It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  Phillip felt pride as she asked about water, supply of milk, and if there were a building into which her guides might go in wet weather.

  The farmer was a newcomer, having bought the land and buildings from the former owner, a gentleman who had sold the manor and gone to Kenya Colony, believing England to be finished.

  The farmer was cautious, non-committal. Yes, he might be able to supply milk. Yes, he might have a barn, perhaps. He couldn’t say for sure. Yes, he might sell some firing for camp fires. He would talk with his wife first. Yes, he would let the gentleman know, when he called next.

  Lucy said when they were alone again that the fields were high, and exposed to winds; but soon they spoke no more of the site. Should they return to the cottage, or walk over the down to the Burrows?

  “I’d like to show you a new way, but it is a bit longer.”

  “I love walking!”

  “We go up Sky Lane, and down to a post-office, where we can buy cheese and biscuits. It’s a jolly walk along the shore, or we cross the sandhills, to the lighthouse. There’s a ferry then, to Appledore. But how stupid of me! Of course, you must know it well.”

  “I’d love to go there again! One sees no one, only birds.”

  “Perhaps we should call at the cottage—won’t you be thirsty?”

  “I think I can manage.”

  “But it’s three miles before we get to the post-office, then four miles round the coast to the lighthouse.”

  “I’m not a very thirsty person,” she said, and whispered “Rusty—Rusty,” to hide her happy feelings—patting the head of the dog resting its head on her knee.

  *

  They set off about five o’clock of that afternoon of sunshine and high cirrus clouds. Down a red sunken lane through a valley, to stop by a pollard ash with a bee’s nest in it, pointed out as one of his ‘secrets’ to be shared with her; and round a bend in the lane, a quarry hung with ivy where a pair of grey wagtails had a second nest. After inspecting this they turned off the lane and up a farm track and so on to the farmyard, to be challenged by the cattle dog on guard with mincing minatory steps and fluffed-up tail.

  “The farmer is rather grumpy,” he said. “I hope we don’t meet him, as this isn’t really a right-of-way. Rusty—heel!”

  Rusty stood still, rolling his eyes and whining and not daring to cower lest he be seized across the neck. Taking no notice of the two dogs—“Hackled master and cringing mastered,” he remarked—he led Lucy past a circular building wherein was fixed a cumbrous wooden cage of vast proportions, explaining that a horse in winter moved round and round, driving a shaft, the cogged end of which turned a turnip-slicing machine.

  After peering for signs of owls in the round house, they continued up a narrow track which became steeper, stonier, and more enclosed by thorn and bramble as they climbed. Water trickled down among the stones of its bed, nourishing plants of brook-lime and forget-me-not. The track was sunken between steep banks, a stony way now almost entirely choked by umbelliferous plants. They stepped slowly upwards, into the sky it seemed, he leading, Lucy in her cotton frock following, spaniel panting behind.

  “There are vipers here, we must be careful. Foxes, too. In the evening one sees literally hundreds of rabbits. If we’d come here in April, we’d have seen the windflowers—lovely white anemones like stars—tinged with pink as they die. But I expect you know them?”

  “Yes,” she said happily. He thought she was like a little child, with her small face and gently smiling lips; she was all innocence. He, too, felt to be his innocent self.

  “We mustn’t look back until we get to the top. There’s a fine surprise in store!”

  They toiled up, he holding her hand, her eyes almost closed. “We’re nearly there.”

  He led her to the top, and still holding her hand, stopped.

  “Now look!”

  Together they looked over the country they had walked through, lying away below their feet as hundreds of fields, with the manor house distantly among trees; and nearer, to the east, a grey Norman church tower among diminutive elms. Amidst the irregular strips and shapes of hundreds of grassy fields, each within its thick dividing banks, were occasional plots of corn beginning to turn into the hues of high summer; for the cuckoo was already silent. Here in the high air he had often walked with Rusty, alone with the songs of pipits and larks.

  A chain of swifts passed in the sky, and he thought of Barley, and her question years ago in South Devon—Do they beat first one wing, then the other? What would she think of him now? Or were all her thoughts, if her spirit still remained near the earth, for her child?

