“Good-night, Irene. Thank you for my supper! Good-night, Julian.”
It was so fine a night that he lay on the grass of his little garden, watching for the tawny owl to alight on the pinnacles atop the church tower. He heard footfalls coming up the lane, and turning down past the higher cottages. He lay quiescent. The footfalls came nearer, he turned his head, and saw Julian’s unhappy face.
“May I speak to you in confidence, old boy?”
“Of course. Come into the cottage.”
He lit the driftwood fire.
“What’s eating her, Phil? What did she say to you when you came in this evening? What did she say to you?”
“Oh, we talked about various things.”
“She’s pretty fed up with me, isn’t she, old boy?”
“Well, I expect you know yourself, Julian.”
“I thought so.”
To Phillip’s uneasiness Julian began to sob. “By God I love her, Phil! I’ve never felt like it before, I swear it’s true. I want to—you may laugh—to help her, to protect her. I—I—by God——”
When Julian was less unhappy, Phillip said, “Julian! Go away, go at once! Make a gesture! Go away and work like hell and write and write, and knock the hell out of yourself by using your fine gifts! Why, with your knowledge, you’d be invaluable on a paper like Jack O’Lantern’s Weekly, or T.P.’s Weekly, or The Outlook——”
Julian turned and glared at Phillip. “By God,” he said, “I may be a maundering idiot, but I won’t stand that sort of insolence from even you! By God, you can laugh, you long, lounging, insolent fool, but by Heaven!—One day, I tell you, I will write great verse that shall shake the world—oh, by God! It’s intolerable!”
He strode off up the lane. Phillip, feeling weak and silly, went into the garden, watched by Crang and his wife behind their little tattered lace curtains; but weak laughter changed to weaker tears.
In bed, he heard Julian walking down the street, accompanying with scoffing laughter the inarticulate noises of ‘Sailor.’ The footfalls and noises went round the corner, and the night was to the owls, and the murmur of the stream below the garden.
*
Within a week ‘Sailor’s’ monthly pension was spent in beer. So he drank white ale, which was about half pure alcohol. One pint of white ale and his eyes at night were those of a pole-axed bullock. Enough wit remained, however, as he lurched to his feet, to articulate to Julian, “Gennulm’n or—hic—no gennulm’n—”—pause while he gathered the juices of his mouth around his tongue and squirted them accurately through the broken window pane—“I’m going—hic—to—tell you—Mister Bliddy Warbeck—hic—that you’m, hey?—hic—a drunken booger! Hey?” ‘Sailor’ staggered to his feet. “And no drunken booger won’t—hic—hey?—won’t bliddy well sleep no more—hic—in my bed!” Dark hair fallen over eyes, with a sweeping gesture of dismissal ‘Sailor’ sagged and became, in the village phrase, dumb as a bit of meat.
Having carried him to his bed, Julian walked into Phillip’s cottage, stumped upstairs, and lay down on his old bed, fully dressed. In the morning he was deferential and conciliatory, but Phillip said “No” to his pleading. Julian could find no one in the village to take him in—until finally he went to Irene, and she gave him a couch-bed in the wash-house attached to her cottage.
The next morning the village taxicab, a 1921 Ford tourer, shook as the engine idled outside Verbena Cottage. Julian’s boxes of books with other luggage were packed in the back. Irene, in neat tailor-made coat and skirt of black, wearing small blue hat of fine straw with a single feather, got in beside the driver. Julian sat alone beside his belongings in the back seat. Phillip shook him by the hand. “Good luck, Julian.”
“Thank you, Maître. You need it more than I do,” he replied with an air of restrained and courteous gravity.
Irene came back from seeing off the little tank locomotive which drew, upon a single line, the small train to Ferndale junction. “Thank goodness he’s gone.”
