The medium, her eyes still closed, continued with occasional shrill overtones.
“I see a comely young woman looking out over water. There are white houses at the edge of the sea. The sky is blue, but the waves look agitated. There has been a tempest, the sirocco has been blowing from North Africa to Italy … I see a mirage.” She stopped and sighed, bent her head, wiped her eyes with a small handkerchief. Drew a long breath, respired as slowly, went on in a tired voice,
“Paper boats, paper boats—rather than weep away the hours I see you sailing paper boats under the leaf-shadows of the Glen —you have come back, your hair is matted with salt water—you are forever seeking her whom you called Miranda.”
Molly Bucentaur’s fingers moved to cover her daughter’s hand, while the medium uttered a sound between sigh and groan, her hand passing several times over her face.
“I see a letter—it is being written by the woman who was standing on the shore—among the white houses—I see the words—the date is not clear but the month is July—the letter is borne on a little paper boat—the letter is the boat—it is folded—a message. The woman writes to the youth sailing paper boats, hour after hour, as he lies beside the waterfall in the Glen—she asks him why he is always talking of never enjoying moments like the past —she wonders if he has second sight—if he will shortly join his friend Plato—or does he expect her to do so soon—she signs her name—and then adds two words—Buona Notte—then in English she says, Good night.”
Plugge was staring at the tears falling down the old woman’s face. A genuine communication, he thought. Laura looked fixedly at Phillip. Her eyes narrowed. Phillip knew what she was thinking, and dreading an outburst, kept his gaze on the table. In a faint, strangled voice the medium whispered, “I see the face of Shelley—he is trying to come through—he is struggling in water —he is trying to speak to the young woman across water, on the sea-shore, by the white houses.” The medium spread her hands, moved them as though helplessly. “He is replying from another world—
“Ariel to Miranda: hear
This good-night the sea-winds bear;
And let thine unacquainted ear
Take grief for their interpreter.
Good-night; I have risen so high
Into slumber’s rarity,
Not a dream can beat its feather
Through the unsustaining ether.
Let the sea-winds make avouch
How thunder summoned me to couch,
Tempest curtained me about
And turned the sun with his own hand out:
And though I toss upon my bed
My dream is not disquieted;
Nay, deep I sleep upon the deep,
And my eyes are wet, but I do not weep;
And I fell to sleep so suddenly
That my lips are moist yet—could’st thou see—
With the good-night draught I have drunk to thee.
Thou can’st not wipe them; for it was Death
Damped my lips that have dried my breath.
A little while—it is not long—
The salt shall dry on them like the song …”
The medium appeared to be fighting for breath. In a choking voice, thin and strained, she went on,
“Now know’st thou, that voice desolate
Mourning ruined joy’s estate
Reached thee through a closing gate.”
The voice became shrill.
“‘Go’st thou to Plato?’ Ah, girl no!
It is to Pluto that I go.”
“A most moving performance,” said ‘Buster’ to Archie Plugge, while they were having drinks at The Eyrie.
“I was most impressed, sir.”
“Bloody rubbish, if you ask me!” declared Brigadier Tarr.
Laura, who had been unusually silent after the séance, now turned to vent on Phillip her suppressed feelings.
“You wrote that poem! You emotional blackmailer! Playing now on that schoolgirl’s feelings! You fixed it all to deceive that poor old woman!”
“No,” said ‘Buster’. “The poem came by water. A drowned paper boat. Piston showed it to me some time ago. I must add that I did wonder if it were a practical joke on someone’s part to copy out Francis Thompson’s poem, and sail it down the Lyn. It was almost illegible, the writing, but I managed to decipher it for her. She really believes it was put there by Shelley’s ghost. Don’t disillusion her. She lives almost entirely on a spiritual plane, as did Phillip’s lady Aunt. The material means—what are they after all? The actor—is he only pretending? The painter with his box of colours, and jar of brushes, is part of the evolutionary impulse to create beauty out of what—chaos?—spiritual forces? They are of the unseen world all about us. Even Osgood Nilsson, with his debunking mind and manner, is only trying to get straight, or clear, with himself. At the same time, I’m not sorry he didn’t turn up tonight.”
