The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  “The gas has got me,” he wheezed. “I got a whiff of phosgene at Oppy Wood, and it recurs at intervals, as you know, old boy.”

  “Malkin is after you, Bill. About a cheque.”

  “That bloody ruffian. I was to have met him in ‘Bosun’s’ today, but I didn’t want a scene. I’d have laid him out. Jujitsu you know——” he caught Phillip’s thumb and bent it so that he was forced to throw his body back with the sudden pain.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sorry, old boy, it’s the phosgene——” cough, cough, paroxysms of coughing, piteous eyes in Phillip’s direction—“it gets me like that, and I don’t know my own strength. I’ve got t-b rather badly, you know. Eighty per cent disability pension, paymaster’s warrant due any day now. In fact, those Pay Corps wallahs at Hounslow have slipped.”

  “Why not open the window? This smoke is enough to make anyone cough.”

  Bill Kidd looked at Phillip narrowly. “Are you inferring that I’m a liar?”

  “Because I suggested that you open the window?”

  Bill Kidd pointed at him a hand on an elbow tensed as for boxing, accompanied by a hard stare. His sallow face narrowed until it seemed to Phillip that an intelligent low-running animal was looking at him. “Some day, old lad, you’re going to get what is coming to you! You think you’re Jesus Christ, don’t you, all that Donkin stuff? Yep, I’ve read your new book, with its pale pink philosophy, its Little England defeatism. Well, old boy, if you can get away with that sort of stuff, good luck to you, but be careful how you go!”

  The voice took on the exaggerated semi-nasal drawl of a hero of a Conglomerated Press sevenpenny magazine. “You may consider yourself a damned fine writer, old boy, but when it comes to narking the British Empire, then look out. Sob-stuff for the Huns is fashionable for the moment, but let that pass; but when it comes to praise of Lenin and the Bolshies, then—well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Malkin the butcher is after your blood. He says he’s going to take you to court. I’ve come only to warn you.”

  “Well, old boy, thanks for your good intentions. I want to help you too. And my advice is, write about trout! Forget that Donkin salvation stuff, you can’t do it. Donkin’s all fake emotional stuff, anyway. Now you come with me tomorrow, and I’ll show you a bit of dry-fly fishin’ on the Stour, and see if I don’t give you a subject for a book. It’s Bill Kidd tellin’ you, mind! I can give you all the dope, and you can write it down, and make it up into dramatic form, and we can go halves. No, I won’t take anything, I don’t want to make money out of trout. I love ’em too much, as you will, too, my Mad Son, when you find out what I am going to show you.”

  A young woman entered the room. She was heavy with child and, Phillip thought, afraid.

  “Phillip Maddison and I are just going up to the Rising Sun to have a quick one, darling,” he said. “This damned phosgene is working off, thank God. I won’t be long. Come back and take pot luck afterwards, won’t you, Phil?”

  “Thank you, but I’m expected home, and am already late, but may I come another time?”

  “Course you can, midear! Can’t he, Molly? We don’t stand on ceremony here, do we?”

  They stopped outside the Rising Sun. Phillip saw no motorbike there. Nor did Bill Kidd, for he said, “I hope Malkin isn’t inside. I should hate to have to sling him out on his ear.”

  Phillip didn’t want another pint; he was becoming more and more unpunctual, and this day Lucy had asked him to be home at one o’clock, as there was a roast duck for lunch; and now it was a quarter to two. He followed Bill Kidd up the stone steps into the bar-room, intending to have half a pint of cider, and then to run home; but as they were standing there, ‘Bosun’ joining them in a drink, he heard the clatter of an old motor-bicycle engine stopping outside. Bill Kidd heard it, too, and his eyes darted from the door to the opening of the barrel room, and then to the window, while his face went the hue of sea-sickness.

  The next moment the door opened, and the butcher walked into the room.

  Phillip half expected a brutal exchange of blows, grunts, thuds and cries of pain; with himself intervening and perhaps being slugged. But no, the butcher went to the bar and asked for a half-pint. Bill Kidd, in the silence of the room, demanded when the butcher’s glass was set before him, a brandy. He invited Phillip to have one with him.

