The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  “Isn’t it exciting?” said Lucy, moving to him. “And won’t it be fun when it is all over, and the place done up? I’m so glad it isn’t very big. I remember how relieved Pa’s cousin Maude was, when she had the house left to her by her father pulled down, and she went to live in a small modern house by herself. ‘O, why didn’t I have it done before?’ she said to me. ‘I feel now that I’m an entirely different person.’”

  Wandering around, Phillip saw Bill Kidd talking to the landlord of the Rising Sun. Kidd was there to buy furniture for the house he had rented.

  “When you want a trout for your breakfast, send for me, my Mad Son.”

  “Ah,” replied Phillip, in imitation of Ernest, who was somewhere about.

  They talked together until Bill Kidd saw Piers approaching, and saying that he wanted a word with the auctioneer, made off into the crowd.

  The auctioneer began at the collection of odds and ends, then passed to the bedding. This was quickly disposed of. By half-past twelve he was half-way; they broke off for lunch, the auctioneer saying that he would begin again at a quarter past one sharp, in the raftered dining hall, where some of the more cumbrous furniture from outhouse and side rooms had been brought.

  Phillip was dismayed by the price some of the pieces fetched. Most of them went quickly; there was a group of hard-eyed men in city suits and bowler hats who appeared to have arranged to bid in turn, he thought. Only afterwards did he realise that he had been too hasty in his desire to make a fresh start with the house.

  The oak sideboard, carved with scenes of the Crimea, a wedding present to his grandfather from the Regiment, went for 17/6; the wine-cooler for 8/-; a pair of Jacobean cast-iron fire-dogs, half-buried under the ashes of the original hall, went to a scrap-dealer for eighteenpence, with the fireback.

  “Now we come to a relic of the past, gentlemen. A genuine Georgian chamber-horse to reduce your weight. I don’t suppose there’s many left like this one throughout the entire British Isles. Anyone wanting to start a museum, now’s his chance. Who’ll open for me?” The auctioneer looked around. “Come on, where will someone start me? Shall we say a fiver?”

  He looked down at the row of bowler hats.

  “If this was in London, you’d get the Victoria and Albert bidding against some American gent,” he remarked conversationally. “Now who’ll give me a start? All right then, make me a bid! A shilling? Be serious, please; we’ve got a lot to get through this afternoon. Who’ll bid me a crown? You will, sir? Thank you. A crown I’m bid, a crown. Anyone want a valuable piece of furniture, the ‘Chamber Horse’ as the first one was described nearly two hundred years ago by the inventor, a Londoner called Marsh. I shouldn’t be surprised if this was made by Thomas Sheraton, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Now then, who’ll say seven and six? You sir? Going at seven shillings and sixpence—for the last time—any advance on seven-and-six—going, going——” he struck the top of his rostrum, and nodded to Bill Kidd.

  “That will sweat the whiskey out of him, Lucy.”

  “Well, we didn’t really want it, did we?” she whispered.

  “I might need it one day.”

  For a shilling or two went uniform trunks and japanned cases. Then heaps of dull pictures, most of them of horses with their riders or grooms; followed by the servant’s wash-hand-stands and towel rails, which made a little more.

  “Perhaps things will be better in the drawing room.”

  Felicity spoke quietly, conscious of many eyes upon her; she determined to remain aloof, lest people suspect her for an interloper. They followed the crowd through the tall white door.

  The same gang ruled in the drawing room. Once the auctioneer stepped down and had a quiet word with Phillip: would he like him he said, to buy in some of the better lots? Phillip shook his head, unable to decide otherwise.

  Again the name of Thomas Sheraton was mentioned from the rostrum.

  “Some call it a supper canterbury, others a music canterbury, gentlemen, but Sheraton describes it in his Cabinet Dictionary, published in eighteen hundred and three, as a supper tray. You might call it a dumb-waiter. Who’ll say ten pounds to start me?” He sighed loudly. “Why, what’s the matter with you? Here we are in one of the original West Country bartons, and … what’s come over everybody? Are you all afraid of the slump? Then now’s the time to buy! And hold for a rise when the Americans come over!”

