A War Romance

by F. W. Harvey

  Eric’s laugh equalled his brother’s in loud enjoyment, and the old man’s topped both …

  This was at Newnham-on-Severn. Some days after, Eric talking to gypsies on Wigpool common, learnt of the existence and whereabouts of that cave called ‘Christ a-weeping’.

  They were now on almost the highest ridge of those forested hills:– ‘ringed with the azure world.’ Tall Cotswolds lay like a faint blue trail of smoke along the sky twenty or thirty miles to east. Westward there towered irregularly and yet more phantom-like the mountains of Wales. May Hill, covered with bracken, rose suddenly like a rusty gigantic bubble of earth less than a league away; and closer still, the pasture and plough of Herefordshire spread a little patchwork quilt of fertile country over the near landscape. The fire-made rocks of Malvern shaped themselves unmistakably, zigzagged upon the middle distance.

  The forest itself frittered away into bushes on the summit called Wigpool Common, and here alone among the holies and the yews camped gypsies in a spot dangerously pitted with ancient iron-workings partially overgrown.

  An unusual intimacy was permitted the boys by these picturesque and suspicious people when they discovered that they and swarthy friends to wit:– Bartholomew Fury and Elijah Dark – had on occasions bought and sold horses from and to their father and grandfather at Barton Fair. A girl whose dark remarkable beauty haunted him for weeks after, told Willie his fortune which was, upon her showing, to remain for ever a stranger to riches, and to marry a foreigner. Eric’s fortune she gravely professed herself unable to predict. She took no part in the brothers’ chaff of one another, but later initiated them into the art of basket making, and showed them how to cook a hedgehog by rolling it into a dumpling of clay which was then deposited amongst embers of glowing fire-wood. The baked clay being removed carried away the creature’s inedible spikes, and revealed a hot and savoury dinner, which the boys tasted, and to their surprise liked.

  It was at her suggestion that they visited Christ a-weeping, and her father showed them the way. Otherwise they would hardly, even by the most explicit directions, have found it.

  In one of the many holes roofed with red-berried yew, there bubbled from tall rock a tiny spring of water spilling over in the life-sized shape of a man from whose face and robes tears dropped eternally down into the basin grooved by their ceaseless falling upon an iron surface.

  “Tis Christ a-weeping’ said the gypsy.

  In the gloom of the cavern the boys stood and regarded that strange and impressive symbol of God mourning – lonely in the world He would save. Outside fell the sunshine lighting the berries of scarlet and splintering upon the branches. Hawks hovered. Wood pigeons cooed. A bell tinkled on the neck of a forest sheep dangerously straying. A faint continuous hum of insect life entered fitfully upon the breeze …

  The best talk is at the end of a day’s tramp. The body’s juices are settled: the mind clear – full like a pool of clear water with the reflections of light and sun. Even in dull country, by virtue of mere physical exercise, does this miracle occur; and when the walk has been lovely as well as strenuous the beauty of the way is absorbed unconsciously by the mind leaving it clean of every-day humours and poisons.

  Peace of the forest had for eight hard days deeply penetrated the souls of these brothers. There is nothing more restful than windy trees. In restfulness that sound surpasses the lap of the sea; the flicker of firelight; the muffled drumming of rain on thatch: the little delicious soft cough of it into the eave-butt. ‘Peace! Peace! – the whole forest seems to sigh it’ said Willie, listening to the voices of the trees which almost brushed the panes of their window at a small Inn – about the centre of ten square miles of whispering leafage.

  ‘But who harbours it?’ asked Eric. ‘Which of the men in my bank, in your office, in the cities around, or in the forest itself, keeps it in his heart? Who harbours it?’

  ‘Who? – None!’ was the reply. ‘I know them, When they are not feverishly employed in making money, they are feverishly engaged in spending it.’

  ‘And that’, said Eric, ‘is what we shall do in time. That is what we must do unless we change our ways: unless we are daring … soon’ he added.

