The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  By God, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices, he said to himself in Julian’s gruff tones. That night he could not sleep for the feeling that one moment seemed to dissolve his body, the next to fill it with an ache of restlessness perpetuated by a startlingly clear mind. He could not sleep, he did not want to sleep; but he slept, to awake with determination to tell Annabelle that he loved her. Then he would tell Sophy.

  But in the morning Annabelle was changed. When he went near her, while she was mixing a feed from the bins in the harness room, she darted away, and said when he got to her, “I’ll slosh you if you don’t keep your distance!” She remained unapproachable, and he felt himself beginning to be a fox dragging its brush.

  “What has happened, Annabelle, have I done anything?”

  “Look in a mirror, and you’ll see!”

  “Won’t you come for a walk?”

  “I’m going out with Peter!”

  Peter Carew, a confident and superior gunner-cadet on leave from The Shop, arrived from a neighbouring house; and the cold clay lay on Phillip’s hopes again. He felt himself to be formless and a bore, and made an excuse to go away to write.

  For three days he remained in Denis’s house, trying to push on with his novel, sitting upstairs beside a paraffin stove, feet wrapped in trenchcoat. It was hard to imagine another world with the face of Annabelle regarding him, and after the third day he gave up. He must see her. As he walked up the drive he felt his determination dissolving; but to his immense relief he was welcomed by everyone, even the cocker spaniels and the terriers—including Nip who always growled and kicked hindlegs on carpet, lawn, or drive when he saw Phillip, and now came up to him with hackles raised and deliberately cocked a leg against his new tweed plus-fours, which had just been delivered from a tailor in Chelmsford, cut long and baggy in the current fashion going with Oxford bags. He made a joke of it by explaining as though seriously that the natural grease had been left in the wool, and Nip was therefore not altogether blameworthy; moreover, he was grateful to Nip for his restraint in not biting him. They laughed. He determined to keep to the level of that moment. Annabelle came to talk to him, asking him where he had been. His replies were light and evasive. He was not playing a game: it was self-protection. He spent the day in Chelmsford, supervising the tuning of her motor-bicycle engine.

  Annabelle’s eyes that evening were dark and reflective. Sent to bed, she came back again to say, “Phillip, I don’t think you put my motor-bike back in the garage, did you?”

  “Oh, yes, I should have told you. Sorry. It’s been decoked, and a new plug fitted as well.”

  She lingered; then she said, “Oh”; and the door closed behind her, silently.

  Left alone with Sophy, he had to act another part: to appear innocent, a Barrie-like hero—Sophy had given him a copy of What Every Woman Knows for a New Year present. He met all her would-be tenderness with a preoccupied air as though he were thinking of problems of writing. Hateful, damnable, to have to act, to pretend, to assume a mask of unsophistication until he was reduced in his own eyes to formlessness between mother and daughter! He could hear in his mind the mocking remark of his ex-great-friend Desmond, Why don’t you kill two birds with one stone?

  *

  On the morning that Annabelle returned to school the proofs of his second book arrived from the printers. Sophy’s criticism of Donkin: “He’s deceitful, and a coward; a real person all right; but you needn’t think you’re like him, because you’re not. You’re ever so much nicer than your ‘hero’!”

  “But most boys would have to protect themselves by deceit, surely, under such circumstances?”

  “I don’t pretend to know about those sorts of boys, but I don’t think a gentleman’s sons would behave as your boys behave.”

  Sophy had other criticisms to make, too; personal criticisms to improve him, as she said.

  “I don’t think you ought to talk about things you don’t understand. Your remarks about our people being no better than the Germans are, apart from being untrue, in bad taste, my dear.”

  The next morning he went to see the Sisleys, before returning to London.

  “Don’t let what she or anyone else says get under your skin,” said Denis. “You can’t expect fireside patriots to know what happened in the War, any more than pew-kneelers, because they are pew-kneelers, can understand what happened to Jesus the human being.”

  In Chelmsford he bought a Valentine card for Annabelle; but when the time came he did not post it.

