The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  Avoiding the indirect invitation, Phillip pretended interest in the spot-light. “I suppose you run it off a dynamo?”

  “Runs off the coil, with the headlights. Doesn’t that tell you something? Look, I’ll show you.”

  He undid the strap across the bonnet and there within cavernous space was the small rough block of a T-model Ford engine.

  “Fools everyone,” remarked Bill Kidd with satisfaction. “I could dine every night at the Piccadilly grill on the bets I’ve won about the horse-power of the old ’bus.”

  In the back of the car were two rods, a net, and a wicker creel holding reels, lines, and a box of flies. Had they come with the intention of staying the week-end? The trouble was that Nuncle was coming, too.

  “I suppose you chaps are on your way to see Piers?”

  “Well——” said Archie Plugge. “As a matter of fact, I’ve seen nothing of Piers since he resigned from Savoy Hill. One hears rumours, of course——”

  “Who’s this ‘Piers’?” demanded Bill Kidd, as they went into the house.

  “Oh, a neighbour who lives down the valley. Do come in. I’m sorry my wife is away just now.” He went to the sideboard. Fortunately Nuncle’s decanter of malt whisky was nearly full.

  “Say when, Bill.”

  “Go on. What’s his father’s name?”

  “Sir Roland Tofield. Piers is the heir to a baronetcy,” said Plugge.

  The level rose to the second half-inch, then to the third, when Phillip stopped pouring. “I’m afraid there’s no soda.”

  “I chase it with water, old boy. Separate glass.”

  Bill Kidd threw half his whisky between his teeth, swilled it round his mouth before swallowing, then tossed back a splash of water.

  “Old White Russian practice,” he explained. “Kills the germs of cholera.”

  He seated himself in Nuncle’s chair. “Now, my Mad Son, what about those six-pounder rainbows I’ve been reading about? Oh yes, I know all about reporters spinning a yarn, but let me tell you this. No rainbow can grow to that weight even in a chalk stream, let alone in land-locked water! And I’ll tell you for why!” He admonished with a finger, “Rainbows, you may care to know, are migratory. They die if they can’t get down to the sea to spawn. And a six-pound fish would be at least four years old, more likely five.”

  “Well, these rainbows are well over two feet long, and deep——”

  “Then they’re not rainbows. They’re brownies. I was brought up on the Test. You know dam’ all about fish if you talk about six-pound rainbows in England, my lad.”

  Plugge’s face had a resigned expression. Kidd had talked fish all the way from London: he had borne with his boasting, awaiting the moment of arrival at their destination, when he and Phillip could leave him to fish alone, and then perhaps they could go to a pub, or call on some of Phillip’s friends.

  “Excuse me, sir, but there be a young leddy at the door, asking for ’ee,” said Mrs. Rigg, coming in from the kitchen.

  A new edition of the girl he had known in London stood in the porch. She was dressed in a tweed coat and skirt, and wore a small hat of the same material, on which was the foot of a grouse set in a silver pin. With a feeling of satisfaction that the two men should see the young and pretty girl who had come to visit him, Phillip led the way into the parlour.

  “You know Archie Plugge, don’t you? This is Major Kidd—Miss Ancroft. Major Kidd comes straight out of The Compleat Angler. What do you know about rainbow trout, Miss Ancroft?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  Bill Kidd, having inhaled smoke from his gasper, leaned forward. “Miss Ancroft, your education is about to begin. The rainbow comes from California. Got that? There are two main species of trout in the States where, incidentally, after I left the Black and Tans, I spent some time on secret government work——” His voice tailed off. He pointed at Phillip, who was laughing. In a rasping voice he continued, “Now look here, my lad! I hear that you’ve been casting some doubts on my having been with the Black and Tans? In case you don’t know, I was withdrawn after a dead body had been substituted for my own, in order to go on a mission to the United States.” His voice assumed a drawl. “All very hush-hush, old boy. As it happened, I spent quite a time on the Coast—California, you know—and my host, the Earl of Clyde—Ambassador and all that—showed me some sport. So I know my stuff.” He turned to Plugge. “As I told you on the way down, Salvenis is the brook trout, the red belly. Salmo, the second species, includes both rainbows and cutthroats. The rainbows, Salmo gairdneri, are subdivided into various genii, such as the Kern River whoppers, the Kamloops, the Golden Trout and the Steelhead. The steelhead is migratory, which means it goes to sea and returns to spawn in fresh water.”

