It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  After supper of bloater-paste sandwiches, with Bivouac coffee, and healths drunk in sherry, the family played their usual games of rummy, snap, and Mah Jong. Phillip did not care much for Mah Jong, so he listened, marvelling, to voices and music from far away in the ether through the head-phones of the wireless set Ernest had made. It was romantic to hear, far out across the dark sea and distant fields and forests, the Morse of ships like the high piping of birds migrating through Arctic zones where icebergs clashed and jarred, and whales spouted in lonely seas glowing with Northern Lights; and moving the dials, to bring in the plainsong chants of priests in some remote monastery or cathedral at Midnight Mass. How Mother would smile her childlike smile as her spirit was set free.

  *

  The morning joviality around the breakfast table dissipated his vague thoughts of the dismissal of Dick Sheppard; and afterwards they went to church, sitting among half a dozen other people of the hamlet while the vicar, who came from two miles away, conducted the service. Mr. Copleston, looking unusually serious in his suit of early Edwardian cut, with high lapels to the jacket, took round the collection bag. After the final hymn to the tune of the harmonium they filed out into the crisp air, and so back to a meal of scraps; the main feast, with turkey, pudding, Stilton cheese, nuts, mince-pies, crackers and port-wine was to be eaten in the evening.

  This was followed by games—ludo, draughts, and Mah Jong—during which Ernest went upstairs to get the ‘prizes’, from a large box of chocolates, Ingpan and Bounderbury’s best, which Mrs. à Court Smith had given him for a Christmas present. The box was taken from its hiding place under Ernest’s bed, and each person was invited to make one selection, after which the box went back under Ernest’s bed, where it remained until emptied by the owner while lying in bed and reading, night after night, one of his presents—Stories of Horror and Mystery.

  When the others had gone to bed Phillip walked alone under the stars, thinking of that Christmas night in the wood below Wytschaete, the perforated jam-tins filled with glowing charcoal, the frosty moonlight, the miracle of silence over the battlefield broken only by distant singing from the German trenches. He thought of the lonely Christmas his parents must be having, and returned exhausted, longing to be with Lucy as he lay alone in the chalet.

  *

  There was a party on Boxing Day at the house of the Squire. Thirty guests for dinner in a lofty panelled room lit by silver candelabra; merriment and laughter at the long table; hide-and-seek in the great warren of the upstairs rooms; rushing down corridors and landings where statues, armour, and other objects were likely to crash dreadfully as one fled away from capture or in pursuit of other players. He felt happy to be in such free-and-easy company, proud of Lucy’s beauty, reassured by Mr. Copleston’s handsome and distinguished demeanour. How foolish he had been to feel depressed because the old gentleman had merely indicated that his taste in spiritual and literary matters was his own!

  After the New Year there was the Hunt Ball of the local pack. The Boys did not dance, also they were having what Tim called “an all-night session” in the Workshop. Phillip took Lucy in the borrowed Tamplin. It was the first car he had driven since Bédélia in France. The roads were icy; the tyres of the car were narrow; the burners of the acetylene headlights sooted up, causing the light to be weak and uncertain; he was nervous of the long and flimsy wheelbase, which so easily could overturn into ditch or hedge along the narrow, winding road to Shakesbury. They left for the dance not having had dinner, after a sandwich lunch and scarcely any tea; supper would not be until midnight. It had been his idea to go alone, and not in a party with some of her friends. As they drove slowly through the frosty night he knew that he should have taken her first to dinner at the Royal Hotel, and gone to the dance happy and fortified instead of hollow and doubtful. In his low physical state the misery underlying the privileged, gay assembly was apparent to him—the unemployed in the coal fields of Wales, and the general sense of frustration among the workers already talking of a General Strike.

  On the way home in the early hours of the morning he stopped the Tamp by a coppice and began to talk of how he had failed Willie at the crisis of his life, even as he had let down Barley by not acting on what he had felt all along—the utter incompetence of both doctor and midwife. “I shall no doubt behave in exactly the same way to you, neither one thing nor the other, but a half-and-half person in all I do or don’t do. I even allowed your very natural and kind reassurance to me, that Arnold Bennett remark, to stop the writing of my book.”

