The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  “Did Willie ever rant before her?”

  “When he spoke bitterly, or in distress, it was always against himself, for his shortcomings, and failure to understand fully another’s point of view. He even praised my mother to me for not liking his ideas, because they were too revolutionary and therefore outside ordinary living. He used to say, ‘If anyone dislikes me, I feel that it is always my own fault for failing to understand. After all, other people’s opinions should always be more important than one’s own’.”

  “Yes, he said that to me once, Mary. I’ve tried to act up to it, but usually fail.”

  All that night Phillip was restoring the critical self-awareness of Donkin, putting back the former hard lines; and when the next day, having met Cabton’s train, he brought over a corrected galley, Cornelian went in to read it. While tea was being laid he came to where Phillip was lying on the sands and said, “No, don’t get up. I came to say that it’s exactly right. Well done. Half a dozen galleys will have to be reset, but it will be worth it.”

  *

  Try as he might, Phillip could induce no flow of camaraderie in Cabton. In Mr. Cornelian’s presence he gave out a feeling of being slightly superior to all he beheld: not exactly from self-sufficiency, but of living independently of the feelings of other people.

  “What sort of books do you like best, Cabton?”

  “Oh, no sort in particular. Why?”

  “I just wondered. Have you read Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea, or Heart of Darkness?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of Conrad?”

  “He’s all right for those who like that sort of thing. But he’s unreal.”

  “What about reality in Hardy? Have you read any of his stuff?”

  “He”—with a jerk of his thumb in the direction of the white-haired Cornelian sitting on the sands with his flannel trousers rolled to the knee and exposing many varicose veins—“gave me Jude the Obscure to read. Hardy never knew a real working man.”

  “But it was a different age, surely? Hardy knew stone-masons and other working men at first hand.”

  “But he’d never been one himself.”

  This seemed ironic to Phillip: for according to Anders, Cabton wrote about country people and he had never been out of London. Still, the story was the thing, no matter how it came into being.

  In the morning there was a letter from Anders, forwarded from Rookhurst, enclosing one from Coats with a report by Edward Cornelian on the earlier novels published by Hollins, which Phillip intended to rewrite, so that they would lead directly to the theme of The Phoenix.

  These three novels are poor in construction, and if the publisher wishes to spoil a reputation likely to be consolidated by Phoenix he should set about republishing them at once.

  Phillip showed this report to Cabton while preparing breakfast. Cabton merely glanced at it before saying, “I shouldn’t take any notice of what that old fool says. Why, just look at those veins in his legs, obviously signs of gout. I saw bottles and bottles of port in his cupboard when I went to his house in Chelsea, and he used my visit as an excuse to open one as soon as I was inside, although I told him I don’t drink.”

  “Aren’t varicose veins due to thin walls of the veins?”

  “Anyway, what does he know about writing? He tried to tell me what to write. I told him I never know what I’m going to write. It just comes, once I get an idea. He’s all literary, trying to fit in everything.”

  “But sympathetic, surely?”

  “Yes, to get letters from famous writers, and sell them when they’re dead. He’s got a lot from Conrad, he showed them to me—not that I was interested. Anyone can see that Conrad had to flog himself to write.”

  “But he produced passages of great beauty, don’t you think?”

  Phillip took the tent Lucy had brought down to the sea-wall and set it up in a hollow of the low grassy sandhills near the marshman’s cottage. There he slept alone. The weather continued fine. The tent was among wild dogswood bushes. He cooked on a fire of driftwood dried in the sunshine. Lying awake at night he heard the wavelets of the high tide falling on the sea-wall. One afternoon Lucy and Billy came over to visit him, having walked barefoot through the sandhills. She and Phillip bathed on the incoming tide, while Billy paddled. Cabton hung back, not wanting to admit that he could not swim. Afterwards they all sat, Phillip and Lucy and Billy with bare feet, in the parlour having tea. Edward Cornelian said that Lucy’s feet were most beautiful, reminding him of Jefferies’ description of the young girl Amaryllis in his novel. Not that Lucy had ‘thick, sturdy ankles’, on the contrary, he said; but she possessed the serenity that was the ideal of all artists.

