The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  He felt his way out of Randiswell Station, and by touch upon shop front, hoarding and railing came to the rising curve of Charlotte Road where the edge of the valise brushing privet hedges gave some security to proceed less slowly. Round the corner to Hillside Road, up the asphalt path; a short press on the bell; the front door opening.

  “Welcome home, Phillip! We were getting quite anxious about you. Have you carried all those things by yourself?”

  “Yes, Mother. How are you?”

  “Oh, quite well, dear! Can you manage your valise? Put it in the front room for the time being, why not? Well now, come into the kitchen and let me have a good look at you.”

  She saw a face red with fog, his eyes inflamed, but knowing that he did not like “personal remarks”, suggested he might like to have a bath—the water was hot, she said.

  “I think I’ll wash in cold water, Mother, I’m not used to hot. How is everyone?” as he looked round the kitchen, finding it smaller than ever.

  “Quite well, I’m glad to say. Your father is in the sitting-room, he’s made up a big coke fire to welcome you. Oh, before I forget, perhaps it would be as well if you didn’t mention your book, Phillip. He thought it very good, but when you got to where you refer to the grandfather’s death from alcoholism he put the book down, saying, ‘He is lampooning his own people, and his old school’, and I don’t think he read further. Now go up and wash, dear, and I’ll have some Scotch broth ready for you when you come down. Father is waiting to have a bowl with you, but I think he wants to offer you some sherry first, but don’t mention that I told you, will you?”

  After scrubbing and sluicing Phillip felt much refreshed, and went down to the sitting-room, knocked on the door, and went in.

  “Well, I must say you have brought some fine weather with you, old chap,” was Richard’s greeting as he got out of the armchair to offer his hand. “What’s it like outside now, a real pea-souper, I’ll be bound. Now come and warm yourself by the fire, and tell me how you are getting on.”

  “Oh, keeping my head above water, Father. By the way, I want you to know that I realize fully how you felt when I was here after the war. I think you were extraordinarily forbearing in your attitude towards me.” He stopped himself from speaking of his own experiences with Julian Warbeck.

  “Well,” replied Richard, “I considered it good for your own interests, to help you fall on your own feet. Now tell me, would you care for some sherry?”

  A glass of Civil Service Stores’ wine induced ease as he sat by the glowing fire: a second made him feel glad to be home again.

  After a while Hetty joined them, carrying a cardboard box. “A little present to keep you warm in your cottage, dear!”

  “How very kind of you, Mother. I wonder what it is?”

  “You must open the box and see,” said Richard, who evidently shared the secret.

  Phillip undid the string and took out six flannel shirts, all of which he saw at once to be hand-made of the finest flannel, but far too short in the arm and tail.

  “I had them copied at the Stores from one of those you sent me to be repaired, dear. I hope they are all right,” as she watched his face.

  “They’re awfully good flannel, Mother.”

  “He’s pretending to like them!” exclaimed Elizabeth, who had followed her mother into the room.

  “Hullo, Elizabeth, how are you?” said Phillip, blandly.

  There was silence until Elizabeth said, “Aren’t you going to thank Mother? She paid twelve guineas for those shirts!”

  “Thank you, Mother, it is most kind of you.”

  “Are the sleeves long enough, do you think?” asked Richard, leaning over the open cardboard box.

  “You did say you liked short sleeves, didn’t you, Phillip?”

  “Yes, Mother. Thank you again.”

  He was hurt by the thought of her wasted effort: so much unhappiness could still be avoided with Father, Uncle Charley, and others if only she would think with her head instead of with her feelings.

  “He’s pretending to like them, I know!” said Elizabeth. “Why don’t you kiss Mother, eh?”

  After a pause he said, “I’ve just remembered, I must see someone at once!” as he went out of the room.

  Hetty followed him into the kitchen. He was putting on his trench coat. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”

  “Oh, but you’ve only just come! Father and I have been so looking forward to hearing all about your new life.”

  “His new life!” exclaimed Elizabeth. “I’ve heard all about that!” She turned to her mother. “The other night at a whist-drive at St. Sabinus’ hall I heard what someone was saying about Phillip, and that book he wrote about his old school. The girl said, ‘I hear that he and his red-haired friend are drunk all the time together’. It was awful, Mother! Thank goodness no one recognised me as his sister!”

  Phillip could not forbear to say, “Don’t worry; one day you’ll be boasting of the relationship, then it will be my turn to be embarrassed.”

