It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

“I can’t wait to see Lucy!” said Fiona.

  *

  Phillip was glad that Martin seemed to like Lucy; he was proud, too, of her bearing and her beauty. Martin seemed to be an entirely different man as he laughed and talked with a genially impersonal air. Just before they went on, Fiona invited Lucy to supper that night at the Mules’ cottage.

  “Phillip will fetch you, I’m sure, on his motor-cycle, and bring you back here afterwards, won’t you, Phillip?”

  “I feel we would interrupt Martin’s work. He’s really fearfully busy,” he said to Lucy.

  “I’d love to come, but I really think I should remain here with the Brownies,” replied Lucy, blushing. “There are only two of us to look after the camp.”

  “Well, my dear,” said Martin, patting her hand between his hands, “I am glad to meet a young woman with a sense of duty. It’s been most pleasant meeting you. Perhaps we’ll meet again some other time.”

  “But why, Phillip,” asked Fiona, when they were over the skyline, “didn’t you want Lucy to come tonight? It would have made a nice foursome.”

  It was now Phillip’s turn to walk on by himself.

  *

  Martin continued his quest for country detail after supper that night when he asked Phillip to read some of his short stories.

  “Oh, they’re pretty bad, Martin. After all, I wrote them a long time ago. Won’t you let us hear what you’ve written while staying here? I am sure it would be extremely interesting.”

  “My work is not of the slightest interest to anybody, including myself. Yours, on the contrary, is. You are the only really dedicated writer I know, and must have plenty of guts to have broken away to face comparative poverty. And, since I’ve come two hundred odd miles especially to see you and to hear all you have to say, I’d like to hear your stories now.”

  He settled himself comfortably in the only armchair in the room, feet to fire.

  Phillip read a story about a raven. Martin was enthusiastic. “That’s your line of country! Why don’t you publish your stories in one volume? They would go like stink. Read some more. Of course we’ll wait while you go to your cottage! I could sit up all night listening to you on nature and the countryside, and I wouldn’t say that to any other man or woman on earth.”

  When Phillip reappeared, Martin was snoring.

  “Shall we wake him up, Fifi?”

  “Why wake me up when I’m not asleep?” demanded Martin, opening an eye. “But before you start, let me change my position. There’s a draught from the window.”

  He lifted his stockinged feet upon Fifi’s lap. Delighted by this show of stability and affection in her first love-affair, Fifi began to massage them.

  “For God’s sake leave my feet alone!” growled Beausire. “I want to listen to Phillip, not tortured to death by your tickling. Get on with your reading, you prize genius!”

  It was midnight when Phillip ended the fifth story, about a heron. His reading had been interrupted by occasional snores; but whenever he had stopped Martin had cried, “Go on! Why the hell d’you keep stopping?”

  “Because you were snoring, Martin.”

  “I never snore, you prize Ass!” and settling back with eyes closed, Martin began to snore again, deeply and consistently.

  “He is asleep now, at any rate,” whispered Phillip, putting down his manuscript.

  “Don’t be a bloody ass!” murmured Martin, half opening one eye. “Go on reading. What happened in the end to Old Grock the raven?”

  “I finished the raven story three hours ago, Martin. Honestly, you’ve been asleep.”

  “On the contrary, I’ve listened first to the story of the raven, then the buzzard, followed by the crippled ex-soldier and the otter, and then Old Wog, or whatever his blasted name is, who emptied his crop of eels, snakes, toads, newts, and rats into the crops of his young, and we left him flying off to catch some more. I want to know what happened to him.”

  “That was the heron’s story, and it’s finished.”

  “Of course it’s finished! Old Bog or Old Wog the heron is finished, like any other bloody fool who catches the 8.15 down to Brighton at night and the 8.58 to Fleet Street again the next morning until he becomes a corpse long before he dies. Old Sog or Old Tog or Wog or Jog or whatever his name is is finished, of course we know that, but what I want to know is, what happened to Old Crock in your first story? It ended in the air.”

