The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  *

  I suppose this is a breaking moment, I am leaving Shep Cot for ever. Have I really given up hope, except a black hope, a Tristan-like longing for the suns which have burned black after falling in rains of fire. A longing for Francis Thompson’s ‘after-sleeping.’ Is it mere false pride, am I destroyed by the fear which is beyond pride, which seeks a ‘noble’ condition of a forlorn necessity?

  Why do I dramatise myself? Because I have not dramatised my spiritual or true life in the service of others, by transmuting the marvellous scenes of my life, as I once intended? Good-bye, little shepherd’s cot: here the children played, here sat Miranda by the open hearth when all life seemed to float in air, to be levitated as Piston would say, all grace and sweetness come into my life, a comradeship unbelievable between Miranda and myself living with an image that I felt I could not sustain.

  *

  The rear wheels of the Silver Eagle were ploughing furrows of sloppy black peat as the vehicle slid and yawed to the crest of The Chains. There the driver found himself in a sudden calm amidst queer little clusters of flickering blue discharges: silent and magnified skeleton-winged butterflies. Keeping the engine running, he lifted his legs over the low side of the body and felt without success for matches in the pocket of his leather flying-coat.

  Bodger was curled on the floor by the pedals, shivering. The dog had shivered ever since seeing the gun put under the tonneau cover; for Bodger once had been shot at by his former master, Aaron Kedd, who owned a percussion-cap single-barrel gun firing black powder poured down the barrel, and rammed tight with paper wads before shot followed to be contained by more rammed paper.

  Seeing that Bodger was apprehensive, Phillip withdrew the gun, removed barrel from stock, and put both back under the cover; whereupon Bodger’s brown-toothed yawn signified relief.

  Man and dog walked away from the motorcar. Phillip was thinking. This must be like the electric storm in Moby Dick, masts and rigging of the ship frosted blue with St. Elmo’s Fire. And suddenly he felt release from a dull acceptance of life being finished: and had reached the tumulus, where often he had stood to look over the Atlantic, when the sky appeared to split down a jagged line of violet light; and the obscuring vapours opened to reveal an immense copper-coloured cloud towering above other clouds moving, white-cowl-like, to smudge away the halo’d sun. A secondary drove of clouds, dark and thick, with ragged edges, trailed below the white hoods—but in the opposite direction.

  These lower, darker cumulus clouds were fuming and tumbling in the skyey war between heat and cold: never could heat and cold, he thought, assimilate the other. The very efforts to come together caused friction leading to violence.

  And violent it was, that war between opposites fought that afternoon on The Chains. Forked lightning hissed continuously; air-cleaving bolts released a smell of sulphurous oxide out of rain-pools instantaneously seeming to be made to boil and cool again in one stroke. Down flailed blobs of ice, to bounce on back and head of Phillip as he held Bodger under his coat.

  After the barrage of hail came the bayonets of rain, stabbing thick and hard; but it was warm after the hail. And soon The Chains, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, was a glittering sheet of water from which a semblance of glassy thistles rose a foot high and side by side, so violent was the down-hurled rain. And the tops of the clumps of sedge-grass were linked by pale blue waving gossamers of St. Elmos Fire. Hurray! Hurray!

  I am the only human spectator on The Chains who will know all the details of this moment in time!

  The terrific purple flashes of lightning, followed by instant shocks of thunder as the nimbus clouds passed overhead at 3–400 feet: the water hissing down as upon a ragged lake: each flash lighting up the glassy thistles which are growing out of this lagoon, some nearly a foot high, to die and give place to others as the clouds shed their liquor!

  I shall record all the details which my inborn visual gift, conjoined with that of the use of words—a clumsy phrase—will bring alive before some reader of the future!

  How ironic, that I was nearly destroyed by the defects of what qualities I possess! No funeral pyre in this slashing, roaring, lightcracking battlefield night—the very elements at war among themselves, the old gods come together to thwart my cowardice, to bestow on me their gifts of courage!

