The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  Before them stood a lime-washed inn which overlooked the Pool, the lighthouse, and the sandhills across the estuary.

  Within, the woodwork of bar, bench, and skittle table was dyed by tobacco smoke. The landlord, a grey-haired man looking like a retired soldier, was leaning on the bar. He recognised Phillip.

  “Ban’t you the gen’elman whose friend was drowned off the Shrarshook the night of the big Fair tide five year back along? Cordarn, I wor’ thinkin’ of ’ee, zur, only this morning. Your face kep’ comin’ to mind. I zee’d ee on the sands of Crow when us took the poor young gen’leman in th’ seine. I mind that someone made a beacon fire on Crow that night.”

  “Yes, that was my cousin who was drowned. I remember you well.”

  He shook hands with the landlord, who, like most of the innkeepers, worked a salmon net to earn a living. He asked for three plates of bread, cheese, and pickled eschalots. They were hungry; the blend of ale and food was perfect. Skittles were fun, after he had shown Piers and Virginia how to swing the ball on its string in parabola or circle, regarding the post from the top of which the string swivelled as dividing the orbit.

  Piers said to the landlord, “Do you happen to know where a number of people of my age from London come down to stay, usually four of five together?”

  “They stay in my house, here, sir, if it’s the same young ladies and gentlemen.”

  Piers mentioned names, and the landlord said, “That’s right.”

  Phillip set up the three outside pins; Virginia swung the ball in a circle. The three fell, clipped on the outside. Her face showed her pleasure. “You’re an awf’ly good teacher, Phil. I saw at once the idea.”

  He set up the nine pins. “Now measure the width of the top pin from the right of the post; then launch the ball to travel an equal distance from the left of the post. The idea is to strike the top pin on the left side, to make it scatt, as they say, the pins on the right side, while the ball travelling on scatts the pins on the left side. The nine go down together, and you have a ‘floorer’.”

  Virginia leaned forward, to judge the throw; while Phillip heard Piers asking if anyone was staying there at the moment.

  “Only one gentleman, sir. Ah, there he is, just coming up the slip.” The landlord pointed through the east windows which gave a view of the sea-wall. “He’s staying here while writing a book, name of Mr. Anthony Cruft, perhaps you have heard of him?”

  Virginia dropped the ball. Phillip saw that the figure of Tony Cruft was only a few yards away, seen through the lace curtain over the lower half of the window.

  “My God,” said Virginia. “If he knows I’m here it will spoil his book.”

  This consideration for her husband’s art roused Phillip to action. As the figure passed the window he said, “Out you both go, and down the slip. Double!”

  Virginia hopped out, followed by Piers. Phillip closed the sash window. Any moment now Cruft would enter the side-door. He must not be seen, he sat with his back to the bar and close to the grandfather clock. He could observe through the gap between clock-case and wall. The door opened. “Any letters for me?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  Phillip could feel Cruft hesitating; sinking a little in despair, after the hope that he knew was hopeless; fortifying himself by repeating She will not write, while remembering the tenderness of the flesh. His head was down, as for reflection; then with resolution his footfalls struck the treads of the stairs. Phillip tip-toe’d to the landlord and said, “Please do not say we have been here. Not a word, mind. I would never have brought my friends had I known who was staying here.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  He hastened to join the others on the rocks below, invisible from the tavern windows. While the two walked under the quay wall to where several masted ships were tied up, he got the canoe and hauled it up river. Which way to retreat? Either they cross the water to Instow, and leave Canute anchored at the top edge of the Pool, and so to paddle over to Crow on the flowing tide; or, pulling it up above the mark of high tide, leave it there and catch the next train to Barnstaple, and back to Speering Folliot by taxi.

  Piers thought it best not to hang about, in view of a possible telescope; so they carried the canoe up the Instow beach and left it among the marram grasses.

