It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  But what had he done? She had asked him, and asked again, to go to see cousin Willie when he was in trouble; and he had demurred—the fatal blank in his nature. She had known; he had denied her intuition, as he had denied his own, accepting the unimaginative assurances, based on laziness, of the midwife’s mother. He was to blame, not that wooden woman; from a sense of cursed gentility, of bogus good manners, he had denied his clearer vision, and so was entirely to blame for her death.

  No, no, her wraith seemed to be saying, you must not blame yourself: or was his mind prompting his own ideas? He closed his eyes and on his knees prayed for simplicity and clearness, saying phrases heard idly in church long ago, among them, Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.

  Mrs. Crang’s supper, cooked for him, a plate of baked rabbit with potatoes and sprouts lay on the table; he could not eat it; he gave it to the animals, who between them cleared up all except the sprouts, which he could not throw on the fire, it seemed too unkind, but took out and buried in the freezing compost heap at the bottom of the garden; and walking down to the sea, saw the morning star rising above the crags and pinnacles of Valhalla.

  *

  Hetty came down the day before the funeral, and he was glad that his mother was staying with him, for she had loved Barley. She loved the baby, too, and holding it in her arms said, “He is just like you, Phillip, your eyes were very big, too.” Then to the baby, “You’re going to be a friend to Phillip, aren’t you, Sonny?” The use of this name moved him, for Barley had sometimes called him ‘Sonny’, a name which had always stirred a faint impatience in him when Mother had used it: but now …

  When his mother was going back, as the train was moving out of the station, and he walked beside the carriage, he was crying voicelessly, Call me Sonny again, just for once—but all he said was, “I’ll come up soon, and see you again, Mother.”

  He ordered a small stone of white marble, with her name on it, Teresa Jane Maddison, aged 19 years, and below, carved from the stone, a device of reaping hook severing a rose bud from the stem.

  *

  George and Boo were invariably kind, always welcoming his visits. George could not do enough for him, giving up his chair by the fire, always cheerful and ready to tell stories about the village people, the old pater, and others; but Phillip did not hear what George was talking about, he shut himself away from the slightly derisive attitude of George towards others—behind their backs. No imaginative life in George, no divining truth—only kindness. He was remorseful when away from George, yet could not bear his presence. Even Boo was a sort of echo of George.

  He met friendly faces in the village, for Barley had been liked by everyone; nevertheless he must leave the place, he must go, he must give notice: burn all they had shared and made together in the dark little cottage. He must go away—leave it all—move to another district—but where? Where? He thought of Willie’s first cottage beside the disused lime-kiln as a refuge; he must go there; he could not spend another night in Valerian Cottage. He went there on his motorbike, and mooned around only to return again, to find Rusty waiting for him, and Moggy: but no Lutra.

  There was a hole dug beside the pig’s-house where the otter had been kennel’d, and another hole inside.

  “Us zeed’n go!” said Walter Crang. “’A called to ’n, but ’a took no notice. Reckon ’a be zomewhere down the stream, maister!”

  He walked down the stream towards the sea, calling and whistling, urging Rusty to pick up the otter’s scent, saying repeatedly, “Find Lutra! On to’m, Rusty! Where’s Lutra? Find’m, find’m! Good boy, Rusty, find Lutra!”

  She had loved Lutra, feeding him first with pen-filler, nursing him against her heart, nourishing the cub back to life, giving him her care, her love—he must find Lutra—someone might kill him——

  The night was dark, he walked with hands held out before him; and suddenly, in front somewhere, Rusty barking hysterically, then yelping with pain. What had happened? He ran, coming to the dim line of the stream bank, where he stopped, heard hissing and yikkering, the clank of metal on stone—Lutra in a rabbit gin!