  Lucy liked him, and under the stimulus of her smiles he began to joke, rather clumsily, on the vicissitudes of marriage to one with the artistic temperament.

  “Arnold Bennett, you may recall, says somewhere that all great novelists ‘begin clumsily, poor dears’. He was writing about Hardy’s first novel, which has remained unpublished. Edmund Gosse told me, when he read it in manuscript, that it had a title something like ‘The Lady and the Mason’, and was full of comical errors about a social world of which the young Hardy knew nothing. And now your husband, who has written a very fine novel, wants to republish his juvenilia.” He turned to Cabton. “You, my dear fellow, will never make the same mistake. Your talent is clear and direct, forthright.”

  “Ah, he is fortunate to have such expert guidance from the start, Mr. Cornelian.”

  “At least Cabton will never write the first thing that comes into his head, without practising the critical faculty, as you appear to have done in those early novels of yours.”

  “But surely one is practising the critical faculty in wanting to demolish them, and true them up, Mr. Cornelian?”

  “Get on with new work, my dear fellow. Have you started your novel of nineteen fourteen and so through the war?”

  “Well, as I think I mentioned when we met in Romano’s, I want an earlier novel to lead to the Great War. So I think I should really begin in the early ’nineties——”

  “It shows poor critical judgment to begin at a period which you cannot have known, since it must have been before your time. No! Start off in the summer of nineteen fourteen and plunge straight into the war. Or are you impervious to the voice of experience?”

  “But surely ‘the voice of experience’ was not always right in the past? Even creative writers have gone hopelessly wrong at times. Look at Byron’s opinion of Keats, sir. He wanted Keats to write like Byron. Keats wanted every line written by other poets to be loaded with ore. Yet both were creative writers, and if they could be wrong about other creative writers, isn’t it possible that a non-creative writer, a critic, might be wrong too?”

  “What do you say to that, Cabton?” asked Cornelian.

  Cabton’s face wore an expression of sardonic indifference. “Oh, I just get an idea and write. If it’s no good, I tear it up.”

  Edward Cornelian went on to say that all writers had their blind spots, and if they did not take care, they would come to a poor end, usually on the bottle. He continued in this strain, humorously prophesying a drunkard’s end for Phillip, until Lucy said it had been most enjoyable, but now it was time to go back to see to Peter and baby Rosamund. She blushed, because she had not mentioned the baby so far, when Mr. Cornelian showed pleasure and told her to be sure to bring the baby over one afternoon. When she was leaving she said to Phillip outside, “I’ll try to come over and cook your breakfast for you, if you would like me too.”

  “Yes, come as early as you can. Do you think I went too far with Cornelian, with my simile of creative writer and critic with salmon and lamprey?”

  “Oh no, he was ragging you, and you were ragging him back, that was all.”

  Lucy came over at half-past eight, and was crouched over the driftwood fire when Phillip saw Cornelian, with serious face, approaching over the crest of the sandhill. The old fellow returned a subdued goo
d-morning to his greeting of, “Hullo, sir! Just in time for breakfast! Lucy has brought over some mushrooms.”

  “May I speak with you privately for a moment?”

  Standing in an adjoining hollow, out of sight of tent and cottage roof, Edward Cornelian said, “Why did you insult me yesterday afternoon?”

  “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Cornelian——”

  “Your remarks about the relationship of critics and writers were most offensive.”

  Lamely the younger man repeated that he was very sorry, but he had not been serious in his later remarks. “I thought we were ragging one another.”

  “Yes, but despite a superficial gaiety, there was, I felt, an undercurrent of dislike in all your remarks to me. This feeling culminated when you said that the creative writer was like a clean-run salmon in the estuary, and the critic was a lamprey which fastened on it and sucked its life away. Such a simile can hardly have a basis in anything but a grudge against myself. Is it because I, as was my duty, to both you and to Coats, advised against republication of those early novels?”

  “But, Mr. Cornelian, how can there be any parallel?”