  Those curious rosy lights playing about below the senior flashes of the sky-cracking purple jags: fire-balls in play, shooting up from moor grass clumps and the wilted white tuffs of the cotton grass, to die away and be succeeded by others, each pink ball about two feet in diameter, and all gentle, a rosy play of infants while the giants fling their bolts in great angry veins of electric death!

  I can go home after all this, I have a warm place to go to, I am free, this isn’t Passchendaele—there all were homeless—I am free—

  “I am free!” he shouted. “Brother Water and Sister Air! I am free with you! Never again shall I cower away from the elements, to mouch about inside a room with the death wish!”

  A cloud directly above him was changing colour from a dirty grey-green to a ghastly swirling white as it heaved like a conglomeration of enormous maggots. It had such a sinister appearance that he stood still upon the tumulus and stared up at it, a discoloured Chinese dragon: an Eskimo painter’s idea of a tropical octopus. He picked up the shivering Bodger in his arms—

  —then from one tentacle lowering upon the earth issued a stunning flash. He felt a blow on the top of his head, breaking body from legs as the earth rose up to his eyes. He thought, beyond an immense fear, that his heart was going to stop with his non-breathing against a stifling mass of horrible burning hair—

  *

  Black lashing rain was rattling on the perspex dome over the Brig’s head and upon the wings of the two-seater, which was being hurled all ways, out of control. A dark cumulo-nimbus cloud, with a black top like the head of a colossal elephant with curving trunk moved slowly up to the shuddering glider, under the perspex dome of which were two pinched-in leather-capped heads, with wan faces. Laura did not understand what her companion was saying, for he spoke through teeth dentures rattling every time he exhaled frosted breath. When he stabbed with a finger towards the ugly black cloud, and then put his hands together as for prayer, and pointed them downwards, she understood that she must dive away from it.

  Grey vapour rushing up and past caused the sailplane to judder, to bounce, to be thrown side-up and then on its tail. Hail rattled on a thick covering of ice which had enamel’d the wings to a depth of between one-and-a-half to two inches. This caused a turbulent slipstream to render the controls almost useless.

  The sailplane rose up on its tail, and fell like a sodden shoe. Laura equalised elevator and rudder, hoping to gain flying speed by diving. And while falling, she saw the perspex dome burning white. She could not see. She felt her arms on the control half-wheel to be broken. Green sparks snapped about her, and when she put a gloved hand to her face one stabbed into her chin. Another blow struck her violently in the back. Some time afterwards she was aware as from a great distance that the Brig’s head had struck her.

  Lightning had run along the radio aerial trailing from the tail to the set and blown the valves. Travelling along the aluminium wings it burst free many of the rivets holding aluminium sheets to frame; but of this she was not aware at the moment.

  The altimeter wasn’t working, it had been burned out by the lightning strike. She extended the air-brakes and put the sailplane into a steep spiralling descent; and after some time was surprised by the sound of a voice come back after her ear-drums had clicked. As they moved out of the area of ionized air, she could hear what he was saying.

  “I’m bailing out, Laura. To lighten the outfit. We’ll crack up otherwise. You’ll have a chance alone. Go down and find a break in the overcast. You’ll have control without my dead weight. Put her nose down. I’m giving orders here! Keep her as steady as you can. God bless you, darling.”

  Having managed somehow to unfasten h
is safety belt he bumped up the hood, which was flung back, allowing him to dive headfirst into obscurity, leaving Laura in an open cockpit after the hood had been torn away.

  *

  At first The Brig had fallen at about one hundred miles an hour through rain which was dropping at a little more than half his speed. He knew the danger of pulling the rip-cord: possibility of canopy tearing with extra weight of water. He turned over and over, seeing nothing beyond sudden flares of light. If only he knew the height at which he baled out. If ten thousand feet, it would take seventy two seconds to hit the deck. He began to count from ten to thirty—allowing ten seconds to have lapsed before he started counting. At thirty he opened up, not knowing that he had been dropping into a hundred-mile updraught. The fabric held; the shock caused him temporarily to lose consciousness; then he was aware of swinging wide sometimes with legs above his head, while feeling any moment he would be jerked out of his harness. He was buffeted until he felt the blows must burst the fabric of his umbrella. His face was cut by stinging hail and when above the cumulo-nimbus he was aware of an intense freezing cold.