  He regretted this tart retort afterwards, knowing that his sister was haunted by fear, and loss of her father’s love.

  Dec. 17. A letter today from Uncle Charley in Cape Town repeats what was anticipated: he was promised the house next door, also his father’s diamond ring. Neither has come to him, either in cash or kind. It is a duplicated letter, written to the bank manager, solicitor, parson, doctor, and others in the district.

  I replied, explaining that T.W.T. was always chopping and changing: I mentioned that he himself had promised me a Boy Scout’s hat and uniform in 1911, but had forgotten all about his promise; and that T.W.T. had also forgotten his promise to his son Charley.

  I went on to say that Grandfather often came in to see Mother, while I was there, to discuss his will: that Mother never made any suggestions to him. She was only a listener.

  I showed the letter to Mother, explaining that the fact that Uncle Charley was thousands of miles away increased his feelings of impotence and of small-hours injustice.

  “Oh, no, please don’t post that letter! Don’t put anything on paper! It would bring a hornet’s nest about your ears!” Etc. Etc. So out of consideration to her I didn’t send the letter. So Charley suffers far away in Cape Town because no one in England replies to his letters. The imaginative lack in Mother has caused him to suffer horribly: how then can she blame Father for the same defect?

  Query: is the religious, or life-evasive imagination, really superior to the imagination which allows one to know oneself, and so to know others and sympathise with them? In other words, which is the true Jesus, the after-death saviour of souls, or the practical psychologist urging love to cast out fear? (Incidentally, he sent his mother about her business on one occasion.) No wonder when he was worn-out he made no effort to defend himself before Pilate.

  Chapter 13

  IDYLL ON CLAY

  OVER the flat and heavy ploughlands of Essex lay a white mist. The hedgerow was a ghost dimly suggested by the beam of the headlight. The sidecar swung lightly; he could feel the gravelly road rushing by under his seat. Denis’s shoulders and leather-helmet’d head towered beside him. Long since had Phillip abandoned himself to the idea of a smash in the fog as the sidecar was wrenched round sudden corners, as the twin-cylinder J.A.P. engine accelerated with decisive clatters of its exhaust in his ears. No longer was he sitting tense and strained, but inert, suspended. After the first greeting, which had been overtly cordial to conceal the mutual slight shock of one another’s altered appearances, they had become silent, although not awkward. A couple of half-tankards of beer in The Thesiger Arms had recalled the effects of a previous friendship.

  “I hope Essex won’t be too depressing after the hills of Devon, Phillip.”

  “I’m looking forward immensely to everything, Denis.”

  “There’s a mount of sorts for you, and I thought perhaps a week-end sailing in the Blackwater estuary—we could sleep in the clubhouse, and catch flatfish. I ho
pe it won’t be too boring.”

  “I hope I shan’t bore you, Denis.”

  After such confessions they had gone outside to the Matchless combination to start a journey through fog.

  Phillip had thought of Denis Sisley for the past three years as a character in his War novel to be written some time in the future: now he found himself more than once during the next two days regretting that he had come to see him. The new Denis had effaced an old acquaintance with whom in the days of the war everything had been so easy.

  Denis’s wife, called Georgie, was kind, quiet, and understanding. They had a small baby about which both told uninteresting things as though they were most interesting. The baby smiled at Phillip; he talked to it, considering that he had a superior understanding of babies. “Priscilla likes all men,” said the baby’s mother, and that momentary conceit was gone.

  “Would you like a day’s hunting, Phil? A customer of mine, another poor ex-footslogger trying to get a living out of the Rodings clay, said you could have his nag if you liked. It’s inclined at times to be frisky, otherwise he says it’s not a bad ride.”

  “This country looks heavy-going. I suppose the hoss is kept corned-up, Denis?”

  “Actually it’s out to grass, I believe, but Percy said he would give it a feed of oats the day before you take it out.”

  A feed of oats the day before a hunt over heavy wet ploughlands! He remembered that Denis had been an actor before the war, a Shakespearian actor. “A feed of oats the day before——”! Shades of Mr. Facey Romford the sporting grocer!

  The next day he saw the horse, a chestnut gelding 15.2 hands high, unclipped, unhogged, and undocked. It looked too light for going over ploughlands, although his weight was under eleven stone. The chestnut had a backward look in its eye, and shifted on its feet when it saw him.

