The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  “The poor girl was so unhappy, Dickie, with nowhere to go. Oh, what a pity that she left that school at Eastbourne——”

  “And whose fault was that, pray? What sort of a man is this Willoughby, to compromise a young woman by taking her on the back of a motor-bicycle in full view of the girls coming back from church? And who, may I ask, connived at the situation, by which, night after night, those two were shut away together in your drawing-room? Never once did that young man come down to see me, or to ask formal permission to pay his attentions to your daughter! Who is he? What is he? I have realised, of course, for some time now I am no longer master in my own house, and have accepted it. Now will you please take particular note of what I am about to say. I hereby categorically forbid Mrs. Willoughby ever again to enter this house. And before the matter is finally closed, I would like to ask you one thing. Were you, or were you not, part and parcel of this affair? Did you know they were going to elope?”

  Hetty began to cry.

  “Mother!” said Phillip. “Do answer Father’s question! After all, it’s done now, and Father only wants to know the truth.”

  “But I couldn’t leave my own daughter in the lurch, Phillip, how could I?”

  While Richard stood there looking at her, she made an attempt to gain her husband’s sympathy by recalling that the very same thing had happened when they had got married. “Mamma helped us then, you know, Dickie!”

  At mention of that event, which he had never been able to begin to think about without acute discomposure, Richard left the room and they heard him going out of the front door. He returned three hours later, and resumed the reading of his newspaper.

  He had walked down to the High Street, and after hesitation had bought a 10d. ticket at the Electric Palace. It was a stimulating experience for him; and thus began a habit which was to last almost to the end of his life.

  *

  Phillip, writing in his bedroom, trench-coat wrapped round feet and counterpane over shoulders, sighed as the imaginary pictures of his mind were crossed and darkened by thoughts of the various members of his family. How could he help them to see one another’s point of view? Things never seemed to run smoothly in that sad house. Now there was the affair of the new sink in the scullery. The old one had always been too large and too high for his little mother. During nearly 27,000 washings-up at that sink—he had calculated 350 days a year three times a day for 25 years—when lifting plates to the rack above the yellow earthenware rectangle, water had invariably run down Mother’s arms to her elbows. So, without telling Father (“I did so want it to be a surprise for him, Phillip!”) she had gone to a small jobbing builder in Randiswell and asked him to replace it with a new porcelain sink, explaining that the old one was set too high.

  The new sink was set too low, and its deeper sides made it lower still. To make the job more profitable the builder, who worked without giving a price, knocked away the old brick supports, which Richard had painted white about the time of the South African war, and replaced them with new yellow bricks set in cement. The bill was eight guineas, which she had paid while feeling that she had been swindled. Father on seeing the new sink had inevitably been cross with Mother.

  “You have incurred structural alterations without my sanction, let alone my permission. This is my house, I will have you to understand! Look at that ridiculous low position! It is more suitable for a doll’s house.”

  He had crouched down to count the bricks, which were built in two pillars on end. “These bricks are four inches wide. There are eight courses, so your sink is thirty-two inches off the floor. There are probably three shillings worth here, and with the cement another shilling, and a further shilling for the cost of labour, comes to five shillings. The sink is worth perhaps a pound at most. And you paid eight guineas! And moreover, where is my sink, if I may be permitted to enquire? What? You ‘allowed’ the builder to take it away? I’ll have you know that that is tantamount to stealing!”

  He breathed heavily, and turned to his son for sympathy. “Well, if your mother gets a permanent crick in her back from bowing to the washing bowl every day, I trust she will not blame me!” He stood up, and caught his breath sharply. “There, you see! Peering into that damned hole has given me a crick in my neck!”