  He began to feel sleepy, to float in a drowse of green water-meadows, he saw mayflies in sunshine rising into the air after the dance of the drakes over the reeds by the river-bank. He let his mayfly float out on the thin, undressed line, and lightly touch the wimpling surface, it floated downstream, it disappeared; he struck; a trout was on, his first trout! splashing, splashing at the edge of the water while the net was placed behind the tail and then lifted, as Daddy has shown him. And he saw himself taking the trout home to show Mother, but Mother had gone away with another man and when Daddy was killed in the tank battle at Cambrai he was alone for ever and for ever—

  *

  The body of Phillip, beside that of Bodger partly charred by lightning, lay head down on the northern slope of the tumulus. He was unconscious and snoring irregularly. In a dark cave he was listening to hear the next beat of his heart, waiting in enormous fear that he had heard the last beat and was dead.

  He lay in the dark cave of Time lost: wearing sailor suit with white skirt and no knickers underneath, pulling aside the fireguard he was forbidden to touch, with the shovel and coal in the hod, but he had to see what would happen when he pushed Mavis into the fire and she was screaming like he screamed when Daddy burned his bare bottom with the cane—bottom was a naughty word, it was really bee-tee-em.

  As he waited for his heart to beat again in fear that he was dead, unable to breathe under the earth with his ears ringing… thump! … his heart had beat again and the Carabineer in woollen balaclava helmet was digging him out of the sulphurous stench of earth while his head was ringing and black-and-white zigzag snake flickering and darting out of his left eye. The windmill across the Messines road blazed until its arms dropped to pieces into running blazing tar until it became darker and darker…

  Thump!

  His heart had beaten, he was not dead! His head was fixed to his elbow: stripe-vibrating eyes protruded from heavy skull of dazed marble, an all-red nightmare in which he was trying to drag monstrous clogged feet through mud suddenly became black-brilliant as in his roll of photographic-negative hung to dry in the dark-room at home lit by his red-lantern on a chest-of-drawers among boxes and travelling trunks.

  *

  While Phillip was lying unconscious upon the burial mound, a stag, walking stiffly after much running, was crossing The Chains, making for harbour in the Horrock valley. Antlers, body, legs were swathed in blue haze. It had been roused out of Summer House Hill that morning, and had run in a circle of thirty odd miles, several of them down stony streams, to throw off scent.

  There followed silence of tongue and horn for some hours; it got up from under the shade of a rowan tree and headed north until bewildered by lightning and drenched by rain.

  Two young hounds, entries of that season, had lost their way. They had been wandering about in the storm when the stag had appeared, an apparition surrounded by blue shimmer. They followed it docilely; and when the stag reached the raised mound and lay down they lay beside it, for comfort and warmth.

  *

  Thump!

  He was riding his 3-speed Swift bike under flares rising in darkness and lighting the way into the wailing of Strombos gas-horns. From glittering shell-holes grew the lilies of the dead. Wailing sound and hovering green-white stalks were lost in a great livid light which bubbled out of the Salient’s huge cauldron. He was floating on the light, floating above the duck-boards while the German howitzers were firing from the Gheluvelt plateau on his left. The duck-board led to Kansas Cross. If only he could get to Kansas Cross he would see Cousin Willie and the world would be saved.

  The light was growing dim, the British 18-pounders on the line of the Steenbeke were firing shrapnel with red-burning fuses passing just over his head. His bike was going down, down into the morass, dragged down by the weight of the barrage. Down, down into darkness. Was he dying?

  Thump!

  He saw Cousin Willie beside him. Willie was lifting him up, he followed Willie floating before him towards a line of larger, oval orange-slower-burning flashes which must be from the line of British six-inch howitzers wheel-to-wheel on the Menin Road.

