Unaware of what had been said, Phillip learned of it in a letter from a solicitor. The matter was settled by payment of a small sum, in addition to a term’s fees in lieu of notice. He asked Lucy to write a letter explaining to Mrs. Frobisher that it was not he who had used a private conversation which surely must have involved the young doctor in some trouble with his senior.
“I can imagine him saying, ‘I thought Maddison was a gentleman, and would know better than to use a private conversation like that.’”
“Oh, I don’t suppose he will think any more about it, do you?”
Phillip left the farmhouse without eating his breakfast and when he returned it was late afternoon. Something had gone wrong on the farm, he said. Things usually did go wrong with poor Pip, thought Lucy, who had heard his voice shouting from far away. Once again Luke had backed the light green trailer, the brakes had locked, the shackle-bolts holding one spring to the body had been torn off.
“Do you really want me to write that letter?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
*
There was now between Phillip and Penelope a partial constraint; a matter of literary importance had to be resolved: a point which he felt sometimes as the sharp thorn of injustice. It was this: in his reply to her request for permission to walk over his land, there had been, said Penelope, a sentence which had startled her on beholding it in a letter from a stranger.
“We can agree to differ about a matter of personal taste, Phillip, but you must not try to argue me out of what I know to be true.”
The letter he had written to her, she maintained, had ended with the phrase, Of course Jefferies had an awful life: syphilis.
“But I could not have written such a thing about Richard Jefferies! It is untrue.”
But no: Penelope maintained her sweet calm and repeated that he had written exactly that phrase.
“Might I see the letter, then?”
“I’m afraid you can’t. I threw it in the fire.”
Penelope pressed the bell. Immediately her housekeeper, who must have been waiting outside, he thought, entered with a tray.
“Do help yourself to a peg before you go, Phillip. No, I won’t have anything, thank you, I’ve given it up. I was getting too fat. Give my love to Lucy. Good night.”
*
Penelope lay on her couch, and took up The Daily Telegram but she did not read it. The problem of Phillip, his isolation from Lucy his wife, was often in her mind. He had undertaken a task too much for him, that was obvious; but he had ability, knowledge of farming, tremendous vitality—how he managed to do all the physical work he did all day, and write at night as well, she did not know. Obviously he was driving himself too hard, and his men were duds. She liked them, having been acquainted with them for three years, but they had been left to themselves all during that time, the former tenant having taken the land for the shooting. Then there had been that friar flapping about the farm—what use could a man like that possibly be? No: she could not be sure how far Phillip was an effect of all the muddle about him, or the cause——
There was his constant frustration. Sometimes his voice came across the river from the Old Manor. At least he never shouted at others; only when alone, and in what he called the Jackdaw Room, where he wrote. Of course he needed help with figures and Lucy had no head for business, but she was a worker. He was kind to his children, but treated them as equals, which was a mistake. Children should be left to develop their own personalities, not be forced into patterns against everything of what their father chose to call the ‘old decadent order’. They were untidy, certainly, but children should be allowed their own untidiness, which was natural.
Penelope could not bear people who shouted. Her husband, whom she had divorced, had shouted; Daddy shouted, alone in his own rooms. Just like Phillip. Daddy had built himself up into something that threatened to destroy him. Mama was partly to blame, of course; and she herself could sympathise over all the difficulties of a marriage gone wrong; but she had seen clearly how the responsibilities of money and position had weighed on Mama, as they did on Daddy—and how social ambition could, and did, spoil human life. Had not Stevenson written, It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive?
Poor Daddy. Where had ambition brought him? She saw his kind face, always so humorous and gentle with her, as she had last seen him: Daddy standing up in the library at home to greet her, his whimsical smile as he went forward with arms outheld to embrace her. The sudden stagger, the recovery, the hand on the table to steady himself, the fixed smile as he tried to show her that he had not been drinking.