“Dear ‘Buster’,” said Laura. “Dear, dear ‘Buster’.” She took Phillip’s hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry, darling, truly I’m sorry.”
“We’ll all meet again for the Midsummer Festival on Old-stone Down,” said Buster as the guests departed later that night.
The following week Osgood Nilsson told the story, with trimmings, in the Zymes Club, including in his account how Molly Bucentaur had to take her weeping daughter away from the Piston séance. A dark horse, indeed yes, Phillip Maddison he said, beaming blandly, his mouth loose and wet with the present amiabilities of whisky. He went on to recount all his wife had told him concerning Phillip: his seducing his fifteen-year-old cousin when he returned from running away during the battle of Messines in 1914; trying to join the Navvies Battalion to avoid going back to the front; pushing his baby sister in the fire when she was sixteen months old, and going to prison after the first war for arson, after failing to convince the police that the fire was started by his best friend, and not himself. Then his admiration for Hitler, having given his wife a baby two days before he gave one to a girl-friend, and then trying to get the two registered as twins; and other stories which held the attention of the drinkers at the bar, who wondered how far he would go, being an American with apparently little knowledge of the British laws of slander and defamation.
“He’s a no-good man!” concluded Nilsson. “He’s a man of no family. His wife has the money. Look!”, and he pulled forth the photograph of the Confederate General—his talisman, his reassurance.
*
Oldstone Down between the lights of midsummer. The form of a motor-coach visible beside motorcars on heather growing beside the narrow coastal road. Far below, tidal currents of the Severn Sea were enscrollings of reflected sky. A lone gull called, spirit of blind ocean.
An all-night journey from London had brought fifty to sixty members of the Eirēnēan Society. They had left the coach and were standing upon the stone-scattered site of a prehistoric barrow.
Mrs. Piston, facing east, was holding up her arms, palms to the sky. The semi-circle of young people—with a few adults—stood behind her also holding out their arms.
“Princess Eirēnē,” intoned the old woman, “we, your sisters and brothers greet you. We ask for your blessing for our prayers—to help restore to the world the spiritual values you taught us here below. We believe that the true basis of life in the visible world lies within the unseen forces all about us.”
“Amen” intoned the semi-circle of aspirants.
At that moment, across the Severn Sea, a scintillant white flame shot up into darkness from the direction of the Welsh Mountains. Its reflection dilated upon the clouds.
*
Unseen by the watchers on Oldstone Down, showers of sparks were raining down on cobbled streets and slate roofs of mining cottages. These people lived in a world of fire from the Bessemer Steel converters. Balanced on iron trunnions, high above but well apart from the rows of cottages, the great iron “eggs” had been slowly inverted, to pour molten steel, in dazzling streams, into ingot moulds below. Each squ
are mould effervesced in a white rain of ferric oxide—the metal burning away to hissing points, and to specks of bluish light. The oxygen was released, and the main molten mass still within the converters, now fully inverted, poured down with a great roaring noise and the tongue of that fire, seen across the sea, cast its light upon the mountains.
*
“They’re blowing the vessels,” said Piston.
“Let us keep our inward eyes upon the heavens,” said his mother. “There are young stars in the halo of the Milky Way above us of unmatched brilliance, could we but see them with mortal eyes. They are the Blue Galaxies, evidence of a cataclysmic universe which pulsates in a finite, closed system. The first light waves caused by the explosion have stretched through a trillion light-years—”
“Now let us stand ‘all Danëe to the stars’, in the words of the poet Tennyson. Let us, by breathing deeply, float from our bodies, and absorb the power of the Great Spirit flowing from our hands. Thus we receive the Spirit of Life.”
The old woman’s arms began to shake. Piston and another moved to support her. One on either side, they lowered her upon a mat.
“She’s in a trance,” said Piston. “Her spirit may now be travelling to a higher sphere.”