  He could not see Willie: he could not move: he was drowning in a shell-hole, he would never see the white-dusty lanes of Kent again, he was between two great pulsings of Europe’s blood running to waste in the light-as-day flashes of four thousand guns ringing the Salient, two pulsings of light in dying Europe’s cauldron flaming to the zenith and making the slough of despond as plain as day, and yet in utter darkness because no one at home knew the truth.

  Thump!

  He was rising up from the morass, he was saved so that the truth should not be lost in death’s dateless night. Only he could write it all, for he had seen Willie plain, as Willie saw Shelley plain. He must carry Europe’s dead in his arms through the blood-weeping night.

  Thump!

  He had got through! He had reached the Town-major’s office in the Old Prison of Ypres!

  And his heart beat again, a great tongueless bell in the ruins of the Cathedral beside the Cloth Hall; and he was carrying his sister, small and burned in the fire, in his arms.

  *

  Thus the release of obsessional pictures among others filling millions of cells of one brain, messages fired electrically in normal times but now stimulated abnormally by a bolt of lightning. The brain cells were fed by more than four miles of veins containing blood; each cell a unit of intelligence, a nerve and its unit commander linked to an appropriate series of muscles, each one transmitting instructions in order to comply with demands.

  The brain an entire G.H.Q. whence messages were dispatched electrically, as over a telephone system, to demand action … a kaleidoscope of batteries firing on targets, co-ordinated by a Headquarters Staff ordering a ceaseless barrage of cross-fire and cross-signal; and sometimes to temporary destruction through over-organisation due to anxiety, to fear in all its sad forms.

  And thus the release of living pictures out of Time past, composed of visual records which were of what once was called dead life; but which is not dead, only delayed in the slow corrosion of the body whence they would depart when the body was given up, to exist within the energy of the unseen world.

  *

  Phillip’s eyes opened upon the visible world and he realised slowly that he was still alive; and dreadfully tired. He slept; and in a dream saw Melissa with his first wife Barley, insubstantial and diaphanous, moving among the phantoms of the past; and he wondered if the distance which seemed always to be between them, despite that they thought alike, was because the natural vital force in him had been burnt out by a dereliction of early life which had caused him to take an unnatural refuge in the Imagination.

  And when his eyes opened again he lay there at rest, unfeeling wet and cold, and slowly his lost identity came back to him.

  He was on The Chains; that was all.

  Then supp
orting himself on an elbow, he saw Bodger lying beside him. All hair had been burned from face and body as the dog had been standing upon his fallen master, snout raised to utter a howl for help: heard by the two young hounds now lying close to him on one side, and beside the hounds lay a stag. They know, he thought, they know; and the poet knew, too, when he wrote, ‘The lion shall lie down with the lamb’.

  *

  Phillip’s habit of talking to himself in the cot, and to the tame robin, to deer seen on the horizon, to Bodger—now broke into lament. Getting to his feet shakily, he lifted the little bodged corpse and nursed it in his arms, crying out, “O Jesus God, this creature died for me!”

  And memory brought back the scene on the Burrows by the estuary where he had walked with Laura earlier in the summer. And you, Bodger, were with us. Were you there, too, Willie, with your spaniel Billjohn? You died on your lonely pathway for the truth, you really did die, not make a mock of it as I have done. You, too, knew that every conquering war is lost until it gives back its revelation of truth. And you, Julian Warbeck, you were there. Are you dead as well? You said on that night of October, nineteen twenty three, when the spaniel was washed up with Willie on the sands of Crow Island, you said, We should give Maddison the honour and purity of fire. But it was only the spaniel the fishermen allowed us to burn. You thought it was the reward of ten shillings for a corpse they wanted, and so would not let Willie’s body be taken from their boat. Surely it was pity for the dead boy, Julian, whose fame, like that of Keats, was writ in water? I liked you, arrogant Julian, when I saw your tears in the firelight as the swallows were flying over on their autumn migration. And you began to quote from your poet-god, Swinburne.

  With that he fell face down in the water, hearing Julian’s voice of grief crying,