  They walked, apart now, to the crest of the hill, coming to a small and narrow gate of grey weathered oak covered with greyer lichens in a gap of the hedge grown tall with many ash-plants. The gateway led to a stony field of poor oats, from where was visible the far wide tract of the Burrows, and the Atlantic lying away to the west and vanishing in summer’s heat.

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He climbed over, and went down the outside of the hedge bordering the track they had come up. He wanted to think. What was he doing? Gould she take the place of Barley? With Barley he had always felt clear; but not innocent. He wasn’t innocent, except when writing—sometimes. If he did not feel clear with Lucy, would it not be fatal to go on?

  He returned to where she stood by the gateway, and seeing her gentle smile led her by the hand among the low, rabbit-gnawn stalks of the oats. They stood in the breeze from the sea, watching the hawks hanging along the ridgeway. Her hand lay almost inert in his hand. After a while he pretended to be looking for a plant among the thin oat stalks, and let go her hand. The faint thread of pain which had entered him when they had been looking at the Ploughman’s Spikenard returned and settled to an ache of negation. Here he was, one moment overjoyed to be with her; the next, overcome by feelings of mortification, pretending to look for a plant.

  He got up and ran down the steep field, pushing through a rabbit-tunnelled bank of furze and blackthorn; and jumping off, continued to run down towards a round pond made to hold water. There he sat down, waiting for her to come to him, and the more he wanted to turn and wave to her, the more he sat still, his chest held on his drawn-up knees, as though trying to hide himself in the knot of his compressed body. He thought how, as a very little child, he had sometimes refused to kiss his mother goodnight, thus to hurt himself by hurting her. Denied a good-night kiss, Mother would be sad, and after leaving him alone for an interval she would steal back to his bedroom; but by then he was fast in a self-fixture of unhappiness, and would not reply. Left alone again, feelings of anguish and remorse would spread over him, he would weep silently on the pillow, and yet remain despairingly obstinate when she returned once more. Yes, that was himself at three or four years of age; but after he had known Barley, the natural girl delighting in natural love, surely the kink had been removed in him? Was there a connection between loving a mother deeply, too deeply, as D. H. Lawrence had done—Sons and Lovers was obviously based on the facts of his own early life—and losing a wife one had loved with all one’s being? Was he back where he had started?

  Almost silently Lucy came to where he was sitting, and sat down near him, speaking softly to the spaniel who was panting, with sandy elongated tongue, beside her.

  “Did you enjoy your run down the hill?” she asked, gently. “You looked so happy. I found a late robin’s nest, with young ones, among the ferns in the hedge up there. Such darlings.”

  “I have a nestling, too,” he said. “A baby son.”

  “Yes, Mary told me,” she replied, smiling unsteadily at him. All the afternoon he had looked so lost, so worried; and now he seemed happy at last.

  They came to the road, and the post-office shop on the other side. There they drank ginger beer from earthenware bottles and bought biscuits, chocolate, and Canary bananas for their journey across the sandhills. He felt that he knew her now. Spirals of joy arose in him, uncoiling in d
esire to sing and jump about: the spaniel’s front paws were lifted up and he was made to dance, to swallow a trickle of ginger beer; and afterwards a saucer of water in preparation for the long trail across the estuarial flats to the white lighthouse beside the estuary where Willie had had the life choked out of him because of a dream. Like Barley, who had dreamed of the baby in her arms, patient unto death. He thought too, of Ralph Hodgson’s Song of Honour, which Julian Warbeck had first told him about; and he thought, I must make my life in that spirit, with Lucy.

  *

  At first it seemed to him that everything Willie had dreamed and hoped in the last spring of his life was being transferred to him. Was he a medium for other people’s feelings or thoughts? Was that the weakness of the true artist—never a man of character, but only a sensitised instrument for receiving the feelings of others? Was it more than that, a sort of possession by others, beyond impersonation? Here he was, walking with this flower-like girl over a tract of sandy country, possibly following the very same way where Willie had walked with Mary, while being told by her that every kind of English wildflower grew on the Burrows, just as Lucy was telling him now. Would the end be the same for Lucy, as for Mary? For it was not the drowning that had taken Willie from Mary; the break had happened before that, many times. Perhaps if Mary had been a stronger character, like Barley, then Willie …

  His thoughts appalled him; was he leading Lucy into the same dilemma?