For awhile Penelope felt sad. The corners of her mouth drooped. Then she caught a movement outside the window, and her eyes became bright with interest as she watched a nuthatch pecking at the nut kernels strung on a string across the bird-tray. A flicker of wings, a scolding chitter: and a blue-tit had driven the nuthatch away. She watched it pecking with tiny furious power, then it danced aside, raised its blue crest as a robin arrived. The robin stood still and regarded it with wings held down, as though it had a sword ready to draw. Suddenly it stabbed forward, the blue-tit vanished. The robin regarded her with full gaze for a few moments, then flitted away into the dusk beyond the pantiles. He knows me, she thought happily.
Penelope pressed the bell. The housekeeper entered.
“Oh, Mrs. Treasure, might I have the lamp, please? And I won’t be down to dinner, I’ll have a tray. And let the dogs come in now, will you?”
At her words the door, which had been left ajar, was pushed open, and the borzois, each like the half of a hairy hoop, curved into the room to lay their heads side by side on the sofa, to receive the evening blessing of two hands stroking in unison.
“And my spectacles, please, Mrs. Treasure. I think I left them on my dressing table. Thank you, Mrs. Treasure.”
The curtains were drawn, the fire mended, the housekeeper left as quietly as she had come. When she brought in the tray she said, “Mr. Maddison has just left this note for you, m’lady.”
“Is he waiting downstairs, Mrs. Treasure?”
“No, he said that it did not require any answer, and left at once.”
Penelope put it aside until she had eaten her dinner. The envelope was still unopened when Mrs. Treasure came to take away the tray. When she was alone again, Penelope opened it.
Dear Penelope,
Forgive me being a bore, by bringing up the case of Richard Jefferies again, but I felt I must explain the position. I wish you had known my cousin Willie, who was drowned in 1923, in the estuary of the Taw and Torridge in Devon. He could make things much plainer and truer than I shall ever be able to do. I was given his books afterwards, and his copy of Jefferies’ The Story of my Heart was for many years never far from me. I mention this because a passage in that book seems to me to express what, in the spiritual sense—‘First there was the Word’—is everywhere being countered in Britain today.
Jefferies is the seer and prophet of a new way of life which can come about only when it is generally accepted that ‘the whole mode of thought of the nations must be altered before physical progress is possible’.
I know that Hudson, who loved Jefferies (though they never met) thought that Jefferies in his Story showed ‘strange unnatural feeling’, and that he was a tormented man, but the forces of negation and reaction that wore Jefferies out ‘before his time’, as Hudson wrote, are the same in the world today, equally powerful, and actively intent on destroying another man of genius. If history is any criterion he will fail; but at least he will have made the attempt.
This is what Jefferies wrote:
‘I would submit to a severe discipline, and go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness of the human race in the future. Each one of us should do something, however small, towards that great end. At the present time the labour of our predecessors in this country, as in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted. We live—that is we snatch an existence—and our
works become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce, ends in a cipher.
‘These objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle with amazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding of, and sympathy with, these things. It is the human being as the human being of whom I think. That the human being as the human being—nude—apart altogether from money, clothing, houses, properties—should enjoy greater health, strength, safety, beauty, and happiness I would gladly agree to a discipline like that of Sparta. The Spartan method did produce the finest race of men, and Sparta was famous in antiquity for the most beautiful women. So far, therefore, it exactly fits my ideas.
‘No science of modern times has yet discovered a plan to meet the requirements of the millions who live now, no plan by which they might attain similar physical proportion. Some increase in longevity, some slight improvement in the general health is promised, and these are great things, but far, far beneath the ideal. Probably the whole mode of thought of the nations must be altered before physical progress is possible.’
Penelope stopped reading. Sparta! It was a cruel system, producing only evil. She did not want to read further.