  “Yes, it did. Old Krog flew away to a better land, after crying his eyes out because North Devon had become a land of portly pole carriers from Sussex.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you say so before?”

  Martin yawned like an old dog showing a mouthful of irregular teeth. He stood up. “Bed, Fifi, my love! Goodnight, you blue-eyed Nog!” he said, hugging Phillip with one muscular arm. “And thank you for reading. Your stories really are first class. I really am most grateful to be allowed to hear them. Don’t be late tomorrow, we leave here at 8.15 a.m. precisely, to go to Hartland. I want to see as much of you and your country as I can.” He turned to Fifi. “We love our old Phillip, don’t we, Fifikins, God knows why we do, but we do, don’t we, my precious?” as, still holding Phillip, he hugged Fifikins with the other arm and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Before I say goodnight and sweet dreams, Phillip, do tell me why you wouldn’t let Lucy come back with us tonight,” said Fifi.

  “Sh-sh!” as he pointed to the half-open door.

  “But I don’t understand! Surely the Muleses know about her?”

  “Sh-sh! Please, Mrs. Beausire!”

  “Do you know why?” she said, turning to Martin.

  “I’ve not the slightest idea.”

  A smile broke over Fifi’s face. “Ah, I know!” She touched the end of Phillip’s nose with a finger, and whispered, “It’s because of Zillah! Why, I believe you’re a dark horse after all!” Her clear eyes became puzzled. “But why Zillah—when you can have Lucy? She is so lovely! And such a sweet person! Why don’t you let her see Billy? My dear, if you really want her, all you have to do is to put that adorable baby in her arms!”

  “Goodnight, you great big beautiful doll,” said Phillip, kissing heron the cheek.

  *

  On the last evening, after supper—they had spent the day, by Chevrolet, at Hartland—Martin set about writing his weekly article, ‘From the Cottager’s Study’, for a syndicate of provincial newspapers. The heavy portmanteau was opened and five or six dozen books laid on the table. Then various book-pages torn from The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Saturday Review, The Outlook, The New Statesman, The Manchester Guardian Weekly, The Weekly Westminster Gazette were spread on the floor about his feet. He took a book from the table and mused upon a page or two before turning them over faster until he almost struck them. Flip-flip-flip—he appeared to Phillip to be musing rather than reading, while his tongue was slightly protruded and curled against his upper lip as though it had an irritation upon the tip. Flop—the book was dropped on the floor, while reviews by other critics were examined. An average apparently having been struck, Martin made a critical cottage pie. An hour and a half passed in which a dozen reviews were written. “Bed, Fifi!”

  “What do you do with all these books, Martin? Keep them?”

  “Good God no! Where’s your bookseller in Barnstaple?”

  “There’s one up Cross Street.”

  “Martin gets half-price for the best ones,” said Fifi. “But the one’s he’s marked he uses for lecturing, don’t you, Poogs?”

  “Do you ever stop talking,” growled Martin. “Our train leaves at eleven tomorrow morning. You did order the taxicab to come early, as I asked you, I suppose, Phillip?”

  “Yes, Martin. It will arrive outside at ten o’clock sharp. That will give you bags of time to dispose of the books——”

  But Martin was already thumping upstairs to bed.

  *

  Phillip saw them off at the junction. Martin’s face seemed leaner as he stood by the open carriage
door.

  “I’ll see you again?” he said between his teeth. “Don’t heed my gruffness—we both love you. Come and see us at Worthing. Bring your adorable Lucy with you.” He jumped in as the whistle blew, and sitting down in a far corner, opened a paper.

  Phillip stood on the platform, watching the guard’s van round the curve of the line. Dear Martin, dear Fifi.

  He walked to the end of the deserted platform, and made up his mind to ask Lucy Copleston to be his wife.

  *

  For the dance Lucy had been invited to join the Master’s house party, and to his surprise Phillip received an invitation as well. A score of guests, most of them young people, assembled to dine in the tall room, once the refectory of a monastery. Footmen, wearing livery for the occasion, stood against the walls panelled in dark oak to the ceiling; faces glowed in the flames of branched candelabra on the long table.

