The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

“Not yet. I say, I want to kiss you, Poppett dear!”

  “Why don’t you then?”

  “I’m soppy, I suppose.”

  “No you’re not. You’re afraid of me!”

  “God’s teeth, no!”

  “‘Swearing strange oaths’, Phillip? What will you do next?”

  “It’s the battle cry of the Hundred and Sixteenth Foot! By the way, do you know what a poppet is?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “It’s the inlet valve in the cylinder head of an aero engine.”

  “And what does it do?”

  “It works on a weak spring, and pops in and out with alternate suction and compression by a piston.”

  “Really!”

  They got over the stile, trellised below with wire-netting to keep out stoats and weasels, and left the covert for a stubble field which glimmered with dew.

  “Poppett, I want to kiss you tremendously.”

  “Go on then.”

  A foolish silence. Phillip began to suffer; he was not sincere; he had merely been responding to her whims, a sort of toady who had begun a light flirtation and now felt—idiotic.

  “Poppett, to be serious, I would like to bring you here to listen to the nightingales in May. I came here last spring——”

  “I know, with that Trevelian girl. You were both in love with love, it was on your two faces! You never went to bed together, did you?”

  He knew that Mrs. Portal-Welch had been discussing him with Poppett. They crossed the stubble and approached the under-keeper’s tarred wooden cottage, near Reynard’s Lane.

  “Is this the end of the wood?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry the walk was not very interesting—I’m afraid I’m a bore——”

  “Don’t be silly! You don’t understand women. You’re a pessimist. You lack confidence. Your attitude should be, ‘Come with me if you want to, I find pleasure in your company, but if you don’t want to, it will be your loss.’ Honestly, Phillip, if you consider what others may be thinking of you all the time, you create the very atmosphere you are wanting to avoid!”

  “But any man can do the heavy egoist, pretending love in order to get a girl. I can’t. If I love anyone, I show it. Although I know I’ll probably be lost by doing that.”

  “That’s your trouble. You’re a pessimist, as I told you, and afraid of women.”

  “And as I told you, I can’t act. I’m soppy, I suppose.”

  “Oh, no you’re not. Far from it. My fiancé is like you, in face and form, I mean. He’s a handsome man!”

  “This moonlight is most deceptive, Poppett!”

  “It’s most revealing, Phillip! You’ve got a fine profile. Honestly, you have. I suppose this is the end of the walk?” as they turned into the road to the station.

  “Very nearly.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why do you say ‘oh’?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “For me ‘Great Pan is Dead!’”

  At these words, one of Julian’s innumerable quotations idly recalled, she stopped and faced Phillip, putting her hands on his shoulders and looking up into his face. He set himself to outstare her, thinking that the moonlight gave her face the effect of white marble, a Rodin vision from the fire-formed rocks of creation. She was acting, of course, seeing herself as in a ballet. It was rather thrilling when her fingers reached up and touched his face. “What made you say that, Phillip?”

  “I was thinking of what a friend once said, in connexion with a line of Swinburne—‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, The world has grown grey with thy breath.’”

  “‘Great Pan is dead’ was a terrible cry, Phillip! It passed from mouth to mouth all along the Mediterranean coast. My father says that was the cry of the world, knowing that it was the end of Nature, and the beginning of the planet’s death. He thinks that the human spirit has evolved to its limit, and from now on the scientific mind will learn to control Nature, and eventually destroy the earth. We haven’t had Armageddon yet.”

  “My cousin thinks the war will come again with the Germans, because they were not treated with magnanimity. He blames the hard-faced, hard-hearted old men—Sir Eric Geddes, quoting Clemenceau, saying, ‘Germany is a lemon to be squeezed until the pips squeak’—the pips being the starving German children under our naval blockade. My cousin can’t think of anything else. Frivolous, otherwise happy talk, hurts him. That’s why he left us this evening.”

  “My father was in the war, too. He’s a sculptor, not a very popular one, I’m afraid. He says romantic art died in 1914.”

  “Does he like Rodin?”

  “Very much. But he says Rodin belongs to the Golden Age, which perished on the Somme.”

