The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  “Thank you very much,” he said, and wrote his account while sitting on one of the wooden benches at Lord’s, to the knock of ball on willow and modulated ejaculations of “Oh, well played, sir”, “Pretty to watch, pretty to watch”, etc. In twenty-five minutes the work was done, and he went back to Monks House.

  The following Sunday half a column headed PARKIN ON BOWLING appeared on the front page in the early Northern edition of the paper, and to his surprise he saw on a placard the same words, in heavy type, and under the words by Phillip Maddison. Not a word of his description was cut. The Light Car Notes also appeared as written, although Bloom had scratched the back of his head while reading the final paragraph.

  “Are yer serious about oatmeal in a leaky radiator, to get yer home?”

  “Yes. It will prevent the pistons seizing. The bit about draining the radiator on arrival, and the driver having a hot meal already prepared, is a joke. But it will delay the boiling away of water in the cast-iron jacket.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the Chief will say, but he sent yer, so I’ll print it.”

  Phillip’s other stories were (a) an interview in Nottingham with a woman who on her 104th birthday had been taken by The Daily Picture in an aeroplane; and (b) another with a parson in Lincolnshire.

  Asked how it felt to be up in an aeroplane the aged woman had replied, “Horrible!” But the Chief was interested in the aeroplane, so that would not do; and the Chief’s brother owned The Daily Picture, so when the same reply was given to the question, “How does it feel to be 104?”—“Horrible!”—Phillip had used his imagination.

  From Nottingham he had gone by local trains, changing three times, to Hogworthingham (as instructed by Ownsworth) to interview the schoolmaster-parson whose photograph had appeared in that morning’s Trident with a fierce Kaiser moustache above a condemnation of the V-blouse, a new fashion which allowed, in the hot summer, an inch or two of flesh below the throat to be exposed to air and light.

  He found the parson in a small Church school in a village. He was a mild, clean-shaven old gentleman who, hearing that the caller had had no lunch, offered him eggs and bacon, and while the meal was being prepared by his wife, showed him round the school, an ancient building of one classroom in which a dozen small boys sat on one side, and six or seven small girls on the other.

  “You were well disguised in the Trident photograph, sir, if I may say so,” said Phillip, sipping coffee with his eggs-and-bacon.

  “I fancy the reporter got that photograph from a volume of Lincolnshire Worthies, where it appeared with an article of mine written fifteen years ago,” smiled the rector. “I wore a slight moustache in those days, and it appears to have been touched up.”

  “By what is called, euphemistically, the Art Editor, sir.”

  The old fellow went on to explain that some time previously he had suggested to the girls, on the breaking up of the Easter term, that as the weather was cold, they should take care to remember the old tag, Cast not a clout till May be out.

  “We get the cold Polar airs over the North Sea during the spring and early summer, you see. I rather think that the local representative of The Daily Trident got hold of the story somewhat late, and interpreted my remarks in the way you have seen. Do help yourself to coffee, won’t you?”

  “Please correct the stupid impression,” he continued in his mild voice. “I see other papers are repeating it. And only this morning I had a 200-word prepaid telegram from The Daily Picture, asking for my opinion on the subject of ‘Scandalous tendencies of modern woman’s dress’. Of course I don’t hold such silly opinions. If it is healthier and easier for women to wear skirts half-way between ankle and knee, as they have since the war, why shouldn’t they? Sensible dress does not mean that a woman is flighty, and prepared to abandon all modesty.”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  He thanked the parson and went away, promising that he would read an exposure of The Daily Trident in next Sunday’s Weekly Courier. In the train he wrote a long and scornful article, and on arrival at Euston took a taxi to Monks House. He was hardly inside the room when the jackdaw’s beak and eye peered round the door of the glass cage and the editorial voice croaked, “What’ve yer got?”

  “A scoop!” cried Philip, fumbling in his poacher-pocket. The jackdaw came out of the glass house, took the manuscript, glanced at sheet after sheet, dropped them one by one upon the floor; then on flat feet, with dejected head, he shuffled back into the cage.

