The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  “I watched them flying round the church tower last night.”

  They strolled back over the fields. She took his hand and led him to Verbena Cottage. Irene smiled sweetly, and invited him to lunch, leading him in by the least touch of her fingers on his hand. He was introduced to the new companion, Mrs. O’Malley, whom Irene called B. When Julian came in he seemed unusually quiet, even subdued. Mrs. O’Malley did not speak to him.

  During the meal the question of schooling arose. “We shall have to find you somewhere, Barley darling, perhaps they’ll take you at my old school at Eastbourne.”

  “Oh, Mummie!” said the girl, wrinkling her forehead.

  “Isn’t she just like a puma cub, P.M.? But I prefer Barley—Oh, your tangled hair, my baby! No school would have you!”

  “I’ll tutor her!” cried Phillip. “My fees are a penny a month!”

  “You’d be a very good tutor,” said Irene, calmly regarding him. “But your work——?”

  “The idea of old Philip as m’tutor is most amusing,” said Julian. “The Barleybright will learn a great deal from old Phillip.” He added, with a chuckle, “But only about old Phillip!”

  “Mummy, may I really be taught by P.M.?”

  “If you let me wash your hair, darling.”

  It was arranged that Miss Lushington should go to Captain P. S. T. Maddison for an hour every morning from noon until one o’clock, and that in return he would come to luncheon and any other meals he cared to have at Verbena Cottage.

  *

  The Selby-Lloyds went back at the beginning of May, for the children—Annabelle and Marcus—to return to school. Queenie had not yet decided, he learned, whether to go to Paris to finish her official education, or take a course of domestic economy—with others “out of the top drawer”, Sophy explained—in London S.W.1. Before they left, Sophy gave Phillip her address; and with almost a shock he saw that it was the house where he had stayed during the early days of the war: Tollemere Park, in Essex, then owned by the Kingsmans. Father and son had been killed in the war; Mrs. Kingsman had not long survived them. The usual story: the best were killed, the family land was lost through death duties.

  “Do come and see us if ever you find yourself in the Rodings,” said Sophy. “If you come in the winter, there’s the hunting. We’ve got three good packs, all within hacking distance.”

  Annabelle—Annabelle was gone! Over and over again he played the record of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem set to music. Barley listened too, sitting still in the cottage kitchen, as though without a thought in her head.

  “Now, we really must do some work. For prep. tonight, write me 400 words on the saying of Horace Walpole, ‘Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’.”

  In the morning, giving neither excuse nor explanation, she said she hadn’t done it.

  *

  Julian was almost a different man. His fingernails were actually grown enough to be trimmed by nail-scissors. By some mysterious means the bill at the Ring of Bells—where Julian had made a reputation for talk, and also for capacity to absorb ale, that was to remain during the lifetime of the publican—had been settled. Two tailors in Queensbridge had each made him a new suit. He avoided the village inns; the puffy look left his face; the redness on brow and cheek was replaced by sun-burn. He walked more, he bathed occasionally, he wrote with less irregularity. Phillip rejoiced that the pain behind his friend’s eyes had cleared, he was less ironic, he was at times almost peaceful. Sometimes he came to show Phillip what he had written, usually in sonnet form. Some of the lines were startling and clear, Phillip said: go on writing, Julian! Most of it was love poetry; but some was about the War, wherein he identified himself with the men he had killed in air-battle. These were, Phillip thought, derived from the poems of Wilfred Owen; but they were good on their own.

  The days went on. The love poems Julian brought were not so clear as the early ones. There was strain in them.

  “In a way, yes, I suppose you’re right, old boy,” Julian retorted, with a shade of the old arrogance. “But it’s good poetry—I know it is. You judge by your subjective feelings: but there is a classical tradition, you know!” Phillip felt that it was good poetry when Julian told him it was; but afterwards it seemed somehow to be doubtful.

  Rows of new books stood on the shelves of Irene’s cottage. Mrs. O’Malley was by now barely on speaking terms with Julian. One of the books, A Shropshire Lad, bore the inscription, To Dublin, because her cooking is so good. The companion-help, who had come from Dublin, thought that both rude and patronising, and said so.

