It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  “Have you met Martin’s wife?” she enquired.

  “Well—I have a very bad memory, I’m afraid——”

  “Well, if you haven’t met Ursula you haven’t missed much, I can assure you! There were two colonel’s daughters, you see, and Martin chose the wrong one. My son is a genius, and Ursula fails utterly to understand him. Martin is the most generous man alive, and so everyone imposes on him.”

  Mrs. Beausire said this in a quiet, deep voice coming from considerable strength of will. She was a stout woman of the same stocky, powerful build as Martin, who was, she went on to tell him, her only child. She asked no questions about Phillip: her entire concern appeared to be for her son, who, she said, had far too many so-called friends, all of whom had sought his acquaintance solely for the purpose of furthering their own interests.

  “They use him, then invariably they abuse him.”

  Beausire’s father came in later. He was a tall modest man with a face as pale and thin as his wife’s was florid. His parson’s clothes were old. Around his straw-hat was a faded black band. He was quiet and gentle, his frequent smiles revealed teeth the same colour as his yellowing celluloid collar and old straw hat. Phillip stayed to dinner, which Martin ate vigorously, having recovered from exhaustion.

  The next day, there being no meet of otterhounds, Phillip met Martin at Barnstaple and took him on the Norton to the north coast of Exmoor. They left the machine in a hedge, and set out to climb a pyramid-shaped hill which Martin said was the Little Hangman.

  “I was in Fleet Street five years ago,” said Phillip, as they climbed the zigzag path up to the summit, with views over the Severn Sea to Wales. “I didn’t much care for the work.”

  “Who does? I wouldn’t stay a day if my novels sold.”

  “I thought you were a best-seller!”

  “Good God no—my novels don’t pay for the cost of typing. So I have to compromise between grubbing for a living and trying to write what I want to write. You must have had tremendous guts to get out when you did, and chuck everything for writing. But wait till you’re married, then God help you, my lad.”

  Phillip had not spoken about the death of his wife.

  “What exactly do you do on your paper, Martin?”

  “Office boy, combined with Book Critic, Dramatic Critic, Film Critic, Leader Writer, and the daily Society Column, most of which I write myself.”

  “Isn’t it a bit of a strain sometimes?”

  “Not if I can get away like this into God’s clean air where nobody talks about London. What’s that bird?”

  “A stonechat.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Insectivorous, builds low in a bramble, makes an alarm cry like two pebbles chatted together. By the way, have you come across the novels of Scott Fitzgerald, an American?”

  Beasuire did not reply, but taking the lead, set a faster pace up through the heather. The sun was hot, Phillip kept close behind him.

  When they stopped to look back he could see that Beausire was trying to conceal heavy breathing, just as he himself was.

  “Evidently you don’t read my book reviews. Now tell me. what’s the gull up there making that noise? What kind is it?”

  “A greater black-backed gull. Rather rare down here. By Jove, there’s a raven! The black-back’s after it! I expect both have seen some carrion on the rocks below. They’re rivals, in a way. The black-back can swallow whole a half-grown rabbit.”

  They watched until both birds were out of sight below the cliff edge, then walked on.

  “What do you think of Scott Fitzgerald?”

  “I think he’s good, but must we talk of authors up here?”

  The Little Hangman was left behind, they climbed to the summit of the Great Hangman and stopped to look over the sea, a milky azure in the morning sun. The Welsh mountains were blue on the horizon below a chain of white-bubbled clouds.

  Onwards down the reverse slopes of the hill, where, passing a cairn, Beausire stopped to throw a sixpenny piece among the grey stones.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Don’t you know that the pixies must be propitiated, otherwise they’ll lead one astray in a fog? You’re supposed to know all about this country.”

  “I haven’t heard that the pixies have migrated from Dartmoor,” laughed Phillip. “But they may have, now that the chars-à-bancs have arrived. What do you think of Dikran Michaelis, the Armenian writer?”