Julian spent the day there and returned on the evening train. Again he slept in the wash-house; again the new T-Ford shuddered at idling-speed of its 20-h.p. engine. This time Irene and Bridget sat in the back seats while Julian sat beside the driver. Irene was again smartly dressed, in navy-blue coat and skirt and smaller hat of cocks’ feathers dyed dark blue. This time the Ford went to Newton Abbot. Exeter was the first stop. Julian got out at St. David’s station and returned by the afternoon train, soberly, humbly, imploringly. He slept that night in Phillip’s cottage, and Phillip slept on the thistly haystack with Rusty, his spaniel pup. In the morning Irene’s door was shut and locked. Julian’s luggage had been left at Exeter. He rode on the carrier of the Norton to St. David’s station. He stood by the open window, in the corridor of the London train, aloof and erect. Neither he nor Phillip spoke. The green flag waved, the whistle blew, the long train moved quietly. Phillip saw tears in Julian’s eyes as he turned away; he hesitated, then with a sigh went back to his motor-bicycle standing by the cab rank.
Part Three
ANNABELLE
“She was a child, and I was a child
In a kingdom by the sea——”
Edgar Allan Poe
Chapter 12
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Outside the winter night was wild and stormy. Puffs of smoke came from the kitchen range. Wind moaned under the door. Inside the oven a brace of partridges were roasting. Rusty, the spaniel pup, lay fully stretched on a sack before the fire. A small cat sat close to the spaniel, gravely staring at the glow between the worn fire-bars. Three pots simmered on the range—brussels sprouts, potatoes, and bread-sauce with onion. A half-bottle of claret stood on the tarred chimney-shelf beside the alarm clock ticking erratically with rust. The dinner, which Phillip had started to prepare at half-past six, was still cooking. The clock hands, at five to one, were in a position of insult.
A brown army blanket covered the window. The room glowed with yellow lamp-light. Phillip was reading. The night was alive for him, through the pages of the book he had bought the day before in the town.
At seven that evening he had gone, as usual, to the Ring of Bells, leaving the partridges in the oven with rashers of bacon pinned by matchsticks to their breasts, and a good fire to roast them. Leaving the inn at nine o’clock, he had returned to find the room full of smoke and the fire out. The south-west gale had arrived, an uninvited guest. Having re-lit the fire, he settled in his armchair—surplus Officers’ Mess furniture—and continued reading Way of Revelation, a new long War novel, reviews of which he had read in The Manchester Guardian Weekly, The Westminster Gazette Weekly (pale green paper), The Times Literary Supplement, periodicals which he ordered in the shop at Queensbridge. It was magnificent, it was the real stuff. For two evenings he had sat before the fire, cat and dog on sack, feet to flames, living with Adrian Knoyle, Eric Sinclair, Burns, Walker, Fotheringay, Gina, and Rosemary; he had trudged the battlefields of Neuve Chapelle, Loos, Ypres, Somme, Hindenburg Line—oh, marvellously real and true a re-creation of those incredibly vanished times and places! By the descriptions, sharp and poignant, he knew exactly what the author was like, and how lonely he must be. Should he write to him, and tell him that he knew every shade of hope and excitement which had written his book for him, and that they must be friends? He read on; he was with the battalion officers in the forest hut in Bourlon Wood covering Cambrai, as the colonel gave orders for the daylight attack: he knew how they felt as they swallowed their quick drinks of whisky, before going back to their companies and platoons: he was with them when the German machine-guns opened up and they fell, and a stream of chips was cut from the young oak tree just above the head of the wounded Adrian…. Here at last was someone whose glance was level upon the world of reality, level in a post-war world of prejudices, hates, scornings, and denials. Dare he write to Captain Wilfrid Ewart and send him a copy of his own book? Dare he? A book about a small boy in the country of pre-war England? To a Scots Guardee? It would
be presumptuous.
*
Phillip’s book had been published during the past October. Early that day he had gone to Queensbridge and bought every available daily newspaper and weekly periodical, and taking an armful to a market seat, had begun a search for his name among the news columns on the principal pages, then on lesser pages, then even among the Shipping, Stock Exchange, and Board Meeting Reports. Surely The Times Literary Supplement would notice the book? It was not even in the advertisement columns.