  Julian’s entire imaginative life appeared to be devoted to Irene. “He writes upstairs in the little dark room, and rushes down to read what he has written to Irene. How she has the patience to listen to him, I can’t imagine,” remarked Mrs. O’Malley. Phillip did not try to explain, although he felt like defending Julian.

  After supper Mrs. O’Malley and he sometimes walked to the high ground marked by the church spire on the horizon to see the after-sunset. They sat on the churchyard wall and stared at the vastness of fading light to the north-west beyond the coast of Cornwall, leaving the Channel tides grey, sad, empty. “You’re a Celt, like me,” she said. “You’ll always be in love—with the wrong person.”

  “My great-grandmother was Irish,” he said, wondering what exactly she meant.

  “Ah, that’s where your feeling comes from.”

  *

  It was timeless midsummer: white owls quartered the wheat now in flag: hues of sunset were steely in the north-west long after midnight: lime-washed cottages below in the village glimmered palely to the mystic summer dawns. Sometimes Phillip returned to sleep on a haystack with a spaniel puppy he had been given by Porky. The pale stars and the moon, the calmness of the night gave an unearthly feeling of tranquillity and peace. Yet it was as though a stranger within him often sighed, longing for the dream-Annabelle whose presence would change the beauty between the set and rise of sun to warmth and peace. From vain contemplation of this dream his mind transformed his shadow-self into a star-wanderer of the centuries of light; but without consolation. He was neither of the natural world nor apart from it, as he had felt before the coming of Annabelle.

  *

  Julian’s mat-beating in the early morning ceased. So did the conventional tutoring of Phillip’s pupil.

  “History, as taught hitherto in Europe, is no good. History must be rewritten from the viewpoint that wars and strife derive mainly from the fertility or barrenness of soils. Until it is written you will be wasting your time with kings, dates, and endless wars. Let’s go for a walk, we’ll both learn more that way.”

  “I know.”

  The two spent most of the time out of doors observing the natural world. They read some of Conrad together, and miscellaneous poetry. He told her the story of Francis Thompson, the one poet whose life he particularly knew.

  She was attentive, understanding, composed, unemotional.

  “You’re too young to understand,” he said, once. “Also, you have no feeling. You are an Icelandic, or a Finnish, type—from cold, cold countries.”

  The blue eyes searched him through; he had to evade their directness.

  “Did you like the verse I quoted, Barleybright?”

  “Yes, P.M. I love the words. And I have feelings, you know. Or rather, you don’t know.”

  “But the meaning?”

  “I know what the poet means, behind the words.”

  “Oh Barley, I shouldn’t be reading sad poetry to you! You belong to a new generation, a new world—I’m part of the sad, frustrated old world. I’m rubbish.”

  “You’re not rubbish. Not with me, anyway.”

  “You’re a funny girl. How much do you really know, I wonder? The sun is shining—if you know that, you’ve got all the wisdom of the ages in your mind. Let’s go for a walk! I’m getting morbid!”

  “You’re not morbid. You think of me as a child, don’t you? So you don’t belie
ve me.” She was by his side, waiting.

  “Now, I think, a lesson in natural history. Let’s climb up to the owls in Farmer Crew’s hayloft at Barton Hole, down the lane to the sea.”

  “Yes!”

  Barton Hole lay in a coombe leading off the main valley: a cluster of thatched buildings around a cattle yard, with a cider press and a circular root-house containing a slicing machine, seasonally turned by a horse. An owl-hole had been left when the farm was built, for the birds to enter and take mice.

  They climbed up into the loft, half-filled with last year’s hay. Part of a tree branch, green with age and tunnelled by beetles, supported the ridge, embedded in the gable ends.

  At the far end the hay had been cleared. As they crept over the floor joists, wary of going through the rotten boards, a spread of white arose in the dimness as the mother owl flew up to perch upon a tie-beam. A chirruping came from the darkness by the eaves. The owl uttered a shriek and flew past them, they heard no sound of her wings, only the wind on their faces. A blackbird cried its shrill alarm outside. The two were now crouching on a litter of small dry bones, fur, and the blue armour of beetle wings. When their eyes were used to the dim light they saw the nest. Three young birds were almost grown, standing there in plumage yellow, grey, and white. Their baby-fluff moved in the least movement of air. As they crawled nearer the three owlets ran away.

