The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  July 30. The remarks of Bloom continue to amuse me. He isn’t such a bad fellow: he is saved by his sense of humour. That is the link between us. Also he told me I was a good man.

  The following conversation took place today. Journalist (fresh from an interview with Cass Gilbert, American architect, who spoke about “poor broken France”, after coming from the battlefields). Journalist, having rushed back from the Savoy in a taxi, leaps upstairs, bursts into glass cage where Jackdaw is glancing at a proof of “Should girls follow Examples of Flighty Mothers”, by (?) Lady Humbold Current £10/10/-for her, £4/4/-for North. “I’ve got a great story! I can do it as it’s never been written! The battlefields of France!!”

  Editor “Aw, more sob stooff! Let’s hear it, then.”

  J. “I can’t tell you—it will write itself! It’s mentally germinated —a tremendous story!!” (Thinking, My chance at last!!!)

  E. “Pough, the stoof about the airy ziffers and sobbing breezes is all right once in a way, but we don’t want it. Now, if you could get Cass Gilbert to speak about London, if he thinks the Ritz is an incinerator of good food, and the Piccadilly a doll’s house, well an’ good. But the battlefields! Pooh, my dear chap, pooh!”

  J. “Dammit, you don’t know good writing when you see it! Cass Gilbert—a great man. I’ll make your paper!”

  E. “Naw, naw. Enthusiasm’s all right young feller, but you’ve got off the rails. This paper ain’t the Monastery Record or the Poetry Review. Good story!”

  J. “Very well—I’ll take it to the Chronicle!”

  E. (emptying pockets of more souvenir’d cigars): “Better take it to the waste-paper basket.”

  The Editor has a sense of humour, and so has the journalist; and the next day the hack sees things from the Editor’s point of view.

  Someone comes over to J. and says, “Why don’t you try Lady Alexander for an article? She’s the widow of Sir George Alexander, the actor-manager, and a dear old girl, always willing to put her name to an article. Why not try her for the need for factory girls to have chaperons at the sea-side?”

  J. follows this up, and the following Sunday dear Lady Alexander’s photograph appears above an article Seaside Morals, and the journalist gets £2/2/-for half a column of the wise remarks of this most gracious lady, resplendent in her pale grey-green painted flat and dressed in musical comedy Edwardian pale grey-green summery clothes and efflorescent grey-green hat (with just a touch of brassica about it) after entertaining “one of Lord Castleton’s young men”. Life, life!

  Austin Harrison has taken another essay for the English Review! I cannot write decently in this journal now. The Spring is gone. I rise with the sap, I fade with the flower.

  The falcon story was harmless, and easy to do. He invented a terrier belonging to some gangers working on the line from St. Paul’s station. The dog, Nipper, was a great ratter. It had a feud with Blackfriars Bill, a great and savage buck rat which attacked cats. The terrier followed its enemy under the girders of Ludgate Circus Bridge, where Nipper was rescued by a man on another man’s shoulders standing on top of a ’bus, while Blackfriars Bill gibbered from a hole in the brickwork wall.

  Soon after this a porpoise came up the Thames on Saturday; it appeared again on Monday, in the evening papers, accompanied (in The Star) by a seal.

  His fellow reporter, North, discovered a Honeymoon Colony in Sussex: a cluster of horse-drawn caravans inhabited by Chelsea artists squatting there because of the house shortage. It was a good story, said Bloom; but why had the photographer of The Daily Picture, following up the Courier story, been unable to locate it? A Daily Trident man reported that he had tramped all over the downs, and made many enquiries, but came back with nothing.

  “I expect they’ve hidden themselves elsewhere by now,” explained North, “owing to the publicity we gave them.”

  “Anyway,” said Bloom, “it was a good story,” as he sauntered away jingling his money. So was Phillip’s story of the young cuckoo being fed by many Cockney sparrows in one of the street-lamps lining the Mall to Buckingham Palace. “But don’t turn the paper into Zoological Notes and Queries,” Bloom called over his shoulder.