  “That is what I am seeking to discover. All I know is that I have praised your recent work to a publisher, and highly recommended him to push it with all his resources. Why then did you insult me as you did?”

  Phillip repeated that he was sorry that his words had seemed serious.

  “There is another matter,” went on Cornelian. “You spoke about critics making it their business to write to authors, and then of selling the letters, when the authors were dead, for considerable sums. What made you say that?”

  “Well, you had been telling us that it wouldn’t be long before somebody—was it a Doctor Sidney Cockerell?—would seek my acquaintance with a view to getting letters from me, as he had from Hudson and Conrad. Really, I was just fooling about, saying anything.”

  “Yes, I notice that you say anything that comes into your head; but all the same, I feel that your remarks were based on a dislike of myself, because I wrote as I. did about your early novels.”

  “I see now that I should have rewritten them, before sending them in. They will be quite different, I assure you, Mr. Cornelian. Well, sir, I do hope that you will not remain hurt by my silly remarks.”

  “Are you now suggesting that I am one to bear a grudge?”

  “Oh no, no! I’d better say no more, the fact is I have a rather worrying decision to make soon, a family matter, which has been preying on my mind for a long time now. But I won’t bother you with that. In fact, I rather fancy it has already been decided for me. Please let me give you some mushrooms, Lucy has picked some specially for you and Miss Beach.”

  “Thank you, but I dare not touch them. But do not let me keep you from your breakfast. Have you seen Cabton?”

  “I lent him a fleabag, when he didn’t return to my cottage, and he said he was going to make a shelter for himself in the bushes somewhere.”

  “He tells me that he has a young lady friend coming to visit him, whom he met at your house. A Miss Felicity Ancroft.”

  After breakfast Phillip walked with Lucy part of the way to Wildernesse. She had brought a letter with her from Mr. Grandison, the solicitor, in reply to one from Phillip, saying that he would go ahead with the details of the proposed autumn auction as soon as he knew what items had been selected for disposal.

  “We’ll do it at the beginning of September, shall we, Lucy? Grandison thinks that it should be held about Old Michaelmas Day, the tenth of October, when the weather is usually fine. By the way, Felicity is coming here, apparently. To see Cabton.”

  He left Lucy at a valley leading to the lighthouse. The sun was over the mainland, and in the eastern light the village buildings across the water looked to be sharper, greyer, while the tide at flood was a mirror in which a second village, spectral and distorted, hovered wanly. He moved along the jetsam line, making for Aery Point, where the coast curved to the north and the open Atlantic was before him.

  It was a haunted shore, it belonged to the past, because all was now safe in print. He felt that he must never return; all was now gone into ancient sunlight.

  He sat by the seaward line of the sandhills, and made a fire for companionship, while past him floated the restless hollow mutter of ocean lapsing under miles of wave-sounds. He lay on his back, letting loose sand slip through his fingers, while the sun swung up into the southern sky, and the air was filled with the roar of the ebb tide becoming more tumultuously broken upon the gravel banks of the North Tail. Melancholy deepened in the vacuum of his heart. The sea was empty, so were the sands stretching under a mirage to the northern hills. He had thought that when The Phoenix was written the ghost of Willie would find rest. All began, all ended, with oneself. There were ghosts, aye there were ghosts: but they lived in the human heart. There they had their dwelling, to leave it with the coming of love. I am all your friends, he could hear her saying. O Barley, bright vision with Michael and All Angels, come to me.

  The breaking moment passed. Bruce’s spider had more reality than ‘a poet’s tearful fooling’. He thought of Flecker’s play Hassan he had seen in London soon after the war. The music of Delius had been beyond resignation, a serene acceptance of immortal longing, of beauty accompanying the lovers who had rejected life, and chosen death, for one hour of love. Then, leaving Death the antic behind, the caravan setting out for Samarkand. ‘Always we must go a little farther.’

  James Elroy Flecker, dead of consumption: all that was left of him were his poems, some learned by heart in the Malandine cottage before the coming of Barley.