  “No thank you.”

  After swallowing half his glassful, Malkin turned to Bill Kidd and said, “You know what I be here for, I want my money. I’ve been fooled about enough, and have my living to earn.”

  “Quite,” replied Bill Kidd. “I came here specially to see you, as a matter of fact. I’m expecting a telegraphed money-order from the Pay Corps wallahs this afternoon, which will pay you the loan you so kindly advanced me.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” said the butcher. “Nor will the county court judge, I reckon. Now I’m telling you, major you be, or say you be, but that’s neither here nor there. If you don’t bring thaccy money to my place by noon tomorrow, I’ll expose you for what you be. And that’s my last word.” He went out of the door.

  “He didn’t leave a moment too soon,” remarked Bill Kidd, as he brushed up his moustachios. “Something was coming to him, and would have come to him, too, if he had said one more word! Just one more word, my Mad Son, and he would have got it—Hook—line—and sinker! Wough.” He hit the palm of his hand with a fist. “Have a drink, old boy.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Bill. You show me how you fish, and I’ll settle your account with Malkin.”

  “Done! Shake, my Mad Son.”

  That afternoon he went to the butcher’s shop and offered him ten pound notes in exchange for Bill Kidd’s cheque. Malkin was suspicious at first, and seemed not to want to accept his offer. Phillip told him bluntly that he could take it or leave it when Malkin began to expostulate, “But what about my expenses? I had to make three journeys here!”

  “You’ll incur more expenses if you don’t have your engine looked at. Your valves are late.”

  Grudgingly the butcher took the stumer from his till, and gave it to Phillip while looking at him as though he were the cause of the trouble.

  That afternoon he posted the cheque to Bill Kidd, in an envelope with a short note. Soon afterwards the familiar roar of Otazelle sounded in the lane. Almost with tears in his eyes Bill Kidd thanked him, saying he was a white man, a pukka sahib, and he would for ever remain in his debt. (Phillip took this remark literally.) Meanwhile, declared Bill Kidd, he was only living to take his Mad Son to the river the next day, to show him the best occupation in the world, bar none, and when he said bar none, his Mad Son must understand he meant bar none.

  *

  Phillip concealed his half-amused, half-supercilious attitude towards Bill Kidd as he watched him changing the number plates of his car from BK1 to FU2. Obviously Bill Kidd was chancing his arm, he thought; and was therefore the more surprised when they stopped by a lichened oaken gateway and Bill Kidd said with satisfaction, “Here we are, Phillip. When we’ve taken the regulation brace-and-a-half, I’ll take you up to Uncle Tiny’s house and we’ll have poached eggs on muffins for tea.”

  They pressed through purple loosestrife and tufts of foxtail grass from which arose spear-thistles four and five feet tall, to the river. There, beside a notice board declaring that the fishing was strictly preserved, and that trespassers would be prosecuted, Bill Kidd put his rod together, greased a tapered enamelled line, fixed a damp gut cast taken from an aluminium box containing other casts curled on wet flannel, and tied to the end of 4X gut a minute and glistening imitation of a fly, in feather, silk and steel, and hardly larger than a mosquito. After stroking and arranging the filaments with fingertips which he had touched with odourless paraffin wax, he crouched forward, and with the expression of an intent dog upon his face and a whispered “Keep on my left side,” began to pull line from the reel and to throw it forward and back, a heavy gossamer, from the tip of
his split-cane rod; a wavy gossamer growing longer and longer as it travelled backwards and forwards from the rod-tip: until suddenly it was curling out over the river and straightening along its length and then lying upon the gleaming waterflow, the fly alighting last by the far bank where the ripples of a rise were scarcely smoothed away by the gliding current.

  Then, even as Bill Kidd had demonstrated in the bar-room of the Rising Sun, there was a jerk of the wrist which tightened the line, and with a swift flicking away of the cigarette from between his lips with his left hand, he muttered, “Got him”, and wound in the reel rapidly until the rod was bending in an arc and the check making a noise like a grasshopper warbler.

  A brown-tail waggled near the surface, making a bulge in the water streaming with sky and cloud in reflection.