  Aug. 2. Six years ago I was getting my service kit together for General Mobilisation. France was waiting with strained face for Britain’s verdict, the French Socialist Jaures was assassinated in Paris, and I felt the shadow of a long and terrible war upon the world. Now memory of my Army days is as far away as the mind’s conception of Caesar’s landing on the Kent coast. My boyhood friends are compost in the earth, or (more bitter) estranged.

  Aug. 4. Tonight I am ill, my inner nature parched and lost. This morning I returned from Folkestone, having bidden farewell to Spica, my only dear, at the station. I said goodbye cheerfully and smiling; she just looked at me, her eyes large and sad, while her lips scarcely formulated “Goodbye”. I could not fathom her deep heart.

  Later, Bloom told me that I hadn’t turned out so good a reporter as he had hoped. Failure, and so early. I hear nothing about my novel’s reception by Rabbitsons; another failure, I suppose.

  It is bitter to think that I have failed all round. Except for a few essays, my writing is unsaleable. No one really wants to read musings. I quite understand why Spica wants only to be friends: what have I that is loveable, for I am not really human? All is in my mind, or head. I dream with my eyes open, I cannot truly feel, only observe. I mean, I can feel, I do feel, deeply, but it is all purely personal to me. As her mother told me sharply: I am moody and unsociable.

  It is true. Ordinary talk seems to poison me. I, who love life passionately, the wild birds and the flowers so deeply that their very movements, forms, and feelings penetrate to my brain almost with their own identities, who think of Spica so holily and absolutely—I am nothing to any of them. Just an animated and observing movement. I am no more than a poppy, the red-weed of the farmer, a spilt blood-drop of flower in the corn, an outlaw, flower of sleep and death, whose seeds in a dry skull rattle to earth like shrapnel. Why does the poppy bloom? The scythe cuts it down, and who shall care? It is terrible to think that.

  Chapter 4

  LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

  The London season was over; the town houses of the established rich were closed, the servants on board-wages. The search for stories was harder than ever. The repeated cry on his return of “What’ve yer got?” sometimes drove him to near-frenzy; but he controlled himself, made himself go limp—his safety-valve when under bombardment. He no longer looked on Bloom, as the hours drew on to Saturday midnight, as a slave-driver. Bloom was driven, too. Perhaps a rival Sunday paper, procured in an early edition by some bribed agent, revealed a story one of the reporters had missed. It was hastily paraphrased, and shoved into the next edition. The Chief, who read all editions of his papers like a hawk watching for movement below its shadow, might ask, “Why hasn’t The Weekly Courier got that story?” Everyone was worried and strained. Supposing a scoop were missed? Copy after copy of rival Sunday papers was smuggled in. It was known that the Chief had got a down on Bloom. The Chief was a man of immense vitality, with strong likes and dislikes. One week the Golf Correspondent described a match and used the sentence, He drove the ball four hundred feet, putting it out of bounds. The Chief read the word putting as a specialised stroke, a putt: and it was explained to him that it was used in the meaning of placing the ball out of bounds. Yet day after day the Morning Bulletins, pinned on every door, referred to the ignorance of Bloom as a sportsman. Bloom could not retort; he took the snubs and suffered. “Well, the Chief’s like that. He’s also overworked,” said Phillip, feeling sorry for Bloom.

  “It’s because Bloom’s a Jew,” said North. “But he’s a kind man. He’s helped people in various ways, always unobtrusively. He helped me once, after making me swear I’d not tell anyone.”

  At 9 o’clock one Saturday night the office boy—also the Art Critic for the weekly Children’s Painting Competitions—came to tell Phillip that a gentleman was waiting t
o see him downstairs.

  “Willie!”

  His cousin looked to be very thin and nervous, as though he had had a bad time: he explained that it had been a rough Channel crossing. Hardly waiting for greetings he begged Phillip to urge his Editor to publish an article he had written.

  “Here it is. Please read it.”

  War is made by the bodies of young men. There has been no change in the minds of the old since the Armistice. A European war will arise again unless there is a change of thought in all men. For blood calls to blood; and the only justice is through forgiveness, and love.