During the weeks of November reviews came by post, exciting little packets wrapped in green paper from the Press Cutting Agency. He read them many times, until he knew them by heart. The Manchester Guardian said it was a beautiful love story, written with an absolute candour which was truly spontaneous, a book of such moving poetry that the reader instinctively turned back to many passages when the book was finished. The Times Literary Supplement was more reserved, calling it a labour of love, a record of sights and scenes and smells which the normal small boy in the country would encounter. Martin Beausire in The Daily Crusader said it was “a first novel of quite unusual distinction and beauty, stamping the author as a true poet of nature”. The Pall Mall Gazette and Globe said the author had great understanding of children. The Spectator declared the book memorable; the good old Weekly Courier, from which he had been sacked, said it was real literature (Hurray for B. B. Bloom! “What’v’yer got?” “Real Literature!!”). The Saturday Review, while objecting to a purple passage, said the writer was worth taking seriously. Miss Rose Macaulay in The Daily News said it contained such hideous words as lastly and photo. And Julian’s friend, always referred to by him as Harold the Critic, after writing to Phillip to ask him to send him a copy for review in Red Tape, the Civil Service magazine, concluded a wholly destructive critique with the words, “We cannot honestly join in the chorus of approbation.” Phillip had met Harold the Critic, a pale-faced young man with a wispy moustache and a literary stoop. He was an admirer of Middleton Murry, editor of The Athenaeum, for whom he reviewed books; Julian had often quoted derisively a phrase from one of Harold the Critic’s reviews in that weekly on Lord de Tabley’s verse, “The poetic content is firm and satisfying.”
Phillip stuck the press clippings in a big book, given him by a bookseller in the town, in which Christmas Card samples originally had been glued.
Now, on the completion of his second novel, he glanced once again over the criticisms of the first, before putting the press-clipping book back in its place on the shelf, and opening the oven door. Surely the partridges were cooked? He had shot them a week before in one of the Barton Hole fields, having been invited to shoot over the farm by the owner. A pleasing left and right; the young spaniel had retrieved one of them, growling and wagging his curly stump as he came to the hand held down for the bird.
At half-past one in the morning the cork of the half-bottle of St. Julien was drawn, the dark red wine poured into the small Tiptree jam-jar used as a glass. It was not like an ordinary jam-jar: it was no insult to good wine to drink from it. Less than three inches high, with slightly sloping sides, it ended in a smooth plain lip. It was one of a dozen small jars, each holding a different jam, sent as a present by his mother—the best conserves in England.
The birds were tender, and he was hungry. The meal was interrupted while a note was made of what the landlord of the pub had said of a wandering pheasant he had shot and eaten.
“A bootiful bird, fat he was, and shining. I didden wait long ’fore I tackled ’n. I’d ate ’n all up less than a hower after shutin’ of ’n! I made the booger sit up! Didden I, tho! I made the shins of ’n rattle!”
The half-grown dog sat on the right of the chair, the cat on the left. Flinging away the blunt knife, Phillip held a partridge in his fingers, gnawing and tearing with his teeth, spitting out No. 6 shot and dropping the bones from his mouth, now on the left, now on the right of the chair. Everything was eaten by two o’clock. The chair was slewed round, facing the range now set for an open fire.
With feet on the warm iron he watched the teak logs burning with green and blue and red flames: salts of cuprum, barium, and strontium which the cooling floods of creation had washed into the sea; salts now arising again before his eyes in the fire of his own making. By God, he said aloud to an imaginary Julian, this is the life; it’s a poor heart that never rejoices. At the sound of his voice the little cat half got up, her green eyes between dreaming and alertness, while the dog thumped his tail and moved to lay his chin on master’s knee. The door shook to the buffets of the wind.
He was in his twenty-seventh year: a third of his life had been lived: what had he achieved? “What have I done?” he shouted, lighting his pipe from a glowing charcoal. For answer the cat chirruped and leapt nimbly on his left knee, while the spaniel arose on hind legs like a little cavalier with feathery trousers, and yowled. Then Rusty climbed up to share the lap with the cat. They sat there until the fire burned away.