This was the Phillip of the strained look, who girded against so much; and for what ultimate goal? To be harmonious and happy? Of course. What then was stopping him? Hurst, with that abominable swastika badge, had long ago departed. Phillip had complained when Hurst was with him; he had complained when Hurst gave notice. If only Hurst had been this; why wasn’t Hurst that? Phillip had wanted Hurst to be something that Hurst definitely was not.
She hesitated. She sighed; then with resolution let the pages float into the fire, where the coal flames twisted the paper and turned them red. One charred fragment quivered, and remained. For a moment the written words seemed to stand out greyly before the heat took the fragments up the chimney. She leaned forward, and read the calcined words.
The life of Hitler, the ‘unknown soldier’ of the 1914–1918 war has so far been lived in the belief that the divination of European genius will, by his efforts, be followed by the union and resurgence of the West for a thousand years of peace.
Lucy said: “I’ve written the letter to Mrs. Frobisher. Would you like to see it?”
“How very kind of you, Lucy. And you have so much work to do—literally all day and half the night. No, I can’t read it. What a tyrant I am—no, don’t post it. Yours was a perfectly innocent remark to the headmistress. My attitude to you was self-willed and petty.”
*
The work entailed in the making of the New Cut had been easier than anticipated. Phillip kept the details in his Journal. 61 ton-loads of lump chalk picked from the quarry by the premises laid the foundation; 40 tons of gravel spread on the chalk—and there was the causeway across the bottom corner of the Steep.
Reaching the grassy side of the hill, grown with little thorns, they cut a way through the marl and shovelled the marl direct into the two horse-drawn tumbrils, emptying the loads into heaps on the field below, where the soil was sandy, and inclined to be acid. Thus they made two improvements at the same time.
When finished, the New Cut was a fine sight. Lorry and trailer ran up easily; the old back-breaking problem of inaccessibility was solved: and all for a capital expenditure of £25. He found satisfaction in thinking he earned this money by writing an 1,800-word script for the B.B.C. It meant an hour of writing between eleven o’clock one evening and midnight; and early the following evening a hundred-mile journey to Broadcasting House in London, arriving back in the small hours. He thought he could do that sort of thing for years, so why worry about capital, he told Luke the steward.
Having chalked some of the acid land, why not finish that hollow of nearly four acres? So by the top of the New Cut they opened a small quarry, digging loam for spreading on those areas which had not already been covered. Half the cost of digging the sweet, thick marl was met by a grant from the Land Fertility Commission. It was reassuring to feel himself becoming a regular business man.
One morning he had a surprise—a letter from Ernest, written when he had arrived at Sydney, whither he had sailed in a P. & O. liner, working his passage among the steerage passengers, all emigrants like himself. Ernest wrote that he had spent eighteen hours of every one of the forty-seven-day voyage in washing-up dishes, and concluded, If I live to be a hundred, I shall never see eye to eye with the chief steward, the purser, and the captain.
Chapter 13
‘THE WHEAT WAS ORIENT——’
How quickly the time had passed. Could it be a year ago that the New Cut had been made, and then the bare-fallowing of the twenty acres of the Steep? How pleasing to see green, sappy heads of wheat waving in the breeze of early morning, beside the neat design of the New Cut leading up to the skyline.
He sat down to enjoy the sight of a weed-free field, pleased with himself that he was able to get free of worry for a moment. Could this be the same field upon which he had looked with such despondency from Pine Tree Camp in his first year of farming, to see what appeared to be a silver-grey mist lying upon a lake in the early morning? But it was not the foggy dew of morning before a day of great heat that he had stared at on that occasion, but twenty acres of seeded thistles which had completely overtopped a dwarfed crop of thin barley stalks: a grey mass of one burst cardoon touching another burst cardoon extending to the distant trees of the Great Bustard Wood. And the yield of barley that season, sown merely to add to the sum to be paid for ingoing covenants—hay, straw, standing crops, etc.—had been about two sacks, and the yield of thistle seed about four sacks, an acre. That was the Steep in the year of his taking over. Luke, and Matt his father, had been the only hands working on the farm.