  Two more, about a fortnight younger, squatted still. Their bodies were dough-like, covered with white fluffy down. Phillip pointed out the shape of head and beak like a vulture’s. The roundness of the face and head of the adult bird was due to thick feathering. Barley picked them up and sat them on her lap; then they saw a still smaller pair, and when these were added to her lap, there remained yet another pair, new-hatched and blind, so small that both could be put in the palm of one hand. While she nursed them, Phillip counted about fifty mice and voles and young rats lying around the nest. There must have been several sackfuls of bones and fur lying about; yet the owlery smelt fresh. There was no waste here, he said, as around a hawk’s nest or eyrie: the owls swallowed their prey whole, and the castings or pellets of indigestible stuff thrown up from their crops were clean feather, bone, and fur.

  He borrowed a basket to take two fledgelings back to show Irene. The farmer’s spinster sister, who kept the dairy, pale of face and gaunt, came out of her cool room with its heavy slate shelves whereon stood earthenware pans of milk, to see the little birds. She walked stiffly, and had woeful eyes; but was kind and quiet in manner.

  “Vancy that, now!” she remarked, in her craking voice. “Pretty birds, I reckon, and do a lot of good catching mice, they say. ’Tes wonderful what a lot of different things there be in the world, ban’t it, midear?”, smiling her sweet, crooked smile at the girl.

  “Owls are beautiful things!” said Barley.

  “There now, vancy that!” exclaimed the old woman, with a smile.

  Having shown the young owlets around—“What a chap you are, Phil!” from Julian—they returned and put them back. Coming down again, there stood the farmer, gnarled like one of his cankered cider-apple trees. He was deaf, so Phillip shouted at him, “I climbed up without asking your permission, I’m afraid! Please forgive me!”

  The farmer’s mouth drew down and open, his eyes, too. He took a long suck of his old pipe, removed it, and with eyes now wide-open “Aw haw haw!” he cried solemnly, then poked Phillip in the ribs. “Aw haw!” he guffawed. “You med go up-along wi’ th’ l’il maid whenever you’m a mind to, zur, I’m only too plaized vor tew zee ’ee! ’Tes nothing to me what others speak agin ’ee, you pay your way, and I’ve nothin’ to zay agin ’ee, midear! You come any time you’m a mind to! You’m welcome!”

  Phillip wondered what he meant, by others speaking “agin” him; but in the company of Barley it seemed not worth bothering about. Yet she said as they walked back, “People always talk, I learned that in Malaya, P.M. You won’t ever let them upset you, will you? Promise me?”

  “Good heavens no, Barley! I mean, I don’t mind what people say about me”; while he wondered if Irene’s odd reception of him when first she had come to the village had been due to Julian telling her of his month in prison after the war. After the deliberate twisting of the ‘Dear Man of the Sands’ letter he wouldn’t put anything past Julian.

  *

  During the next few weeks Phillip and his young protégée visited many places together, Barley riding on the carrier of the Norton. She had a natural sense of balance. Once they went across Dartmoor to visit Willie’s cottage in North Devon, starting soon after sunrise. It was empty, as before. Another day they went to a long, winding valley-village on the coast along the Severn Sea, to explore old silver mines and eat strawberries in the fields above, as many as they could eat for a shilling. They walked over the Chains of Exmoor, she riding on his back across water-plashes where the white tufts of cotton-grass trembled above the bog.

  She told him of her grannie’s villa in the Pyrénées, of ski-ing in the snow by the empty huts of peasants who spent the winter in the valley villages; of how every peasant was allowed one tree a year for firing, and how all except the luckiest would bargain afterwards for a bigger tree, getting one another drunk.

  They walked over the sandhills to an estuary, watching crews of salmon boats putting out and hauling their nets; they bathed in rocky pools left by the loading of gravel into wooden barges. Through her bathing dress, now too small for her, he saw that her shape had budded. Her tumbled hair fell on her brown shoulders, her arms were thin and brown too, she smiled widely, she was delight itself as with a shake of her curls she poised a moment before plunging into pale green water through which she seemed to slip without splash or effort. “Come in, P.M., it’s lovely!” as she rolled over on her back.