  It went to a bowler hat for five pounds. A Sheraton mahogany secretaire bookcase went similarly for ten pounds; a 1745 giltwood carved upright mirror for two pounds. A parquetry dressing-table, style of Louis XV, and a mahogany pedestal writing desk of a decade later, made six pounds each. The bowler hats got all the lots—Dutch marquetry cabinet, 1760, £4: mahogany sofa table £3; eight Hepplewhite mahogany chairs £9; ironstone china flower-painted dinner service of 120 pieces £3.

  *

  Outside the room Phillip saw Pansy. She asked if he was busy. No. During the year and a half since Tim had left for Australia she had written regularly to him, but had had no answer.

  “I haven’t heard from Tim, either. Nor has my uncle, who arranged the passages for those two.”

  “Do you think Tim is waiting until he gets a good position before sending for me, Phillip. May I call you Phillip?”

  “Of course. Yes, that may be Tim’s idea, Pansy.”

  “Oh thank you, you have given me new hope!”

  *

  Another of the spectators at the sale was a lean and spare man who had a severe military appearance offset by a tweed hat in which several flies were stuck. Reading of the forthcoming auction, at the home of a Phillip Maddison, Esquire, Colonel De’Ath had motored over to find out if this was the same fellow he had caught poaching on his beat. Having confirmed this, his next thought was for the Dynawurkur vacuum cleaner which the fellow’s brother-in-law, Copleston, had tried to sell his wife a couple of years back. He recognised Ernest, and putting on an amiable one-sahib-to-another manner spoke to him about the possibility of getting a machine.

  Ernest said that he had one at home, but it was second-hand. This was the same machine which had been the object of a judgement summons and several delaying fees to stay execution, and had finally cost about £40. It had never been unpacked, beyond examination by a pawnbroker when Tim had popped it for £4, since leaving the factory. Ernest let Colonel De’Ath have it for thirty shillings.

  When Phillip heard of this from Lucy he said that he had behaved in the same dud manner over the furniture, as Ernest had over the Dynawurkur: how then could he, even in his mind, criticise his brother-in-law?

  Lucy went on to say that the owner of the Tamplin had turned up, on leave from Africa. After staring at the wreckage in the bramble bush ‘Bongo’ had gone away without a word, to return with a scrap-metal diddecai, who gave him £1 for the engine, leaving the skeleton behind.

  The same diddecai was at the sale. He had looked over the Delauny-Belville in the workshop. Ernest had made a sound job of crown-wheel and differential, the motorcar was in running order. The late owner, disclaiming responsibility for unauthorised work, had already sold it to Ernest for £5.

  “What’ll you take for the old crock, guv’nor? Five pun’?”

  “All right,” murmured Ernest, glad to get rid of the beastly thing.

  Phillip thought, these Coplestons are England in decadence, yet, O God, I am part of this decadence. I do not really care for this land. I am a book-worm feebly channeling one of those leather-bound books of dead sermons I have tipped out as rubbish.

  *

  Other eyes had looked among the rubbish besides the diddccais. Billy was accompanied by his best friend, Artie Rigg, a boy with yellow hair hanging over brow and neck, who owned a wooden box mounted on a pair of old perambulator wheels. Billy had been scrounging, a word he had learned from his father, from bits and pieces left behind by the diddecais. Thus Billy had salvaged half a dozen pink chinese lanterns, each made in the shape of a lotus flower and bearing a tiny ca
ndle. These paper lamps had once belonged to Hilary, who had brought them back from his first voyage in the China Seas.

  *

  Piers and Virginia were staying at an hotel in Milborne, for Lady Tofield would not receive a divorced woman, or one about to be divorced. They invited Lucy and Phillip to tea with them the next day. Lucy could not get away, so she proposed that Felicity go with Phillip. When she came down, having dressed for the occasion, Felicity wore rather noticeable clothes, he considered. She had on a blue woven fibre cloche hat to match the colour of her eyes; her frock showed off her figure rather too prominently, while the slender umbrella and high-heeled shoes, together with an embroidered and beaded silk handbag with a large silver mount was not quite the thing for the country. She knew his feelings, and seated beside him in the Cockchafer said that her mother had bought all but the hat for her, saying she must look her best when taking up her new job.