  He turned to Felicity Ancroft, “Now listen to me, my maid! The steelhead and the rainbow are one and the same, Salmo gairdneri. When the rainbow returns as the steelhead it has a pink line on its flanks under its silver scales, which proves that it’s really iridens.”

  Plugge said, “Then it’s a salmon-trout?”

  Bill Kidd dismissed Plugge with a wave of a yellow-fingered hand. ‘Salmon-trout’ is a cook’s word, a kitchen expression, a restaurant word. Don’t let me hear you using it again. You’re as bad as the Southerners in the United States—to hell with them. Those blokes below the Mason-Dixie line fancy themselves so much as soldiers that they are all born colonels. And what’s more, they lump catfish, croakers and weakfish together as trout.”

  “May I help myself?” whispered Plugge, eyeing the decanter.

  “Do, please——”

  Phillip wondered what Nuncle would say when he found his special bottle empty when he arrived, tired, from Wales.

  “It’s a pretty thin malt whisky, this, Archie. Let’s get a bottle of Haig——”

  “You need reinforcements, my Mad Son? Then hold the line while I’m gone! No retirement to the Peckham Switch this time, old boy. You know you were wrong to go that time—however, let that go—I’ll be back.” He climbed out of the window, making a direct line to his car.

  Plugge laughed deprecatingly. “I feel that we’ve rather landed ourselves on you.” He turned benevolent owl-eyes on Phillip for a moment before continuing, “You know, one never knows quite how to take Bill Kidd.” Peering round to assure himself that they were alone he went on, “On the way down he asked me if I was ‘an old Wyck’. I didn’t know what ‘an old Wyck’ was, and when I told him so he said he was at Winchester, leaving at the age of seventeen to go to Sandhurst. Then he kept referring to his uncle as ‘Tiny Tinribs’. Does such a person exist?”

  “All life is based on imagination, Archie.”

  Phillip was wary of saying much before the interviewer.

  The hollow roar of Otazelle returned down the lane. Bill Kidd, climbing in by the window, announced that all the pubs were shut.

  “Perhaps I can buy a bottle of this malt whisky, when they open in Colham, Bill. It really belongs to my uncle.”

  “I hear he’s Sir Hilary Maddison? What’s he, a bart?”

  “No, a Knight of the British Empire.”

  “A profiteer, in other words. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” He got up and salaam’d.

  Soon the parlour was filled with tobacco smoke, and Bill Kidd holding forth on the glories of a dry-fly purist.

  Eventually Plugge asked mildly, “Why exactly must a fly be dry? Is it anything to do with Prohibition?”

  Bill Kidd wagged a wavering finger, “Now no funny stuff from you, my lad! A dry fly floats, if you want to know.”

  “But fish are sometimes caught on a wet fly, aren’t they?” asked Phillip.

  “Did Izaak Walton use a dry fly?” asked the girl.

  Bill Kidd’s reaction to this enquiry was unexpected. Swallowing his whisky rapidly he said, “Don’t talk to me, my maid, about that faker! Izaak Walton didn’t know what he was writing about. He pinched all his facts, and got some of them wrong, what’s more, from an earlier book by
a bloke called Franck. He dressed up his plagiarised piffle with classical tripe calling himself ‘Piscator’. ‘Piscator’ my foot. Izaak Walton was so damned ignorant a hack that he had to pinch poems from John Donne to pad out his book.” The finger waggled again. “I know what I’m talking about, mind. I was born and bred on the Test.”

  “What is the difference between a dry-fly purist and a wet-fly purist?” asked Plugge.

  “You ignorant Savoy Hill wallah, there’s no such thing as ‘a wet-fly purist’! Look here, I’ll begin at the beginning. A trout faces upstream in order (a) to breathe, (b) to watch for food coming down. The water stream to a trout is the same thing as the food stream. Got that? Well, in certain atmospheric conditions there occurs a hatch, or hatches, of fly from the surface of the stream. They swim up as nymphs to hatch into flies from the said surface, while the trout take position, some in echelon, others in line of companies, to await the food stream passing them. You follow me? If you see trout ‘tailing’, then they’re taking nymphs below the surface. You see perhaps the tip of their tails only, as they make a bulging rise. Now take it from me, no dry-fly fisherman would do more than look at such a rise. He bides his time, standing well back from the bank, waiting for the main hatch, when many nymphs will have space and time to split their skins before flying up. A good trout doesn’t ‘waste energy tailing when he can just suck ’em in, you know.”

