The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  When Phillip was breaking himself in to hard graft, as the men called it, after a period of intense thought-feeling at his writing desk, mental torment was always most active. He had known for years that writing day after day despoiled the body; the creation of an imaginary world had its satisfaction, but it was gained at the expense of physical life. Whenever he started to work with his body after such a period, it was always with dragging reluctance; the work itself was so slow, the first sweatings weakening, the pores of the skin irritated, prickly; the mind was sharp and resentful of the slowness of others.

  There were two ruling rhythms of his life that he was beginning to recognise: the one of body-work, the other of the perfectionist mind. Uncle Hilary was a perfect example of this mental attitude, with his insistence upon a sense of form—ever exhorting to tidiness, exactitude, observance of the letter of the smallest detail. But when Hilary was swimming in the sea, his body again naturally accustomed to an active life, he was quite a good chap: his overbearing attitude was shed with his clothes. But did Nuncle see his previous exhortations as part of a bad dream which literally had vanished in sunlight?

  The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue—and peace of mind.

  “Shall Jim give you a spell, guv’nor?” asked the bailiff, leaning over the edge of the rick.

  “Oh no, I can stick it. Sweats the nonsense out of me.”

  The sweat dried on his bare back and arms and legs, and was salt to the tongue when licked. He was getting clear, thank God.

  After two more days in the harvest field his sweat was sweet, almost with the smell of Barley’s tame otter, which had been faintly of violets. When winter came he would finish the book of the otter’s wanderings; meanwhile he must strive to live in the actual moment, to be thoughtless, in the sense of having a calm mind, to deal with every moment as it came; and seal-off his retrospective mind, with its periods of melancholy, and at times despair that he would never again see Barley coming to him.

  *

  The sun in Virgo burned over the downs, and swinging above the plain of Colham, inclined to the south-west, so that every aspect of his body was made brown, and given strength to force tired muscles to lift beyond aching, to empty a waggon of barley sheaves without pausing—three, four, five together pushed up on the long polished handle of the pitching-fork, six feet over his head to the edge of the stack.

  The carter took them on his shorter-handled fork and served the bailiff, who laid the sheaves, keeping the middle always well-filled as he trod round and round the sides of the rick, splaying ‘chuffs’ at the corners. Up—up—up—driving himself ever the harder, hoisting the long-handled fork. The barley awns were everlasting, creeping through his socks, pricking his skin, working round his belly, into his ankles and between his toes. By now arms and legs were impervious to the scratches of the harns; he had ceased to sweat with the final dissolution of his fat; he was sinew and muscle and bone, burned by the sun, the strength-giving sun of August.

  Every day the welcome sight of Uncle John and Lucy with Billy and the tea-basket—nine days of burning sun and clear blue sky—the corn harvest nearly over—well-saved, thistles and all. Now he could get down to a spell of writing the book which had been dragging itself along through the pages, with constant irruptions, for more than a year.

  How blessed was the tea interval, never early, never late, exactly at 5 p.m. every day. Lucy and her basket of lardy cakes, butter and honey, shared with the men to give them all a feeling of comradeship, as in the war.

  Even so, the three men chose to sit apart, seldom speaking, along another side of the rick. They preferred it that way; as they wanted their own bottles of weak tea, with only a colouring of milk. It had always been like this for them; regularity was their security. They had seen masters come and masters go; the land remained, and without them the land was nought.

  The bailiff regarded his new ‘guv’nor’ as a man too keen, who wanted to get everything done in a hurry; but he was a good man, he would learn. The bailiff knew the land, he had worked on it since boyhood; the land would remain, but the guv’nor wouldn’t, if he didn’t go easy.

  *

  Phillip, sitting on the other side of the stack with Lucy and Billy, felt that he was almost back in his boyhood again. He told himself that farming was the only life: that this was Father’s country: his grandfather’s and many forefathers’ going back before the Wars of the Roses: he belonged to this land. And one day it would belong to him: Phillip Maddison, Esquire, painted on the waggons and carts. Why then was that thin thread of fear, as of a dry-rot fungus moving over airless wood, always at the back of his mind? It was nothing to do with Barley’s death, to be honest; he had always felt like that. Why?

