The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  The Journal of a Disappointed Man.

  Have been reading more of this book. W. N. P. Barbellion says, in a similar way to Marie Bashkertsieff, that because a condition like acute dyspepsia can drive away all thought of beauty, or spiritual life, the body can have no soul. How shallow and thinly thought. And yet, the thought of no after-life terrifies me. Sometimes I am shaken by a terrible fear, as in the war.

  Again ‘egoism’. Barbellion was, as he says, a morbid introspectionalist. Self, self, self. A great artist in function does not notice self. If he be pre-occupied, dreamy, it is because he awaits the beauty of thought that rises, involuntarily and unsummoned, from within—even if its source is from without. He is a medium. But only a little of this true inspiration arose in Barbellion, therefore he was convinced of egotism, studying himself when not inspired, consumed at times by self (as I am, but I know it is bad).

  I am constantly thinking of Spica. How will it end, I wonder.

  Did not go to the Club tonight. Next Saturday is a day off from the office, also the following Whit-Monday. I have half a mind to run down to Folkestone, and boldly call on Spica’s people. Spica, who sent me a gentle little note thanking me for her entertainment in London recently, said if ever I found myself down at Folkestone again, to be sure to call and see them.

  Early the next evening he arrived in Folkestone on the Norton, and arranged for a lodging in the old part of the town. He had written to Spica, at her address in one of the roads leading from the Leas; and called there shortly after six o’clock. The door was opened by an old gentleman in parson’s clothes, whom he imagined to be a relation from Cornwall. He was most affable, and as he invited the caller into the drawing-room he seemed to be washing his hands—a habit that Julian Warbeck had when pleased. Mrs. Trevelian, he said, had gone to tea with her cousin Lady Milly, in Radnor Park Gardens.

  “I don’t know if I am expected, sir.”

  “Oh yes, I think so. Lady Tibby got your card this mornin’.” Phillip sat uneasily for some moments, while a desire to laugh rose alarmingly in him. Had he come to the wrong house? But Dr. Trevelian’s brass plate was beside the door. As for Lady Milly in Radnor Park Gardens, the only Milly he knew was Eve’s aunt, a Miss Fairfax. There was an odd look in the old parson’s watery blue eyes, despite his manner of extreme and gracious affability. Even so, he had obviously called at an unconventional hour.

  “Well, sir, I think I’d better be gettin’ on. I am only just lookin’ round Folkestone. I was here just after the war.”

  “Yes, Lady Tibby was tellin’ me. You were at one of the camps, were you not? Yes, the rooks are still nestin’ in the chimney stacks, the soldiers are still holdin’ on to what they grabbed at the beginnin’ of the war. Colonel Tarr was tellin’ me only this mornin’ that he expected to be there at least until the autumn.”

  This was dreadful. Old Tarr, the Flapper King, had turfed him out of the adjutant’s job less than a year before, owing to the talk about Eve and himself.

  “How is Cornwall lookin’ these days, sir?”

  “Cornwall? I’ve no idea. I expect the countryside is lookin’ at its best now. Ah, here is the good Monsieur le Médècin. It is time for his surgery, I fancy.” He got up as a man of about fifty years of age came peremptorily into the room, saying, “Don’t get up, don’t get up, I’m just going”, and went out again, leaving the old parson smiling a little helplessly at Phillip.

  A moment later the doctor looked in the door again and said, “Maddison? Forgive my rushing away like this, I’ll be with you soon. Few of my canaille patients come to bother me at holiday time,” and the rather flabby face disappeared.

  “I hear you and Lady Tibby have been to the opera,” said the parson, nervously clasping his fingertips. “I have always wanted to hear fine music. But, you know, the little string band in the Leas Pavilion isn’t too bad. I heard some Strauss waltzes there the other day, and very jolly they were, very jolly.”

  “The Nightingale, by Stravinsky, was very fine the other night, sir.”

  “So Lady Tibby was tellin’ me. She said it was a capital good opera. But then she is most musical. Very gifted young woman, a great favourite of mine. We have capital fun playin’ chess together.” He washed his hands in invisible water, his ruined eyes took on a strange and painful blue, as of relief and hope. Phillip felt an impulse to leave the house, but forced himself to sit still.