  “Suck what in?” asked Plugge.

  “Fishermen’s stories,” suggested Phillip.

  “The subimagos, you ignorant bastard, otherwise nymphs hatching into flies,” replied Kidd. “They rest on the water, floating down while struggling to get their wings out of the pellicles, and then bok”—he made a sucking noise with his lips—“Trutta trutta has sucked one down, and in doing so leaves a wide ring on the surface. That’s the time to fish! You’ve got to find out what’s hatching, of course, Miss Ancroft—whether Olive Dun, Blue-winged Olive, Pale Watery, or even Fisherman’s Curse, which fish seem to prefer to all other flies. Smut, in other words. You may as well pack up when the smut is up. After the smut has coupled you get then what we call the Knotted Midge. Fishing with the Knotted Midge is fishing—pure fishing—with a hook no larger than a match-head.” He waggled a finger at Plugge. “You bring to the net a four-pounder on a Knotted Midge, on a 4-X tapered gut cast with a breaking strain of ten ounces dead-weight, and you’re a fisherman, my lad!”

  Phillip began to imagine the life of a trout in the crystal flow of a chalk stream.

  “That’s a very vivid picture you give us, Bill. How about dapping with a live mayfly, as they do in Ireland?”

  “Why not shoot the poor bloody fish and have done with it?

  “Have you ever used a Wickham’s Fancy?”

  “That’s an old-fashioned fly.”

  “In a sense, then, it’s an old Wick?”

  Bill Kidd stood up. Pointing at Phillip he cried, “Now look here, my lad, you’re asking for it. One more word from you, and I’ll snout you! Now let me tell you something. Never forget for one moment, my Mad Son, that you were the bastard who ordered, without my knowledge, all my boys to show their backsides to the Boche on the Wytschaete ridge on April the twelfth, nineteen eighteen, and thereby—now listen to me!—you left Bill Kidd in the Staenyzer Kabaret to face the whole Hun attack alone, after you’d softened up my boys. You put the wind up the whole battalion with your defeatist, pacifist, pale pink talk before we went into the line! You may have forgotten all about it, but Bill Kidd hasn’t, not by a long chalk. You won’t always get away with your Bolshie talk, and it’s Bill Kidd who’s telling you. Take a look at this, old boy.”

  He took out a pocket book and threw two photographs on the table. Then, saying “I need some fresh air,” he climbed out of the window.

  “He’s escaping back to his native tree-tops,” said Phillip. “Whisky always makes him frisky.”

  One of the photographs was of Bill Kidd in fur hat and coat standing beside a row of hanged men; the other, tinted, revealed him in blues with a row of ribands across his left breast.

  “Do you think they’re stills for a film?” asked Archie Plugge, peering over Phillip’s shoulder. “Perhaps he is a movie actor! I rather fancy your remark about ‘the Old Wick’ was touché, don’t you think?”

  “I shouldn’t have made it.”

  Plugge examined the nails of his left hand before asking, “What exactly did he mean about your pacifist talk to his men?”

  “Oh, as acting second-in-command of the battalion, he was supposed to look after training. There wasn’t any time for training, anyway—we were a mixed mob of young soldiers—less than a hundred strong when we went north from the disbanded Fifth Army, to rest and refit after the March retreat. When we joined Plumer’s Second Army in Flanders we got about five hundred eighteen-year-olds straight from home. They were very frightened, so I talked to them in the huts, telling them that we were all in it together, and all equally apprehensive. So was the enemy, I said: but it wasn’t so bad in battle as it was before a battle. The Germans had already mounted a second push in Flanders, and we all knew it was coming. Just before the attack we were ordered to withdraw from the Wytschaete Ridge to conform with the line on our right, after the Germans had broken through at Armentières. We were to occupy the Peckham Switch, which ran down the slopes of the Wytschaete–Messines ridge. Kidd refused to come back, as I said, and stayed well forward in a pill-box, the Staenyzer Kabaret, half-drunk. I went back to report to my Brigadier, ‘Spectre’ West, and while we were talking outside his dug-out a gas-shell smashed his leg, and later he died of gas gangrene.”