  He told himself that he was a free man: he could sit at night by the open hearth of Skirr Farm where he had first sat in that wonderful time before the war with cousin Willie and Jack Temperley, Willie’s great friend. The white owls still nested under the thatch at the eastern end of the roof, flying in and out of the dark triangular nesting hole as they had done for hundreds of years. Father had first told him of these owls when he had been a small boy, walking with his two sisters to Cutler’s Pond, before the electric trams of the L.C.C. ran along the road, and the elms were thrown; he remembered the very moment when Father had told them, and he had shivered with a strange thrill, imagining the scene so vividly that it had remained the dominant of his inner life until, staying with another cousin, Percy Pickering at Beau Brickhill, and sharing the same bed—a wonderful experience, for they could talk in whispers in the darkness—he had heard an owl hooting just outside the window, part of the mysterious Night and the Stars entering his secret life. It was later on that he had visited Skirr Farm, and Rookhurst, in his seventeenth year.

  Jack Temperley had been killed two years later, in 1914. Mr. Temperley had carried on, working harder than ever after the younger labourers had been called up after the battle of the Somme. In 1919 his elderly wife had given him another son; that had provided momentary hope, despite the loss of fertility in his fields, owing to war-time need to grow corn-crop after corn-crop without the essential potash and its equivalent of bullock muck containing the residues of linseed ‘cake’.

  Potash, before the war, had come from Germany; slabs of crushed linseed from the Argentine. By 1924 the farmer was exhausted, like his land; for a farmer’s heart is the heart of his land. It had taken some time before the break-down, the acceptance of final defeat. Skirr Farm, a yeoman holding in his family during several centuries, had come on the market. Other farmers, selling up just after the war, had made good prices for their land; but with the repeal of the Corn Production Act land values had withered away, and with it had begun the decline of the old order of peasantry which had helped to put back into the land what had been taken out to feed the towns.

  *

  Hilary Maddison was driving east in his car, a 14 h.p. two-seater Wolseley painted a bright red. It was a fine day, but even the green solitudes of mid-Wales could not dispel unhappy thoughts about the future of the country, and the threat to his plans to complete the restoration of his estate should the Socialists get back into power and impose a capital levy. In his imagination he was driving through the growing desolation of blast furnaces and docks twenty miles or so south of the Black Mountains. This coastal area to him was more than ugly and squalid to look at: it was a hotbed of all that was opposed to the qualities which had made Britain a great nation. He could not forget the General Strike in May of that year. It had been called off, certainly, but only to postpone the final reckoning.

  For the reality of the situation had to be brought home to the workers sooner or later: the inescapable fact that no one section of the community could be allowed to throw the productivity of the nation into chaos ‘by holding a pistol to the head of the nation’, as The Daily Tride
nt had declared in its leading article. Had the General Strike in May run its full course it would have meant starvation, and worse, in the mining areas of Wales, Durham, and the North; but it would have saved a coming greater catastrophe. The sooner agitators like Cook, Tillett, Bevin and others of their kidney taking orders direct from Moscow were shown up for what they were, the better it would be for the genuine working man.

  Hilary had left the fishing village of Solva an hour after sunrise. Taking it easily, he arrived at the Chepstow ferry two hours before noon, with another sixty miles to go, just as one of the two paddle-boats was being warped to the little stone quay. The tide was nearly at the flood, making a pleasant prospect of pale blue water reflecting the sky; but he could not forget that the Severn estuary was everywhere foul with untreated sewage. Even so, by now he was less pessimistic; and leaning on the rail of the ferry boat as it crossed to the other shore, he looked forward to his arrival at Rookhurst in the early afternoon, where he hoped to hear good reports of the progress made by Phillip.