  “If you’d allow me to exercise the chestnut, and feed him up a bit before I hunt him,” he said to the farmer, “I’d willingly pay for the oats.”

  It was arranged that the cowman should feed a few double-handfuls of crushed oats to the horse once a day—but the farmer would not hear of payment. Phillip wished that he had been more insistent, for “a few double-handfuls” would hardly give enough staying power—the gelding would need at least ten pounds a day, in two feeds of five pounds each for a week at least, to stay it upon heavy clay.

  However, he could hardly dissent, since he was Denis’s guest.

  On the afternoon of Christmas Eve the three went for a walk, Phillip pushing the perambulator. Denis’s greyhound, Lightning, bounded over the marshy grazing meadows, putting up duck, and once a hare. Lightning returned instantly at his master’s shrill whistle, cut from a piece of stag’s horn. Lightning was a beautiful dog, and Phillip wished he had brought Rusty with him. Devon seemed far away and unreal, perhaps Rusty would not know him when he got back. The dog was boarded out with the landlord of the Ring of Bells, who had asked if he might take the span’l rabbiting when he went out with gun and ferret-man. He told the Sisleys about his life down there.

  “You ought to get married, Phil. Don’t you know any sporting young ladies in Devon? You don’t? Come and live here in Essex—you’d soon find as many as you wanted. I’ll give you a job as driver of one of my Titans if you like. You know about engines, don’t you? Three quid a week. It’s easy money for me—one acre, two hours, one pound. There are one or two fairly decent cottages to be rented in the district.”

  Tea was a good time in the converted farmhouse, with Lightning, long sinewy dog, lying before the fire. He hoped the spaniel was happy at the Ring of Bells, and the little cat in the cottage, fortified by a saucer of bread and milk every day. Was Moggy at that moment sitting on the corner of the table, watching the door, or sitting on the window-sill?

  After dinner that night they sat back in firelit ease, listening to an Elgar Concerto on the gramophone, then to Tristan and Isolde, then to Grieg. It was lovely in candlelight to lie back with eyes closed, one’s mind just this side of sleeping, vacant of self, while music flowed through one: music that was hope and prayer and dream, those eternal forces accompanying sky, water, rock, and sun.

  “I know some people who have recently come to live at Tollemere, Denis. They’re called Selby-Lloyd.”

  “I’ve heard of them, but haven’t met them, Phillip. Whisky and hot lemon?”

  “No thanks, Denis.”

  “Really, my dear old man——”

  “Well, it doesn’t agree with me really, Denis. Thanks all the same.”

  “Just a spot!”

  “Yes, I think I will!”

  “That’s better! Remember the binges with old Moggers at the White City?”

  “They were the days!”

  They finished the bottle between them, and went to bed about one o’clock on Christmas morning, feeling again the old timelessness, the old comradeship.

  On Boxing Day there was a meet of the Essex Union. Phillip, wearing pot hat, jacket made from length of Harris tweed—one of the army blankets he had brought away in 1919 from the Dispersal Unit in Folkestone as part of the spoils of war—field boots, featherweight racing spurs, best cavalry twill breeches, and carrying a brutal-looking whip with loaded egg-shaped handle belonging to ex-Captain and Adjutant Sisley—somewhat trepidantly adjusted the unsoaped iron-leathers to the correct length from finger-tips to armpit, looked over bit and bridle while seeing the white-rolling nigger-eye of his hunter; then putting left foot in the rusty iron he swung himself into the saddle. Why hadn’t he looked over the saddlery? But to offer to soap leather and burnish irons would have been an implied criticism of Denis’s friend—so he had refrained. His damned silly diffidence had resulted in himself looking like a gipsy horse-coper. Thus he set off to the meet, thinking that he hadn’t been astride a horse for nearly a year as he trotted along the road, his thigh-muscles already slightly quivering from the unaccustomed exercise.

  Watery furrows of the ploughlands on either side of the road were steeply cast, for drainage and exposure to frost. He passed a familiar clump of willows grown for cricket bats, and thought of Colonel Kingsman, his C.O. on July the First, and wondered whether Tollemere Park were near, and would he see the Selby-Lloyds, and—Annabelle. The willows seemed to be like those Jasper Kingsman had pointed out at the end of the journey from Southend-on-Sea to his home. Was that the lodge gate, with freshly painted white posts and gate? It would never be the same, without the Kingsmans at Tollemere.

