It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  “I’d love it! But wouldn’t it clash with your writing?”

  When the flocks had passed he sat still listening to the sound of bells breaking upon the distant air like the blooms of mountain flowers below the snow-line. “Your word transhumance exactly describes it, Barley—the soft bells—cold air in the sunshine, water running from the edge of the snow everywhere—the fritillaries and the gentians pushing through the flat grass—the great empty caves of the valleys below one.”

  “I was thinking of the Col d’Aubisque just then, too. I was seeing your footsteps as I followed them a year ago—it was a shock when they vanished at the avalanche. I felt awful, I thought I had lost you. It was just a year ago today.”

  “And at night we both dreamed the same dream about each other! And do you know, Barley, I think I must have shouted to those two peasants, when I had climbed up from below Le Corniche, just about the time you got to the end of my tracks! I shouted out that my companion was dead before I could think. It must have been transference of your feeling to me.”

  *

  At noon they rested among aromatic bushes growing on a piece of waste land beside the road. The low stems gave a springy couch without injuring the bushes. Near them the scrub had been cleared by a past fire, so that out of reddened stones on the black ground lowly plants were growing. Each flower of the harsh soil was served by butterfly or bee.

  “Did you notice that the horns of those rams were like the twists on the heads of Greek pillars? I wonder if their descendants came originally from ancient Greece? Did the Greeks come so far west?”

  “The Ionic columns, you mean? Some of the Greeks spread across Italy. It’s possible they may have reached here.”

  “How do you know about the Greeks?”

  “Daddy told me.”

  They knelt to examine the flowers.

  “I suppose if this stony soil were dressed with rich sheep dung, the plants and bushes would degenerate, Barley?”

  “Yes, they’d grow more leaf and stem than blossom. Like the Romans, they’d grow soft and decadent.”

  “Did your father tell you that, too?”

  “He used to talk to me about farming. He was looking forward to buying a farm in England when he retired from the Bench. He was keen on breeding sheep, and also to improve pastures by breeding new strains.”

  “He must have been keen on botany, then.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  He stared at her, his fond possession. And yet she remained always herself. She was part of him, also apart from him. If there were such things as solar bodies, what spiritualists called astral bodies, she was surely his bright other self. If he should ever lose her …

  “I wonder if people like you are born direct and clear, or does it come from a good early training, otherwise schooling?”

  “I hated school.”

  A brown and yellow bee was crawling over the florets of wild thyme. They watched it gathering honey, then he said, “Were you much bothered because your parents didn’t hit it off together?”

  “I was brought up by my amah, and never heard Mummie and Daddy quarrelling.”

  “Were they very unhappy?”

  “Only sometimes. Their minds didn’t think the same way, or rather Mummy’s mind didn’t see the same things as Daddy’s did. He was quick, in both mind and body, and Mummy’s slowness used to annoy him. He was older than Mummy, too, about twenty years, I think.”

  “I really shouldn’t be asking inquisitive questions like this.”

  “Why not? I can tell you things as easily as I can think them to myself.”

  “Then I really must be a part of you?”

  “Have you only just found that out?”

  He looked at her face, examining it as though for the first time. “Do you know, Barley, I think that if ever I loved you utterly, so that everything you were, and everything you did, was of the greatest importance to me, I should lose all ambition to write the greatest novel about the war.”

  “Then I hope you never will, for I don’t want to be a piece of blotting paper, old boy!”

  “You blot up a part of me already, you young devil!”

  “Yes, you old devil!” she laughed, moving out of his reach. Then seeing the shadow of loneliness on his face she crawled towards him and pulled his shoulders towards her, so that they were parallel with her own.

  “Look at me, Phillip! Look at me! That’s better!” She put an arm round his neck, and kissed each of his eyes in turn. “You think I’ve changed towards you, don’t you? Come on, tell me exactly what you really think!”

  “Sometimes I don’t know.”

  “You mean, these last few days?”

  “I have sometimes wondered.”

