The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  Usually the Coplestons had their Christmas dinner at night; but at breakfast on Boxing Day Miss Calmady made a further request—Colonel Coperston wouldn’t mind, would ’a, if ’er went, after lunch, vor visit her sister in Shakesbury?

  “Oh, not at all, not at all,” Phillip heard Pa’s prompt reply. “I suppose you’ll want to cook the turkey before you go?”

  “Aw yaas, I’ll cook’n, if you’m a mind to eat’n midday, like.”

  In due course, about one o’clock, Miss Calmady carried in a large dish and put it before Pa. The old gentleman stared at the sight of a 22-lb. stag-turkey complete with long skinny neck and baked head curled about a body awash with Beefo gravy. After this, in silence, arrived a tureen piled with potatoes hard-baked on one side and white on the reverse, followed by its twin piled with deliquescent sprouts faded of nearly all colour. Then Miss Calmady, wiping her large hands on her only ‘apern’, which she had worn ever since taking up her duties in the kitchen, wished a good time to be had by all and departed.

  “I suppose we must be thankful for small mercies,” said Pa, peering at the monument. “At least she has plucked the brute.”

  “Ah,” replied Ernest.

  Then Billy, watching from a high chair the removal of the bird’s head, exclaimed, “’At pore dickybird might want ’is ’ade one day. You put’n back, Pa!”

  “Ha,” said Pa. “Somehow I don’t think it will be needed.”

  In the afternoon Phillip said he must go home to work.

  After a pause Lucy said, “All right, we’ll come with you.”

  “No need for that. I’m sorry, but I must work. The weather report says more snow.”

  “Well, don’t blame me if there’s no hot water. I did order some coke, but it hasn’t come.”

  “I’ll manage with wood.”

  “I think I’d better come, too.”

  They went back through a landscape heavy with unshed snow. He spent the evening sawing and splitting small logs with which to stoke the boiler. Then to his room, to take the manuscript from the wall-cupboard, with its rusty hand-forged strap-hinges, where he kept a few relics of Barley—a hair-ribbon, the wedding ring, the sand-shoes with the lace that had broken on the penultimate day of her life. He managed to write a few unreal paragraphs, each one slower than the last. What was the use of going on? Who would want to read such a dull account of rushes, heather, trickling water, ice, and draggled white blossoms of the cotton plant? His life seemed to be ebbing away without purpose. He was nearly thirty-two years old: he had achieved nothing that he had set out to do.

  *

  That night a second blizzard coiled out of the north-east. In the morning the casement windows were clogged. A pallid light filled the living-room. After breakfast Lucy took Billy on the lawn to make a snowman. Phillip went to see what the men were doing. They were smoking in the stables, the horses and stock were fed, there was nothing else to do, so he went back again. In the afternoon he was sitting at his table, pen in hand and living in the imagination when Rusty started to bark outside. Looking through the window he saw two young men standing by the snowman and talking to Lucy. She saw him; there was nothing for it, he must go downstairs. She came towards him with smiling, blushing face.

  “Mr. Tofield has called with a friend. They hope they aren’t disturbing you.”

  “I suppose I must see them.”

  “They’re outside, talking to Billy.”

  Looking through the casement he saw that one of the young men wore a brown overcoat and a trilby hat, while the other, taller and slimmer, was clothed in a dark blue ski-ing suit, and wearing on one side of his curly head a grey Tyrolean felt hat. His skis stood upright against the yew-tree on the lawn, beside his sticks.

  “I’ll come out now.”

  Phillip went out in his slippers, a bandanna handkerchief round his neck to keep in the warmth of a corduroy jacket.

  The plump young man began with an apology for intrusion, explaining that he was staying in the neighbourhood and, having read an article in the Crusader, and being told that the author lived in the neighbourhood, he wondered if Mr. Maddison would consider giving a talk for the B.B.C.

  “My name is Plugge. May I present Mr. Piers Tofield?”

  “How d’you do.”

  Plugge went on, “Piers and I have temporarily escaped from the turmoil of life at the Coal Hole. I expect you know that pot house in the Strand?”