  “You should take my job in London, you are interested in books and authors while I, a poor damned hack, want only to hear about birds and flowers! Well, come on, what else do you want to know, get it off your chest, then we can both, for a few hours, live in the sunshine. What do I think of Dikran? He’s every other inch a gentleman, and his writing is not so much brilliant as brilliantine. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I’m sorry. Of course I know how you feel. Only I never meet anyone who is interested in books in Devon.”

  “Don’t I know it! I was born and bred in this country, and lived much as your Donkin lived in your first novel. All authors go through hell before they find their feet, and when they do, it’s another species of hell.” When Phillip looked sympathetically at him, Beausire growled, “Don’t take any notice of my bear-with-a-sore-head attitude. I was an usher for too many years, and dashed myself against the rock of the average public school intelligence again and again with about as much effect as one of those waves down there. When John Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy filled an entire number of Austin Harrison’s English Review I read it to my class at Milborne, and after the fifteenth ‘bloody’ three of the senior boys stood up and asked permission to see the Head Master.”

  “Good lord, why?”

  “They objected to what they called the ‘obscene language’. That’s all that Masefield meant to them—one of the purest poets this country has bred in all its literary history! All literary London was talking about The Everlasting Mercy, which sold eighty thousand copies of that number of The English Review. Even prizefighters in East End pubs were reading it. But public school prefects, with their own cults of pederasty, had to object—and that after a war in which poets like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Julian Grenfell, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge—who as you know was a Dublin dustman before the war—Isaac Rosenberg, and a host of others—including George Butterfield the composer of The Shropshire Lad songs—gave their lives. England that was good died with them. Today I’m trying to get readers of a daily newspaper owned by the Uncrowned King of Glasgow to read decent stuff, to realise what England is, through its solitary great writers who burn the midnight oil alone, as they always have—but not one reader cares a hoot about prose or poetry, all they read my blasted stuff for is to see what moronic actress lunched in the Savoy yesterday, what horse is going to win the Derby, what titled woman has run off with whose husband. Tomorrow I’ll be back among it all, in a room facing a north wall so sunless that no pigeon ever sits on the sill outside, a room not much bigger than a cupboard, so I’d be most grateful if you would not talk so much next time, and more particularly if you would refrain from asking me questions about Fleet Street.”

  Martin strode on faster than before, while Phillip followed, determined to show him that what Martin could do, he could do; but with no more words.

  Chapter 9

  A FLOWER-LIKE GIRL

  He said goodbye that evening at the Malmesbury Arms, and returned along the winding road beside the river to Speering Folliot. He felt his life to be blank again, after so much activity; and a letter from his mother, awaiting him, raised again the problem of what to do with the baby. He could not leave Billy with the Mules’, kind and considerate as they were, for ever. Perhaps, as Mother proposed, he should let his sister Doris adopt him? Billy in that sad, neglected house in Romford? Oh no! Every time he saw Billy, happy in the postman’s kitchen, he knew that he could not let him go. And Billy seemed to like him, for some odd reason. He could talk now—well, almost.

  “Dada!
Dada!”

  Wide-mouthed smile, one tooth coming through—tears and cries until Phillip rubbed the gum, then smiling, smiling, smiling—Billy on the floor crawling to meet him, arms held out … the same feeling, only brought to the point of desperation, that Lutra had had for him, surrounded by enemies it could not understand—who had no idea of what they truly did—gay women not cruel in themselves—neither they nor their men had the blood-lust that some critics of hunting declared—they merely had no imagination to realize what death meant to a so-called lower creature. Even so, was not all truth but relative, with no validity beyond the consciousness of each living creature? Otters slew fish for sport, men slew otters for sport—or to keep them from becoming too numerous lest they eat the fish wanted for food by men. It was the natural scheme of things—all species were full of a sense of fun in killing, little tigers burning bright, in the forests of the night.