  The constraint was eased by the doctor reappearing with a decanter of sherry, and two glasses.

  “Would you care for a glass?” he asked Phillip, while filling one, apparently, for the other man. But no; when the two were filled, the doctor kept the other for himself. He took a sip, and said, “Perhaps you would like to wash your hands? Come with me.”

  In the wash room there was a sort of hospital corner bowl in glazed earthenware at which the doctor stood while Phillip washed his hands. Was he being tested, to see if he were the sort of “sahib” who would rinse them again after his turn at the pissoir? His feeling about Dr. Trevelian was confirmed immediately when the other said, “That idiot in the other room is the Honourable John Carew-Fiennes-Manfred. He’s an epileptic, but at least I get twelve guineas a week for looking after the old fool.”

  The doctor observed that Phillip rinsed his hands; his manner changed, he became the gentlemanly host. “Did you have a good journey from town? You’re with the Thunderer, aren’t you? I expect you know Castleton? He’s done the country a lot of damage, in my opinion, encouraging the hoi polloi in trying to popularise your paper. I take The Morning Post now, at least it’s edited for gentlemen, what?” The doctor’s manner changed again. “I see you’re like the Frenchman, who only washes his hands first, having great respect for his ‘bon ami’.”

  May 26. The Whitsun Episode (in retrospect).

  The present that spins its web so fleetingly, only to be brushed and broken, becomes the past as quickly. The present that passes without conscious existence of time is happiness. But to what has happened since last I wrote in this journal:

  Spica and I went down on the Norton, before breakfast, to the Hythe Canal in the early morning, when the rising sun glazed the smooth sea, and by the shore the wheatears climbed and dived, singing their falling songs. Nightingales sang of the joy that was the present, and the cuckoo called over the smooth greens of the golf course. We sat and watched the canal gleaming with mounting sky-colours, while swallows dipped and flew up as though taking song from water.

  It was a drag to go back to the house; but when she had helped her mother, we returned to the low land, and went onwards to the marshes, and sat in the long meadow grasses among the golden rivets of buttercups, while the pollen was all a-blow, and feeding green beetles and coloured flies. Long we sat there, and I knew by my feeling of alarmed restlessness that love had come back to me. I put my arms round her, and laid my cheek against her face, while taking care that my breath did not touch her, or my lips her mouth. She trembled, she sighed, her eyes filled with tears, she turned away, she whispered, “No, no.” Yet I felt that she loved me. She was frightened at the new thing that had come to her, the sweet pain in her breast; instinctively she dreaded disillusion.

  “No, no,” she whispered, when my arm went round her shoulder, feeling its curve under the silk blouse. “I cannot love anyone, except in my own way.”

  I asked her what that way was, and all she could do was look at me. I persisted, and at last, in a soft, shy voice that trembled, she murmured, “No; if you kiss me now, you will regret when you are famous”.

  I wondered. Was this the real reason? For I realised the poverty of my life without her; the barrenness of my work alone, deprived of her care; the emptiness of life before she came, the silent battlefield when she had gone away. Neither I, nor any other man or woman, can live without love. I thought of the unhappy parson in her father’s house, washing away his sins instinctively to absolve himself of the effects of obvious childish torment in his mind; and recognising in Spica a sympath
etic quality, so that he calls her, in the idiom of courtesy of a thousand years of inherited aristocracy towards the women who nourish the seed of continuity of that aristocracy, “Lady Tibby”—her real name is Tabitha.

  O Tabitha, the very purity and beauty of your being makes me sad—for what am I but a hollow emptiness, a pretension to goodness?

  Notes.