  The otter recognised his scent; there followed a period of wild contorted leaping, of blowing and hissing while Lutra bit on steel, leapt into the air and fell short when checked by the chain, to lie there gasping. He pulled off his jacket and threw it over otter and gin, but it was impossible to get the trapped animal to keep quiet. He was bitten through the flesh of his left hand while trying to hold down the head and kneel on the spring, to release the serrated jaws. Abruptly the struggle was over, the otter gone.

  He ran back for an electric torch, to search around the area of trodden grass. There were two horny toe-claws near the gin. He followed the course of the stream, and found Lutra’s footmarks on a mud scour over which he had passed. He saw blood in the marred print of the off-fore foot.

  Below the scour the water ran fast into the reedy mere behind Malandine beach. He whistled and called. Only curlews feeding on sandhoppers along the tide-line answered him as they flew away in fear.

  *

  Phillip left for London, to stay with his young cousin Arthur at Cross Aulton in Surrey. They shared a large double brass-and-iron bed in an attic den. When alone during the day he made himself write a story about an African baboon, and then another about a hunted hare. In the evenings Arthur walked with him on the North Downs, Phillip trying to put away his thoughts, to exhaust himself so that he might sleep.

  “Father and Mother would be very pleased to let you have the attic room to yourself, Phillip, if you would care to live for a time with us. There’s the tennis club, with twenty hard courts, if you care to join. I’d be very pleased to put you up for membership.”

  While on the Downs he longed for the security of the attic room at night, sharing a pair of divided headphones while listening to dance music from the Savoy Orphean and Havana Bands on the crystal set from 2LO; and later music from France, weak reception but something to hold off the gaping blackness of his mind. After the Marseillaise on its worn record at 1 a.m. he was left with the faint crackling of stars and meteorites; and the soft snoring of his cousin. He lay heavy with grief until, feeling the oppression to be unbearable, he got up quietly and went downstairs, put on his trench-coat and in slippers walked down the road and so to the Downs, past the high walls of the lunatic asylum, which did not always shut out screams and cries echoing his own pain in the darkness.

  Reaching, beyond the new houses, the thin sward on the chalk, he lay down to let the heavy feeling behind his life fill all his limbs, and by breathing slowly and deeply tried to raise her spirit from the grave, to open the closed eyes of the thin face in the coffin, in imagination going down in the earth to be close to her, to pray to be dead beside her, to become tubercular again as he had been when first he had gone to Devon, and to lie beside her in a gush of his own blood as she had died. This dreadful vision did not last; he knew it for a tissue of grief, to be stripped off; but it recurred until one night in April he heard a nightingale singing. Then his tears broke.

  Afterwards he thought, Was it not singing for the honour of life, which was maintained by love? Breathe deeply, slowly, trust in the spirit of poetry, think of the great generations of the dead, of their incurious serenity within the azure of the sky. Remove dark thoughts of defeat by clear thought, accept the light of the sun by day, and the stars by night!

  He got up, and cold in every limb, went back to the house, knowing that his duty was to think no more of himself, but of his mother, Irene, his sisters, Bob Willoughby—and the helpless baby. He would go to see Irene, and then to—the battlefields. ‘Speak for us, brother, the snows of death are on our brows.’

  *

  “I’ll come back again, Arthur, if you will still have me. I won’t stay so long next time, I know I’m utterly boring.”

  “No you’re not, Phillip. Please come back and live with us. May likes you, so does Topsy. So do I. We’ll go for more walks, and I’m sure you will lik
e the tennis club socials.”

  *

  Once again it was Easter, the rapide slowly creeping around Paris: long movement through the night, endure, endure, said the wheels. Life is a spirit, and God is love; endure, endure.

  He walked up and down the platform in the sunrise at Bordeaux, up and down while waiting for the slow train for Pau with its wood-burning engine. Then he was sitting in the same yellow-varnished carriage with straight wooden back and hard seat. Slowly, with much puffing of the forced draught, it drew into Pau. Another wait for an older engine to Gan. At last, at last Arudy; and then his heart seemed to be labouring with the engine hauling the carriages up the valley of the Gave d’Ossau, while he felt upon him the cold turbulence of the snow-waters; and with a shock saw the board of Laruns.