  “Phillip, I ask you! Every time the Crystal Killer does the trick! Three pounds if he’s an ounce. I’ve marked that fish there since April. Here, take this.” He gave him the landing-net to hold.

  “Gently does it, old boy. Lean over the grasses and dip it under the fish as it comes up on its side below the bank. Gently now, gently midear. Got him. Take the rod, hold the point well up.”

  Bill Kidd beside a river was a different person. Phillip began to think of him as a natural man who just didn’t fit into ordinary life—the kind of conventional life, based on money, that he himself was, alas, beginning to conform to. This image was soon dissipated.

  “Bill, there’s another fisherman walking fast towards us from downstream.”

  The shifting eyes of Bill Kidd, observing the approaching figure, assumed the hunted look they had shown when Malkin the butcher had come into the bar of the Rising Sun.

  “Damn, my luck’s out. That bloke is my uncle’s solicitor, and for reasons I won’t go into now, I don’t want to see him. Bit of trouble with his daughter, as a matter of fact we were once engaged, but there were family objections. Grab that fish, shove your fingers through its gills, quick’s the word. Now follow me, and don’t look back, walk up the bank as though we haven’t seen him.”

  A voice behind them called, “Hi, there. Hi!” They walked on, while Bill Kidd gave a running commentary out of the side of his mouth.

  “Listen carefully. I’ll go on, while you go back and keep him talking while I start the old ’bus. Kneel down as though you’re doing up a shoelace, and shove the bloody fish in the runner we’re coming to. Damn good job we didn’t stick a spike through its head. I’ll meet you later on the road. Say you just met me and don’t know who I am. Here’s the hatch. Shove the fish in.”

  Phillip let it slip through the thistles and grasses fringing an overgrown dyke into which jets of water were falling from a half-rotten hatch.

  “Don’t forget—say you don’t know who I am, you just met me, while doin’ a bit of nature study on the bank. You see, old boy, I’m on remittance while I keep clear of England, and if he knows I’m here, there will be no more allowances from the old avuncular purse.”

  Phillip thought the best thing to do was to walk back and meet the probable owner of the beat. He saw a gentleman with a clipped grey moustache and the curt cold manner of a second-rate soldier, to whom he must appear as a hatless cad in overlong plus fours.

  “I am Colonel De ’Ath. This is my water. What are you doing here?”

  “I was looking at the river, sir.”

  “Just ‘looking at the river’ were you? I have taken the number of your car by the gate, and shall report the matter to the police. Your companion caught a fish.”

  “It was put back, and swam away.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I live near Colham.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Phillip Maddison.”

  The other looked keenly at him. “You’re the nephew of Hilary Maddison? You are. Then don’t you think it’s an underhand thing to do to spoil another’s sport?”

  “I hope it isn’t spoiled. We’ve only just started to fish.”

  “At least you have the honesty to be straightforward. Did your companion take any more fish?”

  “Only the one that was put back, sir. It was caught in the corner of the mouth, and the tongue wasn’t injured.”

  “What fly was your friend using?”

  “I think it was a home-made one. He calls it the Crystal Killer.”

  Colonel De ’Ath looked at Phillip keenly once more. “Your friend doesn’t suffer from the supposed effects of alleged phosgene-gas poisoning, I suppose?”

  Phillip thought that this might be a relation of Bill Kidd’s after all; and that he must be cautious.

  “He has an eighty per cent disability pension for a tubercular lung, I think, derived from gas in the war.”

  “Is the fly he uses anything like this?” He lifted his rod, and pointed to the fly stuck in a minute ring near the cork handle.

  “Well yes, it did look something like that, sir.”

  “Then his fly is an ordinary Badger. I think I recognise your companion. Last year I caught him poaching this beat, and he began coughing when I spoke to him, telling a tale about gas at Oppy Wood. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and told him that he might finish his day’s fishing. And I happen to know that he has returned many times during the past spring and summer and moreover has not only claimed to be related to my cousin, General Ironside, but in addition to that has brought his friends here, including the editor of Countryside Life, who wrote an account in his journal of the fishing on this water, illustrated by a photograph. Tell him from me that if he comes here again he will not only be apprehended, but lose his tackle as well. Good-day to you.”