  *

  Early the next morning Piers and Virginia made for Dover, and ultimately the mountains of Austria. Phillip went with them so far as Dorchester, where they said good-bye. He wondered about Piers as he went on to Rookhurst: that morning, when Mules brought in the post, there were two more letters for Piers, addressed in his mother’s handwriting. All her letters which had arrived so far Piers had put between the bars of Mrs. Mules’ kitchen range, unopened.

  Piers had told him that his mother’s letters begged him not to marry a divorced woman: if he did so, she pleaded, he would be excommunicated by the Church, and denied beatitude for all eternity. Lady Tofield had also written to Virginia, asking her if she intended to stand between her only son and Christ. Could she, Mrs. Cruft, take upon herself such a responsibility before God?

  Virginia had replied that she believed that God was love, and she loved Piers, and would trust in God. This reply had broken the mother’s heart.

  *

  Phillip considered it his duty to ask his younger sister and her husband to stay for their summer holiday. They came down in August with their baby son; and thinking that it would ease the strain of marriage if they did not see each other all the time, he suggested that he and Bob should go to Devon and stay in the cottage. Both Lucy and Doris readily agreed; it would give them a period of freedom during which they would be able to do what they wanted to do, go for picnics with the children and have a holiday together.

  Phillip heard that the canoe had gone adrift on a high tide, and floating down half submerged, had been taken in tow by a longshoreman who had it stowed in the court where he lived in Appledore. The two crossed by the twopenny ferry and saw it. The frame was undamaged, but the canvas on the decks at each end was torn. Having paid £1 salvage money, Phillip arranged for it to be towed with the tide to the creek, and left at the boatbuilder’s shack. There he and Bob ripped off the old canvas and fitted new material, tacking it with copper tacks before painting it white. Two empty petrol tins were stowed, one at each end under the new canvas, to act as floats should the long, unwieldy vessel capsize. The cracks in the old canvas of the hull were caulked, and painted. After an interval for the paint to dry, they carried Canute to the black mud in the creek, and slipped it down to the river-water running fast and shallow below.

  At the creek-mouth they met the incoming tide, and then began a long and strenuous paddling against the froth and whorls of the current, Bob in the bows and Phillip in the stern. They managed to get to Crow Shingle, after some trouble to keep the bows straight: instead of paddling on the left or port side only, as Phillip had asked him to do, Bob sometimes dipped first one side and then the other, which threw out the steersman’s efforts.

  They waited until the tide eased, then crossed the Pool. The Pool buoy, green with weed and red with rust, now stood upright in slack water like a gigantic fishing float. They left the canoe in Appledore to be caulked. When this was finished—with putty only, Phillip noticed—the tide had turned. Grey-green water was gliding and swirling fast below the wet sands. The boatbuilder’s son helped them carry it down from the yard, telling them to keep inshore in the riband of backwash and paddle up the Torridge so far as the dry dock, which was about half a mile up the river; then to shoot across the tide which would take them on a slanting course to the slackwater along the Instow shore. Still keeping well inshore, they must cross the String—which Phillip remembered as a fearful area where Torridge ebb battled with Taw ebb—and creep up past the Yelland rocks, now exposed, and continue on past them as close as they dared until they were well beyond Crow which they would see opposite the Yelland rocks. Then, a couple of hundred yards up-river they must turn and shoot acro
ss the tide racing between Crow and Yelland.

  It seemed a difficult matter, with a narrow, 20-foot canoe. They set the small red sail; there was a breeze from the sea which would help them up the backwater and also keep the bows straight.

  “You paddle on the port side only, this time, Bob. I’ll take the starboard.”

  They got in, while the youth held the bows; they gripped paddles and were shoved off into the backwash, a ribbon of water about six feet wide travelling in the opposite direction to the ebb. The first thing Phillip knew was that they couldn’t keep the nose straight, although the sail was being pressed hard against the little mast. He was comforted by the fact that Bob was strong, a stout fellow who had commanded tanks during the war. He had a bullet-splashed neck, where the steel-core of copper-sheathed Spandau machine-gun bullets had pierced the plates of his disabled tank. The enemy machine-gunners used to concentrate on one particular plate of a broken-down tank, while the crew inside watched the steel plate getting red-hot, then yellow-hot, to bulge and finally burst before the succession of steel cores which rang against the inside of the opposite plate and splashed off so that Bob got some molten steel globules in his neck.