  Chapter 14

  THE SOLITARY SUMMER

  The door of Drunkards’ Cottage had not been locked when he went away. Locks were scorned as things originating from fear, pettiness, and suspicion—scorn of his father’s way of living, in fact.

  Phillip was almost immediately to shed this reactionary attitude about a locked door, because the first thing he saw on entering his kitchen was space where many teak and pitch-pine logs had been piled when he left for London.

  There was rust on the Norton, the tyres were flat, mildew on the saddle. Upstairs a little furry cat-skeleton was standing up on his bed. A saucer-like depression lined with fur showed where it had slept, a track of feet defined upon the dusty floor. Oh, poor Moggy! She weighed scarcely more than a pound. Her thigh bones were sharp through her skin. Her eyes dreamed wildly, she opened her mouth and meeow’d with a faint rattle.

  Oh, why had he not thought that an out-of-work labourer could hardly be expected to buy milk for a cat, when he could afford to buy only a very little for his children! And a farm labourer not entitled, like town workers, to draw the dole! The cat must have lived, during his long absence, on mice, beetles, and scraps—precious few scraps after the village dogs had been round the garbage heaps.

  Walter Crang said, “Us thought you would be back in a fortni’t, zur, us gived bread and milk to th’ lil ’ole cat like you said, but then us didden know——”

  “Yes, of course. I am wholly to blame.”

  “But ole Rusty be well, zur.”

  Crang told him that the spaniel had come down from the Ring of Bells once every day and sniffed at the cat-hole in the door, wagging his tail and whining. At the sound of a motor-cycle he had always listened with ears cocked. Once a fast motor-cycle, looking just like his own, declared Crang, had passed through the village.

  “Th’ ’ould dog rinned all th’ way to Queensbridge, and th’ police-sergeant brought’n whoam, zur.”

  He went at once to the Ring of Bells, arriving in time to be invited to the landlord’s table and eat of baked stuffed rabbit, roast green bacon, carrots, tetties, cabbage, and drink a pint of sixpenny. The spaniel stared at him, whined, appeared to forget him. Rusty whined occasionally during the eating, seeming reluctant to come near his master. Phillip knew that it was the reaction of the weeks of waiting and dreaming; the dog felt strange, purposeless, bewildered.

  He knew so well that feeling, and he made much of Rusty afterwards, rolling on the floor with the spaniel and pretending to growl and bite its throat. Rusty knew that game; and after uttering a melancholy howl, went wild with joy, running round the room and panting with long narrow tongue a-flack. That night dog and cat slept on Phillip’s bed, Moggy wheezing and trilling internally after her meal of rabbit scrap, while Phillip told himself that he would not leave them again.

  He lay unsleeping. The streamlet murmured in the darkness—the running murmur of water that came only in the night when the village slept, echoing from walls, roof eaves, the branches of trees. It was so still, so quiet in the small dim room, with its old worn floorboards and thick cob walls which had sheltered men and women since the thirteenth century. Almost could he hear the dust settling again on floor and jug and wooden handrail where his khaki tunics hung damp and creaseless.

  The stream was singing its night-song, running past stone and shard and under culvert on its way to the sea. Stars shone in the little pools. The stream was flowing to the sea even as his life was flowing to that strange sea beyond
time in which were gone, for ever and for ever, the unknown men and women who had lain, even as he was lying, in that dim, quiet, hollow room. The thought of their hopes and dreams lost in the silence of dust, beyond memory and the unthinkable mystery of night was piercing in its sadness, and his tears streamed silently to the pillow.

  Slowly the stars moved past the casement window, wanderers to what unknown infinity. The starlight was so pale, so remote, so beyond all human cries to heaven. He rose on an elbow, trying to think himself beyond the personal life; for that life was vacant as before. He was once again outside himself, living no more in the present, but in the past sadly, then flying to future brightness where Annabelle clasped him, to be lost in her beauty.

  He lit the candle and filled several pages with rapid writing to his mother, telling her how sorry he was for being so poor a son, and putting on trench-coat and slippers took the envelope to the post office, Moggy in his arms and Rusty following anxious lest master go away again.