  On the wooden platform stood Irene, her hair silvered by her ears, smiling as before, but when the smile ceased he saw that her eyes were set as though beyond him, while yet seeing him.

  “You must be very tired, P.M.”

  “Oh no,” he said, and stepping out on a left foot that suddenly wasn’t there, fell upon the board-walk.

  “Oh, poor P.M., isn’t that your wounded leg? I should have warned you of the steepness!”

  “Just a momentary cramp, Irene.”

  When he had had tea, she said, “Tell me about my grandson. Is he fair like his mother, or dark like his papa?”

  “The hair was dark, but is now becoming fair. And he has his mother’s eyes.” It was a breaking moment: the pale face in the coffin, the eyes unsunned.

  “I am simply longing to see my grandson!”

  He sat with Irene through most of the night, playing Tchaikowsky and Grieg and Dvorak on the gramophone, drinking brandy and coffee and eating relays of bread and saucisson; he held her in his arms and laid his cheek on her head, comforting her, the ice within melting into tears as at times it seemed that Barley was near, looking directly at him, as though her will-power were being directed into and for him, so that the sense of loss was kept at a distance, as if life were a dream and beyond the dream she was alive and it would be natural to see her walking into the room, when she would never leave him again.

  But—the truth was that his weakness, his cursed diffidence had led to, if not directly caused, her death, as it had that of Lily Cornford; and in lesser degree, he had betrayed Willie, Spica, Annabelle, and Sophy. He must have been talking aloud, for he heard Irene saying, “No, no, P.M.! You must not think like that, my dear! It would be the last thing Barley would want. Life must be faced, it must go on, Phillip.”

  “Oh yes, I can face it, Irene. You are right, of course. But I did feel no real confidence in the doctor, who forgot to tell me, two years ago, for weeks, that I was clear of tubercle. He also diagnosed a rupture as the pains of food poisoning, and gave a local farmer castor oil, which might have led to a broken intestine.”

  “Did it?”

  “Well, no; I was only told that.”

  “Ah, village tales, P.M.! But to return to the idea of guilt. It is as bad, sometimes, to blame oneself as it is to blame others. Why, I could so easily blame myself because I wasn’t with Barley that night. I would have been, but for a wretched tummy upset. No; one must not assume entire responsibility when life and death are matters for God to decide! Why, you could blame yourself for living in the heart of the country, and not in London, where she might have had better treatment! On the other hand, it might have made no difference. No, P.M., don’t spoil your life by thinking about such things. If there was any blame, it might be attached to that midwife, for going straight to bed and not taking the baby and the cot into her room with her. But again, if she had done so, Barley would not have had the wonderful pleasure of holding her mite in her arms!” and Irene cried again, and it was his turn to comfort her.

  He could not rest there, he must go, walk again upon the battlefields, see once more those places which one day must be recreated as a monument to his friends in the war. The train returned him to Bordeaux, where he dined alone in an empty restaurant, and it was while waiting for the Paris train that realisation of his loss struck him again with such anguish that he hardly knew how to contain his feelings as he walked up and down the station platform without rest until the train from Madrid rolled in under its steaming furnace glare. Having put his pack and staff in one corner of a carriage, he walked up and down again until the express was due to leave.

  A small bearded peasant and his wife had taken his seat, after putting his things upon the floor; they sat there impassively; it did not matter; he could lie down upon the floor of the corridor and feel not so alone with the feet of French matelots on leave from Bordeaux stepping over his body most of the night.

  From Paris he took a slow train to Arras, to seek upon the battlefields the friends of his youth.

  Part Two

  PILGRIMAGE

  ‘God made the country, and the Devil made the towns.’