He whispered to Phillip and Laura, “She may be seeing Jesus, whose whole being is turned to love, originating from the planet Venus. It says so in the Bible. We believe that God cannot be limited, least of all by man. William Blake was despondent, I think, when he wrote ‘all human deities reside in the human breast’.”
Phillip said, “Blake was thinking of the clerics who take the New Testament literally, instead of taking it poetically; for the potential of deity resides in the human consciousness.”
The eastern sky became a vast flock of flamingoes above a sea enscrolled in gold. Larks were rising up to sing. All life seemed happy around the barrow, for it was being renewed.
Weariness set in with the risen sun. The congregation went down the wooded valley to Lynton, where a breakfast was prepared in a café. Afterwards Laura said to Phillip.
“Do let’s go for a walk. Take me to the Burrows of ‘Cousin Willie’.”
She was thinking, If I can exorcise the ghost of ‘Cousin Willie’, and Phillip’s guilt that he was not also killed in that old war, then he may be re-born, and able to see Shelley plain—and me, as I want to be with him.
*
It is well known how atmospheric variations affect all terrestrial life which includes fish and insects. Above the moor detached clouds of cumulus were dissolving as he glanced into the blue sky, his heart lifting with the colours of moor sedge, bell heather, and yellow flowers of furze.
They left the Silver Eagle in the village, and walked beside the Lyn, where waterflies were swimming up as nymphs, to split their pellicles and rise as winged creatures into what must seem to be paradise, he said to Laura.
“Their mouths are sealed, they need neither food nor drink, their year of underwater life is over. Now all is for love, a flight into the sky in the afternoon, followed by a sunset dropping of eggs on the shining surface of the river.”
They sat down on a bank among wood violets. “Tell me about them, Phillip.” She wanted to use the scene for her book.
“Well, as the atmospheric pressure lightens, what we call a rising glass, the nymphs are hatching on the surface of the stream. The trout are rising, too, for fish with their swim-bladders are most sensitive to air pressures. In close thundery air, which affects you and me, trout lie torpid, as though suffering, on the bed of a river. When the air clears, up rise nymphs of Olive Dun and Pale Watery; and whether one is a fisherman or not, one shares in the general lifting of the air, for the pressures upon the body always effect the mind.”
He went on to tell her how larks arise, the chaffinch sings in the hawthorn, turtle doves send their throbbing notes under the trees. “Oh, my heart lifts with the sun, and the vapours, actual and psychical, are gone! And suddenly what Jefferies described as ‘the blue-stained air’ is without flaw. What’s the matter, Laura?”
She was looking around, as though expecting to see someone looking at her.
“It’s so gloomy and out of the sun here. Take me to the sea, to the sands! I love the sea, even if it did drown ‘Cousin Willie’! That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Why can’t you emulate Jesus, and let the dead bury the dead. Or are you the more dead, because you’re still alive?”
She got up and walked back along the path they had followed. Bodger whined, and looked at Phillip. “Let her go.” But she came back, all gentleness, saying “I’m sorry,” to be greeted by Bodger rolling on his back.
“We go at once to the Santon Burrows.”
Bodger pranced, and led the way to the Silver Eagle.
They drove inland, to avoid the main roads and holiday traffic, and were soon lost in a maze of narrow sunken lanes which led past farmhouses and cots of slate or thatch; and driving by the sun, which was high in the south, came at last to what had been, before the war, a little moor of furze and heather, but now was all cornland or grass. And after some turning and reversing, came suddenly to a view of river estuary widening to a miniature Arabian desert, and the sea beside a long dark-blue headland. The headland, he told her, was called Hercules Promontory by the Romans, who knew the power of ocean waves rolling wooden galleys to wreckage upon the bouldered shores and pinnacle’d rocks of its twelve-mile ‘arm’.
And there, this side of Hercules Promontory, lay the Atlantic, open to far Labrador. They breathed the sea-air, stood absorbing the azure of ocean fuzed with the sky.