  Phillip took the soft hand, and shook it enthusiastically, liking Plugge’s large, benevolent, and almost entirely round face upon the upper half of which was fixed, in conjunction with his ears, a pair of American horn-rimmed spectacles with lenses which enlarged a pair of dark brown eyes so that he had the appearance of an owl; but unlike an owl, always ready to enjoy the brighter world.

  “I never managed to get so far west of Fleet Street when I was helping to draw The Weekly Dust Cart, otherwise The Weekly Courier.”

  At this remark the plump young man screwed up his lips and laughed almost girlishly; but the laughter ceased at the next words.

  “Would you care for a pint of beer?”

  “Would I not.”

  “We have a Wood Hole upstairs,” went on Phillip, leading the way to his writing room. There, in the middle of a wall of logs, rested the pin of home brew. A set of pewter mugs, ranging from quart pot to half-noggin, hung across the chimney piece. These had been bought from the landlord of the Rising Sun in Colham.

  “My word,” said Plugge. “A most excellent sight, if I may say so.”

  Phillip stooped to fill the quart pot. Plugge stood by to take it, but Phillip offered it instead to Billy.

  “I say, can he manage all that?”

  “Ah, I hear the voice of envy. Can you manage a quart, Plugge? Tofield, do you mind the pint pot?”

  The other man hesitated, while giving a modest half-look at Lucy.

  “I’m afraid beer is wasted on me,” she murmured, colouring at this defect, as she thought of it, while lowering her lashes.

  “I must see to the tea,” she said, and left the three men sitting with the child around the fire.

  “I hope I’m not being most frightfully inquisitive, but who is Nuncle?” asked Plugge. “I heard Billy saying something about Nuncle and an Iron Horse.”

  “Nuncle comes yurr, don’t ’ee?” asked Billy, appealing to Phillip for confirmation.

  Again Plugge laughed loudly; then seeing the child’s face he stopped as suddenly as he had begun. “I say, do forgive me, I am so sorry, but honestly, I thought it was all a joke of your father’s.” He looked at Tofield before saying, “Who, or what—if it isn’t most awfully rude of me to ask, is ‘Nuncle’?”

  “Well, the name really illustrates an everlasting human problem—the problem, I think. Which side of a man’s nature is the real one?”

  Feeling that he had gone beyond the depth of his audience he told them about the shoot, and how the appearance of the Iron Horses had diverted all the birds of the best drive.

  “I heard about that,” said Tofield. “Brilliant. Every bird out-flanking the guns.”

  Phillip admired the way Tofield talked, always with understatement, and usually making a point obliquely. From what was said he and Plugge appeared to belong to the London set of young men and girls who had grown up just after the war, and so had had all the reaction to the war years without any of the action. He had read of some of their original, daring, and occasionally outrageous (to the older generation) doings in the gossip columns of The Daily Crusader.

  They stayed to supper. Phillip had three bottles of champagne, kept to celebrate the birth of Lucy’s baby due at the end of February. He opened one, they drank to ‘Lucy, and the trout’, Phillip reminding them that Pisces was the zodiacal sign for the end of February.

  Plugge seemed puzzled; but Tofield turned away any possibility of further questions by asking Phillip, Did he ski? He would be glad to lend him a pair if he cared to borrow them. Phillip said that he had never skiie
d; whereupon the other replied that he would be delighted if Phillip would care to accompany him on the downs. By the end of the evening they were using Christian names. Archie Plugge said he had to go back to the office next day, unfortunately.

  “Yours is quite the jolliest party I have ever been to, Lucy,” he said. “May I come again?”

  “Yes, do,” replied Lucy. “Phillip and I so seldom see anyone.”

  “I am a great admirer of his work,” continued Plugge, who had read one newspaper article half-through. “I do hope that we haven’t interrupted it too deeply.”

  “On the contrary,” said Phillip. “All is fish that comes into my net, Archie.”

  “I say, am I to appear in another book? I’m in one already, you know, Tony Cruft’s new novel—it’s to appear in the autumn, I hear. Well, it has been most enjoyable, Lucy, and I do thank you most awfully.”