  In bed once more, sleep would not come. Four o’clock struck. His money was gone, hiring hunters at thirty-five bob a day——

  How rude he had been to the Sisleys, using their home as an hotel, going out after breakfast and usually returning when they were in bed.

  In future he must stand alone, and avoid all personal contacts—like Baron Heyst in Conrad’s Victory.

  *

  The resolution to stand alone did not survive the arrival of a letter from Annabelle, at her school on the coast of Sussex. It was forwarded by Sophy with a note saying that the girls were not allowed to write directly to anyone except to their immediate relatives. It began Dearest Phillip——

  Instantly Annabelle was the English spring: fields of grass shining in the wind that bore the swallows; the planet Venus shining beside the new moon in the western evening sky. Annabelle was in the moving white clouds over shingle-bank and dune, she fled with their swift shadows on sand and sea below.

  Sophy wrote to him about once a week, tender and friendly letters which he read somewhat bleakly. Sophy asked him what he thought of What Every Woman Knows. The copy she had given him bore the inscription It might teach even you, O Wise Child, something about Woman. Several times he had failed to read the play; the hero seemed an awful fool and bore, though he realised that artificiality was necessary for the play’s drama or suspense. He replied to Sophy that the patience and steadfastness of the heroine merited a better man than that wooden-headed and selfish young Scot.

  Her next letter said that she had an idea of renting a furnished house on the coast during the summer months, and would he send the name and address of the leading local house-agent? He sent it, and stimulated by the thought of seeing Annabelle in the coming summer, wrote a letter thanking Sophy again for her kindness. He wrote rapidly to Annabelle many letters which he tore up, to send eventually via Sophy an unsealed envelope containing a cheery, superficial letter about his dog, his cat, and the wonderful time he was having on the sands every day—the sands which he had not visited since his return.

  Having encouraged Gubbacombe to talk when he delivered the morning post, Phillip now found him a bit tedious, and when the postman knocked and called up good morning he shouted out, “Top of the morning to you,” and waited for Gubby’s footfalls to clump away before running downstairs to see what he had brought; a journey preceded by the incantation, There will be nothing from Annabelle, so you will not be disappointed. It worked: there was nothing from Annabelle.

  On the table, covered with a blanket in orderly-room fashion, lay his work of the night before. He turned to it as to a great friend, reading eagerly, laughing at the comic parts and enjoying an entirely subjective pleasure.

  One morning the postman brought a letter from Anders Norse telling him that he had sold a short story to The Pictorial Review in America for five hundred dollars. With the letter was a cheque for ninety-eight pounds. Two days later another letter: The Saturday Evening Post had bought a story. Still another letter—Collier’s had paid five hundred dollars for a third. Anders wrote that he had also sold the British Serial Rights of these stories to The Royal, Pearson’s, and The London magazines, for twenty guineas each. His agent asked if he might take fifteen per cent of the American receipts, “while I am building you up over there”.

  Mrs. Crang looked round the door-post. “Oh, I reckon’d you had company, zur, by the way you was talking.”

  “I have: there are seventy-four wooden women somewhere hidden about the place.”

  Mrs. Crang laughed and passed on. She had often told Phillip of his reputation “for the ladies”. This was the only reference he had made about his missing logs; of course she wouldn’t know what he was talking about, otherwise he wouldn’t have said it. Now he’d see that they never went short of coal in the winter.

  Three hundred pounds to come in! Now truly every day the sun shone. Carrying bread and butter and cake in his haversack, he went down to the sands, entering again June’s timeless light when the nights were never really dark, the interval between sunset and sunrise being slight.

  Romantically he wrote in his journal;

  Towards midsummer the last dropt petals of sunset seem to bud again in the dawn over the Forest of Dartmoor.

  The dust of the lanes thickened on his shoes, the salt of the sea in his hair. The voice of the corncrake arose from moonlit corn; male swifts flew all night far up in the starry zenith as he wandered through fields among tranquil sheep and cattle. It was high summer, the sun had moved into the constellation of the Crab; when it passed to the Lion he would see Annabelle!

