“Lying down in their rooms my lord, resting.”
“I’ll wait for them to come down. Do go out and see the sights, if you care to.”
“I thought of going to see the amateurs in the Town Hall, my lord. I had a season with the D’Oyly Carte company at the Savoy, in the old days. It will be interesting to see what the locals make of it. I understand the orchestra consists of one piano, one drum, one fiddle, and what looks to be what Thomas Hardy called a serpent, borrowed from the local museum.”
“We may join you later.”
“If I may say so, as a spectacle it should have its moments, my lord.”
‘Buster’ put the bottle back in the cupboard, and went on the terrace, to look up at the sky like the breast-feathers of a slain flamingo. “He hath outsoar’d the shadow of our night” he said to himself imagining Shelley writing his threnody Adonais on the death of Keats. Buona Notte: Francis Thompson conjuring up from the vasty deep the dying voice of Shelley. But what written tribute have I paid to you, my father?
‘Buster’ was still sitting by the cypress tree on the terrace when he felt an electric chill passing down his neck to his spine. He touched the stone coping of the terrace, it was still warm. No leaves moved on the trees. He wetted a finger, held it up to determine the direction of any moving air. A normal slight loss of temperature all round the finger. No wandering night breeze. The air over land had the same temperature as that over the sea.
The spinal shiver was as though lifting the short hairs above the neck. Was that someone standing in front of him, a dim etching of Byron? My father, he thought, my father: the portrait by Orpen shows you to be on the small side, with Byronic shape of head, and something of Robert Burns in your face. O God, I wish I could remember my father. It all went from me when I bought that packet in the Reichswald …
‘Buster’ breathed deeply, respiring as slowly, to control emotion, to keep his mind calm as he went inside to switch on the B.B.C. news and weather report.
“A ridge of high pressure remains stationary over the North Atlantic east of the Azores, extending across Europe, and is likely to maintain itself for the next forty-eight hours …”
The image of his father persisted. He tried to rationalize the idea of the essence of personal survival. There was Hoyle and his theory of a self-regenerating universe; even a falling raindrop created electrical energy by friction: an ion of life which might help to create a portion of flower or flesh.
According to Caspar, the electric encephalograph could record the brain’s pulses and recessions of energy; the mind was part of the physical tides of the salt, estranging sea. The instrument revealed harmony, dissonance, repulsion. The mind’s despair when a deep-seated nervous inhibition was approached was indicated in a zigzagging graph, of cerebral cells grinding through temporary obfuscated memory; brain-cells in disconnection through fatigue following stress. The extremity of despair bordered on insanity: settled despair due to chronic lovelessness; stalagmites hanging upon the sick mind, with its four miles of veins erratically carrying turbid blood to the millions of cells … an entire universe in miniature was built-in with every wretched little animal created on the planet, to be held together only by love—Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
What a way to die! The stricken Mahler, warned of imminent death, sitting down to compose his swan-song—the lyrical joy of nature, the enduring love of Earth Mother! Mahler went out, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but in high faith and gratitude!
The icy feeling returned behind his neck: the psychic shiver. Had Father come to him, from the salt estranging sea? A falcon, each flight feather set with barbs, barbules, and barbicells, could find its way by feeling across hundreds of miles of alien land and sea and land, drawn in spirit by love to its native eyrie, its home, its base of life. My father and I are one, he said to himself, and going to the gramophone, put on Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, and sat in his armchair, eyes closed; imagining the composer to be making his adieux to the golden threads of his life, calling up the spirit of Wagner among them. He sat still while the record ran off the last grooves and getting up, tears dripped from his closed eyes. I must rescue Hess, old flier on the Western Front, and your friend, Father.
*
Peter paddling in his canoe around the small harbour, taking first Jonny then David as crew. When they had learned balance, not to shift their weight, Phillip let them go by themselves; but only when the tide was coming in. “You have a go, Dad” said Peter.
So Phillip went out by himself, sending joyfully the light canvas-and wood craft through the water with alternate thrusts of a two-bladed paddle.
Why hadn’t he returned to the sun before?