  Gone were the first-day perplexities of balance, the fear of toppling with crossed skis which could only be freed by lying on one’s back, lifting up aching legs with heavy elongated wooden feet above one’s head, precariously, then to one’s flank to lie on one’s side to set them parallel in order to push sideways and try to squat and then rise again.

  The secret was bended knees, and one ski a little in advance of the other after the push off with sticks, down the long slope, faster and faster, juniper bush covered with snow in the way; stop by sitting down and using one’s wet behind as a brake. The technique of rising was once more repeated. By the late afternoon, in sharpening frost and the first glitter of stars, he could sail down quite fast in a straight line, while the snow rose in little fountains about the curved prows of his wooden feet and the wind softly roared in his ears—Oh, this was the life!

  The next morning they had the new world to themselves, as they plumped up to the crest of the downs, leaving chevron-patterns diminishing far down to the head of the borstal. Plomp-plomp, all the way up to the sky-line, first one out-turned foot, then the other; the body glowed, sweat cleared the mind. How welcome was the crest, with its view of the vale below, black trees and hedges spreading away under the sun to the loneliness of the Chase under the sky. This was his own land—his people, before him, had lived here. Then the sailing rush down again through keen air. He learned to stem in a cloud of snow, to jump over small clotted objects. The fingers, recently numb with cold in the valley, glowed with warmth that filled his whole body with a feeling of life lasting for ever.

  They travelled the crest of the downs for miles, pushing themselves along with their sticks, wearing nothing above the waist in the midday sun except dark snow goggles which Piers had brought from Austria. Phillip made a fire one afternoon, in the lee of a dilapidated bullock yard, its thatch half fallen, the flint walls dropped away in patches. They lay on straw, eating bread and smoked garlic sausage which Piers had brought from London, and drinking red wine. They spoke about the war; Piers said he read all he could get about it, having heard so much about the fighting while at school, and wondering, with the O.T.C. during field days, if he would be able to stand the strain. The war had ended a few months before his sixteenth birthday.

  One late afternoon they followed the ridge way down to Colham, and the Rising Sun.

  “I’ve been here once or twice,” said Phillip. “‘Bosun’ the landlord is quite a character.”

  The landlord was leaning both elbows on the mahogany bar-counter, visible from the waist up in thick blue worsted jersey and shapeless peaked chief-petty-officer’s cap. A pint glass of beer was beside one elbow. On the floor of the bar-room, a fathom from the counter, stood a brass spittoon.

  “Good evening, gen’l’men,” he remarked, with movement only of eyes and lips.

  “May we have two hot Irish whiskeys with lemon and sugar?”

  “Missus!” bawled the landlord, swivelling his head through forty-five degrees. “Bring thik kettle o’ hot water.”

  There came from behind the curtain the scrape of flattened slippers, followed by a pale face looking round the curtain hiding the barrel room.

  “And may we have some eggs and bacon?” asked Phillip.

  “Oh, it’s the gentleman who came yurr in the summer on a motorbike. Yes, I can give you both a fry.”

  The two friends sat at a three-legged cricket table in front of a coal fire, drinking mulled claret, two musty bottles of which the landlord brought up from his cellar, explaining that ‘two gents what went water-whippin’ left’n there in the summer the war broke out and never came back to drink’n’’, with thick fried slices of home-pickled gammon with eggs.

  “I must say I find this an excellent place,” remarked Piers.

  The room was decorated with glass cases of stuffed birds, beside masks of badgers, various weapons of foreign make including spears and wooden clubs which might have come from the South Seas, rigged sailing ships in bottles, and hams wrapped in brown paper hanging from the beam that held the joists of the floor above. “Archie Plugge would feel very much at home here. How long have you known it, Phil?”

  “Only since the summer.”

  “Have you done any fishing yet?”