  Later, in an atmosphere of ‘Nulli Secundus’ Embrocation, he said to Phillip, “Your mother has no idea of the value of money. Why, she even allowed that asinine brother of hers, Joseph Turney, to ‘advise’ her to invest two hundred pounds in that ‘Valley of Peace’ building-swindle on the downs near Brighton! Would you believe it, old chap, she has bought forty housing sites of bleak land, with no water laid on, no roads, no drainage, no gas or electric light, and no guarantee of any such services whatsoever! Of course she is liable for such services herself, as the ground landlord! The value of the land is less than five shillings an acre as worn-out, third-rate grazing land; yet she allows her brother Joseph Turney to persuade her to buy five acres at forty pounds the acre! His idea was to resell the plots at ten pounds each, or eighty pounds the acre! Why, the whole thing has long been exposed in The Trident as a swindle!”

  “Yes, Father, I understand.”

  Chapter 18

  WANDERVOGEL

  One frozen evening at the end of January, while Hetty was ironing Elizabeth’s underclothes in the kitchen, there came a long peal on the front-door bell. Who could it be at that time of night? Not Elizabeth’s friend Nina—she always tapped twice on the knocker, two gentle, hesitant knocks. Nor could it be a telegram—a double, peremptory rat-tat was the traditional notice of the postman. Doris would have fluttered the letter-box lid—there had never been any box behind the slit: the plans to make one had remained in Richard’s carpenter’s chest with his tools since the arrival of his father-in-law next door at the turn of the century.

  “You go, will you, dear?” said Hetty to Elizabeth, as she spat on the iron to see if it was hot—a habit which Phillip had tried to get his mother to alter.

  “It may be that awful Warbeck, Mother! You go!”

  “Very well, Elizabeth, I’ll see who it is,” said Hetty, putting the iron on its rest, an inverted saucer. “I only hope it isn’t bad news about Doris!”

  Phillip, tip-toeing downstairs two at a time, was at the door before his mother had turned the corner by the coal-cellar. She heard his voice saying, “I had a feeling it would be you! Come in, old boy! Let me take your pack. My God, I’m glad to see you! Mother, here’s Willie!”

  Soon they were all in the sitting-room, sitting before a coke fire of rose and lilac, listening to the traveller, who in a ready-made French hunting jacket of dark material and biscuit-coloured trousers, sat upright in Richard’s armchair with one leg wound around the other and arms folded across his chest, the head with its large, gazing brown eyes thrust forward from a neck sunken into square shoulders. He told them that he had walked from Germany and Belgium, and then through the old battle zone to Calais.

  “Why, you and Phillip are restless chaps, ’pon my soul,” said Richard. “But you’re become a veritable wandervogel! Now you’ve flown here, Willie, you must rest yourself, and stay awhile.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t stay very long, Uncle Dick. My train leaves Paddington at 12.45 a.m., so I’ll only have a little time here, I’m afraid. That is, if you can put up with me for a couple of hours or so.”

  “Off again in less than four hours’ time!” exclaimed Richard, taking out his watch. “My dear boy, does your father expect you?”

  “No, Uncle Dick. I thought I’d surprise him at breakfast.”

  “Well, old chap, you’re most welcome to stay the night here, you know, if you care to. We have an extra bedroom now.”

  “Yes, do stay and rest yourself,” said Hetty.

  Elizabeth and Phillip, for once in harmony, urged him as well.

  “If you are sure I shan’t be a nuisance——”

  “You are most welcome to stay as long as you like!”

  “Thank yo
u, Uncle Dick. I’d love to!”

  “Have you had any food? I can give you poached eggs on toast, Willie.”

  “I am rather hungry, Aunt Hetty.”

  “I’ll lay a place in the kitchen for you at once,” said Hetty, getting up to leave the room.

  “Why not down here?” said Richard. “It isn’t often we have the pleasure of Willie’s company!”

  “May I have an egg, too, Mum?”

  “Of course you may, dear!” cried Hetty, happy that Phillip had used the old endearment.

  “I expect you’d like to wash,” said Richard. “You know where the bathroom is, don’t you?”

  Phillip said outside, “Father is rather liable to be upset by mention of Germans, so don’t say too much, will you?”

  “I understand. My God, I’ve seen a few things! I’ll tell you about them later. Talk about blood calling to blood!”