  Lucy sat quietly beside him, and when he said he was sorry she put her arms round him and told him not to worry. They drove home, had some hot milk, and the ghosts temporarily departed.

  The next evening, determined to make his life orderly and regular in habit, he went on with his book from where it had been broken off before Christmas. Mr. Copleston had allowed the use of his library (for some reason the dining-room which had been about to be an office was now the dining-room again) and while he and others sat at night in the far room, reading or playing games, Phillip retired to the other end of the house, and sat in a small space surrounded by shelves of books; cabinets of eggs, shells, coins; guns, swords, daggers, animal heads and other relics of a full life about the world. There was a model railway-engine, to scale, in copper, brass, and iron, which Pa and ‘Mister’ had made in days before their friendship had become commonplace and then void. There was a walnut cabinet of drawers filled with trays of salmon and sea-trout flies, many eaten by moths. There was a glass-covered case of fossils and geological specimens. Among the prints on the walls was one of Pa’s old home, with its lake, deer park, and house of half a hundred rooms.

  By now he had an idea of the declining fortunes of the family. Pa, being a younger son, had inherited nothing from his father; but from an Aunt had come the Oxfordshire mansion, together with a dozen farms comprising the estate of two thousand acres; but the inheritance was subject to various charges, which, in the decline of agricultural values in the later decades of the nineteenth century, could not be met without reinvestment of capital produced from the sale of some of the land. Grandpapa, said Lucy, had been rather extravagant, and when he had died Pa had had to sell the rest of the estate with the land and the house, to pay his debts. Even so, he had been able to live as a country gentleman until the war of 1914–18.

  “Ah,” said Phillip. “I remember Aunt Dora telling me that Napoleon, when he was captured in 1815, made a prophesy. He said, ‘Britain will rue the day, in a hundred years’ time, that she refused to work with my system. For there will arise a nation, Prussia, who will challenge the British sea-power for the second time.’ Napoleon was only a year out, Lulu, for 1914 was ninety-nine years after that prophecy! Do you remember telling me that the greater part of Pa’s money was invested in Russian bonds?”

  What a story, he thought, as with imagination stirred and flowing freely he prowled about the room staring, under the large hanging oil-lamp, at the relics of a bygone age, finally to sit down at the oak table to continue his story of the family in the house by the sea.

  But nothing would come. He got up from the table, glancing half-seeing at the books, at the birds’ eggs—Mr. Copleston had said he might look at them, “if you care to do so”—and crouched down by the hearth to alter the coals in the fire. Anything but write. He could not write in that room; it was stored with too diverse a life; it was too rich with the past; there was too much for present distillation by the imagination. So he sat at the table again, feelings of frustration growing in him.

  Was it because too many voices were speaking from the past? Or was it because Pa, trying to read Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, which he had lent him, had put it aside remarking that it was “the most frightful nonsense”? It was a copy of the Everyman edition; Phillip had not yet read it himself, but only of it, in a magazine called The New Horizon, where Wallington Christie had declared it to be a book of deep spiritual significance.

  It
was so with other books; half-hesitant attempts to discuss them had met with no response among his new friends, except Tim, the youngest, who was always ready to listen, but had little to say beyond occasional exclamations such as, “By Jove, I must read that!” “Yes, of course I see what you mean,” and once, “Absolute confounded ass!”—this last referring to the reviewer of Keats’ poems in The Edinburgh Review, who, said Phillip, had “advised Keats to go back to the gallipots”. Phillip liked Tim, an attentive and willing younger brother; and yet, even as they talked together alone, in kitchen, workshop, or the potting shed, he felt himself becoming weary, and a suggestion of impatience came into his manner. After all, Tim’s life had been so different from his own. But was that the only reason?