  He met Mary in the village, and the talk turned to otters, and so to the otter hunt ball being held in the Albert Hall of the town next month. He said, “I suppose you wouldn’t like to come with me, Mary? I’m afraid I don’t know anyone else to ask, to make a party, otherwise I would ask you all to dine with me first at the Imperial.”

  “I’ll be away then, Phillip. I’m going to stay with some of my father’s cousins in Scotland. But if you want a partner, why not ask Lucy? She will be coming for a brief visit in two days’ time. She hopes to find a camping site for her Girl Guides on the high ground over there somewhere”—she pointed to the north—“near the bay, and sheltered, with an empty barn for her girls to go in when it’s raining. I suppose you don’t know of a farmer who would give leave for a troop of Guides for a fortnight? They’d want butter, milk, and eggs, and usually the farmer’s wife is glad to see the girls——”

  “I think I know the very place, Mary! Shall I take you to it—perhaps this afternoon?”

  “Why not wait until Lucy comes, and take her?”

  “Well—to be truthful, I wondered if I had offended her by calling her by her Christian name, Mary.”

  “So that was it! And Lucy’s been wondering why you had dropped her!”

  “I——? Drop Lucy? I liked being with her!”

  “She liked you, too, Phillip. Come to tea the day after tomorrow, and tell her about the site.”

  Lucy met him at the door when he called at Wildernesse on the appointed day. He saw suddenly how beautiful she was when a blush came upon her cheeks. She told him that she was going to spend the next day and night with her aunt and uncle at Bideford, but might she come over by ’bus the following day, and see the camp site?

  The visit was arranged for a Thursday, when Lucy would come to luncheon with him in his cottage at one o’clock.

  *

  On the Thursday he waited, with Mrs. Mules and Zillah in their best clothes, the circular mahogany sitting-room table laid with clean cloth and bowl of flowers, until a quarter to two; and when Lucy did not arrive, he ate his omelette alone. When she had not appeared by three o’clock he decided that she would not be coming; and closing D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, which seemed to him not to be of the first clarity of genius—the author was somehow immoiled within himself, like Julian Warbeck, though in a different way—he returned to his cottage with dog and cat—Moggy so slow, running to him and then stopping, always lagging behind, while Rusty went on ahead like a scout.

  His cottage door was open; it was seldom closed from one week to another; and to his surprise and happiness the strains of Destiny Waltz were coming from the kitchen. And there was Lucy, sitting at the table beside the open Decca trench-gramophone, her lips parted, her head moving slightly as she smiled.

  “Hullo,” she murmured, standing up.

  Her voice was almost inaudible, lost in the colour rising in her oval face. She wore a pink cotton frock with short sleeves, and a hat whose brim made her eyes seem to shine darkly in the room. Destiny Waltz, the record worn out in 1917 and not played for the past eight years, scratched on.

  “I’m fearfully sorry! I’ve been waiting for you in Mules’ cottage! I have my grub there! Please forgive me—I forgot to tell you——”

  “I’ve been quite happy,” she smiled.

  “But have you had any lunch?”

  “I bought a banana and an apple on my way here, and ate them walking beside the estuary.”

  “Let me cook you some eggs and bacon?”

  “No thanks, really.”

  “Let’s make some tea?”

  “I’d like some tea, but only if it’s no bother.”

  “Oh, no bother at all, really.” He went to the empty larder. “Well, when I said ‘no bother’, I should have said ‘no milk’!”

  “I like tea just plain.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no sugar, either.”

  “I don’t take sugar, thank you.” Her cheeks were now their normal colour.

  “Heavens, I’m frightfully sorry, but there’s no tea, either! But there’s water. It’s very good water.”

  “I like water,” she said.

  “We dip it from a well behind the cottage.”

  “Ours at home comes from a well, too.”

  Carrying two mugs and an earthenware pitcher, he went with her to the well. One neighbour watched from a small back window, another from a second window.

  “It has quite a different taste from our water,” she said.

  “It’s iron-stone water here.”

  “Ours is chalk, I think. And it has shrimps in it, and ammonites.”