  Phillip saw the scars reddening as Bob drove his paddle hard against the greater thrust of the tide; and had to back-paddle to try to keep the bows straight, while seeing the thin crescent of the new moon sliding round the green western sky. The Shrarshook ridge, which was two feet above the water and growing every minute, was sliding forward. He realised that they and their craft were being taken down to the open sea.

  “Don’t waste your strength paddling both sides. You take the port side. I’ll take the starboard.”

  “Righty ho.”

  For several minutes they dug into the massive slide of water. The dark stones and blue mussel clusters of the ridge were no longer sliding forward; they were now in front of Bob’s reddening neck scars. He said, after some minutes of desperate paddling, “The blasted thing’s filling with water.”

  “We’ve got the empty petrol tins, remember, Bob. She’ll float if she fills up.”

  “Are you sure? You told the fellow to take them out and tar them, didn’t you?” He stove-in the brittle ply-wood of the bulkhead with his heel. “He’s left out the for’ard tin, any old how. Water’s pouring in. We’re for it.” He smiled to himself, and fumbled for a cigarette. “Yo ho, and a bottle of rum on a dead man’s chest!”

  Phillip felt the disintegration of fear. Below the lighthouse, which they were now passing, lay the dreaded broken water of the Hurleyburlies.

  “Paddle, you bloody fool!” he shouted. “Don’t waste time singing shanties! Now then, for God’s sake, together! Dig! Dig! Dig! That’s the idea! Keep it up like that. For God’s sake don’t muck about!”

  Water was slopping over his legs. They were sitting in three inches. The gunwales, with their copper beading, were less than six inches from the surface of the sea. The craft was heavy, deep in the water. Their paddling could no longer control the steering. They were moving down at seven knots with the tide. Phillip heard the noise of water breaking over the rocks. He thought he would be drowned. A frenzy arose in him; not from the thought of Lucy left alone, or the children, but that now his book on the war would never be written.

  Unknown to his trembling self, men were running over the sands a quarter of a mile away. He began to bale, using an old rusty tin which he had picked up on a sandbank that morning with the joking remark that one never knew when such a thing would be useful. It was useless. The water was now spirting in through those cracks in the painted canvas which had been stopped by moist putty. Soon the canoe would pass the black-and-white Pulley buoy, which was wallowing violently a few cables’ length away.

  “They’re getting a boat,” said Bob, pointing.

  “Keep the head upstream! Paddle on the left! I’ll take the right!”

  But Bob had his own ideas; he dipped first one side then the other, causing the craft to rock with water slopping about inside. He ignored the shouting behind him. In his fear and rage Phillip wanted to strike him over the head with his paddle.

  *

  “I thought you were going mad,” said Bob, when they were back on Crow Spit, having been taken in tow and the canoe left at Appledore. Phillip was ashamed of himself and resentful of Bob for his slightly contemptuous judgment.

  “I thought we would both be drowned.”

  “So did I, but it was nothing to make a fuss about.”

  “Didn’t you worry that you might never see Doris or your son again?”

  “I thought that they’d probably be better off without me.”

  The two men went back to Rookhurst that evening. The holiday was a failure. A week later the Willoughbys returned to London—Doris and her son and their dog in the little sidecar.

  After they had gone Phillip felt depressed. The baby was to have drawn his sister and Bob together. It hadn’t altered the unhappy situation in the very least. Now the feeling between himself and Bob had ceased.

  He walked to the Longpond. No fish were visible. They were dormant after the summer gorge. ‘The sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.’ Piers and Virginia would be in the Austrian mountains by now, seeing through the open windows of some wooden Gasthaus the snow-peaks of the Alps.