  I am a soldier of 1914, one of the early volunteers. I went through the war, I was wounded, and decorated by H.M. the King. Now I am working at the Concentration German Graveyard in Artois. I have been helping to dig up dead German soldiers, or their bones and scraps of uniform black as fragments of old mushrooms but more fragile, and relay them, in their thousands, in the Concentration Graveyard at The Labyrinthe, which was a German redoubt of great and terrible strength commanding the Arras-Bethune road.

  The war was Europe’s tragedy; the causes of that tragedy have still not been resolved. New and tender thoughts of youth have appeared among the Wandervogel—free-wandering German boys and girls borne on the lyricism of their countryside—but these are hesitant, a nascent flux based on hope and faith that one’s neighbour is oneself. Against these ideas the old crystallised European thought has, in the manner of crystals forming, striven to suppress, by cracking, other patterns.

  At the German Concentration Graveyard the dark spirit of revenge is made manifest.

  Elsewhere in this rolling downland country the barren white chalk thrown up by the bombardments has been partly plowed in, or covered by grass: on the Labyrinthe it remains white, a wide expanse of chalk darkened when the sun shines with the shadows of crosses; but one does not notice the shadows. For, packed close together, and in pairs, back to back, the crosses that are planted in the bare chalk are a vast and terrible sight. Acres of black crosses, acres of blackness, nearly 100,000 tall black symbols of crucifixion, each with a name and number and regiment stencilled on it in ragged letters of white paint. I have marked many of these crosses, nearly as tall as a man, for hour after hour, day after day. I have seen, now and then, a motor-car stop on the road beyond, and someone—usually it is a woman alone—walk steadily through the gate with an expressionless face, and pause, as though hopelessly, before beginning a search in the immense silence of charred human hopes. This German Concentration Graveyard has been designed deliberately and made by order of the French Government, in a spirit of hate.

  Black, black, black, vast and terrible, the charred forest sweeps over the horizon. In the waste ground adjoining there are concrete machine-gun shelters burst open, their iron rods rusty and clawing heaven. The grass is long and rank there. Larks sing above in the free sky; the larks have always sung. Now they sing above the monuments, black as charred thistles, to the dead, these tarred wooden crosses pressed together, unloved by flowers (none grow on chalk), stark, the graves of the hated invaders! They burnt and laid waste, and now their bones lie in a burnt waste … but that is a facile thought of the old crystal-pattern of a competitive civilisation: for the hated invaders were men taken away from their homes, men who must go where they are told, men who must believe that the infamy of war is virtue, and that God loves men to crucify and kill one another.

  Here is the spirit of revenge, which will call forth equal revenge, so that men will march again, and fall once more upon the fields of Europe.

  I have helped to dig up those German bones and black fragments of uniform, and to shovel them into boxes, roughly in the shape of coffins, but very narrow, for the bodies are no more, having wasted away; I have helped tall blond Flemish labourers to toss in the bones with what remains of leather equipment and uniform black and brittle as old mushroom fragments dried by the sun.

  It is my duty to supervise with a French gendarme. I am there to see that no British bones are taken by mistake, for in war-time friend and foe were often buried together. But not in peace-time—that time when the nations (or those minding the business of lesser people) practise war, and invent new ways of death.

  The bones of the slain, of the laughing boys and the earnest fathers of families, may lie side-by-side at peace in war-time; but in peace-time they are religiously separated into nations again, each to its place: the British to the beautiful cemeteries, fragrant with green turf and flowers one sees in cottage gardens, ‘that are forever England’, and the others to—the Labyrinthe.

  The Labyrinthe! Black as thistles—the unwanted thistles that the farmer and his wife unroot through the long spring days. One sees them in the corn, while an entire family—grandmother, mother and children—on their knees advance in line across a levelled field sown with wheat, a field which reveals the past by the scatter of subsoil chalk in the brown loam, and sometimes a bone or a piece of iron, or a useless concrete building, low and square in the springing wheat.

  They are happy as they move slowly across their fields among the plants of wheat; while on the rising ground beyond stands a darkness in the midst of the noonday sun, black as a burned place, bitter and black as a frost or fire, a frost of silence among the black crosses.

  Once these were men who, having marched where they were ordered, and having done what they were commanded, after endurance and suffering, fell, and were lost.