  “Well, I have changed towards you.” She held him with her hard young arms. With her cheek against his she repeated, “I have changed towards you, but in one part of me only.”

  “You mean—physically?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you had.”

  She pushed him back gently and lay on his chest, then lifted her head to kiss him lightly upon his face, planting little kisses while making a sort of humming noise from her diaphragm. “Nice little man!”—kiss kiss kiss—“dear little man!”—kiss kiss kiss—“clever little laddy”—kiss kiss kiss—“he’s going to be a daddy!” and then she buried her face against his heart, murmuring, “Now you know, so be kind to me.”

  *

  Bédélia was moving with its secret shadow along a track through a flat region of reed and water, where pink reflections drew out from flamingos, and distant boats seemed to be sailing above the horns of wild cattle in the marshes.

  Here the Rhône had rolled fragments ice-broken from the Alps until its flow was checked by its own rush, so that the river had sought many courses to the sea.

  They had arrived at the Camargue—with its strange primitive life of fen-men and water-beasts—wilder and wider and more mysterious than the country of Dick o’ the Fens and Bevis, in those days when, thought Phillip, there had been romance, but little true living, in his life. Now he had got through to that ‘other side’ which all poets whom life had ‘mumbled in its jaws’ had dreamed of, but never achieved. How fortunate he was, he thought for the hundredth time, as he listened to nightingales singing among the osiers, and larks above in the sky.

  “‘If I cannot achieve immortality, at least I can think it’. Like Jefferies, Willie never found true love, otherwise he would have been calm, I think. I’m damned lucky to have found you, Barley.”

  “What happened to that girl who loved your cousin, Mary someone?”

  “Mary Ogilvie? She still lives in her mother’s house on the Burrows in North Devon. I ought to go and see her sometime. Poor star-crossed lovers.”

  “Is that your expression? It’s not bad.”

  “It’s Shakespeare’s, from Romeo and Juliet! You’re an uneducated moon-calf!”

  “Yes, because you were my tutor, don’t forget! Tell me about Juliet.”

  “She tries to cling to her love, while feeling herself to be on the edge of doom. She tries to keep Romeo just a little longer, when the dawn breaks. ‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear’; but he replies, ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn, no nightingale’. The mortmain of hate destroyed them. But here we are, alive, listening to lark and nightingale together.”

  She moved into his arms; he stroked her hair, and kissed her eyebrows; but it was not enough; behind his eyes waited the apparition of magnesium flares and gun-flashes, of toiling men upon the brown, the treeless, the grave-set plain of Flanders——

  “Come on, let’s get a move on!”

  They continued along the track by the shore of a waveless sea, stopping to bathe and swimming apart in order to enjoy coming together again. “Oh! quick, let’s get out!” She had seen a fleet of Portuguese men o’ war, their single blue sails adrift, their poisonous strings below in the water. The sky
was beginning to look sulky; she said the mistral might blow, so they went on to Sète, to wander among the quays of the old port until it was time for dinner.

  “I wouldn’t mind living here.”

  “You mean always?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m so fond of Devon——” She thought, I want my baby to be born there, where first I saw Phillip, I want to play with my baby on those very same sands of Malandine.

  *

  Across a flat plain of stones, through the torrid air with its mirages of shifting dark blue levels, they came to a desert of sandhills, and beyond the sands was the sea.

  A welcome wind blew from the short wash of waves which revealed with every retreat glints of mica in the lapsing sand. Throwing away their clothes they ran into the sea, then lay upon the shore. He was restless, they walked back to the sandhills, into the intense heat under a motionless air. There they sat down, she letting the cub crawl in her shadow.

  He wandered away, and leaning upon an elbow, watched her playing with the cub until his feeling became detached from her, beyond his abiding personal happiness, until he felt himself to be bodiless, a mere consciousness in the timeless elements.

  Everything was so still, the sound of the little waves a mere whisper. Yet each moment the sandhills were changing. Every beetle toiling up the hot slope, every touch of gossamer bearing tiny Linyphia, every vibration of wing of sand-wasp and butterfly caused a stir among the grains of sand revealed by a glint, a spill, a change.