  Phillip returned to Bill Kidd.

  “Well, my Mad Son, what did the lawyer bloke say? Rusty old Tory stuff, to which you quoted Lenin and the New Testament?”

  “How did you guess, Piscator?”

  “What were you two jawing about?”

  “Oh, among other things an article in Countryside Life——”

  “That silly bastard Frank Spinnaker went and advertised this beat to every poacher within a hundred miles. Now, here’s my plan. We’ll wait till this bloke’s off the map, and then you can have a few casts. Pity we didn’t hold on to that fish, she was a beaut. Hen fish, not such deep shoulders as a cock. Not an ounce under three pounds.”

  “I really think I ought to go home now. I’ve quite enjoyed this outing, and my first adventure in fishing under a master.”

  Chapter 15

  INCOMPLETE GIRL

  Phillip motored to London and left the Cockchafer under the Adelphi arches, a series of caverns faced and arched with London Brick once yellow but now dingy with soot. These had been built when a wharf lay beside London river and small shipping bore up with the tide to discharge wine and other merchandise for storing in the great cellars.

  The Barbarian Club was a place of good-fellowship among writers, actors, painters, lawyers, and doctors of distinction. There were small bedrooms in the garrets, a library, billiard and card rooms, and on the first floor a large supper room and an adjoining bar. It was near the theatres, and the supper room was a place of convivial talk which often went on after midnight.

  The new member found much kindliness at once. He did not know who the older men were, except those with internationally known faces—two pianists in particular, men with hard eyes in austere faces set to concert pitch, as it were, before attentive mankind. To escape from mental, spiritual, and physical devotion to their art, such men were to be found in the card room, playing poker. That, and golf some week-ends, appeared to be their only relaxation. They never drank and made merry like other Brother Barbarians who lived mainly on hope—the comets and shooting stars below the established constellations.

  Phillip felt that this was his home in London. Within the Adelphi Terrace house was warmth, light, and joviality; below, along the Embankment, the leaves of the plane trees were falling; the Strand was a hurrying place of people, near-homeless most of them, transients or inqui
lines as Compton Mackenzie had called them in Sinister Street—men and women like himself, conscious of the appalling loneliness of the soul as they hurried to find, to meet, to hope for—what?

  Whom could he see, or go to? Was the best of life to be lived only within the spirit, the mind which was made up almost entirely by memory? He walked along the crowded Strand, wondering how Piers and Virginia were getting on in Austria and Germany, or would they now be in some pension or auberge on the Riviera; wondering what his mother and father were doing, and his sisters—Doris now on her own, for Bob had disappeared: simply gone to work one morning as usual and never returned. No letter, no card: nothing. A week after returning from Devon he had vanished. Doris had given up her school-teaching to marry him; now she was left with a small son and a baby soon to be born.

  Should he take them in, and look after them? Lucy was willing. That generous, kind, and tolerant woman, what was she doing at that moment? Sitting in the parlour at home, by the fire, knitting or sewing in the light of the oil lamp, perhaps making herself a cup of tea, happily absorbed by thoughts of her children sleeping in the room above her, having seen them all tucked up and settled for the night. And he was so regarded: one of her children, sitting in his room listening to the wireless, or trying to write—and nothing beyond sketches or articles, mere journalism, ever attempted nowadays. One could not write in that house; one was no longer self-sufficient, no longer a writer. It required a space continuing, a wilderness extending for hundreds of consecutive hours of imaginative living to begin, continue, and finish one real book. The artistic imagination must be free, unhindered, and never adulterated by material life.

  He turned back at Waterloo Bridge and hurried to Adelphi Terrace. There was the old porter, Flanagan, in his small lodge, the old soldier of the Chitral campaign, and other small wars on the mountain passes of Empire. Lucy’s grandmother, Mrs. Chychester, had told him that what was ‘colonial exploitation’ to many stay-at-home critics, was ‘service’ to those who helped to keep the peace, and improve the living standards of the natives.