  From afar came the faint rattle of a reaper-and-binder. Ned was cutting the only corn on the farm, eight acres of oats grown for cattle feed in winter. He thought of Felicity: why had she left without saying goodbye? Had she started an affair with Cabton? Perhaps it was just as well: it would be pretty awful if he had had her, as he wanted to at the time. No; there could never again be anyone like Barley.

  *

  The next morning, an enlivening surprise—the galley proofs of The Phoenix arrived. In the post was a letter from Edward Cornelian saying that he would like an opportunity of discussing certain points in the story, and did he know of any cottage to be let furnished in his neighbourhood. Phillip thought to write at once and offer him the cottage at Speering Folliot, but on second thoughts decided that it would be unsuitable for such a famous literary figure. There was nothing to be done on the farm which Ned could not do; the old arable was now down to pasture, being grazed by stock put there by a dealer, on the principle of meat for manners. The manners being the dung dropped by the bullocks. They were fed extra food from small circular iron bowls, too heavy to be kicked over, each with a daily ration of crushed oats mixed with broken cotton and linseed cake provided by the dealer. Thus the fertility of the fields increased, while all Ned, the one remaining man, had to do was to take up the ‘cake’, and water in the iron cart to fill the drinking troughs once a day. After the other two men had been given notice by the manager, Mr. Hibbs, the rumour in the village was that the land had already been sold by Sir Hilary to the military; but as Phillip told Ned, he knew nothing about it.

  “My uncle has not taken me into his confidence.”

  Many farms were being advertised in the columns of the local paper, for sale as from Michaelmas. The unemployment in the towns was increasing. Nearly all the workers said they would vote for Labour at the next election.

  “Why not tell Mr. Cornelian about the White House?” This was a cottage on the sea-wall beside the estuary. “It’s just the place, and cousin Mary told me that the marshman’s wife takes in summer visitors.”

  “Let’s all go on holiday to North Devon.”

  So they drove west, and stayed in Scur Cottage; and in the evening went along the toll-road under the sea-wall to see the marshman in the White House. Yes, they had two bedrooms and a parlour to let. The charge was £2/2/- a week for the apartments, and Mrs. Pedrick would cook for Mr. Cornelian and his friend without extra charge, if they would supply their own food.

  Mr. Cornelian arrived with an elderly woman friend, and said that Cabton was coming to visit him, and did Phillip know of a lodging in the village where Cabton might stay?

  Lucy suggested that he might stay in the cot
tage, while she and the children went to cousin Mary at Wildernesse. So Phillip lived by himself, until the time for Cabton’s arrival; and every day went to visit the White House, taking groceries and provisions ordered the day before by Mr. Cornelian’s friend.

  On the fourth afternoon the critic said, coming out of the White House to greet him with galleys of The Phoenix in his hand, “I think you should be more reserved after the drowning. There is too much detail. You very nearly give the effect of sentimentality, like Morland in his novel Possession where Evelyn Groucherd’s wife’s lover commits suicide. And Donkin is not self-critical enough.”

  Phillip went on at once to see Lucy at Wildernesse.

  “Before, Cornelian said that Donkin was too self-critical, so I toned down his remorseful outbursts. Now, he says Donkin lacks self-criticism. I based it originally on what you told me Mary had said to you. Do you think I might ask Mary? Or would it upset her?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, after all this time.”

  “All this time—five years? I can hear Julian Warbeck’s lament as though it were last night. ‘O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow, The heart’s division divideth us, Thy heart is light as the leaf of a tree, But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow——”

  “I’ll tell Mary you’re here.”

  “Thank you.”

  He found her in the kitchen.

  “Mary—forgive me—I keep remembering my cousin, as the equinox comes near——”

  “Yes, Phillip, so do I.”

  “Will it upset you to talk about him?”

  “No, Phillip—nothing you could say would upset me.”

  “Mary—surely he was self-critical?”

  “Yes, he was very self-critical, Phillip. It was due, I think, to great sympathy for others, my mother included. When we are alone, sewing or reading at night, she still says sometimes, ‘You know, I think I understand him better now’.”