  The fact was, this elderly man had centred all his hopes on his nephew. Phillip was, in part, an extension of his life, a compensation for a growing awareness of his own inner distress. He had bought Skirr Farm, to add it within a ring fence, when the inflated prices immediately after the war had gone down. The Fawley estate, with the woodlands, including the war-wreckage of Rookhurst Forest, consisted of a little over thirteen hundred acres. All this land, with the exception of Skirr Farm, had been sold by his father forty years before, under conditions which had led to the break-up of the family.

  Later, his own family life had been broken. He had divorced an unfaithful wife, and disowned the two children by her previous marriage for whose education, the boy at Winchester and the girl at Eastbourne, he had provided, only to meet with, in his eyes, crass ingratitude from both. Neither had bothered to keep in touch with him—not so much as a postcard from either since the divorce, in which their mother had been proved to be the guilty party. There had been several men during the war, while he was away at sea, in service to his country; he had found out about one, the co-respondent in an undefended case. And for all that he knew, Phillip might have been one of her paramours, according to his sister Viccy, whose maid had seen Bee go into his bedroom when Phillip had stayed at the Hampshire home in the spring of 1915; only to leave, abruptly and without notice, very early on the morning following his arrival of the day before.

  However, that was neither here nor there. If Phillip, his only nephew surviving from the war, showed himself capable of assuming responsibility as the future head of the family, he would in due course become tenant-for-life of the estate; and when his son or sons came of age, they would, if they proved themselves capable and of good character, become trustees and in time Billy, the heir, would become tenant-for-life in his turn.

  For himself, Hilary, whose life had been spent first in a Glasgow shipping office and then on the high seas until he entered the Ministry of Shipping in the war, and incidentally made a small fortune in the buying and selling of tramp steamers, had no desire to play the squire. He had been driven by an idea to see his father’s land back in the family, and thus, in part, to heal the despairing early memories of a father who had kicked over the traces and broken his mother’s heart. Now the land was back in the family, the ambition of his life had been realised; but so far it had not yet given him any satisfaction.

  *

  Phillip saw the red car stop outside in the lane and ran down from his writing room. Nuncle was just opening the door to get out.

  “Good afternoon, Phillip.”

  “Good afternoon, Uncle Hilary. How are you? Have you had a good journey?”

  Hilary looked at Phillip’s beard. He paused with his hand on the top of the door and said, “You can’t go about looking like that, you know. That beard looks simply awful.”

  Phillip, as though complimented by this remark, waited a moment before saying, “May I take your bag? How are the trout in Wales?”

  “Oh, local poachers have taken out most of Captain Williams’ fish with a prawning net. He tried to stop them using a seine net for sewin at the mouth of his river, you see. How are the rainbows in the Longpond doin’?”

  “I’ve seen several. They’ve grown a lot since they were put in. They like the deeper water at the bottom end, near the reeds.”

  “They’re probably tryin’ to get down with the stream to spawn,” replied Hilary, as he squeezed himself out of the roadster. “Rainbows usually disappear in land-locked water, you know, after a year or two.” There was a pause, then he said, “You must shave off that beard, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “It doesn’t become you.”

  “To tell the truth, I haven’t had time to look. Where’s your bag?”

  “I can manage it, thanks. But be a good fellow and give me a hand with the wireless set.”

  At the back of the boot was the biggest loud-speaker Phillip had seen. “I say, that looks a magnificent job. The promenade concerts from 2LO are starting again. My little Cosmos crystal-valve set is very feeble, except late at night. How many valves has this?”

  “Twelve. I can get America on the Welsh coast. I get New York sometimes very late at night at Bournemouth, but I don’t anticipate it will pick up many foreign stations here, being so far inland. Well, Lucy, my dear. You look blooming.”

  He was about to kiss her when he heard Phillip’s voice behind him saying, “Oh hell. Don’t look up the lane, anyone. I’ll take in the wireless set,” and he staggered away with the cabinet.

