The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  So, Molly thought, Phillip was to Anda a sort of foster-father … until the girl’s return from Shep Cot that afternoon, and her announced intention of helping Phillip with his magazine and other literary work in a full-time job when she had left school.

  “I don’t want to go to University.”

  “Yes darling, I know how you feel. But at Oxford you will get a wide grounding on all sorts of authors.”

  “I’m getting that already, Mother.”

  “Darling, your father might not care for the idea of a young girl alone in a remote cottage, even with cousin Phillip.”

  “It’s nothing to do with him.”

  “He is your legal guardian, as well as your father.”

  “He seldom sees me, he’s probably forgotten my existence.”

  “He’s very fond of you, darling.”

  “Then he should let me do what I want to do.”

  “He expects you to go to Oxford, you know.”

  “Well, if I must go, why can’t Cousin Phillip live in a village not too far outside Oxford? Then I’ll be able to bicycle there and help with reading contributions, and also see that he gets proper food.”

  “You and Cousin Phillip have talked it over, I presume?”

  “He doesn’t know about it yet. It’s only my idea.”

  Molly was relieved. “What will Laura say to that, darling?’’

  “Laura is selfish, she can’t help it I know, but she’s no good for Cousin Phillip. It isn’t fair, the way she behaves towards him. Oh, I know she needs constant reassurance herself, owing to an emotionally upset early life. So does Cousin Phillip, in another way. But not Laura’s way. Those two are impossible together. She can’t help sleeping with one man after another, and what good does it do her? It doesn’t fill the gap of basic loneliness.”

  Molly tried again. “You should be a writer, with your penetration and sympathy.”

  “That is what Cousin Phillip says, Mother dear. He is a master, why can’t I be his pupil?”

  *

  Towards midnight, when the party at The Eyrie was going well with distillation of grain, grape and grape-skin, and juniper berry, ‘Buster’ turned his searchlight into the trees of the wood growing steeply down to the rocks creamy with the surge of tidal waves. Smoke had been straying to the terrace, and ‘Buster’s’ idea was to try and attract some of the witches of the coven known to be holding their first revel there since the end of the war.

  “They build a fire, throw off their clothes and dance around it, going through all kinds of mumbojumbo,” he said.

  “But darling Hugh, wouldn’t that be a bit outré? I mean, to expose them in your searchlight?”

  “My dear Molly, I don’t mean in the way of being a peeping Tom. But light attracts, and a fixed beam might bring them up to the terrace. I really would like to meet them. There’s a sense of delightful other-worldliness about it all. This is no Saturnalia, since the naked body in gymnastic action sets free the horrific convolutions of the mind. On second thoughts I’m not so sure that Mornington would approve. He is a respecter of women—a respect derived from a holy fear of the young female, and an equally unholy fear of what he calls old faggots. What do you think, Laura?”

  “I’m nearly an old faggot myself—here goes my last chance!”, cried Laura, throwing off her clothes while uttering the high, sharp screams of a vixen calling a dog-fox.

  Miranda was about to follow her, but Molly restrained her daughter.

  “Why not, Mummie? Blake said that ‘Everything that lives is holy’.”

  “I don’t want you to catch a chill, darling. Also, some things are not always so holy as others.”

  “Well said!“cried Riversmill.

  Laura went down among the trees, to introduce herself to the witches and wizards (of the evening) carrying out coven rites by their fire.

  Mornington helped ‘Buster’ to bring boxes of magnesium flares for his master to touch-off among the shrubs and bushes of the garden, and on the terrace in front of the house. Laura came up through the woods and concealed herself behind a cypress tree on the terrace, to watch Phillip and Miranda, who were visible standing side by side in green-powdery light among slanting shadows.

  Unknown to Laura, Kedd had been watching the revellers in the wood below the house; but on seeing the naked girl arrive, his stew of feelings had been directed to her. He had followed her nearly to the terrace, and behind a tree was awaiting an opportunity to expose himself before her with onanistic fascination.

  Standing still, Laura could just hear what Phillip and Miranda were saying.

  “Life is so beautiful when I am with you, Cousin Phillip.”

  “I feel the same, Miranda.”