  “How fortunate! Shrimps in your tea! But it shows the water is pure.”

  “Pa wants to get a trout to put in the well, to eat the shrimps. But I like shrimps.” She blushed again. He thought of fresh-water shrimps, the larger male carrying the smaller female in its arms as they flipped about a stream: but said, “What is an ammonite? I thought it was a Biblical tribe.”

  “It’s a prehistoric fossil, I believe.”

  Their thirst slaked, they went back to the cottage. Should he ask her if she wanted to wash her hands? There was nowhere for a guest to go; the privy, with its walls of cob, had collapsed during the previous winter; and the landlord had not yet had a new one built. He must make some excuse to leave her on the walk to the camping site. He played the two records of César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A minor, and then they set out.

  It was a long climb to the fields above. The site was another two miles after the high ground had been reached. They passed through a village of lime-washed cob and thatch, and so to fields overlooking the sea.

  On the banks of the sunken lanes grew many wild flowers. They played a game of taking turns to guess a plant pointed out by one another. The score was even, with six guesses each, when they came to a colony of rare plants, previously identified by Phillip from Johns’ Flowers of the Field. Could she name it? Perhaps the scent would help?

  While she sniffed inaudibly he regarded her curve of cheek, and set of waist where she bent down to touch the miniature yellow-thistle flower. Her legs were a pleasing shape, too; indeed, he could hardly believe his good luck. With added joy he realised that she had a delicate sensibility: she made no attempt to pluck the flower, but barely touched it with the tip of one finger. She is a green-corn spirit, he thought, she is more delicate than Barley. In a way she was like his mother, gentle in thought to all she beheld; but without the sadness of Mother.

  “I can’t think what the darling is,” the soft voice murmured, as the finger-tip caressed the miniature cardoon of yellow. “I don’t know!” she said, with a small laugh.

  “Well, I oughtn’t to count this one, as I looked it up only the other day. It’s Ploughman’s Spikenard. Can you smell the aromatic oil? I wonder if Jesus smelled it when his feet were anointed by Mary Magdalene?”

  She blushed again, her lashes hid her eyes. Then she was smiling, her head moving slightly as she contemplated him. “Ploughman’s Spikenard—what a lovely name.”

  “Do you know Francis Thompso
n’s poetry?”

  “A little. Mary showed me her book once, which your cousin had given her.”

  “Thompson fell in love with a girl who didn’t understand him—or perhaps she understood him too well! She probably thought him a half-man! ‘Like to a box of spikenard, I broke my heart about your feet, That you did love me.’ I suppose, biologically speaking, a woman has no real use for a poet when he is obsessed by his vision of harmony and beauty.”

  Lucy did not reply, but looked upon the ground. She did not know what to reply, and felt stupid. What could she say? No thought came.

  “Very few writers or poets know the feeling. D. H. Lawrence touches that feeling sometimes—but he’s engaged in clearing away the effects of his writhen childhood—like these wind-blown thorns you see here——I’m afraid I’m not really being very clear.”

  Lucy was stroking the spaniel, her face still averted. “Rusty,” she said in an almost inaudible voice. Then, looking up, “Have you written many books? Someone was asking the other day what it was you wrote.”

  “Oh, I write magazine stories about birds and animals.”

  “How lovely!” With a hesitant smile on her lips, “I used to write and edit a ‘Nature Magazine’, for the Boys.” She was blushing again, smiling at him with her grey eyes set with long lashes. “It was read only among ourselves, of course.”

  “How many brothers have you?”

  “I have three.”

  “Do you still keep a nature diary?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do I!”

  She stroked the spaniel, who was overjoyed at his good fortune. She looked up. “I’ll put Ploughman’s Spikenard into my diary when I get back!”

  They went on down the lane, past the high walls of a manor garden, with farm premises beyond. Calling at the farmhouse, he explained what was wanted.

  “This is Miss Copleston, the Guide Mistress of the Shakesbury Girl Guides.”

  “How d’you do, Miss!”