  Hilary turned to look up the lane and saw what was evidently a country gentleman approaching about two hundred yards away, walking with a shooting stick and a retriever on lead. He asked Lucy who he was.

  “It’s Major Crichel, I think.”

  “Why doesn’t Phillip want to see him?”

  “Oh, I don’t really know, exactly. I think it’s something to do with politics. He’s the local Conservative chairman, I think.”

  Hilary went after his nephew. “Major Crichel has called. You must see him.”

  “But I don’t want to have anything to do with politics. Anyway, I believe in socialism.”

  “Well, the sooner you learn sense the better. You’ve come to live in the country, so you must take your place in the normal life of a country gentleman. And politics apart, it’s a matter of common courtesy to greet a guest, for whatever purpose he comes. You can’t allow Lucy to stand there by herself. Come along.”

  They went out as Major Crichel raised his cloth cap. Lucy said, “How very good of you to come all this way, Major Crichel. You’re just in time for tea! This is Captain Sir Hilary Maddison—Major Crichel.”

  After a few words Major Crichel excused himself, saying he had to be on his way, but might he include their two names on his list? Having made a tick against the names he enquired about the corn harvest and left.

  Hilary approached his nephew on another course.

  “I thought Crichel looked a thoroughly decent fellow. Why don’t you like him?”

  “He wouldn’t let his wife read The Constant Nymph, which I lent her when she came to see us, but sent it back the next day by his gardener, with a terse note of thanks.”

  “That’s a very slight reason for not wanting to see him, surely?”

  “Just before I lent the book he asked me if he could count on my vote at the next general election.”

  “Well?”

  “I told him that I felt I couldn’t allow him to count on me, as I was unreliable politically.”

  “Why couldn’t you say straight out what you meant?”

  “I thought I had.”

  Hilary turned away impatiently. He faced his bearded nephew again. “What’s all this nonsense about your being a socialist?”

  “But mayn’t I decide for myself at the polls, Nuncle? Probably I shan’t vote at all in the next General Election.”

  “It’s high time you learned sense. And don’t
call me by that awful name.”

  Lucy came in with the tea tray. The guest settled himself in the only armchair in the room—it had come from his old home—and read The Morning Post. Soon he was snorting about the unrest in the Durham coalfields.

  “Here you are, Phillip. You ought to read Birkenhead’s speech, and learn what your precious socialist agitators are responsible for—unsettling the men, so that the Geordies won’t do an honest day’s work.” He looked round, “Hullo, where’s he gone, Lucy?”

  Phillip had crept quietly upstairs; he had heard what was said, and thought, Five thousand poor bloody Geordies lying out on July the First, in Sausage Valley. You’re right, they hadn’t done an honest day’s work, the machine guns from Ovillers and the Glory Hole got them first. Then, not wishing to cross Nuncle further, he pretended to sneeze and returned downstairs after blowing his nose.

  “I’m afraid there’s a lot of doust, as the men call it, in the barley sheaves, Uncle. It gets in the nostrils.”

  After tea Hilary let down an aerial from his bedroom window, and pushed a portable copper earth into the flower-bed below. Having heard the 6 o’clock news, he disconnected the battery and said to Lucy, “I don’t suppose you’ve had much chance of leaving the house while the harvest was on, why not drive with me over the downs, to Stonehenge? We’ll take Uncle John with us. There’ll just be room for Billy beside us.”

  Left alone, Phillip went up to his room, and tried to write, but his mind was crossed. He wondered where he could go. On the Norton to Stonehenge? No: he wasn’t wanted—there had been plenty of room in the dickey seat. So he went to Colham, and sat in The Rising Sun, drinking beer and playing skittles with the landlord, a fish-poaching ruffian named ‘Bosun’ Tinker, whom he had found to be a kind man under his rough exterior. Once again he determined to leave the village more often, and mix in the world outside. After three pints of ale he rode home, and was putting the bike away when he heard the sudden blaring music of the loudspeaker, followed a few moments later by silence.