And turning south, saw the hills of Dartmoor, a darker blue rising under the sky forty miles distant as the falcon glides.
“In my young days, three of us walked from the South Coast across Dartmoor to the fishing village over there, built round that conical hill. That’s Appledore, where the salmon fishermen live. It was a haunt of mine in pre-war days, with Piers Tofield and his first wife. Do you see the dark ridge, half-covered by the tide, in the estuary, by the lighthouse? It’s called the Shrarshook, after a sailor who was washed off it and drowned, called Charles Hook.”
“God! Can’t you get away from death?” she cried, and ran down the hill.
*
How still it was, how vacant now upon the hill. A wood lark singing somewhere on a stone wall below. Afar the slow murmur of the sea.
When she did not return, he walked on with his dog, making for the Burrows, or what was left of them. For during the war the churning tracks of American tanks, practicing for the invasion of Europe, had done some damage there.
East of the Burrows lay the Pans, an area holding brackish water where grew the first vegetation of the land proper. Worthless to the farmer, the Pans remained in their primeval state. Here were mosses, rushes, the pink bog-pimpernel, and the dwarf willow … onwards to a no-man’s-land where every species of wildflower known to grow in England had its home.
A haunted land for Phillip: here had walked Willie with Mary Ogilvie, in that tragic summer before his death; here, too, had followed himself with the ghost of Willie between him and Lucy Copleston—days long past, recalled with sudden stillness of the heart, for that they were of Time lost, yet waiting to be brought back from ancient sunlight—
Now before him lay slopes of sand, wreckage of former hillocks once crested with marram grasses like great, green-quilled porcupines; but here military manoeuvres with live shell and other explosives had taken place on and through what, in 1940, had been wired, mined, tank-trapped and set with poles against enemy airborne landings.
And yet, how trivial it all had been, when seen against the eternal war of the elements! Sand originally of rock and sea-shell smashed by sea-wave, harried by air when washed upon the land, to be dried in summer and sent spinning in vacuous ropes by the screaming gales of ocean. How are the mighty fallen! Vast rocks from the Promontory of Hercules himself, rolled by tides along the foreland until they rested awhile as smooth pebbles; but
always trituration by wind and wave, from quarrels by Fire and Water, brother ousting sister upon the faces of land and sea—until the bastion rocks were no more than dry skeins of sand faintly hissing, piling drift on drift until the hills were formed, and bound by marram grasses.
Phillip dropped down, to lie on his back, face to the sun, feeling himself slowly to be consuming within.
*
Laura crossed one valley after another amidst the rust and bleach of army litter until she felt to be lost. Above her arose a pyramid of sand which appeared to have escaped disintegration. Up she struggled, to look around from on high, with views of the sea whose cool airs were drifting past. No sight of Phillip. She sat down, she tried to think what she could do. Thought, or rumination, led to incipient turmoil, so she ran down the northern slope amidst the bleached bones of rabbits and a large kind of snail-shell, perhaps one brought by the Romans?
My feet are purring in the hot sand, and is it fancy, do I hear a rising and falling music—? Is it the hot grains of sand slipping down, their sounds multiplied—Is it really music—the music of this magic place? The glare of the sand is eye-tightening under the sun; but a sun in declension, alas, for soon it will move out of Leo into Virgo, which for all the good this relationship is might as well be me.
I am alone in a hollow where four plants of the Great Sea Stock grow. And over there is a Sea Holly, whose spiny leaves are as formidible to my naked foot as they are beautiful. Glaucus may be the word to describe their hue. If it is a wrong word I do not care, I do not bother about words while I am in this still and hanging air. And, O Great Pan, there is a strange, remote music!
She listened, and a line of poetry came to mind—her own line—the dunes were dulcimers—
Is Ariel come again? Those eyes of melting blue, the gentle lips of Phillip, why do I still whisper the name Prospero? This dull ache within—But all life is a dream. There it is again—one note seeming to descend an octave before rising again into the sky.
The Gale of the World Page 28
