The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  *

  About midnight they were standing in unreal moonlight on the crest of the pass, hearing the noise of the Hispano-Suiza engine receding into Spain. Far below lay the valley where Roland, “the temples of his brains broken”, blew his horn for help that never came. The three friends were standing together, endeavouring to feel as they imagined they would feel when at last they stood side by side above heroic Roland fighting the Saracens while awaiting help from mighty Charlemagne. Phillip stood appropriately a little apart from them, and silent. From far below floated the noises of torrents and swift waters. He did not share their passion, knowing nothing of Charlemagne and being vague about Roland; but he could feel it. There they stood, their shadows slanting short on the white road as they faced the North Star.

  They set off down the winding road. Soon walking was unreal in the white and timeless night. At first no one spoke; each man walked with his own thoughts. Trees were tall and gloomy beside the road. In his ignorance Phillip set out to descend a hairpin bend direct, and nearly fell into a ravine. Hastily he climbed up again, and followed the others. Alas, the spectral silence did not last. There were arguments, there were shouts. Apparently a mild remark about something or other had detonated the mental figments of Rowley Meek.

  “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you bring your Rolls-Royces, your white spats, and your loathesome silk hats with you? Why did you come if you didn’t intend to walk like ordinary, normal, natural men? Your little pots of caviare and foie-gras, oh, what will you do without them? And who will bring you your electrically-sterilised and hermetically-sealed platinum pots of hot shaving water at eleven o’clock in the morning, as you snore in your silken pyjamas and wallow under your oil-painted bedding?

  “Shut up, you coxcomb, you preposterous fribble!”

  “Chuck it, Rowley! It’s not amusing after the first twelve hours.”

  Rowley Meek strode ahead by himself. It was his third night without sleep. Phillip, too, was irritable-weary, but kept silence, glad to grind away the wastage of frustration in the chiaroscuro of the night.

  Between three and four o’clock he suggested that they go into the woods which stretched above the ever-down-winding road, to make a wood fire and sleep round it until sunrise. Surprisingly the mediaevalists spoke of trespass, policemen, and other civilised objections. By now he was thinking only of the blessing of sleep, sleep, sleep. It was the sensible, or natural, thing to do. Wolves were probably extinct, but the wild boar and the little bear still lived in the forests; let them lift their snouts to flair the smoke of a fire. He urged the delights of warmth, of sleep in the torrent-haunted night. It was too risky, decided the admirers of Chanson de Roland.

  At last, after descending a winding road for some hours, they came to a wooden shack where Spanish soldiers slept, guarded by a sentry with curious musket, broken boots, and creased uniform. The guard turned out, yawning and scratching, and for ten minutes their passports were peered at by the light of a lanthorn, while slow and incomprehensible questions were asked out of suspicious tallowy faces before they were allowed to go on down the winding road.

  They walked now in mist, through a tenuous vapour of torrents and declining moonlight; and the cry of water in their ears was louder, and strangely like the chuckling of Saracen devils, said Bevan. Or were they human voices echoing among the trees and the rocks? Phillip was too tired to share a Catholic fancy.

  The sky was growing grey, the moon, sinking to the distant Mediterranean, a mere shell of light. The night was over; but not the walk. They slogged on, Rowley striding chin-out in front; his cousin, admirer and literary disciple of Leonard Merrick, walking reflective, blear-eyed; Phillip following, longing for sleep, feeling wan and weak; Bevan padding along behind.

  At last they were trailing into St. Jean Pied-de-Port; hesitating before a small pension filled with minor Anglo-Indians on leave or retired from administrative posts in the British raj. There was a further controversy over methods of eating; Bevan favouring breakfast at a table, after washing and shaving, Rowley urging the fitness of gulping from a bottle and tearing a loaf with the teeth while walking on.

  “What’s the sense of it, Rowley? Tell us that!”

  “Bah! I’ve come here to walk, not to loll about talking anaemically of literary criticism, folk dancing, nature lovery, and artful crafty movements!” Swinging his staff, and giving them a “So long, cretins!” over his shoulder, Rowley Meek strode away up the road which now lay mist-white in the risen sun.