  One morning Gubbacombe brought the galley proofs of his volume of essays, some of which had appeared in The English Review. Reading them was to re-enter his other trauma; who cared about food that day? Surely the print stood out of the paper? Most other books were flat print, worn-out ideas, worn-out details, nothing discovered for themselves by their authors.

  *

  The summer days shone towards harvest; corn rustled in the breeze; wayside flowers dropped their seeds; dust from occasional motor-cars covered the road hedges; birds no longer sang. The first oats were cut; horseflies migrated from the sunken lane to the fields. Neap tides allowed the upper sands to dry again, the hot loose sands cried underfoot as they burned the soles of his feet and the mysterious music of the rocks rose and fell beyond the limits of the ear.

  Soon, soon Annabelle would be walking there, for they had taken a furnished house at Turnstone near the golf links for the whole of August and half September.

  Alien footsteps ruffled the singing sands. Rocks were clothed here and there with drying towels and bathing dresses. But there were still great spaces upon the shore where one might be alone all day; and in solitude crouch over a drift-wood fire, boiling spring-water in the black tea-kettle hidden in the tall reeds growing at the edge of the land.

  A motor-car had found its way down the lane to the shore. There it was, brassy bull-nosed, chattering beside the sea. Poetic justice! There it stayed, sunk to the back-axle. Then he was running for a rope and horses, which pulled it back to its proper place, the road.

  Another day he found a broken bottle on the shingle where ring-plover nested. Supposing she had trodden there, and cut the delicate arch of her instep? He sliced the tip of his index finger while burying the pieces of glass; it bled and bled. How could he meet Annabelle with a handkerchief rolled round one finger? For they were arriving that afternoon.

  He had, weeks before, engaged a taxi in which to meet them at Queensbridge station: how could he, with bandaged finger? The truth was, he was dreamed out, all spirit spent in imagination. So he sent the taxi, already paid for, to collect them. With self-destructive determination he spent the evening in the Ring of Bells drinking beer, staying there until closing time, when he joined the amateur crew of a longshore net which fished by night on the spring tides. The sea was phosphorescent, the waters in which he waded to his chest hauling the rope were warm. Fish glittered on the wet sands agleam
with the moon, they were casting at the turn of low tide. Skate, pollock, sea-trout, flat-fish, and garfish which had green bones were slithered into sacks, and loaded into a horse-butt. This was the life—why had he spent his time sitting at a table? He lay in bed, glowing with beautiful tiredness leaving him through his feet as he worked them like the flippers of a seal, but unlike a seal, alternately, while he thought of Anadyomene rising out of the waves. In the morning he would take over his share of the fish, four sea-trout, called peal by the fishermen, for their breakfast.

  Aug. 6. I have joined the tennis club at Turnstone with Sophy and the two girls. It is quite a small club, of about twenty members—a retired admiral and his wife, a colonel and others of that sort. The doctor, who runs it, has let in someone (new bungalow dweller) without committee approval—a very good player but obviously from the Midlands. Sophy’s opinion is—“not out of the top drawer—not our class, is she?” The girl, about 35, who lives with her old parents, retired folk, sometimes gives a little shriek when she misses a ball, and then looks round at the others; who maintain equable demeanours. “She’s common,” remarked Queenie. “Why did Dr. MacNab let her in, I wonder?”

  Sophy was sitting at the piano, accompanying Annabelle and Phillip for Gounod’s O, That we Two Were Maying! Annabelle sang with a childish simplicity, every note of which went to his heart. When he glanced at her, he tried to keep the feeling from his eyes. Apprehension lest Sophy discover what he felt for Annabelle made him assume a mask of innocence; yet surely Sophy must know of Annabelle’s feeling, revealed in the faraway look in her eyes seeming larger above cheeks burning in the light of the oil lamp? Sophy never appeared to see; but he knew that she knew. He tried to tell Annabelle of his love as he stood beside her; and again when he sang Roger Quilter’s Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, and then Loveliest of Trees from The Shropshire Lad.