  In the sitting-room at night among the others, Phillip had ceased to utter the thoughts that held him. References to Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Barbusse, Bernard Shaw—whose play Saint Joan he had seen in London, and been deeply impressed by its balance and interpretative fairness to all the characters—watching the scenes on the stage with wonder and emotion, while ideas for his own work clarified in flash on flash—references to these writers induced monosyllabic utterances of “Ah”, or “H’m”. From the mental habit of transposing himself so that he might see from the eyes of others (a process started on Christmas Day of 1914) he saw himself, if not as a bore, at least as one who interrupted the settled ways and thoughts of the family. This did not upset him unduly: but it was the cause of evening retirement to the library.

  *

  One night as he sat in that musty room his thoughts wandered to the sky of the snow-fields above the Pic de Ger; the azure sky above the peaks with their immense loneliness; the sudden deep blue of the gentians growing out of the grey grass where the snow had melted, the clear blue air far above ordinary human life, the clear and deep blue eyes of integrity, of beauty that was truth, a clarity he would never find again, far surpassing the tenderness of a charitable woman. With the feeling almost of levitation he felt the room to be full of the dust of things, of life outworn, of the spirit uncreated; and as he got up from the chair with a stifled groan, to seek Lucy with whom to plead for understanding, he saw the door opening, and she was standing there, a little hesitatingly.

  “Come in, please come in!”

  “You look tired, dear,” she said gently, closing the door behind her. He longed for her to put her arms round him and clasp him to her breast. “Don’t write too long, will you? I came to say goodnight. I think I’ll go to bed, but I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Oh no, really, you’re not disturbing me.”

  “Well, goodnight, dear.”

  Still standing there, he said goodnight to Lucy. She looked at him with a tremulous smile. He hoped she would kiss him; but he knew his mood was forbidding. “Goodnight,” he said, almost formally, and with another half-glance, she was gone.

  It was the first evening since his return that they had not kissed each other goodnight.

  *

  Rusty was watching from the worn rug before the fire, and seeing Phillip take his stick from beside the door, jumped up, wagging his tail. Any time during the day or night Rusty was ready for a walk. Phillip felt like walking all night, to tire himself out, to reduce his mind to nothing. What was he doing there? What would happen to that gentle trusting girl if he married her? Had they anything in common, she and her family and himself, except a knowledge of the names of birds and some wildflowers? Would she be hurt if he went away, and stayed away for weeks, even months, to write? But would he be able to remain alone, ever again?

  He went out of the hall door and down the little weedy path to the iron gate and so into the lane; and, crossing the river over the old hump-backed bridge, stared at the stars shaking in the moving waters below. He walked up the hill, and along the crest of the down, the short grass rimed and the rising moon a swelling gourd in the east. He returned by other lanes that led down to the valley, and finding direction by the moon above, reached the hump-backed bridge. It was two o’clock in the morning, the Christmas truce was over, the dull flat reports of rifles echoed over the frozen Flanders fields—all ghosts, but living close to him. After some anguished hesitation, he removed shoes and socks in the kitchen and in bare feet crept up the back stairs to Lucy’s small room. He felt his way slowly to her bedside, and whispered her name, and knew by the silence that she was asleep. After standing still for more than a minute, he moved to the bed-head and reaching down, softly stroked her head.

  “It is I, Phillip.”

  “Is anything the matter?” her voice from the darkness said.

  “No,” he replied, and knelt by the bed, laying his cheek on the edge of her pillow, his forehead touching her cheek. A hand came from under the bedclothes and sought and held his.

  “I’ve been for a long walk, Lulu.”

  “How lovely! I thought I heard you closing the gate.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “What about, darling?”

  He hesitated. “Am I your darling?”

  “Of course you are. Don’t you know it?”

  “You must think me an awful washout.”

  “Of course you’re not!”

  “But I am really, you know. I’m not a bit like I seem! There’s a hard, critical person inside me. I’ve tried to alter it for years, but it won’t be suppressed.”

  “Only when silly people upset you. People are silly! I won’t let them upset you any more, see?”

  “Pa doesn’t like Dick Sheppard, does he?”

