there’s plenty of time to decide.”

  Phillip, trying to write upstairs, with the window open, heard this and, looking out, said, “What’s that? Irene going to Malandine with Nuncle?”

  “Yes, Phillip,” replied Hetty. She had learned, under her son’s persistence, and with regret, not to call him ‘dear’.

  “Those two together?”

  It was a shock. He did not know what to say, or think, as he sat on his bed. Those two going to see Barley’s grave without him! He felt active dislike of Nuncle. But no: Nuncle had his feelings: and perhaps, after all, he would be asked?

  Irene and Hilary were fishing. They returned with two trout which Hilary had killed in the pool below the Longpond, watched by Irene, who had carried the long-handled net. Phillip heard him telling Lucy that he would cook them for luncheon, an offer to which she readily agreed.

 
; Whose house was it, that Nuncle behaved as though he were the captain of a ship? Still, what did it matter? All the same——

  The fish, gently simmered in the tinned copper kettle with the lid on, were allowed to cool in their own liquor. Uncle John brought in a couple of cucumbers, to be thinly sliced; the mayonnaise was made by Irene; an excellent meal, all agreed.

  Afterwards Lucy said, “Well, dears, I hope you have a nice run to South Devon.”

  Phillip waited to be invited.

  Nothing was said.

  When they had gone—and Aunt Dora was lying down in her room—Phillip walked up the valley beside the brook, feeling ashamed of his bad behaviour on the first evening of their arrival. If only Willie were alive. With a little shock he realised that Willie was nearer to him than Barley. Ah well, it was done now. He must accept life as it was.

  How swiftly the spring had gone—and he had hardly seen it. Long since the blossom of the downland thorns, haunt of magpies, had fallen. ‘For faces fade as flowers, and there is no consolation’. Dear, lonely Jefferies, he thought, as he walked beside the brook, following its course through the water-meadows to the Longpond.

  The Longpond—a stretch of ornamental water—had been made in the ’eighties by damming the brook a quarter of a mile below its source at the foot of the downs. At the base of the hill a spring gushed forth to flow at the rate of hundreds of gallons a minute. The spring-head was confined within a ring of limestone blocks, with a spillway of paved stone carrying the water to the ‘broad’, which was shallow and narrow at this entry but became deeper as it widened to fill six acres of the little valley.

  The Longpond had never silted, since the flow of water was from out the chalk-bed composing the downs, which lay several hundred feet above the vale. The flow was crystal and everlasting; no floods disturbed it. The water issuing from the spring-head had fallen as rain upon the upland pastures anything up to eighteen months before, taking so long to filter through the flint-beds underlying the chalk.

  Here had stood Hilary and Irene—while he had remained aloof: and now it was too late. If he had only behaved as a true host, instead of inwardly grizzling about his ‘position’, like some uneasy little official fancying himself snubbed. Well, was it fancy, after all? Did Irene prefer Hilary to himself?

  *

  Ornamental shrubs and trees had been planted round its banks when the stream was dammed, part of a scheme to bring picturesqueness to a bare countryside by a North Country industrialist who had bought the land and come south to found a family. His only son, a soldier, had in due course inherited; his marriage had ended with the drowning of his wife. Thereafter the place had slowly become ruinous. It was sold after his death to speculators, a syndicate of anxious lawyers’ clerks who had failed to get their price for the house. It had remained empty until the outbreak of the Great War, when it was taken over by the War Department. The trees were cut down, including those around the Longpond. During the post-war shortage of building materials, the house, which had been bought by Hilary, was stripped of its panelling, doors, floors, staircases, banisters, and all metal fittings, including the lead roof.

  Hilary had waited to buy the place cheaply. His idea had been to build a small, labour-saving lodge on the site of the dilapidated shell, using two of the outer walls; but they were found to be rubble, and infirm. Plans were drawn but nothing built. Hilary was too comfortable with his sister Viccy at Bournemouth, and his caravan was enough for the spring and summer months.

  During the years before the war many fish—roach, jack, rudd, perch, and carp—had increased in the Longpond. The year before the arrival of Lucy and Phillip, Hilary had had the weed-beds cut with chain-scythes, and pulled out, several score tons to be heaped beyond the banks. The water was then netted. Cartloads of fish were removed, some to be fed experimentally to pigs, but the main mass, of over a dozen tons, was rotted down with waterweed between layers of straw and bullock dung. This he called compost, and Mr. Hibbs called trash.

  In fact, declared Mr. Hibbs, it wasn’t worth the carting: every rat came for miles, some of them in droves led by old king-rats, to the heap, to dig in and tunnel away from crows, daws, and gulls in conflict above. Soon the heap was literally a heaving and squeaking mass, and Skirr farm acquired a new name—Rat Town.

  In due course the decayed heap was carted to the arable in the autumn and spread, six tons to the acre, experimentally upon four acres. The following spring—just before the time of Phillip’s marriage to Lucy—plants of wheat upon the area, with ‘stalks like bamboos and heads like maize laid themselves down’, in Mr. Hibbs’ words, ‘and rotted in sympathy with the skeletons of the fish’.