  “Do I make you feel happy?”

  “Your presence, yes. I feel we can be tremendous friends—we are both what is called spiritually based.”

  “It’s such a lovely world when there are people in it like you, Cousin Phillip. You will begin to write again soon, won’t you? I wish I could leave school this term. I’m wasting my time there. I no longer want to go up to Oxford.”

  “Oh, Oxford will be great fun. It will remain with you and affirm you all your life.”

  “Do you sometimes feel that life is a dream?”

  “Many people have felt that, Miranda. The great poets and artists not only feel that, but they are that.”

  “You are so sweet! And after all you’ve been through, you’re never bitter. ‘Buster’ says when the commandos shot you on your farm, and he was sent to apologize to you in hospital, you were simply terrific, saying it was all your fault because on the Western Front no one in khaki ever fired at you and so you didn’t know any better! Did you really feel like that?”

  “At first I was in a rage, and did know better than to walk into their fire. Probably a little bit suicidal, too.”

  “You won’t let yourself ever feel like that again, will you? I won’t let you,” and she took his arm.

  Not far away a second man was concealed behind a tree. He, too, was watching Laura. When he moved, a twig cracked; and Miranda looked towards the noise without moving her head. She whispered to Phillip, “It’s Brigadier Tarr. Mummy says he leaps on anyone. I hate him because he calls you ‘the fasciste!’ He thinks women are only waiting to go off with him.”

  From the terrace came the shrill scream of a vixen. At once the sturdy figure of the Brigadier moved uphill. They watched while he walked, crouching a little, towards the cypress tree. They heard him saying, “Your dog-fox is ready at stand, pretty girl.” There was a white movement of withdrawal before a multi-shadow’d figure with arms held before it like a Japanese wrestler in position for karate blow. Gravel rasped as it shifted position to bar escape.

  They heard the Brig’s voice saying, “Come on, no more bitchiness darling” as the Brig went up to Laura, intending to put an arm round her waist and the other hand ready to grope.

  The hand was seized, twisted, jerked: Brigadier Tarr was falling, bottom uppermost, over Laura’s shoulder, and then she was gone among the trees, where a voice yelled, “I see’d ’ee! Sodom and Gomorra lot, all of ’ee be! Yew wait, midears, you’ll zee what be comin’ tew ee!”

  “Sounded like poor old Kedd” said Phillip.

  Now some younger members of the party, having thrown off all but basic garments, began to whoop and leap around the apparition of the Wissilcraft turning cartwheels before resting, like a female Nijinski, pallid and self-possesed, against the trunk of a tree. After this exhibition Molly and ‘Buster’ claimed Miranda, so Phillip wandered off alone through the wavering light of flares rising, hovering, floating down under little parachutes upon Noman’s land from wan dusk to gangrenous dawn, the great livid wound of the Western Front lying across Europe from North Sea to the Alps.

  In the magnesium lights on the terrace, Laura’s lips were livid under eyes that were blue Valkyrie glints.

  “What is Miranda to you?”

  “A good friend.”

&n
bsp; “Have you had her?”

  “Do you ever think of anything else?”

  “No!”

  *

  The old Western Front was pale under the same moon. Were there now foxes in the country about the Somme river? Trees grown high again to cluster together as woods above the Ancre stream, haunt of wildfowl which had never heeded the flashes of guns in the valley below Thiepval and the Schwaben redoubt.

  *

  Now only the moon. The last flare had spluttered to a dull blob, the searchlight swept its last inquiring look at the racing tides of Severn Sea. Coven gone, vixen too, it seemed. Tiny flashes of lighthouse along Welsh coast, stars cold. Then his hand was taken and there beside him on the terrace was Laura, clothed, the others inside drinking tea to take away taste and clug of grain alcohol.

  “Oh Phillip, never leave me. Please never leave me,” as he sheltered her with his arms. “I am so afraid—like you.”

  “I am not afraid when you are yourself.”

  “But how can you love me?”

  “We are really brother and sister.”

  She drew away. “Damn that! Is there anything between you and Miranda? Is there?”

  “Kinship of ideas—that is all.”