  The landlord, who had remained leaning over the bar, leaned forward. His cheeks tautened, and a salivary torpedo struck the brass spittoon amidships. “Whippin’ water. Huh.” He seized a bottle, squeezed away the cork, poured rum into the half-empty glass of beer, and tipped it down his throat. Then turning his face, with a cunning look in the salmon’s eyes, chin thrust sideways as though inviting a lead from a boxing opponent, he said to Piers, “I suppose you think I don’t know who you be, eh? Wull”—another torpedo into the spittoon—“I do know, see? Whippin’ water gent, you be, totty li’l ole fish you takes ’ome, I knows, see?”

  He held out his right arm, placing the index finger of his left hand between elbow joint and shoulder. “Scores and scores of fish I’ve took. Not by this yurr whippin’ water——”, his voice becoming exaggeratedly refined as his smile broadened with cunning, while his eyes were nearly enclosed below hairless brows—“this yurr toffs’ way of whippin’ water to get a totty li’l ole fish to take ’ome and get stuffed in a glass case.” He poured rum into his glass. “Many and many’s the time I’ve took trout four and five pun in weight and sold them to the toffs, and zeed in next week’s Col’am Times a photygraff with the toff and ’is catch! And I zold’n th’ booger.”

  “I suppose you did it with night-lines?” asked Phillip.

  “Ay. Water-bailies or no water-bailies, I’ve had’m, y’knaw!”

  “Did you ever try acetylene in bottles?”

  “No, I never holt wi’ that. I seed it done wance, and all the totty li’l fish in the river for a mile an’ more down was turned up next morning. I don’t holt wi’ that kind of caper.” He stared at Phillip. “I’ve a-seen you afore somewheres, I reckon.”

  “You sold me those pewter mugs.”

  “Ah, I’ve got you now. Very plaized I be for tew meet you agen. I hope you’m very well.”

  “Couldn’t be better, after such an excellent supper.” Mrs. Tinker, who had been listening one side of the curtain, now came out to give her husband a kick on the behind. “There you see, you ould toad. Someone likes my frys, see?”

  “I don’t trouble,” replied Mr. Tinker, getting his third salvo on the brass target.

  *

  Midnight struck from the stable clock of Field Place. The whisky bottle on the table was half empty. The leather armchair was deep and comfortable, the hearth in play with lilac ember flammets.

  “I suppose you heard the usual propaganda stories about ‘Huns’ at school?”

  “I don’t think we took any notice of them. There were a number of German boys at Eton throughout the war. They couldn’t get back to Germany after the summer half, so they stayed with their housemasters’ families during the holidays and were there when the Armistice was signed.”

  “What a wonderful school Eton must be. But then you had an exceptionally able Head Master, or is it
Provost, in Lyttelton. I saw a caricature of him, beside Bernard Shaw’s, done on a wall in a billet at Cambrin, near Loos, in nineteen fifteen. Both were hanging from a gallows. The guardsman who drew it was probably, like most of his regiment, killed a few days later in the attack on Hill 70. I watched the attack of the Guards Division from the Tower Bridge, above the Double Crassier. They fell in straight lines, one after another.”

  He told the story of how he had spent his light duty after the first two days of the battle looking round the front line.

  “You must write that.”

  “I hope to, one day.”

  “No, soon. My generation knows nothing about the war. We want to know exactly what it was like. I suppose it was pure hell?”

  It was now Phillip’s turn to reply to Piers’ assumptions.

  “I rather enjoyed most of it, apart from the few real bad times. One didn’t realise them at the time. How can I put it. Well, we all lived in an accepted idiom, after the first shock in action. And the ‘horrors’ of home-thought were not ‘horrors’ to us. They were always just a little apart from us. Only at moments was one overwhelmed; dead before death, as it were.”

  Piers listened with tactful silence, realising that his friend was not yet detached from what had happened in the past.

  “I can show it, I mean reveal what I’m trying to say, by the popular, 1915 scorn and ‘hate’ against your Dr. Lyttelton, and G. B. Shaw. Even if the chap who drew the pictures had truly known that both wanted to stop the hell, he would still have felt righteous scorn against pacificism, side by side with his secret fear of death, and his sense of desolation so deep that it appeared to be ordinary life. It was our ordinary life. It was only after the war that we began to realise what an awful thing it was.”

  “Yes, I suppose that explains the paradox. I’d never thought of it like that before.”