  Spica’s mother has a sort of wild look, redeemed by sudden generosity and balance. I think she must have a bit of a struggle to make ends meet, with that not very intelligent husband of hers. And yet—she is limited, too, in understanding, as we all are in our various ways. But to facts:

  She read The Hounds of Heaven, and said that she “saw nothing in it”. From this she went on to say—this on the last evening, that my influence on her daughter was bad: she had always been dreamy and impracticable, and these “vices” were more apparent since she had known me. She wanted her daughter to be happy, and she knew that to be introspective and moody was a state to force oneself away from, otherwise it led to misery and unhappiness, not only for the person concerned, but also for those who cared for that person. Her little daughter (she kissed her lovingly and tenderly) she loved, and was it not a mother’s greatest wish to see her children happy?

  On the first day of his holiday in the West Country, Phillip called at the house of his Uncle John at Rookhurst. He was invited to stay the night; but the atmosphere of the place, some of the rooms shut up, with white sheets over the furniture, made him feel almost imprisoned; his mind was set on arrival at his destination—Cousin Willie’s cottage on the coast of North Devon. Feeling that he could not very well refuse, he stayed; and later was glad, a feeling of new life having come from a rump steak eaten with watercress and washed down by a bottle of burgundy. Under its influence he talked about his literary ambition, to be told that it ran in the family; both his Grandfather and his Aunt Theodora had shown talent in that direction, as amateurs of course.

  “I think Willie, too, Uncle John. His letters from France are very vivid, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, he never writes to me, Phillip.”

  In the morning he went south to the coast, meaning to follow the lanes as far as Land’s End, and so up to North Devon. He bathed from the Chesil Bank, and in the late afternoon went on; up and down hills, first turning away from the sea then winding back again, until the declining sun made him think of a room for the night. By now he had passed through Exeter, and was following the road to the coast, seeing the blue tors of Dartmoor on his right turning purple as the sun went down behind them. His wrists ached with the bumpy, twisting road; at long last he came to a town built down a hill, with a narrow High Street leading to what he thought was the sea, but arriving at a quay, saw it was mud-flats. There would be flat fish there when the tide came in, he thought, and wild duck flighting in winter. After talking to a sailor beside a moored sailing boat he went on up another hill, and through more twisty lanes until suddenly before him and below lay a wide valley of pasture land. He stopped, arrested by the sudden strange appearance and change in the countryside. The grey road descended before him, to rise, after a curve at the bottom, up the reverse slope. But what had startled him was the sight of the dark mass of a church on the horizon, with a shortened spire on its western end. It was as prominent a landmark as the church on the Passchendaele ridge before the bombardments of Third Ypres.

  He waited there, astride the Norton, held by the atmosphere of the place. Above the lower grape-dark horizon floated red and yellow islets and peninsulas of sunset; below the sombre silhouette of the church, with its suggestion of a magician’s pointed hat the valley appeared to hold a living shade. Gulls flighting overhead in silence gave thoughts of generations of drowned fishermen and sailors whose wooden ships had been battered on the rocks beyond the church, whose spire had perhaps held a warning light in black stormy nights of winter.

  He heard a partridge calling somewhere in the lower gathering gloom, and from farther off came the tooth-comb scrape—crick-crick, crick-crick—of a corncrake. Then down the reverse slope of the valley a barn-owl came in wavy, hesitant flight, moving irregularly above the mice runs in the grass: at the bottom it hovered, then came up the near slope towards him, suddenly to check, throw up its white wings and drop to the grass. One more mouse had copped it. He sighed, and holding back the valve-lifter, paddled off down the hill and rushed with deep-drumming exhaust to the bottom, leaning over into the curve at the bottom, and then full throttle up the farther rise as the moon was showing its top rim over the sea.

  Passchendaele village, as he thought of it, was bleak and unfriendly, no one about; he returned down the valley, and taking a side-lane, descended another valley and came to a village, where he lodged for the night at the post office, kept by a Miss Potts who had a red tip to her nose and charged him 5/- for bed, breakfast, and supper of cold beef and pickles. The village, he learned, was called Malandine.

  He was up early, and soon on his way below the southern boundary of the moor to Tavistock, and so to Launceston and then Bideford, where he had luncheon in an old hotel by the bridge across the Torridge.