  So the cat was out. Often in their talks during this walking her leaf-green eyes had peered at them from the bag. Often her scratching had been audible in forest glades. She was out.

  ‘There are two ways of living’, went on Eric, ‘one (and I believe not the best) possible only to a few daring spirits who will pay the price – the honest pagan life of men like your beloved shepherd of Newnham-on-Severn; accepting experience rough and smooth joyously or at least without regret and faced at last as by a blank wall with death: the other (better, and though hard, possible I believe to all) – the honest Christian; transmuting experience by belief, and looking beyond the wall at the end. You and I in the life we lead are neither. The whole present age is neither. The people you and I live with since we left childhood, and the farm, cannot live. They cannot be happy. They cannot know peace. And we shall get like them. Don’t think I am superior in talking like this, It is God who gives truth, and He alone gives faith, and the peace that comes from it. But the truth is that not one of us dares grasp happiness: dares grasp peace, by reason of a cowardly allegiance to the world as he finds it – a world which dare neither accept life in the pagan way nor live it in the Christian.’

  ‘It is true’ said Willie.

  ‘Peace’, went on his brother, ‘comes in the acceptance of life as it is without explanations: with no reasons, if with occasional rhymes – a hard creed, a dispiriting and debasing one: or peace comes gloriously in zest of service which enables one to disregard present hardships because the end is noble. To live nobly is to do the work (whatever it be) that God meant us to do.’

  ‘It is hard to be sure what that is’ said Willie.

  ‘Yes, old man, it takes a long fight to find that out; and, as I admitted, it takes daring in the fight. But a time comes when to our own human gnawing hunger for something (a hunger which may deceive us) there comes, as there has come in these last few days of walking in the forest, a conviction imposed.’

  ‘As though the trees had voices, and talked of God – openly’, said Willie.

  ‘Ah, you have heard that too!’

  ‘I have; and I am glad you have spoken now. I was frightened somehow at what they said. I, whose passion it is to make poems – I did not know how to begin to speak of it. And now’, concluded Willie, ‘and now, it has come, and what (think of everything) are we to do?’

  Eric wrinkled his brows. ‘It is difficult I know’, he said, ‘difficult: but once we have glimpsed light and freely given ourselves to follow, God will provide a path. Yes, I am sure of that’, he added.

  So, the boys grasped hands and turned to sleep …

  ‘Why do you want to write poetry?’ asked Eric an evening later. (Now that is a hard question if you like!) Willie thought.

  ‘I have tried prose’, he answered, ‘but my best thoughts always run into verse:– not that I mean it to’, he reflected. (A good reply!) ‘For somehow’, he went on, ‘the building up of a poem (and every poem is built:– constructed upon the original bit of inspiration supplied free, somehow this building takes the original meaning which is our (quickly forgotten) sight of God’s gift, and makes it better than it was.’

  (Full marks for Willie, who has perceived that miracle which form alone imposes!)

  ‘I don’t understand how’, he admitted. (Who does?)

  ‘God is a capitalist who supplies the materials, but poets must always be labourers’, he explained. Eric nodded assent.

  ‘This I do know, however; and understand’, he continued, ‘poetry is not the finnicking pastime of rich people (which the world supposes) but something common to all men:– as feeding as bread and cheese. Bread nourishes the body. Song satisfies a common hunger of the soul.’

  ‘Then it is like religion’, said Eric.

  ‘It is. It is religion.
’

  They had crossed the Severn at Arlingham and were following the shining horse-shoe bend of it to Framilode where they meant to sleep. Another day’s walk would see them home.

  ‘The ideal poem’ continued Willie, ‘is magical as Coleridge and Keats; as accessible as Wordsworth and Whiteman.’

  ‘That’, thought Eric, ‘was what Christianity should be.’ ‘So now’, he added, ‘we are both enlisted under the banner of the Holy Ghost. May Christ help us!’

  ‘God’s world, for me!’ cried Willie. He was watching the fishermen mending nets beside water rose and gold with sunset – ‘Christ’s empire for you!’