  Never for an instant did the elements cease to cry their sharp and mindless cries of creation, even on the most still day of summer, under the vast blue silence of the sky.

  When the mistral blew, the shape of a dune might be changed in a day, diminishing and streaming away in the coils and re-buffets of the wind until the damper, finer sand of the interior hillock was exposed, to be carved cliff-like, so that roots of the binding grasses hung loose when the wind had blown itself out.

  Here the elements of air and sun and water strove to abrade all form, living and dead, in the ceaseless percussion of the sands. Bottles rocked upon the shore of the tideless sea received the blast of grains driven by the wind until the glass was dulled to a beauty like the fathomless light of ocean’s floor.

  Moving the sand with his fingers, he saw that they had buried the skulls of water birds and the shells of snails; wind and sand wore them thin, they broke, and joined the sand-blast, to help polish newer bones and shells, now lying white, momentarily at peace, under the shimmering sky.

  He went back to her, and taking her hand, trudged over the scalding sand, feeling himself to be thoughtless as a gossamer drifting in the air. He was part of her, she of him; they were one in spirit. How vain and unreal was his former conception of love, arising from longing. With her beside him he shed the shuck of experience, to exist within a freedom which, before he had truly known her, had lain always beyond the horizon of life.

  With her he felt himself to be of the very air of the shore, of the light of ocean, without body, beyond desire.

  Walking on, they came to a lower plain extending to another range of sandhills, where torrid air arose in mirage all around them, where even the skiey whisper of the tideless sea was shut out. Such was the heat upon that dried-up plain that they were forced to put on their espadrilles; even then the heat burned through the rope of the soles. In silence they came to wind-ribbed slopes, and ascending to a crest, pale green with marram grasses, met the cool shocks of the breeze moving in through the gaps in the dunes torn by old storms bearing across the sea the yellow dust-clouds of Africa.

  The sandy hollows were strewn with the battle-wreckage of air and water—jetsam of rusty tins and bleached corks, litter of pine and cork-tree bark, cast feathers of sea-birds, bottles, sea-coal, shattered lengths of bamboo reeds and roots of olive trees torn from mountain ravines by floods of melted snow.

  Beyond, the shore was stony. Unknown wading birds flickered away, to alight and run over the line of pebbles anciently rolled smooth by the Rhône. Among black and brittle bladder-weed the shore-birds would gravely pause to pipe their thin notes, to run on again and pretend to pick up food. Somewhere their young were crouching above the verge of the sea, speckled as sand and gravel. He knew their fears and hopes, and led her away.

  He must swim! Leaving her with the cub he ran into the water, to plunge through the translucent shells of waves, to glide with open eyes over blurred sand, and then to jump up, shake water from his eyes before turning on his back, hands behind head, to float there bodiless.

  They returned the next morning with a tent; they were the only human beings on miles of shore, their faces gilded by hot, quick-silvery reflections of the sun on the pale green wavelets losing their brief water-shadows as they tinkled on the sand.

  He built a fire of sea-wood and grilled a fish, which they ate with their fingers while the engine beats of a coastal steamer came to them, a ship dissolving and disintegrating before their eyes as the medusas of the mirage strove to reduce it to scrap.

  Now where was the tent, and their clothes? Where was Bédélia?

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  “I believe the sun feeds us through our skins.”

  They walked for an hour, and there was Bédélia, apparently uplifted, surrounded by legless black ponies which scampered away into the mirage as they approached.

  “I don’t want to wear clothes ever again.”

  “Nor do I.”

  Cicadas flipped against their legs. Thin and pale in the sky hung a new moon above the Algerian glare of the sun.

  She pointed to the sky, where yellow clouds were gathering. “The mistral may be on the way.”

  “Let it come.”

  They sat by a driftwood fire and ate biscuits and bananas as the sun followed the moon now upon the rim of the sea. He lay, his dark hair curled with salt, with his head on her lap.