  In the sitting-room there brooded a spirit of happiness: even Richard accepted a cup of tea, instead of his usual hot water, feeling that he was taking on a new lease of life when his nephew suggested a game of chess. At the other end of the table Phillip tried to teach his mother and sister three-handed cut-throat bridge—playing for matches.

  Willie stayed for three days. The two cousins walked into the country every morning, returning in the late afternoon; and on the third day, when they went into the reading room of the Borough Public Library, hesitating before the enclosed smell of old air and old men who had gone there for warmth, they saw Warbeck at one of the oak tables: Julian with face and body not so puffy, reading a library volume, pencil in hand and notebook open before him. His face lit up when he saw them; and when Phillip saw weariness return to his eyes, he invited Julian to accompany them on their walk. After all, had they not known one another at Folkestone in those far-off days? And now that Eveline had married ‘Naps’ Spreycombe it was a happy ending.

  The feeling of comradeship fortified Phillip against the idea of returning to Essex; it was a hopeless situation. Work was the only thing—labor omnia vincet was the motto to follow. “Come on, let’s get warm, go as fast as we can!” he cried. “Forward to Reynard’s Common!”

  They jumped on a pirate steam-bus to Brumley. “Let’s go the same way we went on our bikes on that Saturday before August Bank Holiday, 1914,” said Willie. “I’d like to see those beautiful Lake Woods again. What’s happened to Desmond and his friend Eugene, who came with us?”

  “I haven’t heard from either for over two years, Willie.”

  They set off down the lane beside remembered meadows until they came to the keeper’s tarred wooden cottage; and turning off down a footpath, went round the edge of a frozen ploughed field leading to the hazel and chestnut coverts where the two cousins had last walked with Broughton and others from the Parnassus Club on the way to the deserted chalk quarry—a world of time away.

  So they came to the western boundary of Reynard’s Common, and through groves of silver birches, oaks and hollies to an area of gorse and bramble, beyond which rose up the windmill. At the end of a row of small shops was the Greyhound Inn.

  During the walk Julian had been an interesting companion, as he told them about the book he said he was writing, The Death of Lyric Poetry.

  “I saw my theme clearly after reading Spengler’s Decline of the West,” he said. “Spengler foresaw long before 1914 the end of European civilisation, which has the same pattern as the growth and decline of previous civilisations—each of which had a beginning, a middle, and an end. First the pioneers, who in the struggle to build had no time for culture. Then the middle period, when material wealth brings prosperity and leisure to the cities. The beginning of the end is the flowering period, the bright blossoms of art appearing just before inevitable wilting, followed by discoloration and decadence. Sexual indulgence leads to perversion, while the fertility of the soil is drained away down the city sewers to the sea. A stricken soil produces a stricken peasantry, while in the towns art becomes formless and corrupt; pederasty increases, destructive satire followed by obscurity rules in literature, until the barbarian is through the gates.”

  Willie said eagerly, “That is happening in Germany today, Julian. The French are in the Ruhr, and all industry is at a standstill. Unemployment is rife, people are pale-faced, all skin and bone. The French hope to bleed Germany white. They are demanding over two hundred million pounds in reparations each year for the next forty years! Black colonial troops buy starving children, of both sexes, to rape! In one bar in the Kurfurstendamm I saw two rows of fair-haired women sitting on stools with painted faces, all looking alike. I felt I was in a sort of Madame Tussaud’s among endless mirrors, that all was unreal. Then one ‘girl’ asked me to touch her breast—it was hard, being made of wood. They were all young men, in blond wigs and black silk stockings! As you said, Julian, in a decadent nation or civilisation all kinds of perversion flourish. There is chaos in the streets of Berlin—continual clashes between the Reds and the Nationalist parties, with stabbings, bombings, and machine-gun fire. The lyric is certainly lost in Berlin—but it will come back!”

  “I don’t think so,” said Julian. “Spengler shows that once a culture or civilisation begins to decay, it is doomed. D. H. Lawrence is the last of the true poets, doomed and damned by the scholar critics, who henceforward will take the place of genius in creative literature, as the scientists will replace the humanists. The war has killed the lyric, as it has shown the Christian religion to be unworkable. Henceforward materialism will rule, and finally destroy, the spirit of man.”