  “What a pity the flowers are over, they are so beautiful in the spring,” she was saying.

  “Yes,” he said.

  *

  The petals had fallen: the wildflower air of spring was now the radiant heat of young summer arising from the bronze mosses and glinting grains of loose sand. The time that Willie had entered there, as in a dream of tenderness and renewal was passed with the wild-sweet cries of lapwing and the high songs of larks above a green place which Phillip knew from reading Willie’s diary—a passage, known by heart, describing marsh helleborine and whitlow grass, heart’s-ease and celandine, dove’s-foot crane’s-bill, and ‘that pink dewdrop of flower, the bog pimpernel’. If only his own heart and mind could re-create, out of Time, that first walk of Mary and Willie upon the Burrows, and all that year now lost in ancient sunlight, that spring of tenderness and renewal of plant-life in beauty—yellow-wort and ladies’ bedstraw, sea-rocket, horned poppy, and wild thyme—for a novel about Willie! But—‘never a bone the less dry for all the tears’. Willie was gone; the flowers he had seen were dust, the earth had trundled over six hundred times on its axis through space, night succeeding day, since that September night.

  Would Lucy understand such ‘immortal longings’; or would they be ‘morbid thoughts?’ How deep were Mary and she in friendship? Did Lucy feel as Mary once had felt?

  “Did Mary tell you much about Willie?”

  “A little,” she said, and could not look at him for tenderness, having divined how much he had loved his cousin.

  They walked on, side by side, and after a while he glanced at her and she shared the glance, their fingers touched, he held her hand naturally, thoughtlessly, it was as though Spring had come again, and all the lost beauty of wild flowers and the thoughts they had given Willie were resurrected through her presence beside him.

  They passed over the mossy pans and came to the sandhills. Taking off their shoes they climbed barefoot up the loose slopes, the soles of their feet burned by the sand that spilled away under each tread. He was thinking, Barley, Barley, like this we walked upon the hot sands of the Camargue.

  Reaching the crest of the chain of foot-hills they found the sea-breeze stirring the marram grasses, and saw the sea beyond, crinkled in the heat ascending, so that the white lines of breaking summer waves seemed to be a mirage in the lower sky. They played a game of follow-my-leader along the peaks of the sandhills, running at a slow loping pace, arms extended like wings, continuing without pause even when a sudden precipice opened before their feet. It was a wonderful feeling to stand still at the moment of poise, of being buoyed by the wind, to feel oneself a bird about to fly—and then to drop down a sudden cliff of sand, to feel oneself as Ariel until legs sunk into the loose sands ten feet below.

  And playing thus they reached the Valley of Winds, a place of great heat and silence, a veritable plain of the dead, an ossuary of bleached bones of rabbits and shells of snails, which must be crossed before coming to the sea whose crinkling blue was fused into the Atlantic azure.

  He lingered behind her on the cool shore, to see with what grace she walked; and hastening to be beside her, was delighted by what he now knew to be her serenity. What a lovely girl she was, smiling and natural beside him. She was a Shakespearian heroine in quality, with the simplicity of naturalness. He wondered again, as they sat by a fire, what age she was, thinking that she was about twenty.

  She had mentioned her father and her brothers, but never her mother. As they gathered more wood for the fire, which was now embers over which hovered sodium flames pale yellow in the sunshine, he said, “When these are burned, I think perhaps we’d better be moving on. I know well the feelings of a mother about her daughter staying out late.”

  “My mother is dead.”

  A pipit fluttered into the hollow where they sat, and alighted among the grasses. The sun would soon be resting on the rim of ocean. “She died when I was seventeen, during the war.”

  He calculated that, if her mother had died in 1918, she would now be twenty-four.