  ‘Amen!’

  ‘Burns was not a very great writer’, mused Willie, later, ‘but he was one of the very happiest (or should be if he can see the world), for his songs are read and sung by common people. I want Gloucestershire people – fishermen and shepherds – to sing my songs. I want them to shake the beams of Inns. I want ploughmen to shout them. Then I would be happy’ …

  A half-timbered Inn with red blinds sheltered them at Framilode. Shelter – what shelter does man need from light of stars shaping themselves to immemorial patterns in immemorial skies: from rainy sounding trees and yellow windows peering through with so friendly a human look! What shelter should be craved from sea winds scented with country travel: from an echo across water which thrice-speaks music of singing men: a tearing sound of tide rushing past for a full hour and gradually diminishing, till after a time of silence in which you may hear your watch ticking the delicious moments, it turns again to the sea! What shelter from a curve of moonlit river: shadowy hills from whence it flows: a belated bird singing on Barrow Hill; and moon bright piratical spits of sand – the prey of tides! It was there they slept.

  At dawn they rose. Fog had not then lifted its white curtain upon the drama of human life. Yellow elm tops made islands in a moving ocean of mist, milk white. Timid animals were creeping to their dens and holes. The sun arose. Dew glinted in bare hedges and hung upon pointed thorn. A horse, shod golden in sunrise, rolled in grey meadows, waving his legs. Then Man went ‘forth to his work and labour until the evening.’

  One offered the boys a place in his boat. It was only occasionally that one could journey from Framilode to Minsterworth by water. He was going to do it on ‘three quarter tide’:– grasping as it were the mane of the great wave which would take them safely over the wide and shallow stretch of Bollo against the flow of Severn.

  They jumped at the opportunity. The bore foamed past. They gave it a good start. Then the trouble of water following, the boat was boarded and put adrift. ‘Steady – sit quiet!’ She is heading for Minsterworth, and (what fun!) away they go on a body of roving sea water journeying home – home again! …

  ‘Prince, you have horses: motors, I suppose

  As well! At finding pleasure you’re no fool.

  But have you got a little boats that blows

  Up-stream from Framilode to Bollopool?’

  Cotswold towered before them her quarries white in the morning. Behind were the Forest hills from which they had travelled. They are riding the tide like a grey horse cantering easily:

  ‘And round the boat the broken water crows

  With laughter casting pretty ridicule

  On human life and all its little woes

  Up-stream from Framilode to Bollopool.’

  It was in trenches that Willie wrote his ‘Ballade of River Sailing’ and with later memories of Severn in mind, but the germ of that poem took life surely in these swift moments, with Eric sitting silent and thrilled in the boat beside him, as they danced upon the water.

  At home that night they lay long awake talking of all that had happened to them on the holiday which was now over: discussing from all standpoints the decisions they had made in that old Forest of Dene, and which must now be carried into effect.

  Willie broached the matter in characteristic fashion by handing his brother a slip of dirty paper scrawled over with verses. Eric looked at it, and smiled ‘You must decipher it for me, old man!’

  ‘It is the poem’, said Willie, ‘that I have been hammering out during our tramp home. It’s about the forest: what it seemed to say to both of us – “Peace!” So “In the Forest” is the title of it. It came to me so poignantly that the trees or rather their far ancestors had uttered that word ages and ages ago before any man was there to listen. They have never ceased to say it over. And now man is here:– man for whose sake they were taught to speak it. But he won’t listen! It is as if the whole world were dead!’

  ‘Read the poem’, said Eric in reply, and his brother did so.

  We have come out of the world

  Under the green banners of peace

  Unfurled:

  For the world is dead.

  Peace! peace! peace!

  Over and over let the sweet word be said.

  Long long before tongue spoke

  This rustling soft word of the trees

  Awoke!

  No one was there to listen and understand

  What the trees said, the trees

  Of that weird lonely land.