  Sitting on the bank, Phillip wondered how the Longpond could be tidied up. Perhaps if his books made some money, he could engage men to do it. And—here was an idea!—he could write a book about how he had restored it to its former beauty. Some credit must be given to Hilary, of course, since, during the month of March, a year previously, he had purchased a thousand fish at the Hungerford Trout farm, at a cost of £75. The trout had arrived by lorry in four galvanised tanks, with ice afloat to dissolve and release oxygen in the water. Half the trout were brownies for the brook; the two remaining tanks held rainbows, and went into the Longpond after tank and lake water had been equalised, to avoid shock.

  Everything had been done to ensure that a good stock of game fish would replace the former coarse fish. Herons were shot, and Haylock even put down an otter trap, which ‘disappeared’ from the entrance to one of the overflow pipes. It still lay hidden in nettles where Phillip had thrown it.

  Several large trout had escaped the net by getting below its leaded drag in deep water. These were not cannibals, as Hilary had supposed, but being feeders in the shallows (minnows) by night, and in deep water by day, had avoided the rushes of monster pike, some of them nearly thirty pounds in weight, which ruled each area of the Longpond, raiding from the cover of its particular weed-beds—those strongholds castellated in early summer by white flowers of water-crowsfoot.

  After the pike had gone, the big trout began to cruise, each a lord within its own waters as it seized 8-inch rainbows across the back and swallowed them head-first, with an occasional roach and rudd; but the cruising became general and careless when the mayfly was up and all fish thought only of those objects of crisp and cream. Phillip remembered the big trout in the fish-ponds at Westerham, when he was a boy—the bluish-green tapered fish, some as long as a man’s forearm, and spotted, in the clear headwaters of the Darent, scores of them to be seen at once, unafraid of figures on the banks, seizing creamy mayfly after mayfly; sometimes the crisp crushing of an insect between prickly fish-tongue and palate was distinctly audible. And here he was, no longer a fervent suburban explorer on a Swift 3-speed bicycle, but the heir to a thousand acres—as yet a desolate area to the mind. Yes, he could include that in his book.

  Willows sprawled unkempt beside the Longpond. Reeds choked the margins, half-concealing in one place the ruins of a boat-house. He could not bear the sight of the dead stumps of ornamental trees, felled for the few pounds they had brought to the local speculators during the war; and the appearance of ruin extended by the army—brick sills of huts long since robbed of their window-frames and doors, the asbestos walls broken, pieces still lying among the nettles. These fragments, and an occasional dried green boot, its sole a mass of rusty hob-nails, were all that was left of a vanished life.

  He felt tired; his strength went suddenly; perhaps his tubercular lung was infected again. Or the excitement of the past forty-eight hours. He looked at his watch: time had passed quickly: it was already six o’clock. Would Nuncle and Irene be at Malandine by now? It was possible. Was his sudden fatigue due to transference of Irene’s emotion at the grave? He had meant to go and tidy it, plant flowers, and also a bush of rosemary; but had never gone. O God, what must Irene think of him. He had meant to ask her to stay many times, to see Billy, but had never written. A feeling of being unreal overc
ame him, of being somebody not himself. Perhaps nobody was ever really himself, as labelled and known to others: the real self was that upon which the personality was grafted; the blossoms of the graft coming from the pollination of others. Piers had added to his personality, he had copied the manner of Piers, the oblique Etonian idiom of speech; it came out at times. Ernest dissolved that part of him, by shutting himself off. But these were superficial influences; the true begetters of the mind were the poets, musicians, painters, and writers; one had grafted them upon oneself—or rather, had ‘grappled them with hooks of steel’. And the hooks pierced not only oneself, but others in one’s life.

  Feeling now empty and nearly without hope, he left the thistles, nettles, and burdocks growing out of uncleared heaps of pink bricks and rotting roof-felt, and went home, while the thought of Irene’s unspoken criticism possessed nearly all his being. Or was it all his imagination? If he had been more expansive to her, would she not have responded to him? Surely she would have responded anyway, if she had divined the condition between Nuncle and himself? And now she had gone off with him.

  Irene! he cried, I did not forget Barley! She was gone; it was too late to tell her now, to so behave that she would be once again the Irene he had known at Malandine, in those far-off care-free days (as they now seemed) when the Barley-Irene friendship was the very sunshine of life. Nuncle and Irene had made friends, and he was left out! They had gone to visit the grave of Barley; he had longed to be asked to go too; but they didn’t want him.

  The fact was that Irene had suggested that Phillip might feel hurt if he were not invited to go with them, but Hilary had replied, “Better not open old wounds, dear lady”.

  And the truth was that Hilary wanted to be alone with Irene.

  Phillip went for a long walk on the downs with Rusty, to tire himself out; and descending along his usual route to Colham, went into the Rising Sun and drank several pints of beer there, to arrive home just as Lucy was going to bed.