Phillip had, the winter before, watched Luke ploughing the slippery slopes with two old horses. The single-furrow plough had barely scratched the surface. The horses had been under-fed. At its steepest part the field had a gradient of 1 in 4. And during the subsequent harvest, of almost entirely thistles, he had watched a Fordson tractor drawing an old Albion binder jattering and slewing about behind it, and sometimes rearing up, while the binder in mechanical panic hastily jettisoned a string of unbound sheaves.
“You can’t do anything with this land,” the driver had declared to Phillip. “It’s a thistly old sod.”
The grass seeds he was supposed to have sown in the young barley the April before, to restore a permanent pasture which had been ploughed up by his master, simply hadn’t come up. No wonder, in a seed-bed consisting of dried strips and lumps of sulky clay held together by weeds, and scratched about by harrows.
That was the Bad Lands system of farming before he had taken over.
What a difference today! Sitting at the edge of the wheat he felt a flow of happiness: for he had, by insisting for once on having his own way, changed the surface of the field. Luke had objected to a bare fallow, so he had ploughed the field himself, with reliefs by Brother Laurence. Still, one must be fair: neither Luke nor Matt had seen working the new and unknown make of tractor Phillip had bought without seeing after reading about it in The Daily Trident by the farming correspondent whose daily Countryman’s Diary, under his initials, Phillip had read in his youth. The tractor had an hydraulic attachment by which twin plough-shares could be lifted out of or put into the ground by a lever. Plough and tractor were designed as one. The machine was a very light affair. It could walk up steep hills while ploughing, without digging-in its wheels or overturning, a fault in old types of heavy tractors which merely lugged heavy-framed ploughs.
Phillip ploughed twenty acres of fatty loam, up and down the Steep, in the month of May, happy on the new tractor. The furrows dried out. Then rain fell, and soon through the crumbling furrows arose a green luxuriant crop of thistles.
“Mygor, what hev you done?” asked the steward’s father.
“Raised millions of eager thistles, Matt.”
“Harn’t yew a-goin’ to cultivate them?”
“I’m going to let them grow.”
One June morning he replaced the greased plough-breasts with seven shining cultivator tines fixed on an iron frame. These were the tines designed by Ernest, who had made a mahogany prototype, which had been taken to a foundry, and a dozen mild-steel tines pressed out.
Behind Phillip on the tractor seven tines winged like down-slanting terns moved eight inches under the furrows. Up and down the slopes the driver went, cutting roots of thistles. Soon their green luxuriance was wilted in the sun. Within the shine of another day they had turned to bronze. By the third day they had lost colour. Within a week all were withered away.
The stirring of the soil, making it friable, pleasant to crumble in the fingers, had stimulated another form of life. All over the Steep little dark green spots were breaking from out the loose soil. Kneeling upon his bare knees—for in the hot sun Phillip wore only shoes and khaki shorts—he stared at the blue-green kidney-shaped leaves of the charlock, hundreds of little plants to the square foot, thousands to the square yard, trillions to the acre. Each tiny seedling appeared to be dark-green because of its sharp shadow thrown under the high noon sun. Behind the shining tines of the cultivator the sun burned them to dust, even as it burned Phillip’s flesh to the colour of dust. He was happy, he could feel virtue coming back into the soil, and so to himself. No more decadent living, no more cramped hours with the pen, shut away from the sun, living entirely in the imagination, to warp the outlook! How glad he was he had risked all in buying the Bad Lands!
When the thistles came up again the gleaming winged tines once more rustled through the earth, crossing their previous course. Underground they severed stalk from root, leaving behind a mould to feel which he must dismount again and again to hold in the hand, letting it fall through his fingers lightly, a lovely mould, the ‘marther’ by which all things came to being. That was Matt’s word—he supposed it came from ‘mother’. The Steep was no longer a thistly old sod: it was reborn, it was alive, it was fertile.
The Phoenix Generation Page 35