  While in the sun with her, the image of Annabelle vanished; Annabelle’s beauty was for the night. If only Annabelle were Barley—swimming and diving with an ease beyond premeditation!

  The girl would have swum across the channel to the fishing village had he not told her of the swift currents. She laughed: there were no currents, she said—it was slack water of low tide! But she thought no more of crossing, because he was anxious.

  After disporting in the warm pools they picked up their things and started to walk back in their bathing dresses over sandhills that rang in the heat. Soon they were dry, the salt white on brown flesh, the sands burning the soles of their feet. He felt himself to have no body, to be part of the sea and the pale blue sky pierced by larksong.

  They arrived home late, after crossing Dartmoor by moonlight, which quenched the glimmer of the new acetylene headlamp—it was nearly eleven when Irene had given Barley a hot bath and tucked her up in bed. Where was Julian?

  After cooking Phillip a sea-trout, and putting it before him, Irene closed the window, which had been open at the top.

  “I feel most awfully mean, P.M.,” she began, “especially after the way I treated you when I thought you had been unfair in telling me about Julian so soon after we met, when also you appeared to be talking about me to him.”

  “I think I was horribly tactless, Irene.”

  “We’ll let bygones be bygones, shall we?”

  When the meal was over, and coffee brought in, she said, “Do tell me, P.M., has Julian any money of his own? Between ourselves, I lent him forty pounds, as he seemed to be in difficulties through default of his guardian. You see, I’ve been rather hard up lately, paying off one thing and another, and I’ve asked Julian several times if he could manage to repay the loan. His replies puzzle me. He has a different excuse each day. I can’t make him out. Are all writers the same, unable to discern reality from imagination?”

  Phillip told himself that this time he would be careful not to be involved. “Well, you know, I suppose all of us tend to go along a single-track of the mind, which is a form of egotism or selfishness.”

  “You put it very nicely, P.M., but the position isn’t happy here. Julian is such a con
tradictory mixture. Bridget can’t bear him in the house, and I don’t want her to go. But most of all I cannot bear the idea of a friend lying to me. There’s no necessity to be untruthful. Why do men——?” Appealingly she looked at him. He saw that she was tired. “Do you think I’m an awful fool, P.M.?”

  “Certainly not. I think you’re very decent. In fact, too decent. I understand exactly how you feel.”

  There was a movement at the top of the stairs. Barley in home-made pyjamas stood there. “Hullo, darling! I left you in bed, naughty one! Did you enjoy your day with nice, kind P.M.? Been stealing my puma cub, has he? What did he tell you about this time?”

  “He told me about salmon, about the War, and how a four-stroke engine works, Mummie.”

  Irene gave Phillip a smile in which was a suggestion of bewilderment, pride, amazement, admiration. “The new generation, P.M.! Direct, straight … none of the inner complications that grieve you and me—but you’re a boy still, P.M., with a wonderful future——”

  Perhaps it was the strong sunlight of the long day, or the tiredness; or the unexpected sympathy, but he could not help tears coming into his eyes. Life seemed to be but a making and a breaking of friendships, ties, affections. Most people seemed to be rootless; fallen between two worlds. When Irene went away, as she had spoken of going, where would his life be then?

  “P.M.’s tired too, isn’t he, darling? Let’s give him a peg and send him home to his camp-bed. The sun was very strong today—your hair, my baby, is very nearly bleached white, and oh, so full of sand! I must wash it tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Mummie, I do so hate my hair being washed. And I wasn’t tired, really. You can’t get tired in this sun, it isn’t like the Far East, Mummie.”

  “Well, run wild while you can. Now to bed, my sleepy-head. Kiss P.M. too, darling.” A touch of lips on his forehead, and she was gone.

  Julian came in as Phillip was about to leave. His fingernails were gnawn again. At first he sat silent, head held down at an angle, as though self-absorbed; then he glanced uneasily at Phillip, who guessed by the quick breathing what Julian was feeling, vainly trying to shift the weight of misery in his breast by thoughts of the dead Swinburne, of loneliness and darkness to be faced once more by poetry. He was between hope and despair; listening to and watching every word and smile and movement of Irene: longing to escape the interior weight by imagining himself striding into darkness and death to the ultimate triumph of poetry over life.