The sea lay azure smooth under solar brilliance. Upon the high moor cotton-grass was in flower, as though in pattern with the cirrus cloudlets remaining unmoving in the height of the sky. Lucy was happier than she had been for years. She was living as in the summers of peace she had known when she was a girl, and in the early years of her marriage to Phillip. Dear Phillip, he had done splendidly for them all.
Of the children, Jonathan was particularly happy. His father had given him for his birthday his 7-foot, 2-ounce fly-rod, with a box of dry flies—Blue Olive, Palmer, Red Spinner, and other whisked-and-feather-winged Beauties, as Jonathan thought, gloating over them when he was not making his way up the Lyn, to cast horizontally and thus to avoid branches overhead, and to drop his fly lightly on run or eddy, watching that the fly did not drag on the enamelled silk line greased so that it should float. Fishing with dry fly in rapid, gloomy water needed a quick eye and wrist, for the Lyn, like all rivers large or small, flowing fast or gliding through level lands, was a confluence of many currents moving at varying speeds.
A fly floating with wings cocked aided by a delicate touch of grease, must resemble a living fly tremulous after a noon surface hatching, following its swim up as a nymph and now riding down upon the water-flow in a new and strange element of air. Let the line but drag its fly askew, even under water, and no trout would remain within its subaqueous stance, but dart downstream as from menace. And so with the adult fly in early evening—its life-span being but one day—when dropping her eggs just clear of the surface—the angler, with his tapered gut cast, must send her likeness to drop lightly, as though spent after love—when snap! the fish has leapt to take the lure.
Jonathan cast his fly so that it touched the surface, and rode down rocking lightly on the midstream current of his choice; or perhaps he cast over to the farther bank, holding high the rod point against drag … staring cat-like, he saw a dark neb appear momentarily in no more than a petty rocking of water under the shadow-dark Glen … with a wrist-flick he drove home the hook, to wind-in swiftly to keep the pull on his line steady. The trout dashed downstream, the boy let-out line to be carried swiftly in a loop below the fish, which, feeling the pull from behind, went upstream. Now to reel-in the slack, keeping gentle pressure by the curved split-cane, and it was wound in, the net slipped forward from behind, as Dad had told him, and there was his first trout!
“Mother, I’ve caught my first trout! Look, it pulls down to that notch just below the quarter-pound—to five ounces!” Jonathan held it up on the spring balance. “Put it on a plate in the larder at once, before a fly smells it. The box larder under the caravan I mean, where no flies can get in through the gauze. Cor, I what-you-call like this place! I’ll get some more for supper!”
Jonathan caught four more on that fly, and proudly gave them to Lucy.
That evening Lucy had a caller, announcing herself as a friend of Phillip. “I’m Rosalie, the wife of Osgood Nilsson. How happy you all look! Is that your little girl by the stream? She won’t fall in and be swept away, will she?”
“I don’t think so,” replied Lucy, colouring. “Jonathan has tethered her to a peg in the ground.”
“I can’t see any rope.”
“Oh, it’s green nylon cord, one can’t see it very clearly. It’s well short o
f the river bank.”
“What a good idea, my dear. Do you ever go down bathing on the beach?”
“It’s a little difficult, with the steep hill. My little car won’t take it, I’m afraid.”
“I’d be only too pleased to take you down, Lucy. May I call you Lucy? I’m afraid I can never be formal for more than a minute! Yes, do let me take you down, my dear—”
Lucy and the children (with Melissa, who had walked down) spent the following afternoon on the grey bouldered beach of Lynmouth. They looked in on Elizabeth, who seemed surprised that anyone should want to see her. She kept looking at Sarah, and was delighted when the child wanted to climb on her lap, attracted by a cameo brooch on her blouse—one of Dora’s Victorian relics. Once upon the lap, the baby wanted the brooch.
“So that’s what you came for, is it?” said Elizabeth, the softness gone from her voice.
“All children are acquisitive—and inquisitive,” said Lucy. “You should have seen Rosamund when she was that age.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Elizabeth, looking dejected. She wanted to be liked for herself.