  Feeling some of Rowley’s personality upon him, Phillip looked distastefully at a breakfast plate of undersized trout scarcely bigger than sardines, which had been netted from the river outside. But he ate the sprats and then three rolls with butter and plum jam washed down with coffee.

  All day they lounged about the village. Bevan wore the beret he had bought at Hendaye, and already had the look of a native Basque. They drank many bocks, sitting outside various little estaminets. Espalier plane trees were thick with sap, knotted with Samson-muscles, about to burst their buds with the sun’s power. Two of the nails in Phillip’s boots, which had given him blisters, were removed at the shoemaker’s shop, and the holes neatly plugged with wooden pegs. They wondered what Rowley was doing, missing his tyranny; and that night, each in his small room, they slept luxuriously between cool clean sheets.

  *

  Bright and powerful overhead was the sun as they walked along the white roads under the enormous incult foothills of the Pyrénées. They drank wine and ate bread and cheese in the midday estaminets, thankfully sitting on stool and bench, sweat-soaked and burnt of face and hands. Phillip swam in the swirling grey-green water of the Gave de Mauléon, while the others sat on the bank in the shade of alder and ash. They stayed at night in hotels almost empty, for ten, and sometimes five francs a room. Food was equally cheap—the exchange rate was one hundred and twenty francs to the pound. They drank bocks—pale beer with a mountain goat on the bottle-label—in one another’s bedrooms, talked and laughed in freedom, slept sound and awoke to the lowing of cows in the market place. They were amused to see everywhere large hoarding advertisements of Igharra, that liqueur which Rowley Meek, faithful matrix of Belloc, had declared was made only in one small secret mountain inn.

  They came to another valley, where the heavy snow-water of the Oloron drove against the stone piers of the bridge they crossed, and Atlantic salmon showed their backs in the great eddies. They watched Basques playing pelota, a sort of long-distance fives played against a wall with a long-bouncing ball. They had fun with a native sponger who advised them to drink a wonderful drink which tasted like aniseed and liquorice in hot water—admirable for mules suffering from colic, said Phillip—and invited him to lunch. He smilingly acknowledged their insults delivered in raw and bawdy English as though they were the most flowery compliments exchanged between Allied generals during the War. And only when they were on the road again, feeling the sunshine to be a little uncertain, did they realise that the drink which appeared to be so childish was in fact the sinister absinthe of Fleetway House fiction.

  The walk had now progressed during the sunlight of four days. By the fifth Phillip felt fine and taut, eager after breakfast to set out into bright daylight for his stint of thirty-five to forty kilometres. Sometimes they rode in steam-trams, with bottles of red wine, costing two francs, sticking out of their pockets. Once they sat opposite a child whose face Phillip stared at, brown-eyed innocence, while he imagined such a child coming from love with Annabelle. In broken French he tried to pay the child’s mother a compliment, saying, “J’aime bien les filles”, and her expression, hitherto amiable, became austere; even when Bevan hastened to explain that milord anglais meant les jeunes filles.

  “Filles,” he explained, “means tarts, you preposterous British foxhunting eccentric in Oxford bags!”

  *

  At the end of the week Bevan and the seldom-speaking Archie Meek were tired of walking for its own sake. Time was short, and soon B
evan must be back in Fleet Street. The two wanted to visit Chartres, of which Bevan had read and dreamed. As they walked up the valley road they decided to take the train to Chartres on the morrow. At their decision Phillip felt slightly tremulous: his fate was imminent!

  He had bought a Michelin motoring map in Arudy, and followed their route on it during the midday rest at Castet. As they lay beside the river he worked out that the distance to Argelès Gazost was about fifty kilometres from Laruns, where they were proposing to sleep that night. Thirty miles from Laruns, the road rising in virage after virage to about 6,000 feet, zigzagging about and then down again. It would be hard going if it were to be done in a day, even with the May nights being comparatively short. Irene or Barley would be able to advise him of the best route to take. He folded the map and put it back in his breast pocket.