  “Nice girl,” remarked Piers, when they were leaving to return home. “Hope you manage to get some work done. I thought once of having her myself.”

  “There’s nothing like that between us, Piers.”

  “You mustn’t be cruel to the girl. She loves you.”

  *

  The south-west gales streamed away leaves from the trees; beaters went tap-tapping, in smocks, through the coverts, to the screechings of cock-pheasants and their rocketting wings. Then the shooting was over, the guests departed, including Lucy’s father and brother. Ernest did not shoot; but Pa had been in fine form. It was agreed that the shoot of the day was the bringing down of two high pheasants from the Hanger while standing in Lobbett’s, two cocks travelling at well over forty miles an hour with the wind.

  ‘Mister’ had come over to lunch of steak-and-kidney pudding, potatoes in their jackets, cheese and burgundy, a ‘spread’ in the keeper’s hut at the edge of one of the coverts, afterwards wobbling back to Ruddle Stones with a cock and hen tied to the handlebars of the ‘Onion’.

  Once again the farmhouse was redolent of the scent of burning joss-sticks.

  ‘Mister’ had brought with him a copy of The Ecclesiastical Times to give to Lucy. She left it on the parlour side-board and Hilary took it up the next day. He had already heard of the ‘attack’ on Phillip’s novel in a letter from his sister Viccy. After glancing at it his first impulse was to put it down; then he read it through … ‘Donkin’s communist propaganda … extolling Lenin … bathing naked with children … attacking patriotism, soldierly virtues, and the sacrifice of the dead; sneers at parsons in uniform’ … ‘a hero who is ceaselessly blaspheming against the Established Church and attributes the birth of Our Lord to purely physical causes’ … he put the paper back on the sideboard while telling himself that while he did not share the religious beliefs of others, there was such a thing as good form, and to give needless offence to his readers was the act of a fool.

  He wanted to discuss it with Irene, but hesitated. How far was she in sympathy with such ideas? Surely not with Phillip’s book, which, according to the Editor of the paper… He read it over again. What in God’s name was the young idiot thinking of? Whatever induced him to follow in the footsteps of his cousin Willie, who had also gone off the deep end, according to what brother John had told him in the past. What was the purpose of it? Where was the sense? Unless—and here Hilary thought he had seen the light—Phillip was indeed what they called in The Morning Post ‘a pale-pink communist’. His socialist ideas had been bad enough, but this latest thing was beyond the limit.

  He was still fuming over the review when Lucy came in.

  “Did you know Phillip was writing this sort of thing, Lucy?”

  “Oh yes, I think so.”

  “What is his idea, d’you know?”

  “I think he wrote it as a sort of memorial to Willie.”

  “Good God! Have you read this?”

  “Not yet. It only arrived here from ‘Mister’, yesterday.”

  “Have you read the book yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “It made me feel rather sad.” It was an effort to add, “I thought Donkin was rather a poor one.”

  “‘Donkin’ is based on my nephew William?”

  “Well, not altogether, Uncle Hilary.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. My brother John would turn in his grave.”

  He pulled down his waistcoat, the bottom of which had ridden up. He had not had a new suit since before the war.

  “Have you seen Irene? She was here before I dropped off for—” he looked at his watch, “ten minutes.”

  “I think she went with Phillip to see the spruce scions grafted in the nursery.”

  “Did they take Billy?”

  “No, Billy went with Felicity to play with the rector’s children.”

  Hilary walked up and down for awhile before saying, “I suppose you wouldn’t care for a walk? You do far too much, you know. Can’t you get a woman to live in, a cook-housekeeper? That’s what Viccy has.”

  “I did think of it, but it’s a question of the bedrooms. And now that Felicity is coming to live with us—”

  “Who is this girl, Lucy? Oh, a nurse for the children. She seems a cut above the usual run of nannies.”

  He noticed that Lucy blushed as she answered, “Well, she is going to help me a little, but really she’s a secretary for Phillip.”

  “Then he’s going to continue writing this sort of stuff?”

  “Oh no. I think he wants to write about fish.”