  “You can’t write against the Trident,” the voice said plaintively. “Don’t you know the Chief owns it?”

  “Of course! But this is true!”

  “What else’ve yer got?” shuffling out of the cage again.

  “Who owns the Picture, sir?”

  “The Chief’s brother. Why? What else’ve yer got?”

  “Old female aeronaut is polite foremother of the hamlet, articulate glorious Milton,” replied Phillip, with a straight face.

  Bloom glanced at the copy, and croaked, “Did she really say her father helped William Blake to publish his poems, and that she reads Conrad and finds him the greatest living writer in English, and that another hundred years aren’t enough for her to read all the authors she wants to read—Somerset Maugham, John Galsworthy, Henri Barbusse and T. S. Eliot? She did? All right, Newell, have it sent upstairs, but first take out that bit about her father knowing William Blake and she reads Conrad and the others by candle-light all night.”

  Left alone, Phillip looked at his V-blouse copy. All wasted. Harry Ownsworth came to his help, by suggesting that if he took out the words blouse and modern dress, and put in a few negatives, he could turn it into Parson attacks Flighty Mothers. Hadn’t the rector said something about the unhappiness in a home caused by flightiness?

  Phillip rewrote the story from this viewpoint, and to salve his conscience went to see the Art editor, who arranged the photographs, and asked him to shave off the Kaiser moustache. When the first country edition appeared at 9.30 on Saturday night there the wretched rector was, on page 3, grim and grey-faced with pin-pointed dark eyes and stiff, clean-shaven upper lip.

  “What a cad I am.” he told Ownsworth. “That gentle host, treating me as though I were a gentleman!”

  “Better than have the Chief spotting the aged female aeronaut reading Conrad in the paper while The People reporter says she is an orphan who can neither read nor write,” grinned the News editor.

  On the Tuesday morning, when Phillip received an envelope with £12/12/-, Ownsworth said, “Bloom said you might be a new star. We sold 15,000 more copies last week of the Northern Edition, due to your Parkin story.”

  Walking down Bond Street that afternoon, Phillip stopped at the Copenhagen pottery shop, and seeing a tawny owl on one of the rows of naturalistic glazed animals and birds, went in and bought it for £10/10/-. From there he went to a music shop in Oxford Street for records of Parsifal, heard from the Doves’ Nest where he had lain, stretched out, head on arms and eyes closed, in the azure spirit of the music—azure to him above the eternal tragedy and hopelessness of the world. Playing this music in the garden room until after midnight, he determined to go down to Folkestone on the following Saturday night, and in the morning ask permission from Mrs. Trevelian to present the porcelain owl to Spica in token of friendship and for help received in his literary career. Nothing more.

  Conceit in his powers as a reporter was soon reduced when he realised that what was done one week was forgotten the next and all was to do again.

  There were three men reporters and one woman writer on the paper. All were fed on clippings supplied by Harry Ownsworth. Two of the men—North and Singates—were on the staff at £8/8/-a week each, while Phillip and Miss Vivienne Lecomte were on space. For these two it was not what they wrote and turned in which counted for payment, but only what was finally printed in the paper.

  Four days a week all four reporters were sent out on stories, only to find that some were dead the next day beca
use one or more of the dailies had got there first. So most of what they had ‘got’—perhaps a hundred or more miles away after train journeys taking from early morning to late at night and written in the early hours of the next morning—was impaled on The Spike, a tall steel poniard with a wooden base in the centre of the News editor’s desk, where sat Harry Ownsworth with his scissors searching through a pile of morning and evening London papers, provincial weeklies, parish magazines, trade journals, Society magazines, and wrinkling his sloping forehead for ideas.

  As the end of each week drew near, when The Weekly Courier became a live newspaper covering Saturday’s events, so the punk rose like so many paper butterflies impaled on the steel thorn by a mechanical shrike.