  Afterwards they were driven, in several motors, to the Assembly Rooms in the town a dozen miles away.

  The hour after midnight seemed to pass very swiftly, both on account of the champagne he had drunk and because he seemed to have been talking, as he and Lucy sat at the top of some stairs, about everything except what he wanted to say.

  At the end of an hour he was exhausted, and talking wildly; while Lucy sat there with pale face, unable to help a mood that was, by its very nature of exhaustion, not to be helped by words. At last he arrived at the unadorned point with, “Lucy, would it be awful if I said to you, ‘Will you marry me?’”

  She replied, “Yes, didn’t you know already?”

  “That it would be awful for you?” he laughed.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way!”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked pale.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  They sat unmoving for a few moments. “Shall we go and have a drink?”

  She said, “Yes, certainly.” She, too, was exhausted; she waited while he finished his whisky and ginger ale, and said she would see him in the ballroom in a few minutes.

  “Oh, I’ve left my bag on the stairs!”

  “I’ll fetch it.”

  He hurried away. Where they had sat were a young man and woman, arms round one another’s neck, kissing. Lucky young people, not to be in love! They moved politely apart. He apologised for his presence, saying that his partner had left something there. Recovering the bag, he took it to her, thinking that he had not yet kissed her. Had he acted from his head only, and not from his heart?

  While she was away he drank more whisky, and on her return took her to the supper room and gave her some food. They both cheered up; he danced with her, while happiness began to flow in to fill the vacuum of the past hours.

  “Don’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “No, my dear, I won’t.”

  “You called me ‘my dear’!”

  She looked at him steadily. “Well, aren’t you my ‘dear’?”

  “Am I?”

  “I only hope you won’t be disappointed in me. I’m not clever at all, you know.”

  “Nor am I. I’m often a terrible fool!”

  “We’ll be just ourselves, won’t we?”

  “Not all the time!” he laughed.

  Too soon The Post-Horn Gallop sent them racing with others round the floor. The dance was over!

  “I wish it were just starting!”

  “It’s been lovely!”

  The next day, saying goodbye to the family at Arleigh, he set off with Lucy to her camp. She rode behind him on a cushion strapped to the carrier. They avoided the main area of the village by taking a side-lane which came to the Great Field, where he stopped to tell her that the villagers thought him a little mad. Unknown to him, Lucy had absorbed his mood, which he had cast off in the telling of it; and when they arrived at his cottage she walked past the open doors of the neighbours unspeaking, her eyes on the ground. He left her in his kitchen with the gramophone while he went to enquire if Mrs. Mules would prepare an omelette for two.

  That excellent woman at once asked who it was, and he said, “Miss Copleston, who is a Mistress of the Dorset Girl Guides.”

  “Tidden true!” cried Zillah, with sparkling eyes. “I reckon you’re the Guide, Mr. Mass’n. Tell the truth and shame the devil, is it the same young lady?”

  “Yes, it is,” he replied sharply, in his nervousness. “Do you mind?”

  “I don’t trouble who it is!”

  “Right, we’ll be down at one o’clock.”

  “And mind you see that she turns up this time!”

  The feeling of constraint remained when he returned with Lucy down the lane to the gravedigger’s cottage. Dreading possible remarks, he did not introduce her to either woman. It was therefore an uneasy meal, served almost in silence by Zillah, while Lucy kept her eyes upon the table.

  Afterwards he took her to his cottage, and going round the back way for a word with his neighbour—“Don’t you think my friend is lovely?” he found Zillah already there.

  “Copleston—well, us don’t think her’s much cop, her didn’t say good morning like a proper young leddy would!”

  This was both hurtful and humiliating, and he tried to explain that his guest was shy.

  “Shy!” said his neighbour. “What—be ’er too shy to say good morning? ’Er thinks ’er’s too grand for us, I reckon!”

  It was useless to try to explain: he realized afterwards that he should have taken Lucy to see them then and there; but at the time felt hurt that they had so misjudged her. This led him to say to Lucy that “some people in the village are a bit narrow-minded”. Then he said, “If perhaps you could say ‘Good-morning’ to them——” and then was startled when she stopped, with reddening cheeks, and broke into tears.