  “You’re very quiet, Phillip,” remarked Bevan. “Are you still going to do your Excelsior stunt, you mad nature-lover, you?”

  “Ah,” said the other man, in one of his rare epigrammatic remarks. “Cherchez la femme, what?”

  *

  They reached the town of Laruns and took three rooms for the night in a small auberge. While the others were upstairs, Phillip, not wanting them to know where he was going, showed the written address to the patron, who after consulting his wife led him outside and pointed to a house on the hillside, painted pale blue and white.

  As Phillip was crossing the square he noticed a woman walking in front, a black beret on her head, and a mass of fair curls on the shoulders of her tweed coat. Could it be Irene? He walked faster, his nailed boots slipping on the stone-paved street, the iron tip of his staff tapping at every double step. The woman turned round, stood still, looked at him and said laughingly, “I knew it was you, I recognised your footfalls!”

  “I thought it was Irene, with her hair grown thicker somehow! Barley, you’ve changed! You’re a young woman, or should I say young ma’m’selle?”

  Her face, which had gone faintly pink when they met, was now pale. He thought she seemed somehow to be so much more mature than her mother. Irene was appealing, rather helpless; but this grown-up girl was self-contained. As they walked to the villa on the hillside he noticed how light on her feet she was, how she walked in step with him, how quick she was and yet not nervously eager as he was on too many occasions. He took her arm, saying, “Barley, I can’t quite believe I am here with you! The last time I saw you, you were a cygnet, now you are a swan!”

  They walked on lightly. “Mummie will be surprised, although after your postcard we have been expecting you, P.M. Where are your two friends?”

  “I left them at the auberge. They’re going on by train to Chartres tomorrow.”

  “And you’ll stay with us! I am glad!”

  “As a matter of fact, Barley, I had planned to walk to Argelès Gazost tomorrow.”

  “But you can’t, P.M. The Col d’Aubisque is closed until July.”

  “Oh, I’ll get there.”

  “You can’t get there. The Corniche is blocked. It’s a narrow track above precipices, in places cut through tunnels in the face of the rock. The road has to be cleared every midsummer. I’ll take you up and show you as far as La Gourette, if you like. But no farther. It’s beautiful there now the gentians are coming out.”

  They went on in silence. Then he said, “I must get over, Barley. It’s a matter of—well, importance—to someone else. And to me, in a way.”

  “Look, P.M.” she replied, her forehead wrinkled, “your two friends are going to Chartres. You can stay with us for a day or two, and then go to Argelès by train. Or I’ll walk there with you, by road, if you like. I know the way.” She gave him a quick glance and went on, “You did not tell me that Annabelle and the Selby-Lloyds were coming to Argelès!”

  She said this in such a matter-of-fact voice that he was shaken. They entered the gate of the blue-and-white house. How had she known about Annabelle? He felt apart from her, and said to himself that he would not stop long, when she continued, “You ought to come and stay here. Do you ski? Then I’ll teach you. Bring Rusty and Moggy, and the Norton, and stay with us! Hullo, Mummie!”—her voice was joyous—“look who I’ve found!”

  “Darling!” cried Irene. “How lovely to see you again!” to Phillip. “So you’ve come at last! How well you look! Barley said you would be here today, she woke up and said, ‘He’s coming today, I know he is!’ Do come in, you’re just in time for tea.”

  When he had told Irene of the walk and of the others’ plans, she said at once, “There’s a room for you tonight, if you like, for as long as you care to stay.”

  “He’s booked a room at the Hirondelle, Mummie, and says he’s leaving tomorrow.”

  “What energy, P.M.! Now I’ll see about tea——”

  He sat on the window seat with a view of the peaks and listened to Dvorak’s New World Symphony on the gramophone. Barley sat beside him, still, composed, arms folded, feet stuck out.

  After tea Irene said, coming to sit on the other side of Phillip, “You breathe much too quickly, P.M. And too shallowly. Barley and I practise the Mazdaznan deep-breathing, and find it makes all the difference in our lives. All harmony depends on how one breathes. But you are smiling your sad smile, perhaps I am talking too much?”