  They walked to the station side by side. He felt less unsure of himself now; and one remark of hers aroused longing. “Part of you was killed in the war, Phillip. I wish I could bring it to life again.” He held her hand to his side, and they came in silence to the row of oil-lamps along the station.

  At first it seemed that they were the only passengers going to London, it being Sunday night; but out of the shadows came Otis B. Quick, patient American boy running towards them and embracing both him and Poppett. Phillip thought that Quick was a nice man.

  “Broughton said he wasn’t going to wait, and I guess I felt lonely without you two.”

  At Charing Cross Phillip and Poppett did not kiss. Was it all a game? He was inspired by her glances, he could see the beauty of her shoulders under her coat. It was warming to be with a girl so pretty and naturally eager.

  “Goodbye, it has been such a happy day, hasn’t it? Thank you both for coming. Goodnight, Poppett, goodnight, Otis. You’re both such nice people.”

  “When shall we meet again?” Two faces looked at him out of the waiting taxi. The one that mattered said, “I may not be able to get there, but I’ll try to be at ‘Sappho’s’ party next Sunday afternoon.”

  Taxi drives away—where? Otis and Poppett to sleep together, valve responding to piston? What was it to do with him? Tender feelings arise but to fade.

  He decided to walk home. He could get there by 10.30, and so keep his word. And walking above Thames on the footbridge beside the railway he thought of Spica, still in the marble and awaiting the hand, or the heart, of a Rodin to bring her out of the cold wave of life, out of the white Tyrrhenian stone of antiquity formed before Great Pan had arisen with Anadiomene out of the sea. The thought shook him; he fumbled in his pockets for notebook and pencil, and tried to write by moonlight; but it was gone under the vision of dark eyes in a pale face, classically beautiful in a moment now passed for ever. Ah, if only it had been Spica!

  *

  On the following Sunday afternoon he went across London to ‘Sappho’s’ salon. He had another manuscript in the poacher pocket of his blue barathea jacket. It was called A Walk Through the Woods, and had been written after he got home the previous Sunday night.

  Phillip was in confident mood. Anders Norse had sold his falcon short story to Pan Magazine for eighteen guineas, and spoken of the possibility of five times that sum from one of the American magazines, publication to be simultaneous in both countries.

  In the garden, when he arrived at the house in St. John’s Wood he saw a pretty girl in the sky-blue uniform of the W.R.A.F. hoeing weeds in the gravel of the carriage sweep, and recognised the daughter of the house. He was talking to her when from the drawing-room above stone steps came the notes of Vesti la Giuba so powerfully loud that they caused people strolling in the street to stop and listen. He, too, was amazed at the tremendous voice, and when the singing was over he said to the girl, “Is that a Caruso record on a sterterophone?”

  “No, it’s a tenor from the Royal Danish Opera House.”

  “It’s tremendous! He must be very famous!”

  “He’s just arrived in England, to find work here. Do go in, I’ll finish this hoeing, and then join you.”

  He was approaching the steps when he heard the noises of typing i
n the basement room, and glancing through the barred window saw a man sitting at a table beside a pile of manuscript. The front door was open. He entered the drawing-room hazy with tobacco smoke and found himself among about fifty men and women of all ages, most of them standing, but some of the older ones sitting down. These had already ‘arrived’—he recognised, from photographs in literary magazines, Netta Syrett, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Rose Macaulay; and, sitting between crutches, J. D. Woodford. The younger writers were all standing, among them a fat and happy young man in a brown suit and wearing a pink shirt which matched the colour of his face. Having presented himself to his hostess, and been introduced for the fourth time to the lean ex-conscientious objector who was confident of being a leading European novelist when the European paper-shortage ended, Phillip was passed on to the tenor, to whom he said, “Sir, you are going to be world famous!”

  “Mr. Melchior does not understand English,” said Mrs. Portal-Welch.

  “Has he had an audition at Covent Garden? No? Then I will go tomorrow and arrange one. I heard several Wagnerian tenors last season, and there was no one there to touch this chap. Is he going to sing again?”