  In silence he covered the embers of the fire with sand, and turned east along the shore of the estuary, where heavy waves were pounding the shingle. The wind blew fresh; the sun was burnishing the horizon; the light was bright gold, and very clear. Across the water the pebble ridge of Westward Ho! was distinct and grey. Windows of the houses on the hill beyond seemed to be on fire.

  “Isn’t it beautiful here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am happy, too.”

  He picked up stone after stone and hurled them as far as he could into the waves. They walked now with the sun behind them, along the shore of the estuary. Everything was beautiful: every wet stone, every wave sweeping grey and aslant the pebbly shore; the buoys marking the fairway; pink white clouds remote in the sky; their long halo’d shadows moving before them on the strand. Their feet crunched on wet shingle, past the black iron tide-ball at the top of its post; past the white wooden lighthouse rising out of the dunes; and as the sun’s rim rested on the lilac heave of ocean they came to the narrow shingle-tongue of Crow, set with wooden mooring posts of gravel barges.

  He tied his handkerchief to his stick, set it in the sand, and sat down beside her.

  The lower half of the sun was now quenched in blinding fume upon the waters; the crescent moon revealed a point of light above its horn. The wind was dropping; the fume of spray was clearing; the fairway buoys were no longer leaning and wallowing. He waved his banner towards Appledore while they sat side by side in the sand, the spaniel between them, turning its gaze upon first one face then the other—his own feeling to be thin and brown with sharp, pointed features; Lucy’s gently curved, her expression innocent as motherless Eve’s when first she sat beside Adam. But no, he thought, with feelings that descended with the going-down of the sun, he was no natural Adam. Like his features, his mind had become too sharp; a mind stripped of normal flesh, like something hanging on the wire entanglements of the past, deathlessly, crying that by clarity alone could human un-understanding, the conditioner of all wars great and small, be removed forever from the mind of man.

  The image felt upon his face was seen by Lucy, who after one glance became as though subdued; he felt it; he turned to her and said, “I must tell you, Lucy! I feel as though I am possessed by Willie! Do you see any difference in me?”

  “I thought so, just now. You looked very anxious—sort of lost.” She longed to say, You looked such a poor one, but forebore. I am a medium, he th
ought, I am an instrument of the dead.

  *

  The handkerchief fluttered on the stick. No boat came. He imagined the salmon-boat crews sitting in the inns, or resting in their cottage parlours. The top of the sun was now under the rim of the west. A green twilight held sky and water. Light suddenly flashed from the white tower.

  “One would think that the idea of a lighthouse, when first suggested, would be welcomed by all men. But it wasn’t.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “To many land-dwellers on this coast a wrecked ship meant a lot of loot.”

  She sat quietly beside him, her eyes reflective. The spaniel, tired, was curled asleep in a hole it had dug in the sand. The air was quiet, except for the wash of wavelets receding aslant the shore.

  “Ah, there’s a boat putting out!”

  They watched the small triangular sail, preceded by its wavering streaming image, crossing the wide lagoon of the Pool.

  They sailed across as the water was beginning to move gently to the west, and in ten minutes were among lively bare-foot children playing and shouting. A hawker was selling fruit on a barrow. He bought three pounds of strawberries. Farther on stood the remembered black omnibus, with wooden forms for seats and an iron railing fixed above its sides to prevent passengers from falling off: the converted lorry in which Willie, Julian, and he had arrived there during the January of 1923.

  They sat in the back seat, pulling strawberries off stalks with their teeth. He held out a particularly luscious strawberry for her to bite. She took it in her hand, saying, “Thank you.” Then it was her turn to take a large berry from the bag; and after inspecting it, give it to him, saying, “Here’s a nice one.” Her upbringing, of course; but he felt slight disappointment that she hadn’t held it for him to bite.

  Lights were twinkling along Bideford quay when they got down from the bus, and set out to walk on the road above the tidal river gleaming below trees and rocks amidst muddy banks, until they came to the white gates of a drive on the right of the road. There he stopped, and before she could ask him in out of politeness—it was getting on for ten o’clock—he said, “Well, goodbye, and thank you for coming. I’ll write what the farmer decides about the field. Oh, may I have your home address?”