  “One of my lungs is patched, Irene. They said it was from mustard gas in the war. It was tubercular, but tests say it is all right now. The scars remain, of course.”

  “How silly of me to give you advice, P.M. Do forgive me! I had no idea, do believe me, otherwise I should never have spoken like that!”

  “I am glad you did. As a matter of fact, I have done exercises, off and on, but never stuck to them. A young cousin of mine, who is an athlete, told me the same thing. Perhaps that’s why my thoughts are so often jumbled.”

  “Have you noticed how Barley breathes, always very slowly? I’ve brought her up like that, to learn to be still, to rest. A guru in India was my teacher. What is it, darling, twelve inspirations to the minute?”

  “Sometimes eight, Mummie. By my stop-watch.”

  “I must be nearly thirty!”

  “I know, P.M. I’ve been listening.”

  When her mother went out of the room, Barley said, “Go by train to see the Selby-Lloyds in Argelès, then come back here, why not?”

  “I rather want to walk there.”

  She looked at him steadily. “It is Annabelle, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “Then please don’t go, P.M. I know it will be no good for you. Please believe me. I know, just as I knew you were coming today.”

  He got up saying, “You are right, but if you knew all the circumstances—— Well, I think I ought to be getting back to the others.”

  She placed herself before him and the door. “Please don’t hide yourself away from me like this, Phillip! The Selby-Lloyds are no good for you. I could see it all the time in Devon.”

  He made for the door and she seized his arm and made him face her. “Please listen to me. I’ll explain about Annabelle. You will think me a dreadful tittle-tattle, but I am your true friend. I know it’s not good manners to talk about other people, but I don’t care. I know that Annabelle is attractive, but she does not understand the real you. You are not your real self ever with her, are you?”

  “I don’t feel my ‘real self’ with you now, as I used to, anyway!”

  Irene came into the room holding out a photograph album. “No, Mummie, please, Mummie!”

  “Let P.M. see, darling. There’s some of Devon he hasn’t seen. There’s a man at the kitchen door wanting to sell me a salmon. I won’t be long,” as she went out.

  He saw the snapshots as flat surfaces. There were the sands, and the rocks where first they had had tea; himself with beard; Drunkards’ Cottage with Moggy on the wall and the Norton leaning against it with a flat back tyre; himself on the shaggy cob Queenie had hired, without first telling him; Irene going in to bathe; Barley on a rock in Cornwall—he looked at a n
ew and better edition of Barley in a black bathing dress about to dive, a slim figure with mass of hair, firm high breasts and long smooth legs. He stared at it, knowing that she was watching him intently.

  “H’m.”

  “H’m,” she mimicked.

  “And here is the original, sitting beside me.” Without premeditation he stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “You’re a nice girl, Barley.”

  “Mind you don’t forget,” she muttered, through her teeth, as she leaned over to take the album from his hands.

  “No, I want to look at you!”

  She drew in a slow, deep breath and sat very still.

  “Please trust me, P.M.!”

  “I do trust you, Barley.”

  “Please don’t go to Argelès. I’m not just selfish, asking you that.”

  “I wonder if you really understand?”

  “More than you do, I think sometimes.”

  He turned a page to see more of this new and very confident person. There she was on skis; in jodhpurs and short jacket, hatless, sitting on a bullock with wide horns—one of the white bullocks which in pairs drew heavy-wheeled carts so slowly along the roads, by a beam secured to their horns.

  “That’s a joke!” she cried, covering the photograph with her hand.

  “Can you play the bagpipes?” he cried. “I can! Listen!”

  He played The Campbells are Coming, and she sparkled with laughter. “That’s awfully good! Where did you learn that?”

  “In a scarlet fever hospital, when I was a small boy in a London suburb.”

  “What else can you do?” she asked, delight in her face.

  “Nothing much. I want to look at these snapshots. Are there any of you as the Puma Cub?”