  “I will ask him. But I think it best not to mention the audition until it materialises. You haven’t brought your friend Mr. Warbeck, have you? That’s a good thing! He is a slack-twisted young man, and quite impossible. Now I will ask Lauritz Melchior if he will sing again.”

  Before the fat young man sang the Prize Song from The Mastersingers someone opened the windows, for the vibratory power of the top notes was almost too much for the ear-drums.

  After the exhilaration of the singing, Phillip felt lonely. Where was Poppett? Neither Broughton nor Quick was there. What was there to say to the other people? One day they would know what he was, he thought. Until then—all they saw was the camouflage behind which he concealed his spirit in communication, almost every moment of his conscious living, with those dead poets and writers living in his thoughts, and helping him. And accompanying this belief was an acceptance of what Spica had said: that he would never find anyone like himself while he was alive.

  *

  What Phillip did not realise at that time was that he was suffering from profound nervous exhaustion, out of which he had created a private world of fantasy wherein sense and nonsense were combined—the nonsense arising in momentary relief from the burden of the private world upon which all emotion was expended. At such times his talk was almost deliberately vapid and inconsequential. During some of the Thursday evening lectures he had set out to play the fool, to raise a laugh at the expense of some of the lecturers who gave their services at the Parnassus Club. At such times he invented incidents and gave them out as facts.

  “As Arnold Bennett said to me the other day——”. Etc., etc. After one such exhibition Mrs. Portal-Welch had taken him apart. “You say things which are not, my dear boy.”

  “I am only a verbal water-boatman, ‘Sappho’!”

  “You are too young to call me ‘Sappho’——”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon!”

  “Have you read J. H. Fabre?”

  “No, I haven’t, Mrs. Portal-Welch, I’m half-ashamed to say.”

  “Then you should. He is a real nature writer, dealing with living realities. Now about your water-boatman metaphor. You may be like that insect with long legs which skates about the surface of a pond in all directions without apparent purpose, but do you know why it does it?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, really——”

  “You may not appreciate the value of modern psychological knowledge, but Freud could tell you what your water-boatman is seeking.”

  “And I could tell Freud,” replied Phillip.

  Phillip was not the only young man there seeking one who, hearing his words, would respond with recognition in her eyes and beauty in her face as the spirit braced the body above its interior sag of loneliness. Looking around, he noticed a rather subdued young woman with candid brow and eyes of brown which seemed to indicate that she was picturing scenes elsewhere. Before being taken to her by his hostess, he was told by that free-speaking lady that the girl was the daughter of a writer famous for short stories about Thames longshoremen.

  “He’s very irritable and moody, you know—enclosed by a typical puritanical monogamatic encrustation. So his daughter made a runaway marriage with the author of Warp and Woof. You know it, I expect?”

  He remembered the sensation Warp and Woof had made; it was read by everyone in the mess at Landguard in the summer of 1918. The author’s name was said to have been struck off the Old Boys’ register because he had guardedly referred for the first time in a British novel to occasional furtive habits among herded growing boys.

  “I tried to read it, Mrs. Portal-Welch, but it seemed to be only about ordinary scenes of school, cricket and football, which had occurred in the author’s life—literally true perhaps but——”

  “Ah, you prefer Eric, or Little by Little, or Tom Brown’s Schooldays, no doubt. Well, don’t tell the author that, will you? He and his wife are not very happy together, poor dears.” She went on to give details, while Phillip thought ironically of her criticisms of himself for inventing ‘facts’, while Mrs. Portal-Welch was apparently unaware of the possibly equal fault of talking about her guests.

  He found the famous, or infamous, author of Warp and Woof to be a mild, modest, and gentlemanly young fellow (as Father would say) standing as though patiently beside his child wife who had the clouded brown eyes of a pre-Raphaelite beauty.

  After a short introduction—“Mr. Maddison is a sentimentalist who has not yet found his writer’s feet,” Mrs. Portal-Welch led away the young author, to meet—Poppett, Phillip saw from the corner of his eye. Poppett! He felt a sudden aching for her restfulness, for self-absorption in her beauty. Oh damn, why hadn’t he spotted her first? Still, she was not likely to be allured by cricket, football, and boys-will-be-boys talk. Having settled his mind in that direction, he said to the girl-wife, “Do you like the poetry of Francis Thompson?”