  “When does Irene expect us?”

  “Oh, any day.”

  “Won’t she be anxious about us?”

  “Why should she be?”

  A cold wind fanned the flames. The sun was round and red. It was time to leave. They had no light but the moon upon the wastes.

  *

  The next day they drove with a view of the high peaks of the Pyrenees. Carcassonne, with its old walled town dark on a hill, was passed; they were making for Pamiers. Before them lay a route of steep ascents with many coiling bends, or virages, which so wore the belt of the smaller pulley that they had to change it over at Mas-d’Azil for the climb to St. Girons. The air was cold with patches of snow still unmelted on pastures where sheep grazed upon the subdued grass.

  There was a further climb to the Toulouse-Tarbes main road, a steady ascent to St. Gaudens and on to Montrejean—over sixty kilometres from St. Girons. Would Bédélia’s belt hold out?

  Up again from Montrejean, and on to Lannemezan, which according to the Michelin map was nearly 600 metres high. Could they get there on the belt now frayed and ragged? They took the wrong turning and found themselves on a small stony road, leading with many bends to St. Laurent-de-Neste. She suggested turning back; he went on until the belt-fastener tore loose. He repaired it and fitted a spare link and continued along the twisting route to Bagnères. The engine had plenty of power; up they went in low gear until Bédélia, long and narrow, stuck at a hair-pin bend. They managed to lift round her tail. But how to restart the engine up a slope? It was hopeless.

  They lifted the tail round a complete circle and returned the way they had come, spending the night in an otherwise deserted auberge at Bonnemazon, sitting before a wood fire in the dining-room after a dinner of small thin trout and tough mutton. In the morning, back to the main Tarbes road beyond Capern; and from Tarbes along N 117 to Pau, the adventure nearly over, for at the end of the road was Laruns.

  It seemed almost the end of the old life together when they stopped at the villa and sat still for a few moments before looking round t
o see Irene as she came down the garden path to greet them.

  “Well, P.M., what do you think of France?”

  “A marvellous country, Irene!”

  “And how is my brown, brown daughter?”

  “Happy, Mummy!”

  Hitherto he had thought of France as all one Départment du Nord seen in those areas occupied by the British forces. Now he had known a new France—varied, vast, magnificent—mountains, rivers, bridges, cathedrals, meadows, vineyards—France as she had endured for centuries, France now majestic in his mind.

  *

  A week later Bédélia, her rear tyres worn to the canvas, was sold—after some hesitation, for they had shared so much with the faithful little ’bus. Still, there was satisfaction in knowing that seven one-thousand-franc notes were folded in his hip pocket, as he sat in the Paris train at Bordeaux, thinking that the blossom of the hawthorn would be white upon the hedgerows when they returned to England. It would be great fun, too, to ride the Norton motorbike again.

  And yet——

  As the train ran through the old battlefields she said to him, “Are you sorry we didn’t go there, after all?”

  “No. It may have been so different from what is in my head.”

  She took his hand. “When my baby can walk, we’ll all come here together, shall we? On our way down to the Camargue?” She laid the cub, now active and fat, against his neck. “We’ll bring ‘la loutre’, too, shall we? You look after him, and I’ll look after Billy! I’m sure it will be Billy!”

  At the Dover customs there was nothing to declare. Fortunately Lutra—Phillip had given the cub its Latin name—slept soundly against her heart, so there was no bother about quarantine.

  Chapter 2

  FRIENDS AND RELATIONS

  Their return to Malandine was unexpected; Mrs. Crang had agreed to clean up the cottage, but Phillip had forgotten to send her a postcard. So it was exactly as it had been left.

  “Please don’t bother, Mrs. Crang. I rather like to see dust over everything.”

  “My goodness, you’m married now, midear! And you mustn’t slape in thaccy bade, you’ll get rheumatics! Walter hasn’t hoed your garden, and just look at the mores (weeds) growin’ up to the cabbages! If only you’d a-sent us a card, us’d had the place all clane for ’ee!”