  And ‘peace’ – that tragic-sweet word

  Yet in a dead world’s ear

  Is whispered.

  Aye, though green flags of peace

  Are flying in victory near

  Man lies defeated: and trees

  Ever – ever unheard

  Over the world do sigh

  The word:

  And wave tempestuous sunny banners of Peace

  In triumph high

  Unseen – save of living trees!

  ‘It is an experiment technically’ he went on. ‘I have tried by repetition of sybilant rhymes, half-rhymes, and use of suspended rhythms to reproduce the whispering of a forest. Of course it has not “come off” all through. It is skating on thin ice. But I don’t see how else it is to be done’, he concluded.

  ‘It is a good poem’, said Eric, – and believed it. ‘I cannot give you one in return. But I will try and live mine.’

  ‘And now, old pal’, said his brother, some moments later, ‘we’ve got to tell mother’ …

  The next evening they did it – and she (the wise sweet woman) understood.

  First let Willie pass his final examination was her counsel. He would so at least have a sound profession to fall back on if the world – as was its fashion – should batter the artist. Poverty’s loaded dice would not so easily triumph. That was true, and both boys agreed.

  Eric, she said, would be as well (or badly) off in a rectory as in a bank. So there was no need for him to delay. A mortgage should provide the necessary training as soon as that could be arranged. Then they must fight their ways (‘and God be with you my dears!’) in the battle they had chosen.

  ‘You only can know whether it is the service God meant you to do’, she concluded. ‘We must all serve, and fight hard to be happy.’

  Now that was a queer and illuminating saying from one whose goodness seemed to be so absolutely effortless. But that also was true.

  PART IV

  TEMPTATION

  CHAPTER I

  So now after twelve chapters we have arrived at that point where most novels begin. So far as have merely seen what made the boys. We now turn to observe what the world, and the war did to them. So far the influences have necessarily been particular in character since they went to form two particular personalities. What in essence happened to them may have happened to no others. But now the influences will be general. What now comes happens to millions of others besides our two boys:– happens to all. The effects may be different (indeed if they were not there would be no need to write novels) but the things are always the same. The material of life shapes ever to the old patterns. Men dream dreams and are disillusioned finding or failing to find at last the dream which awaits no disillusion. A man strives and fails and rises again embittered or sweetened by his fall. He knows curiosity. He knows adventure. He know fear. He m
eets friends only to part with them. He learns the magic and value of memory which so encircles and tortures a man. He falls into love and risks many things driven by it. He falls into folly and into sin and learns their natures. He is made homesick at a word: at another he flames into murder. He cries in agony to God and to his fellows and they seem deaf. Pride and humility – those best and the worst of human emotions play upon him with discord or harmony. Gratitude, the twin sister of Humility, sweetens his bread. Common life seems at times most wonderful, and at times intolerable. This it is to have been born a man. The world brings such to all – take them or leave them. It is life.

  But it is the meeting of man with life (in a clash of steel and flint) which lights the spark of romance. There is no romance without man to make it. This has been romance in all times – man fighting. The old romance concerned itself with men dead or living (but defiant) confronting the forces of nature. Against odds tremendous he died gallant or merely pathetic. The outer world, Nature, grim Death, gaunt Hunger, all aching impossible things he faced and dying handed on the torch of defiance. His victories increased. The tide of battle turned against the blind giants. Nature, that terrible foe, became tame: cringed dog-like before him. In the last century both steam and electricity turned to lashes in his hand:–

  ‘Glory to man in the highest

  For Man is the master of things!’

  Sang the poet of that age. It seemed that the battle was done.

  Then Romance became a butt of the intellectuals, who thought it dead. They thought narrowly. Man had more enemies than he knew:– more than were visible. His old eternal enemy lives. That which laughed at his vain assault upon the mastodon: which gloated when the careless teeth of Frost gnawed the thin thread of life to which he held: which clapped hands above the grave of its puny yet unconquerable foe: That dies not! When that dies, it will be the end of the world, and not until that dies will Romance be dead.