  Afterwards at a book shop half way up the steep High Street he bought a half-inch Ordnance map; and at Barnstaple was in more or less known country. The Norton flew with crisp exhaust note beside the estuary of the Taw, and turning west along the Ilfracombe road, climbed to high ground from which the mountains of Wales were seen. From there, after losing his way several times, he found the village of Breakspeare St. Flamnea and went down on foot to Rat’s Castle, a semi-derelict lime-burner’s cottage above the tidemarks of a cove on the rocky coast, hoping against hope that Willie would be there.

  A window was unlatched. He got inside, and walked across a floor bestrewn with plaster, bits of torn-up writing paper, and owls’ crop-pellets. Upstairs the one bedroom was equally desolate, with splashings like lime-wash on the floor. Books lay about, their covers warped by damp. A heap of bracken along one wall was apparently Willie’s old bed. Looking closer, he saw the white faces and yellow plumage of three young barn owls. Willie’s favourite bird was the barn owl: what fun that they were holding the fort for him!

  He spent the rest of the afternoon there, until the westering of the sun began to cast a shadow on the beach; and feeling melancholy (he had eaten only bread and cheese since noon) he said goodbye to the little cove, thick with sea-shells, and climbed up the brambly path to the lane above. Should he make for Aunt Dora’s cottage at Lynmouth, or return across Dartmoor and stay a few days in Malandine, where he had slept the previous night? But Aunt Dora’s faint disapproval in a letter of some time back —warning him against ‘treading the promrose path’—decided it: he would run back to Malandine.

  There he arrived at twilight, and walking up a steep narrow lane above the stream, spoke to a labourer pumping water just off a turning, below which were two stone-built cottages, their front walls bulging slightly in places and covered with yellow lichen. Learning that a thatched cottage was to let lower down the path, he went there and spoke to another labourer who was picking peas in the garden in front of the cottages, which had a common wall. Asked if he would like a cup of tea by the labourer’s wife, he entered their rather stuffy kitchen and sat down on the settle by an open fire of wood. At once he felt at home with the old fellow, and learning that badgers, foxes, and all sorts of wild birds lived along the coast, and in the woods, decided to spend his holiday at Malandine. Miss Potts, the post-mistress, put him up that night; and next day, hearing that the cottage adjoining that of his friend the labourer was to let, he sought the landlord, and looked over it with him.

  There were two small rooms upstairs, divided by a stud-and-plaster wall. They looked clean, having been recently brushed over with lime-wash. The roof of thatch seemed to be waterproof —there were no patches of damp on the ceiling—and although the coal-burning range in the north wall of the single room downstairs was rusty, and half-hidden under a heap of soot and mortar from the chi
mney, he was already determined to take it. What would the rent be, he wondered. He would go up to £30 a year.

  Not liking to discuss money, he asked about the water.

  “Us pumps it from th’ pump up th’ lane. Tes good water.”

  “I suppose you don’t know where a bed can be bought?”

  “Into town, I reckon. But furniture be turrible dear. Tes the shortage of wood, you see. So prices be hup, my gor’, bant’m, tho’!”

  “By ‘Town’, you mean Queensbridge?”

  “Aye.”

  Rents too, thought Phillip: no doubt the grasping peasant had spoken of the rise in prices as a preliminary to charging a whopping great rent.

  “Where be you from, zur, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “London.”

  “Lunnon? Vancy that now! You come all that long way. Well, well.”

  At last Phillip asked about the rent.

  “Would vive pun’ be too much, zur?”

  “What a week?”

  “Noomye! Tes by the year us lets’n.”

  “Five pounds a year?”

  “Aiy.”

  “How good to meet an honest man!”

  They shook hands on it, and Phillip paid a year’s rent then and there in pound notes. He had a home of his own!

  He went into Queensbridge, and bought the first furniture he saw in a second-hand shop. Meanwhile he had remembered a talk with Jack O’Donovan in the gods of the Opera House, of spending a holiday together; and as soon as he had bought two beds he sent a telegram, c/o The Age, Fleet Street, inviting Jack to come down. The next day O’Donovan arrived by train; Phillip met him at the station, and took him on the back of the Norton to Malandine. “Welcome to Valerian Cottage!”