  And then, on Saturday morning—a change of scene, a quickening of tempo. The paper was now alive, covering the world served by the news agencies, Reuters and Associated Press. From these clicking machines on pedestals, topped by glass domes, writhed endless lengths of paper tape, reproducing electric impulses which had travelled along submarine cable and telephone wire. The Weekly Courier room was deserted; Bloom moved into the news-room of The Trident with its big subbing table, editorial desk, and barrister’s table—there was a barrister permanently employed to vet possible libel. Heightened tempo induced tension as afternoon slumped into evening, with damp proofs trodden upon the floor like Bank Holiday litter among furlongs of tape. Bloom, his invariable dark suit looking more shapeless than ever, became a waif-like wanderer in slow movement from upholstered editorial office to news-room, his face becoming more haggard from nerve-strain in the electric light as he glanced at the latest news at the head of the writhing worm of paper issuing from a tape-machine, while the building vibrated periodically with the basement roar of rotary machines printing succeeding country editions. He seemed lost in his own maze as he picked up a damp galley proof only to drop it again, adding it to the hundreds of other proofs trodden flatter and scattered farther from the feet of the sub-editors sitting in shirt-sleeves around the mahogany subbing table. As the dead-line for the London edition drew nearer Bloom seemed to be partly shattered; he approached, as though wishing to avoid, his reporters standing by, looking drabber and becoming more querulous as the electric night ground on below his feet. But he never swore or cursed, nor did his face ever become maniacal.

  Late one Saturday night a rumour went round that the Chief was in the building. The effect on Bloom was immediate. “Find out who says so,” he cried to North, the first reporter he saw. The lines seemed to deepen across his brow, his eyes were apprehensive. Then seeing Phillip come in, “Well, what’ve yer got? Well, why not? That’s what yer here for, to get the story when yer sent out on it! Why didn’t yer give the butler ten bob, he’d ’ve talked then! Shut the door in yer face? The front door! What’s wrong with the servants’ entrance? That’s where a reporter should go. Here, Ownsworth, send Singates—Maddison’s fallen down on the stolen pearls story!”

  Singates, the crime reporter, pseudo hawk-eyed, dressed in old burberry and felt hat pulled down almost to level of tips of ears and nose, hurried away, muttering. North came back and said, “The Chief hasn’t been in.” Fed-up, Phillip cried to Bloom, “Fallen down! It was a story no-one should have stood up for! I’ve missed tea, dinner, and supper trying to get that mouldy nonsense about her Ladyship’s pearls! Why don’t you print real news—about the unemployed, for instance! Why not run a campaign to employ the unwanted nuisance of ex-service men on making new roads for the coming age of the motor lorry and the popular motor-car? And here’s another idea! Hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of sewage are turned every year into the Thames. The black mud of Southend-on-Sea is only sewage sludge! It ought to be called Southend-on-Drains! The sewage should be reclaimed, and returned as engine grease, and even lighting gas, and compost for the fertility of our cornfields depleted in the war! Do you know that if the river Thames were cleared salmon would come back to the river?”

  “Aw! Sob stoof, Maddison!” sneered Bloom. “You don’t do what yer told! You fell down on the British Communist Party’s meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel this afternoon. Is that where you got your ideas? Or did you address the meeting, telling them about airy ziffers just around the economic corner? Or about the cultured centenarian aeronaut whose great-grandfather knew Sexton Blake?”

  Phillip laughed. “Ha ha, dam’ fine joke! But as a fact, I’ve got a much better story than that pearl nonsense! But you wouldn’t print it, as its about a peregrine falcon I saw in front of St. Paul’s after I’d left the Communists’ meeting this afternoon!”

  “Well, what did yer get?”

  “You’d only laugh!”

  “Please yerself,” replied Bloom, turning away.

  “All right! The pigeons at St. Paul’s were in complete agitation, after being raided by a peregrine falcon, which came down at about a hundred miles an hour out of the blue.” Looking Bloom in the eye, he went on, “I’ve dived in a Sopwith Camel and know what speed is. People were looking up at the loud swishing noise as the falcon came down like an arrowhead. About fifty yards above the pavement it zoomed up, did a half loop, and while on its back struck a pigeon. There was a burst of feathers; the pigeon dropped, the falcon tipped up in an Immelmann turn, and cut down at it, taking it in another zoom about six feet off the flagstones. Soon there wasn’t another pigeon to be seen in the sky, they’d all scattered!”