The boys played with the little dogs. “May we take them for a walk, Aunt Elizabeth?”
Again, hesitation: they wanted the dogs, not her.
“Won’t you join us on the beach?” Lucy suggested.
At the end of an afternoon in the sun, by a gentle sea, Elizabeth felt herself to be happy again. How foolish she had been to think she might fall down in a fit if Phillip came near: that he had been telling people all about her past life! What nice children they were, so well-mannered, addressing her as Aunt Elizabeth and talking as though they had known her all their lives.
And what a pleasant young woman Melissa was! She took such interest in her little dogs, asking how they had been fed during the war, if she exhibited them, and where. Happy in sunshine, Elizabeth felt that if Phillip appeared suddenly, she wouldn’t mind in the least. Phillip, when he wanted to, could be a pleasant companion. However, he didn’t turn up, and in a way Elizabeth felt slight disappointment.
“Come home, all of you, to my cottage and have tea! We can buy some cakes on the way!” Fortunately there were sugar’d buns, with currants, too, in the shop, although both these things were still rationed Lucy had a pot of honey, one of several dozen she had brought from the farm, and with margarine, the split buns tasted delicious.
After tea the closet was an object of speculation between David and Jonathan, as to where the contents in the pan went when you pulled the plug.
“I reckon it goes straight into the river, with all those old motor-tyres, pots and pans and criggely old bikes. It’s polluted, like Dad’s river was, on the farm! So you oughtn’t to try for sea-trout,” declared David.
“Why should anyone want to pollute the river when there’s a sewer pipe set in concrete going right down to the sea the other side of the Rhenish Tower on the quay?”
“It looks very old and rusty, and may be cracked.”
“But Mr. Nilsson fishes for sea-trout, he ought to know.”
“I won’t eat any fish out of this estuary, ’bor!”
“But it’s only compost, and salt will kill any germs.”
“Not typhoid, not likely!”
The argument continued until a compromise was made. Jonathan declared he would buy a bottle of red ink, pour it into the pan, pull the plug and see if any tell-tale stain showed in the river. They borrowed some red ink from Aunt Elizabeth, pulled the plug, and running outside, peered into the rapid flow of water past the mossy boulders.
“There you are, no sign of red ink anywhere!”
“It may still be inside the pipe, so let’s follow it down and see if it comes out of any cracks.”
The pipe went into the wall of the quay, and reappeared on the beach. The tide was low, they slithered over slimy boulders.
“Ugh, it’s pretty foul,” declared David.
“It’s only algae, you fool!”
David cried with a laugh, “Algae met a bear. The bear met Algae. The bear had a bulge. The bulge wasn’t Algae, but crap!” He staggered about acting the clown as he leapt from one boulder to another, pretending to save himself from falling by tottering on to the rusty pipe, while screeching. “It will crack, it will crack!” Then he found an old broken umbrella amidst other village rubbish, and opening its ribs and tatters, did a balancing act on the pipe, to the amusement of children hastening down the beach to watch.
“Blast, we’re having what you call some sport!” said Jonathan. Then they were all looking up to watch two gliders passing in straight flight three thousand feet overhead to the Porlock marshes.
Later, at supper, ‘Buster’ told Melissa that Laura, with Brigadier Tarr as passenger, had reached 18,000 ft., according to the sealed barograph.
*
That evening, on the way back to the Castle, Melissa called in to say good-night to Elizabeth, who greeted her with smiles.
“How nice to see you, Melissa!” said Elizabeth. “Come and have some coffee.” Later, she said, “Why don’t you stay the night? You’d be most welcome! I’ve got a spare bedroom, if you don’t mind sleeping in the one my aunt died in, during that awful winter. She was frozen to death, you know. And Phillip never bothered to go to see her!”
Melissa listened for over an hour to the poor woman’s complaints. The condition of Elizabeth was frontally adverse: attributing motives to Phillip which were her own motives. The weight of a deep-seated insecurity was the cause of an imbalance of lovelessness. It would take some time to approach the block which had estranged her, as all growth denied under a glacier.