  “Yes, it is all.” She sighed. “Phillip, please tell me truthfully—Do I inhibit you? I know my manner does some people.”

  “It’s not you Laura, it’s I who am inhibited—or inhabited.”

  “Inhabited by the ‘enlarged and numerous senses’ which William Blake said were the requisite of the poet.”

  “Or, as Conrad wrote ironically of such gifts in Turgenev, ‘There’s enough to ruin any man’.”

  “But ruin is the basis and material of art.”

  “It’s the past that makes us. If we are kind to the past, we get clear of our prejudices and fears, I think. You must write, Laura. So must I.”

  “We’ll always be ‘with’ one another, as we are now, won’t we? Even though our bodies don’t ‘fit’?” She clung to him. “I love you when I don’t feel sexy.”

  “‘Love has its tidal moments, lapses and flows due to a metrical rule of the interior heart’. Francis Thompson quotes that, of Alice Meynell, in his tremendous essay on Shelley.”

  “Phillip, I now realise that the poem you sent me was prophetic of my own death in the sea. As I wrote to you, I will die with you, but I cannot live with you. And that poem was so beautiful—

  ‘Ariel to Miranda:– hear

  This good-night the sea-winds bear;

  And let thine unacquainted ear

  Take grief for their interpreter’—No, don’t talk, Phillip. Let me finish. I think drowning is the best death. It’s the cleanest, and it’s over soon, and no-one sees your body. I have a horror of that; I mean, lying on some slab, when it isn’t you any more. But I don’t want to die now. I am so happy! I feel, at last, that I am on Prospero’s isle, and I am your Ariel. Let’s go to Corfu, and write there! Come and ask Molly about it, she’s been to Corfu.”

  “Before the first war a woman would have said, ‘Please take me in’. But the revolution started when women began to work in munition factories, then to clip tram tickets. I remember—”

  Laura’s eyes widened. “You know what you can do with your old tram-tickets! God, you old sweats are either all nostalgia or all cock, like Brigadier Tarbaby!”

  Dreading a scene, he said, “Let’s find out about Corfu. Molly will be able to tell us.”

  He took her arm, they went in together. Just inside the room the Brig was giving advice to Molly. “You want to keep an eye on Miranda,” Phillip heard him saying. And Molly’s reply,

  “I don’t understand you, Brig.”

  “You know what the Americans say, don’t you?”

  “They say a lot of things, no doubt.”

  “They say, ‘When you’re big enough you’re old enough, and when you’re old enough you’re big enough’.”

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  “The fasciste is trying to seduce your decoy.”

  “My decoy?” she replied, distinctly.

  “Come, don’t beat about the bush. You visit him don’t you? And send your girl over—”

  Molly said slowly, “Which character is it in one of Oscar Wilde’s plays who says, ‘Never ascribe to your neighbour motives meaner than your own’?” She turned her back on the Brig and said to Laura, “Did I hear the word ‘Corfu’? I spent my honeymoon with Peregrine there. The very place for writers. Truly a magic isle, my dear. One can live there very cheaply.” She put an arm through Phillip’s, the other through Laura’s, and led them to the terrace. “Take your Ariel to Shakespeare’s ‘magic isle’ dearest Phillip. One can go quite cheaply by tramp steamer, and see the dolphins that Byron watched from his yacht.”

  “Two tramps on a tramp, what?” said the Brig, who still stuck to them.

  “Oo-er, I do believe you’ve been listening to the Light Programme of the B.B.C., Brigadier Caliban!” said a mock-demure Laura.

  *

  Phillip’s room was next to Laura’s. Hardly had he arranged the pillow, having switched off the light, when Laura hopped into his bed. There followed a new experience for him: some sort of hobby-horse release of the neurotic or erotic female imagination achieved—to her apparent satisfaction but not to his—after which he lay awake wondering if the rôles of male and female, due to some evolutionary switch, were about to be restored to their original status. Was it unknown in law for a woman to rape a man, to use him as a vehicle of onanism, before discarding him, and incidentally pinching all the bedclothes?

  He shook with silent laughter, while faint little snores came regularly from Laura. He punched her gently in the back. When she sat up he hauled some of the blankets to his side of the bed; but with a turning cocoon movement she managed to draw to herself even the strip of sheet and corner of eiderdown he had held on to before.