  Old Saying

  Chapter 5

  TWO BATTLES

  In the village of Roclincourt in Artois there lived a widow woman who kept a new estaminet worth 85,000 francs. With pride she told her English guest the value of her new house as she showed him up the stairs of bare poplar boards to his bedroom. He stayed in her home during several nights, after wandering about by himself during most of the daytime.

  It was gracious weather, with white cumulus clouds moving high under the blue sky. Cuckoos were calling, larks sang everywhere above the cornfields. He carried a map, the names of which were familiar; but when he came to any of the named places he found a strangeness which induced a sort of momentary helplessness: they were of a different world: for he had known them only in war.

  The hamlet of Roclincourt was a few miles from Arras, on a slope leading north to the villages of Farbus and Vimy. He was glad to be quiet, to walk about slowly in the sunshine which sustained his thoughts as he tried to get himself together.

  The wheat in the wide fields was beginning to tiller, and the silky reams of the wind moved across the plants from the south and west. One morning he strolled up the long and gradual slope to the northern sky, recalling the story told to him by Colonel Vallum of his Regiment, of Sir Douglas Haig coming from Advanced Third Army Headquarters to Arras on the tenth of April, 1917, and stepping out of his black Rolls-Royce motorcar with the small Union Jack fluttering on the radiator, to ask, But where is the Vimy Ridge?

  Well, where was the Vimy Ridge? Looking east from the Maison Blanche no obvious slope was visible; but when he had walked up the long way to the crest, and was standing on one of the cracked roofs of the reinforced concrete German gun-shelters at the edge of Farbus Wood, immediately there was a view over hundreds of square miles of flat country to the north, where the smoke of industrial towns dissolved the far horizon. Below in the foreground was the wide, sprawling, brick-redness of Lens rebuilt.

  Through miles of green plain below, the trench pattern of the northern spur of the Siegfried Stellung was visible in blurred lines of chalky subsoil spread amidst the brown and reclaimed top-soil of the fields.

  After wandering among the concrete shelters of the German gun-pits along the edge of the wood, trying to visualise scenes of those far-off days but seeing only a remote face or two, like transfers upon the air, he thought to descend the reverse slope of the Ridge down to Vimy village for some wine, bread, and cheese. With the sensation of remoteness from life still upon him, coupled with a vague resentment of the present, he entered an estaminet and had an omelette there with a bottle of red wine that was more an act of communion with his friends of the war than a refreshment. Afterwards he pottered about, looking at old concrete pill-boxes and touching rusty strands of barbed wire.

  In one grassy field, revealing its war history by the gentlest undulations where shell-holes had been filled in, the land resown with rye-grass and clover, a bull was grazing beside a cow. They grazed quietly and happily nose by nose, less than a yard behind the wire fence at the edge of the sunken road. He
stood and watched how their tongues caught and pulled the succulent young grasses. Their noses were apart only by the width of their horns. How content they were! The feeling from those tranquil beasts gave him for a few hours an acceptance of life that was serene behind his fatigue and sadness; but with the sun descending he hurried back to the widow’s house as to sanctuary.

  His room was bare as before; but in the kitchen there was a warmth and a comforting friendliness. The old woman was wise, gentle and quiet. She was looking after two English gardeners of the local cemeteries, and had done so since the estaminet had been rebuilt. There was a gramophone; and newspapers from England arrived regularly. They had their meals in another room, while he ate in the kitchen, at the table that was scrubbed every day and allowed to dry before the new American cloth was relaid upon it.

  There was only one picture in the kitchen: the portrait, enlarged from a snapshot, of the widow woman’s only son, a soldier who had fallen at Verdun. Thin-faced, with fixed eyes and slight dark moustache, his image stared blankly from the wall. The mother was proud of her fine new house with its electric light and central heating (not used yet, for economy), and of her shining cooking range, porcelain and enamel with a pleasing design of pale blue birds and pink flowers; but sometimes when she was telling him how jolie was her house her eyes lost their shine and her sight became unfocused; her voice faltered to silence, and he knew that she too was lost in her world of wraiths and phantoms.