  “I have thought,” said Phillip, “that when human life is regulated into a sort of great barracks, there will be no more eccentrics, and so no more great art.”

  “I know what you mean, Phil, but the lyric is the essence, or inner core, of the human spirit. This lyric was everywhere throttled in little children before the war—the throttling arising out of the internecine money system—of all against all—and the weakest, or poorest, went to the wall. There is no revenge so deadly as the revenge of money! The blockade by our Navy was maintained for months after the war, in order to force Germany out of our export markets!”

  “Don’t forget the scarcity of ships, Willie. All the belligerents are still very short of merchant ships.”

  “I know. Uncle Hilary made a small fortune out of ‘floating coffins’ towards the end of the war. He’s no better than a profiteer! You know he’s bought up a lot of our old land at Rookhurst? My father wrote to me a year ago, and said he hoped you and I would start farming.”

  “Let’s!” said Phillip.

  “Hur!” scoffed Julian, rubbing his hands. “You birds remind me of those two characters in Flaubert’s novel, who thought only of composting, and worked everything to theory and principle, and went broke before they could get started. At least you’d be losing someone else’s dough! Well, here’s the Greyhound! The reward of all work—beer! Let us drink, to victory over all scholar-poetasters, with their

  Grey minds and grey faces

  Shuffling upon pavements in halting paces.”

  “Is that Swinburne, Julian?”

  “Good God, no! It’s merely a couplet from some damned bad verse I wrote after drinking nothing but tea all day, on Porky’s principle that needs must when the devil drives. Landlord, three pints, if you please!”

  Julian raised his elbow and literally poured beer down his throat; then placing the empty glass on the counter, asked for another. “Come on, you chaps, drink up!”

  “One pint is enough for me, Julian, in this cold weather.”

  “How about you, Willie?”

  “No more for me, thanks.”

  An air of arrogance came upon Julian’s face; he hesitated, then picking up his florin, put it back in his pocket saying, “The sun is in the constellation of Aquarius, soon it will enter Pisces—until then——” He held open the door for them.

  “Well, that’s a surprise!” said Phillip, as they walked on to the windmill. “Let’s eat our
sandwiches as we go on, it’s too damned cold to sit about.”

  “By God, I am enjoying this!” exclaimed Warbeck. “We must walk every day!”

  “Unfortunately this is our last together, Julian. Willie’s leaving tomorrow, and the next day I am going back to my cottage.”

  Julian looked unhappy. After awhile he said quietly, “I suppose you wouldn’t let me come down for a bit? I honestly want to write, Phil. I’ve tried in Father’s house, but it’s no good. So I go to the free libraries, but they’re all the same, filled with old men mumbling over magazines and peering at periodicals, spelling out words slowly with blue lips, grimily rolling the edges of the next page held between finger and thumb—periodically wetting the thumb the easier to roll the bottom of the page, not into a dog’s ear, but the tail of a mouse. Not to mention hoicking, snuffling, gurking, and sniffing. Oh, it’s no good trying to write anywhere near an old man.”

  Later he said, “I have thought of a room down in Queenhithe, or Wapping.”

  Coming to the oak-paling fence of Knollyswood Park, Phillip said, “I’d ask you down to the cottage, but I’m only going to be there a couple of nights, before Willie joins me. Then we’re going to walk across Dartmoor to his place. But if you don’t mind being by yourself——”

  “Not in the very least, old boy! Er—you’ll be back, I suppose? Oh good!” said Julian, rubbing his hands together. “It will be like old times! All for one, and one for all—The Three Pensters, or should it be Typewriters?”

  When they arrived back Julian said, “Phil, I wonder if you would mind seeing my father, to tell him that I am going with you back to Devon? He’ll be in tonight. If you could drop in about six it might help me to get some dough from him for the journey. I’ll be out of the way until you have gone.”