  “Has your father seen the new book?”

  “Oh yes. Phillip sent him a copy from London.”

  Pa had read the copy all through to the last page, and then closing the book had remarked “Ha,” as he removed it from his reading stand, to replace it with a detective story, with a remark to Ernest, reading on the sofa, “Phil’s an ass.” Ernest had told Lucy this, as a joke, and Lucy had repeated it to Phillip soon after his arrival from London. She had expected him to laugh; instead, he had remained silent. Then she had changed the subject.

  “What did your father think about it, Lucy?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He’s getting on in years, and prefers detective stories.”

  *

  Phillip was standing beside Irene in the nursery, which occupied a couple of acres of land behind the keeper’s cottage. The area had been reclaimed from wilderness in the year following the Armistice. Plots were laid out in rows of seedling beech, oak, larch, and spruce. Adjacent plots carried rows of 4-, 5-, and 6-year old trees, which were ready for transplanting. The area was wired against rabbits with galvanised netting 4-feet high. Occasionally a squirrel was shot, since their teeth cut the sapling conifers, he explained.

  “But these clones in this row were topped by the forester, Irene. I helped to graft the scions on them nearly two years ago.”

  He pointed out the scions, which had been collected during the white winter when Piers had taught him to ski.

  “What exactly is a clone, Phillip?”

  “It’s a grafted sapling. The scions are from one of our few remaining sixty-year-old spruces. We shot them down with swanshot. They’re old, and can produce fruit—as the forester calls the cones—while the sapling stock, being young, rapidly pushes out the scion into branches. The idea is to get fruit quickly, near the ground.”

  “How long will it take these clones to produce fruit?”

  “Oh, some years yet.”

  Irene had been wondering how her acceptance of Hilary’s offer of marriage would affect Phillip’s future. She saw that the present complication might become simplified by her answer; she had given it much thought. Hilary was not normal; he had suffered, he was still suffering, from loneliness. It made him a little overbearing, and unkind to Phillip. He had spoken of his wish to travel again—to visit the places of his youth, particularly China—in her company. ‘Alone, I shall feel entirely lost, dear lady.’ He had written to her of his future hopes of making over the estate to a trus
t, to provide for her present living, as well as her future. He had no wish to be one of the trustees; he wanted all to pass out of his hands, it was time that he gave up his burden.

  ‘I’ll be only too glad to wash my hands of the entire matter, once I have evidence that Phillip is prepared to devote his whole energies to management, as tenant-for-life. I’m prepared to add a capital sum to ensure a life-income for Lucy. I believe that farming will come back in this country. As a nation we cannot afford to neglect the land for long, with signs of German resurgence. And I’m not alone in my opinion that the neglect of agriculture will not last very much longer—ten years at most. Germany should have been broken up into states and principalities as she was before Bismarck. The Prussians ruined my mother’s family, they’ve caused one world-wide war, which wasn’t properly finished, as it should have been, by carrying on with the Americans through 1919 after refusing the German request for an armistice as soon as they saw the game was up. This is an unpopular idea at the present time, I know; but I am prepared to back my judgment. There’ll be another war within ten years, and when that happens the land will be of supreme importance to the nation. Your grandson will be growing up then, and ready to take his place in the production of food for the nation.’

  Phillip was explaining that timber-growing was a long-term business.

  “The stands, that is the mature trees, take about half a century from seed to timber-hauling.”

  “That’s more than a generation, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, provided there isn’t another war, which there may be unless the die-hards like Nuncle don’t change their ideas. Look how Germany was treated during the occupation of the Rhineland! Willie was there, six years ago, and told me a lot about it, how the French allowed the rival political parties to meet, and fight it out. ‘Divide and rule’, of course. Our blockade caused much starvation and suffering among the poor—their bread, he told me, was half sawdust. He saw small girls of six and seven years offering themselves to sailors at the ports, for a cake of soap. I’ve put all he told me into the mouth of Donkin, the half-deranged ex-soldier in my novel, The Phoenix. In it, Donkin, who is based on Willie, prophesies another war in a few years’ time, arising from the hard faces of what he calls ‘the old men of Europe’.”