  “Oh that! He doesn’t know anything about him! It’s only what that silly paper said! Why, if Pa knew him, I’m sure they’d be friends at once. Don’t take any notice of what Pa says.”

  “I admire Pa very much, really, you know.”

  “Yes, he’s a dear, isn’t he? He and Mother were inseparable. Poor dear, when she died I think he felt his life was over. But look at him now! Reading his boys’ stories, just like Donkin in your book! It is such a lovely book.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course I do. Don’t you know it?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Well, don’t ever think it isn’t, for it is! Don’t worry any more, will you, darling? One day we’ll be alone, just we two, won’t we, with Billy? Then we won’t let people worry us, will we?” Her arms softly drew his head to her, she held him close, smoothing his hair with one hand, while murmuring as to a child. So they kissed goodnight, and he went outside to the chalet on a lawn crisp with frost; and undressing swiftly, got into bed and lay back thinking of the beauty of the morning star over the battlefield, years ago.

  *

  Some time later he was aware of footfalls on the gravel path. Looking up he saw the outline of Tim.

  “Hullo,” he said, “how goes it?”

  Tim came into the chalet. “I thought you might be asleep, Phil. I say, I wonder if I might ask you a question?”

  “Of course, dear boy. How is Pansy?”

  This was the name of a girl Tim went to see in the only shop in the hamlet, kept by the widow of a sea-captain and her elder daughter. Phillip had been told by Lucy that she was Tim’s first love.

  “I was wondering, Phil, if I dare ask Pa if I might invite Pansy and her young sister to supper tomorrow night. It’s her sister’s last day, and I thought it might be a good opportunity to introduce Pansy to Pa. She’s been too nervous hitherto to come by herself. What do you think?”

  “Have you asked Lucy?”

  “Oh yes, she says it would be quite all right. Only Pa, as you may have noticed, is a bit old-fashioned—not that I wish to imply the slightest criticism of him, or anyone else for that matter.”

  By ‘anyone else’ Tim meant ‘Mister’ and Mrs. à Court Smith. He had confided in ‘Mister’, with the result that Mrs. à Court Smith had invited him to dinner the following night, and talked to him about it, advising him not to let his friendship with the girl become serious. Tim had been too shy to tell
her that he was serious.

  ‘Mister’ had confided Tim’s confidence to Phillip, taking the line that he ought to warn young Tim not to make an ass of himself.

  “Oil and water won’t mix in this world, there’s no use denying that fact!”

  “But human beings aren’t internal combustion engines, ‘Mister’.”

  “You can make a joke of it, but I’ve known men marrying beneath them before, and it jolly well doesn’t work, old chap! I know what I’m talking about!”

  “Ah!” said Phillip, noncommittally.

  Tim had a secret admiration for Phillip, not only because he was so understanding, but he had fought in the war which to Tim seemed a truly terrible thing, of attacks night and day without ceasing in mud and blood, machine-guns going all the time, bombs bursting, scout planes falling in flames, little to eat and nowhere to sleep for four and a quarter years. How Phillip or anyone else had lived through it all Tim could not understand.

  “Well, if Lucy says ask them up, why not ask them up? I’m sure they would enjoy themselves. What’s the sister like?”

  “She’s quite different from Pansy, who is very shy. Her name’s Marigold, by the way,” breathed Tim, as though he were afraid of his own voice. “She’s a short-hand typist in Dorchester, and, Pansy says, has some experience of office work. We’ll want someone to keep the books, of course, when the Works are built.”

  “When do you think you’ll get going?”

  “Oh, in the spring. We’ll be able to employ several girls as well; we’ll have five thousand square feet of floor space, you know, half in the machine shop, the other half in the loft upstairs. We’re having a bench put along all one wall, with almost continuous windows to let in light. The whole place will be wired for electricity, of course. We’ll have our own batteries and engine, and by the way, the Misses Jardine in the house up the lane want electric light, too, but say they can’t afford to have a plant installed. So Ernest and I are considering a cable from our battery house, to be laid under the lane, if we can get permission to dig it up, and then under the Jardines’ garden and orchard to their house.”