  “Yes, very much!” Her eyes lost a little of their absence.

  “Does your husband also like Thompson?”

  “No,” she replied, with a slight shrug. “He wants to be a realist, like Tolstoi.” Her lips resumed their former downward droop.

  “I’m a writer of ‘mere musings about nature’, according to Mrs. Portal-Welch,” he said. “She tells me I must read, not morbid stuff like Thompson’s verse, but scientific works like the books of J. H. Fabre, and learn how to count the hairs on the water-boatman’s legs, and ascertain the shape of its thorax and how it connects with its mate with those long legs. I say, I’m awfully sorry—really you know—I don’t suppose you’ll believe me—but there’s no connexion between the insect ‘water boatman’, and those longshoremen your famous father writes about. Do I sound mad?”

  “Oh, I’m quite used to madmen! Tell me about your ‘mere musings’.”

  “Well, to me the English countryside has no connexion with John Crowe’s powerful pessimistic novels about his unnative Cornwall. To me, it is full of beauty—light—grace—form—hope—a place to lie on your back with the sun on your face, your eyelids blood-red while you take a deep breath and float away in your mind into the sun.”

  “Icarus,” she said, and quoted Francis Thompson. “‘O Dismay, I, a wingless mortal sporting, With the tresses of the sun! Ere begun, Falls my singed song down the sky, Even the old Icarian way!”

  “Yes,” he said. “‘Rags and Rubbish’, Mrs. Portal-Welch summed up Thompson and his verse to me, once.”

  “Her!” retorted the beautiful pale girl, giving him a look of her wide-spaced brown eyes.

  “It’s bad manners to discuss one’s hostess, as it is one’s guests; but speaking only in a literary sense, I do find that some literary figures discompose one, so that one says anything, and plays the vapid fool.”

  “I know, Mr. Maddison. You’re like all sensitive artists: chameleonic. H
ere she comes.”

  Mrs. Portal-Welch was making her way towards them: a determinedly bright, kind figure in purple velvet offset with gold brocade, one able to make at any moment’s notice definite pronouncements on literature and the literati; having no reserve, she said what came into her mind—and when he responded with a matrix of her manner she at once dismissed it.

  “Barbara, I want you to meet Hugh Walpole——”, and taking the girl’s arm, swept away with her.

  Left alone, Phillip went into the hall; the thick smoke in the room was oppressive. Where was the lavatory? The tapping of a typewriter drew him downstairs, and knocking on the basement door, he was bidden to enter.

  Before him at the kitchen table sat a small, middle-aged man at an ancient typewriter like a model of the inside of Albert Hall including the organ. Telling himself to remember this Compton Mackenzie-like simile, Phillip said, “I’m afraid I’ve interrupted your literary work, sir.”

  “You have not! And it isn’t my literary work! It’s my wife’s!”

  “How interesting, sir. Do you like literature?”

  “I hate literature!”

  Phillip decided to ask no more questions. The quiet small gentleman wearing gold-wired spectacles then said, “What was that noise upstairs? Was anyone being murdered?”

  “Not more than usual,” replied Phillip, beginning to enjoy himself. “I mean,” he hastened to add, thinking that his remark was perhaps an implied criticism, “in a sense we are all being murdered, or murdering, by degrees. Oh!” he added, realising that he was probably talking to Mrs. Portal-Welch’s husband—“I mean generally speaking, sir! I really wasn’t implying any criticism of this afternoon’s gathering of the literati!”

  “I was hoping you were!”

  Phillip laughed, and dropped his pretence of upper-class aloofness. “I suppose all writers are egoists, in a way.”

  “You’ve found that out, too, have you?”

  “I’ve been one myself for a year.”

  “Ah,” said the amateur typist, leaning back on his wooden chair. For a moment his face was sad; then he looked up, having put away personal thoughts. “So you’re a writer, are you?”