  He got off the bed and looked out of the window. An owl, one feather upstanding over each eye, uttered a single note from a tree outside. It called again, Who.

  “Me,” said Phillip.

  “Who’re you talking to?”

  “A long-eared owl, almost a rare bird. I thought you were asleep.”

  “What, after you’ve rolled me into a Swiss roll?”

  “You cocoon’d yourself.”

  “You forced me to, otherwise I’d’ve lain here starko.”

  “That wouldn’t have been an entirely new experience.”

  “You talk like one of your old tram-tickets.”

  From below the window came the high triple bark-scream of a vixen. Life half-ripped across. At once Laura was beside him.

  “Poor darling,” she whispered. “I hope he’ll be kind to her.”

  They got back into bed. He held her, and while stroking the back of her head, there came the remote clang of a dustbin. “That’s the dog-fox,” he said. “The town foxes are a different lot from those on the moor. They live out of dustbins. He’ll bring her bacon rind, or a mouldy chop bone.”

  They remade the bed and snuggled up for warmth. “Go to sleep, you’re tired. You need a long rest.”

  Someone was blowing a hunting horn out of a window. “It’s the Brig, Phillip. He blows it sometimes when we’re gliding. He’s so happy in the air.”

  They lay still, nearer to being real friends after the shared fun of the night. But lay not at peace. Shortly Laura left him to visit ‘Buster’ down the passage, a night-light burning by the bedhead; little boy lost—to whom all tenderness—

  On the bedroom wall hung a portrait in oils of his father, Major Manfred: a youth in the ‘maternity jacket’ of the Royal Flying Corps, a khaki jacket fastened at the neck by invisible button, then diagonally to the waist. Across the left breast his ‘gongs’—including the Victoria Cross. On another wall, most dim in the little candle-gleam, a portrait of ‘Buster’s’ grandfather, the canvas torn where the lead pellets of a 12-bore gun, fired by Manfred, had passed through it.

>   “Laura,” said ‘Buster’, “we really must start work on my unhappy father’s biography. Come New Year’s Day, which is in two months’ time, he will have been drowned in the North Atlantic, on a Great Circle course, twenty three years ago. A strange man. While the history of the Peerage is full of odds and sods, I think he must be the only one who fired a twelve-bore Purdey gun at the portrait of his dead father.” He reflected, while she gently caressed his forehead with little kisses. “Indeed he was a strange man. After the Treaty of Versailles he took the sins of the British upon himself, particularly the lies of that upstart Mr. George, the Prime Minister who can be excused, in part perhaps, because he had no idea of manners. Be it as it may, my father returned his ‘gongs’ to the War House, and later virtually committed suicide by attempting to fly from New York to Cornwall, where we lived then, in a monoplane with one engine. Years later a bottle was washed up on the Cornish coast, near Lyonesse, with his last letter to me. I’ve got both bottle and letter in the bookcase in my study. Remind me to show them to you, will you?”

  From Laura came a little snore. Then others. Gently he took her in his arms, she turned over and settled to sleep; while he lay still and desolate as Phillip in another room.

  Chapter 14

  WINTER ON THE MOOR

  The long journey eastwards across Exmoor in the Silver Eagle, Laura wearing Phillip’s black leather flying-coat, helmet, goggles, fur gloves, plaid rug around knees. Windscreen down against frost patterns on glass. Through Taunton and the winding road to Wincanton; on to Wiltshire and the Great Plain at a modest, a steady forty miles and hour … then the crisis, Laura, silent for miles, suddenly screaming, trying to throw herself out. Whimper of worn tyres, car slewing, sliding to standstill. Engine switched off. Silence. Flask of hot coffee refused. Likewise luncheon at Mere. Thence mute to London, drab traffic on Great West Road, second-gear crawl amidst fog-thickened diesel fumes. Fanless radiator boiling. At last Old Compton Street, the silent packing of tinplate perforated names and addresses of subscribers; card indexes; piles of Mss. and stamped, addressed envelopes. Returning down the stairs, Phillip to Barbarian Club.