  “It’s a good story!” said Bloom, one crease unfolding from his brow. “Here, Newell’’—to the chief sub-editor—“put it on page one for the last edition. Make it a top. I’ll pay £4/4/-if it comes out just as you told me, Maddison, d’yer hear?”

  “I’ve already written it!”

  Bloom shook his head, smiling, and sauntered away, hand in pocket jingling money, a sign of pleasure.

  In fact it was already written as part of a magazine story Phillip was doing in his spare time. He dashed off the imagined episode, 150 words in nine minutes, and took it to Newell. Within another five minutes he was reading a proof, a minute later the lines of type-metal from the Linotype machine on the top floor were being cased in the Page One frame; two more minutes, and the pale yellow papier-mâché matrix was pressed on the forme, put in the oven after being formed semi-circular, baked, and taken away, not much heavier than a pith helmet, to the foundry for a type-metal stereo to be taken from it, faithfully reproducing every aspect of the original page; to be bolted with its complementary semi-circle of another stereo to the rotary machine. At half-past eleven the presses started printing the last London edition. Three-foot thick rolls of newsprint unwound at speed, round and up and round and down the rollers so fast that when Phillip held a finger two inches from the paper static electricity escaped across the air to his fingernail.

  The crews of the presses stood by their thundering machines, ready for break-down or halt; the grey-haired Father of Chapel, proud of his men, waited among them. At the far end of the rotary machines folded 16-page copies of the Courier were being flicked out by the dozen, six papers every second, it seemed; the bundles were grabbed and lifted away to trestle tables, wrapped and corded, grabbed again by night-hawks in old mackintoshes and mufflers, and flung into waiting vans, to be taken away behind headlights through narrow streets above which, he saw with happiness, the stars of summer were still shining.

  *

  The odd thing about the falcon at St. Paul’s was that it was hanging about the dome of St. Paul’s on the following Monday. Three different reporters on three different evening papers saw it, and described it in paraphrases of the original Courier story. Only in two of these accounts it had become a hawk. By Tuesday, when the three reporters—Singates, North, and Maddison—reappeared to help fill the jackdaw’s nest, the falcon had made its final appearance in Rowley Meek’s (‘Sundowner’) comic column in The Daily Crusader.

  CROWDS AT ST. PAUL’S

  “Has the falcon-hawk come?” I asked one man, who seemed an expert in high-compression single-cylinder
internal-combustion engines. “Not today,” he said. “Not till next Sunday. He only comes once a week to pay a special visit to his copyright owner.”

  Phillip slept in Monks House after the paper had gone to bed. His usual couch was on the dark green moroccan leather sofa in the editor’s office of that rich relation, The Daily Trident. Then soon after dawn, when the last of the trams had long since ground away up and down the Embankment taking home weary newspaper men, he got up and after sluicing his face went down to the entrance and wheeled out the Norton, to enjoy a blind beside the glimmering river, with its spars and funnels, moored groups of barges and general shipping in the Pool. In the past he had sometimes gone to see the sunrise through the Tower Bridge; or by way of the bridges of Blackfriars, Westminster, and Vauxhall, to the Old Kent Road, and so to his dug-out in the garden-room, to read by candlelight until, wearied out, he might find relief in sleep; while the porcelain owl kept guard on the shelf above the fire-place.

  One Sunday morning towards the end of the month he went to Folkestone, leaving behind, in the usual dejection of the hours between night and day, the figurine intended as a token of friendship for Spica.

  July 27. I have been to Folkestone, and called on Eveline Fairfax. We are now good friends. Lionel, her husband, is waiting for a job on the Gold Coast in Posts and Telegraphs, after being retired. The two are fretting each other’s lives away. Not that this was obvious; both were keeping up appearances, poor things. Lionel hinted to me that Eve’s cousin, Spica, was expecting me to work hard at my job, and not to fritter away my energy. I did not call at the Trevelians while there, as S. was away. Came back determined to succeed. My will for this end is firmer than ever. Spica is my guiding star.