  He trotted on, relieved that his horse was sprightly rather than lively. Its mouth was not hard, it responded to the usual aids. But—those heavy furrows! He set his bowler more firmly on his head.

  A traction engine with threshing box was trundling towards him a hundred yards away. The lane was narrow, with deep ditches on either side, water in them, he noticed; then as the smoky apparition approached, his horse began to issue more evidence of its dyspeptic state. A coincidence, he hoped, for the brute’s ears were not more than normally vertical. Then the sky slanted up and the traction engine was sliding from view. How he managed to keep his seat he did not know, for the chestnut had reared and toppled sideways into the ditch, describing two parabolas with its forelegs. It stood wedged in the deep clay ditch, withers quivering and nostrils distended, while automatically with fervently conciliating voice he spoke to it, patting its neck and wondering what it would do next. The ditch was quite five feet deep. It stood there until the engine had passed, and then violently scrambled out, himself somehow remaining on its back. In front of him was a girl wearing a black soft felt hat and black coat, astride a grey hunter. As he approached he saw she was Annabelle.

  “Do you usually go to ground in a ditch when you see a threshing machine?” she laughed.

  “Well, this is a borrowed beast,” he said, conscious of his hairy mount and rusty irons.

  “Where did you spring from?”

  “Devon.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A few days.”

 
; They trotted to the meet side by side, unspeaking. He saw, beyond personal disturbance, that her boots were too large round the calves, that her dark breeches looked to be ready-made.

  “How is your mother?”

  “She’s very well. She’s coming, in the car.”

  “How is Queenie?”

  “All right. She’s out today.”

  They came upon hounds grouped against an old barn wall of weathered oak and brick. Brown collars to scarlet uniforms, the usual lean small huntsman with weathered hacksaw features and marvellous polish on thin boots and sitting as though grown into his horse. He saw with relief that Annabelle knew none of the faces. She sat her mount quietly, composed, looking around with frank eyes.

  Acutely conscious of his poor turn-out, Phillip tried to appear aloof among the uniformed on their tall hunters. Looking round casually, he saw Sophy on foot near the pack, wearing grey coat and skirt and carrying a blackthorn thumb-stick. She had not seen him as she moved towards Annabelle, he heard her say, “It’s a big field, isn’t it? How’s The Learned Pig behaving?”

  “I like him, Mummie. Where’s Queenie?”

  “She’s with the General.”

  “Phillip’s here!”

  “Phillip Maddison? Where?” Then she saw him. Her face went pink. He raised his hat, then sought his cigarette case in a flap pocket of his yellow waistcoat.

  Before he could open it there was a blast on the horn, huntsman and whippers-in moved off with the pack. There was a general stir as the field moved off behind the Master.

  At the first cast by the huntsman a fox was found in the middle of a ploughed field. The Gone Away sounded, the field set off, mud flying from hoofs. The chestnut was quickly wet with sweat. When he put it at a thorn fence it refused to jump.

  He became one of a straggling cavalcade seeking gaps and gateways. Taking his own line after awhile he found himself in a rectangular field of pasture shut in by high hedges and a wired ditch. There was one gap, which might have been broken by bullocks. A track about two and a half feet wide was worn down both of the steep clay banks. Red cow-hair was caught in the smoothed trunks of the two thorns beside the aperture. Annabelle was now cantering with others across the adjoining field. He put his horse at the gap, and then pulled its head round: too great a risk to expect an untrained animal to descend five feet at an angle of thirty degrees, then ascend the other slope of the V. It could not be flown, owing to branches level with the horse’s nose. Annabelle was about to jump a low quick-set hedge three hundred yards distant. He thrust the chestnut at the gap, lay along its neck, kicked with his heels, while wondering if his skull would be stove in by a broken horizontal branch polished as by the polls of bullocks. His mount gave some sort of spring, he was jerked and thrown about; there was a violent dig from a branch upon his offside ribs which made him gasp with pain, and as the horse went down on its knees he went over its ears and was tipped neatly on to the grass of the farther bank. Rapidly he rolled away from forefeet plunging hammer-like by his head, then he was watching the horse getting out of the ditch, after which it got down again to roll. There it was rolling, the damned thing! Then with a loud noise of stitch and wind breaking simultaneously it scrambled upright once more, leaving upon the ground a saddle dry and torn inside and looking to be stuffed with several layers of compressed brown paper.