He was a god to them; but nothing to himself. He read, for the twentieth time, the letter he had received six weeks before: a simple account of what Annabelle was doing at school, but ending with four words which held for him all the promise of spring—With love from Annabelle.
The wind wrinkled the wide rain plash driven in under the door. It was time to flop upstairs to bed. The reluctant dog was lifted gently by his master’s foot into the night, and the door closed.
“You’re a hero, Rusty, if you can do your little job in such weather!”
Rusty was no hero. The next moment his head appeared at the round cat-hole a foot above the skirt of the door, then his two paws, and like a small seal he squeezed through, groaning with relief. The little cat walked forward, tail vertical with pleasure and arched herself against him. Rusty yawned with a yowl, showing a long tongue.
Phillip, with stinging eyes shut tight, went up the staircase. The animals slept downstairs, side by side in a special basket. They were forbidden to go upstairs. A few minutes after he had got into bed the delicate patter of the cat’s claws sounded on the bare boards of the stairs, followed by the slow, as if cautious, lolloping claw-titter of the spaniel. Very gingerly one after the other they climbed on the bed. Phillip pretended to be asleep. Soon they were comfortably settled on his feet, while the rain from the thatch splashed heavily on the sett-stones below the open window, and his thoughts wandered back into the past.
Irene, Bridget, and Barley had been gone nearly three months; they had left at short notice, because Ivan the Terrible—whose cablegrams had been succeeded by periodical showers of letters addressed in a large spreading hand on very thin envelopes—had cabled imminent arrival for the rest of his life. During the hasty packing Phillip had devised a scheme to lead him astray, should he arrive after Irene’s departure. In her cottage were samples of writing paper which had been sent from Harrods’ Stores. On one of these, with a Perthshire address, he wrote a letter beginning My poor Child, and then followed an invitation to Irene to go north at once and there to meditate on the advisability of renouncing the world and taking the veil. After signing the letter Hubert Crackanthorpe he had torn it into six pieces and scattered them on a flower, or rather weed, bed by the cobbled path. But Ivan never turned up; he had probably got into another emotional tangle by that time.
After they had departed he walked along the cliffs, in the sprays blown up hundreds of feet from the grey sea. In the afternoons the coves and stretches of sandy beach were in shadow as the sun went down over the land-mass to the west. A few last swallows flew about the cliffs, seeking flies and midges to sustain them on their long journey to Africa; he thought they would never be able to cross the sea. The spaniel followed faithfully, or ranged ahead, always keeping him in sight; the cat awaited their return, sitting on wall or window sill. Fire lit, blanket screen fixed over window, cat and dog content—then, as often as not, would come through the sound-box of the coal-cupboard the voices of his half-starved neighbours raised in argument. Walter Crang, out of
work, with only five bob a week pension for a gammy leg from the Somme.
It was sad: he felt that he had no right to feel snug before the fire, or safe from winter storms, with so much worry and trouble in the world.
One December night, as he sat before the fire, thoughts of his old home began to encoil him: Mother’s letter was still lying unanswered on the table. What could he reply? He had torn up half a dozen answers already. But it was no good putting off something which must be faced: the mind, or the will, was rotted that way. ‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.’
What could he say to Mother about Uncle Charley? He got up and sat at the table.
*
Hetty had written to warn Phillip that her brother Charley had been sending letters about her father’s Will to various people in Wakenham, including the vicar, Papa’s old bank manager, and Leppit the solicitor; to all he had written that neither the value of the house in Hillside Road, promised to him verbally by Papa, nor the diamond ring left to him in the Will, had been received by him. His letters to his sister and brother, as executors and trustees of the Will, had not been answered, declared Charles Turney.
“I think, dear Son, that you know all the circumstances, so I will only say that if Uncle C. writes to you, I hope you will ignore his letter. It is the only way, I am afraid. Uncle Joey agrees with me—so, my Son, let sleeping dogs lie. It can do no good replying to Uncle C., his mind is set on causing trouble. I am sorry to bother you with all this, but thought you should be warned in time. We have of course long ago written to him, enclosing a copy of the last Will.
The Innocent Moon Page 28