When Elizabeth is free, Phillip will be free, she thought as she lay in her small room, hearing the sounds of flowing water, and the wind in the trees outside the open french windows. Water and air were playing on stone and leaf and branch in the wan light of a moon fretting above high cirrus clouds. She could not sleep, she floated in a reverie of the past, seeing a lean, dark-haired Phillip with the soft voice and delicate profile of one born in full harmony with life and its creative purpose: a gracious presence which, when his unbandaged eyes had looked at her in her grandmother’s hospital for wounded officers for the first time, she had felt to be the nicest man she had ever seen. And that feeling had remained with her ever since, with what frustration and sadness only a woman, who had always longed to have children by a man she loved, would ever know.
She lit the candle by the bed-head, and read over a letter she had received that morning at Oldstone Castle. She read halfway, and paused, sighed, and read no more; but took up her diary wherein she had copied from an old book a poem which she had altered in places to fit her own thoughts.
When will my May come, that I may embrace thee:
When will the hour be of my soul’s joying?
If I may come and dwell with thee at home,
Thy shepcote shall be strowed with new green rushes;
We’ll haunt the trembling prickets as they roam
About the fields, and beechen hedges;
You have a skewbald cur to hunt the coney
So we will live and love most bonny.
But if thou wilt not pitie my complaint,
My tear, no vowes, nor oaths made to my lost Beautie:
What shall I do, but languish, faint, and die,
Since thou seeth not my teares, and my soule’s dutie;
And teares contemned, all vowes and oaths must fail
For when tears cannot, nothing can prevaile.
From subjective feelings, her mind moved to Phillip’s vision, as revealed in his books, its confluence with Birkin’s thought—both streams of thought flowing with Diaphany—the firm belief in the positive, creative evolution of man: service not in vacuo, as priests in their devotions, but an amalgam of creative science with the Christendom of tomorrow, which would fulfil and fortify Man’s deepest aspirations. Eugenics must raise the general level of intelligence to a higher empathy, or Man would meet his doom through m
alevolent application of the strayed ‘wonders’ of science.
She blew out the candle, and lay in darkness, before moving the camp-bed on to the balcony beyond the french-window. She was now over the river, listening for the undertones of the stream below. Ripple-echoes were fading out, but to return: a fast flowing succeeded by a sudden lull, an individual gushing of water, subsiding to a quietness of following streams preparing to gather strength again as though to assault that certain large boulder immediately beneath the window, to push it seawards: a hollow pause of water breaking back in bubbles on a large mid-river rock.
Or were the splashing noises made by salmon, or large sea-trout, which had come into fresh water with the tide: the slashing tail-swirls of vigorous, clove-spotted silvery fish eager for spawning in the little waters of their moorland birth?
Perhaps the origins of the water-noises were deceptive, being echoes pulsing over the surface of the stream, and combining, as nodes of musical vibrations, to a sudden loudness? Water noises were coming direct from many echoing places—from boulders, from hollows of banks, washed-down tree-roots, leaf-masses, caught up on a particular stone in the shallows?
To these night echoes within the room, she listened. The river in its broken flowings and gushings upon its bed of shillet and boulder had a rhythm or recurrence of water-pulses. Every so often the water swilled surging into some miniature bay or backwater, and made a hollow, chuckling noise; and the same pulse of the river, a temporary gathering of the many streams, sent a wave of water lapping over a part-submerged boulder, causing an equal back-wash which in daylight had sometimes looked, to the boys and herself peering over the wall of the river, like the swirl of a large square tail—the familiar tail of salmon or its cousin the sea-trout.
Noises of water on stone flowed past her, and then through her, as the short hours of darkness ebbed away. She could not sleep. Had Phillip’s Aunt Theodora listened in the same way, so that the vibrations of her feelings were recorded in the walls and ceilings of the cottage: the vibrations that were the spirit of a place, of human thoughts—the spirit of life, invisible and unheard, lying behind all movement, all friction which were of the forces of creation, of all terrestrial life?
The Gale of the World Page 34