  “Lucy, please forgive me! It is every bit my fault!”

  “I have let you down,” she wept, her head turned away.

  “No, I was stupid and nervous! Of course, I should have introduced you in the first place. Really, it is all my fault.”

  He was startled and dismayed by her tears, for she had told him that she had cried only once in her life, when her mother had died.

  He walked beside her, while thoughts of his own failure made him numb, and apart from her. Lucy was similarly unhappy. In her modesty she had no feelings of superiority to the Mules, who had thought that she had scorned them as servants, and so beneath her. She should have said good-morning to them, she knew, but had waited for a lead from Phillip, because she was his guest. Now she felt that she had behaved badly, and had spoiled it all for him.

  They walked back to the camp, seldom speaking. There they said goodbye, Lucy to walk on with feelings of grief at her own stupidity, Phillip to return, damning himself for having ruined her holiday.

  That evening he went back to the camp, and found the site empty. He had forgotten that it was their last day. What must she think of him?

  After a sleepless night he filled his pack, settled Moggy on top of his shirts, and with Rusty on the tank, set off for Dorset.

  Part Four

  DOWN CLOSE

  ‘Oh, we don’t bother about anything here.’

  Saying of Adrian Copleston, Esquire

  Chapter 12

  PA AND THE BOYS

  During the days that followed he never ceased to wonder at the happy feeling in the house above the river. He told himself again and again that he was very lucky to find himself the friend of the kind of family he had thought never to exist outside a picaresque novel. In that house, where Lucy looked after three grown-up brothers and an old father there was an ease and a kindness, an absence of fuss and social convention that were entirely new in his life. He learned from Lucy that they had very little money; and the unconcern about this seemed to him to be ideal. This was, if not Liberty Hall, at least Liberty Lodge. Meals were at no regular times. If one brother were absent, the others tossed Odd Man Out for his portion. If the absent one came in late, Lucy would drop wh
atever she was doing, and either cook something for him or cut bloater-paste sandwiches to be served with a cup of Bivouac coffee—the dark liquid from the bottle with the label of a kilted soldier in parade dress sipping a cup beside a camp fire. How poor they were he could not decide: certainly the house was full of objects and portraits denoting a different past.

  He began to wonder if he could be of help to them. This feeling came to him on the fourth day of his stay, when as lunch-time approached he discovered Lucy in the dark larder, with Bukbuk the cat and four growing kittens mewing about her feet, while she gazed at the shelves, and after awhile said, “Bother, I don’t know what to give them. There just isn’t anything. Bukbuk has eaten the rest of the cold mutton. Oh dear, and she’s been at the rabbit pie, too.”

  On the shelves, beside innumerable empty bottles and jam-pots, were two large cold potatoes on a plate; scraps of pastry around the dish of rabbit pie; the crater of a Stilton cheese within a blue-and-white Wedgwood cover; half a loaf of bread, and some mildewed crusts in a box.

  “Bother,” she repeated. “I don’t know what they can have for lunch. There’s bloater paste, but they are going to have that for supper. Oh well, I suppose they’ll have to have potato soup.”

  “Give me just ten minutes!”

  He ran to the Norton, and leaping on, went into the town to return with several pork pies, a bottle of sherry, a Dundee cake, and four pounds of tomatoes.

  Lucy had told him that the dining-room was being converted into an office (for what he did not ask) and so meals were taken in Mr. Copleston’s study, a small room with scaling blue colour-wash on the walls and filled with books to the ceiling against one wall, while along another stood a cupboard with guns behind glass, cabinets of shells, coins, and birds’-eggs. The third wall held family portraits and faded photographs, swords in cases, horned heads, and other relics of a sporting past.

  By the window stood Mr. Copleston’s desk, with blotting pad almost covered with ink, paperweights, a spring balance, a brass duck’s head with ruby eye holding down bills, and a tray of faded pens.