  “Is it true what Kidd told me, that he got the Military Cross?”

  “Yes. He was captured on the twenty-first of March, but escaped and came back and did very well during the retreat to Albert. So much so, that the Kaiser praised the way the division fought, to some of the prisoners at Courtrai.”

  “Then what Bill Kidd told me in the Game Pie was true?”

  “More or less. Felicity, I can’t think why my wife hasn’t come back. Let me show you the geography of the place.”

  He returned to Plugge. “I’m awfully sorry, Archie, but with one uncle ill in bed, and another coming to stay, I’m afraid we won’t be able to put you up. D’you know the Rising Sun in Colham?”

  “I’ve been there with Piers. ‘Bosun’ Tinker, ha ha——”

  “Do you mind staying there as my guest? They’re not on the telephone, or I’d ring him up.”

  “Oh, I say, really—you must let me—— No? Well, it’s most awfully good of you.”

  Felicity joined them in the garden. “I feel that you must have rather a lot to do just now, so shall I come back another day?”

  “No, don’t go. Just let me get these two base-wallahs settled——”

  When the two men had driven away Phillip and Felicity sat on the lawn, which had been resown that year. There were many weed plants among the grass—plantain, daisy, dandelion. He began to feel frustration. The mowing machine needed sharpening. The first of the nature articles for the Sunday Crusader must be written. Nuncle was probably on his way. Where could he get a bottle of malt whisky? They walked to a cast-iron seat from which the Queen Victoria-Jubilee paint had almost wholly scaled.

  “You won’t include anything you heard indoors in your interview, will you?”

  “Of course not. In any case I’ll send you what I’ve written before I show it to anyone else. May I say that it really would be a pleasure to help you deal with all those letters I saw in the wooden holder.”

  “Oh, that’s a bushel measure——”

  He was a little discomposed by a feeling that he was being drawn to her. He knew that she felt this also when she said, “I thought your wife, when I saw her in the Aeolian Hall, was so beautiful. She had such a serene look.”

  “Yes, she is always composed, I’ve never been able to attain that condition, unfortunately.”

  “But you were happy when you lived
at Malandine, surely?”

  He said stiffly, “Yes I was so happy that I didn’t do any writing in my last year there.”

  “But the year’s rest ultimately produced the beauty in The Water Wanderer—— Oh, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Why not? The book was an attempt, which failed, at resurrection.”

  “Oh no, not failed——”

  The air was uplifting, butterflies and bees were on the garden flowers. The heat of the sun had cast the distant hills of Cranborne Chase in a warm blue leaden mould at the bottom of the sky. He looked at her; she was twisting a handkerchief in her hands.

  “Couldn’t you be serene again?” she said, her face pale.

  “I really have a horribly critical mind. D’you hear that squeak-king noise? It’s my wife coming with the baby’s push-cart down the lane. I’ve asked for it to be oiled several times. I should lubricate the axles myself, of course. Instead, I prefer to criticise Lucy. I’m what the psychologists call, in condemnation, a perfectionist. My uncle is a perfectionist, too. That’s why we don’t get on together. A perfectionist is a neurotic.”

  Lucy appeared at the gate. She smiled and waved. They went to meet her.

  “This is Felicity, Lucy.”

  “How nice of you to come. I’m so sorry I was out when you arrived. I’ll get tea right away. I expect you’re both hungry.”

  Leaving Felicity with Billy, who immediately claimed her, he went into the kitchen. “She’s offered to help me with the letters. What do you think?” He added, avoiding the impulse of his real motive, “What will Nuncle say?”

  “Oh, don’t let that worry you. There’ll be a bedroom if she wants to stay here.”

  “I’ll insist on paying her, of course.”

  “Well then, I’ll ask her to stay. Cabton will be here then, and it will be jolly with all four of us together. We won’t bother Uncle Hilary, he’ll be fishing most of the time.”

  *

  Plugge had no intention of being landed with Bill Kidd for the week-end if he could help it. The problem was, where else could he spend the week-end? If the worst came to the worst, he could always get a bed at the Tofields’, pretending surprise that Piers was not home: but the prospect of a teetotal week-end with two old people was too much. Better to go back to Town. There was always Zorinda, the Coal Hole whore.