  I, an old soldier, have found truth and beauty in this waste land; I would declare it to be a true miracle; for near La Folie Farm stands a single cross of poplar made of a living stick pushed into the ground. Below lies a legbone, a rib, a skull. A plowman has done this act for some unknown German soldier left, perhaps, in the final retreat. Now the stick is a little tree, with many rustling leaves, a shivering poplar; the wilderness has blossomed.

  If all had been as wide-minded as the plowman in his field! Then the German people might have been given the ground wherein their dead lie, as a perpetual gift equal with that ground given for the English dead. It might have cost as much as one submarine: and the heart of the people would have been moved.

  I sit in the long grass at the edge of the field, and wonder, can it still be done? A gesture that might mean, for the moment, personal loss for its maker; a gesture that has a precedent in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. A letter to the German people, saying that the French land was broken and many of the people had suffered (as all suffer in all wars) and are still suffering grievously; and that the German people must help to restore the dwelling-places and to make the land fair as before.

  Such a letter would be within the experience of all to feel and to understand; and if it is sent now, it might give another direction to the history of Europe. For I have been in Germany, and I have seen brutal things done by the conquerors to the conquered: I have seen, too, the dark spirit of revenge arising under that brutality.

  I beg that this gesture of love be made as I write this, hastily and clumsily, sitting by the plowman’s mite in the long grass at the edge of the cornfield, and pray that the example of the simple plowman be followed: he who lights his candle with thoughts of Christ, the intellectual and spiritual light of the world.

  Phillip sat still after finishing the script; then rising, said, “It’s beautiful, which is saying it’s the truth, Willie. Come up and see Bloom. I’m afraid it’s too late for this week, the article page is already made up. It might do for next Sunday; or perhaps be kept for Armistice Day. You won’t be too upset if he can’t do it, will you?”

  “Oh, no, I shall understand.”

  They went up to see Bloom, who automatically held out his hand with the incantation, “What’ve yer got?”

  “Willie, this is Mr. Bloom, our editor. Mr. Bloom, Captain Maddison.”

  “How are yer,” murmured Bloom, offering a limp hand which then took the manuscript pages. He glanced through them, went into his glass office and read them again. When he came out he said, “You can writ
e. But if we ran this it might start the war yer talk about. Have yer anything else for me? No? Well this might do for The Observer. The Chief is no friend of the Germans. I’ll tell yer what, I’ll give yer a chance at descriptive writing, if yer come on space. Come back on Tuesday morning.”

  *

  On Willie’s first day Bloom said to him, “Go down to Father Bernard Vaughan at Farm Street and get him to say something about Present Day Laxity of Morals. Now tell me are yer a Roman Catholic?”

  “No, Mr. Bloom.”

  “Well, ‘confidence for confidence’, nor am I,” Bloom blandly replied. “Tell Father Bernard I sent yer. Pump the stuff into him”—Bloom made the motion of filling a syringe at a pail, and then injecting it into an imaginary listener—“Dope ’im with what you want him to say, and he’ll say ‘yes—yes—’, and you say humbly, ‘Thank you very much, Father,’ and ask him if he will put his name to it. Then he’ll read the paper between meat and Mass and think what a fine article he has written.”

  To Phillip he said, when Willie had gone, “Your pal ought to try that Graveyard story on The Nation and Athenaeum if The Observer don’t want it. Now you’re a novelist, go down to yer brother of the pen George Moore in Ebury Street and ask him if he approves the increase in frankness about sex matters in the modern novel, particularly the novels written by D. H. Lawrence, and ask him if he thinks it’s a good healthy sign, but don’t say I sent yer.”

  Phillip, having rung the bell, was stating his mission to the housekeeper when a little shapeless man appeared angrily behind her, and turning a pale watery eye on Phillip he said, “If you want an interview about the increase in dogshit on the pavements of Chelsea I will give you an interview on that subject, for your paper is the right one to deal with it, being mainly crap,” and with that the door was shut in Phillip’s face, leaving him laughing weakly against a lamp-post as he thought that if George Moore in his books gilded the lily of his sexless life, he certainly knew how to put his own particular bloom on the servile classes of Fleet Street.