  West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go

  Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young Star-captains glow …

  Georgian poetry died on the Somme. The young star-captains—Sorley, Butterfield, Thomas, Ledwidge, Brooke, Owen, Rosenberg, Grenfell—now glowed phosphorescent in the wood of wild willows in the unclaimed areas of Flanders, Artois, and Picardy. Their poetic race was run. Modern verse now surveyed the waste land of Civvy Street; but no urban poet of alley-way and coffee spoon could speak with the authority of the phoenix—which had no real existence. The fleet of stars was burnt out and black.

  *

  A feeling of wildest desolation arose in him; he searched the immeasurable legions of the sand—rock, bone, tree reduced by air and water ever fighting for creation. He stared along leagues of empty wave, sky, and shore, longing to see one human figure. Had Wordsworth felt that—life a vacuum, once filled by what he had, in youth, been able to put into ‘nature’?

  The far prospect of sand lay under its dilating shimmer of blue. When he stood up the mirage dissolved, releasing three small specks in line. Lowering his head to the level of the sea-shore, he saw the specks crumble and melt once more in quivering heat.

  He ran up a sandhill, marram grasses pricking his bare legs, and surveyed from the crest. A man and two women were walking there. He awaited their coming, his mind buoyant once again as he watched them getting nearer. He decided to go towards them and see who they were; and running down the slope of sand came upon a number of blue butterflies among flowers of sea-rocket growing with yellow-horned poppies above the tide-line. He wondered if, there being no scent in the sea-rocket, the butterflies had been drawn by the colour of the flowers. His footfalls purred past them, and as the group came nearer and the man waved, his heart leapt: surely it was Martin Beausire? It was; and with him were Fiona and Felicity.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” cried Martin, approaching with a hand held out. “We met Lucy in the village and she told us where to find you.”

  “Where have you sprung from?”

  “We’re staying with the Mules.”

  He wondered about this, since Martin’s novel published two years before, with its caricatures of the Mules family, had been read in the village.

  “Hullo, Felicity. This is a surprise.”

  “But, Phil,” said Fiona, �
��surely you knew Felicity was coming?”

  Seeing the girl’s downheld eyes he replied quickly, “Of course I heard from Cabton that she was coming. Only I’d forgotten the exact day.”

  Martin wanted to bathe.

  “It’s dangerous at the ebb, particularly at Aery Point. When the tide has run out we’ll be able to cross over the Hurleyburlies to the Shrarshook, and swim in the old gravel pits there.”

  “It’s your line of country.”

  They put on bathing dresses and sat in the sun before wandering down to Aery Point to look at a salmon boat which had just put in to shoot a draught. The ebb was still running fairly fast; but the main volume had lapsed. The fairway was two hundred yards distant. Salmon, cruising along the coastal shallows, just clear of breaking waves to find the river, were now moving into the estuary, he told them.

  In the fairway two other boats, each with its crew of four men and piled net, were making for the sandbanks of the South and North Tails, now marked by white confused waves. Each of the fishing places, or pitches, he explained, were visited in rotation by the licensed boats, on the basis of equal chances for all.

  Phillip and Felicity walked down wet shingle towards a whale-back of gravel where a shallow stream was rushing fast and noisy.

  “Here the ebb is checked by the sea-mass, Felicity, and so the shingle piles up.”

  They crossed the stream, the whale-back was loose with draining water. Each step up caused a slide of pebbles, so he gave her a hand. They descended the seaward slope, to walk upon the sandbank which lay beside the deep and narrow channel of the fairway. Marking buoys were lying nearly flat on their sides as though exhausted by resistance to the weight of the ebb.

  “Cabton is in the camp. We’ll go there after the bathe. I expect you’ll be glad to see him.”

  He left her, to follow or go back to Beausire, as she wished. No, he thought: I must stand alone. I belong to the dead. This is the North Tail, and across the narrow channel is the South Tail. There, on that late September morning the body of Willie’s spaniel was found. Did Billjohn follow his master to the Shrarshook in the darkness of that awful night? Did they meet? Did the spaniel find Willie and were both swept away together on the rising tide?