It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  “I must aplogise for not coming to church, Vicar. My only excuse is that I have been writing about my escaped otter, which is also, in a way I suppose, a search for God.”

  “The search was concluded a long time ago, you know! There is no need for man to make his own search. But I understand your problem, as I think I understood that of your cousin William. Now you will want your certificate. Come into my study, my dear boy!” said the smiling priest.

  On the birth certificate Richard’s occupation was described as Banker’s clerk.

  “My father is now the Registrar of an Insurance Company, Vicar.”

  “He was a banker when you were born, I see, so I will put down Banker in my certificate.” He completed the form and said, “I suppose Mary will be going to the wedding?”

  “Do you know, sir, I really don’t know! I suppose Lucy will have invited her. But the Copleston’s are a bit vague, so perhaps I’d better ask her. There aren’t any formal invitations being sent out, I do know that. It’s to be a small, very quiet wedding. Do you think I should ask Mary?”

  “I think she would like to go. She is very fond of her cousin, I fancy. I shall look forward to seeing you and your wife when you come to live here.”

  “Yes, of course. Only—for a while at least—we may not be here. My uncle is starting us off on a farm near Lucy’s home, but we shall be here in the holidays, of course.”

  Phillip went to Wildernesse, and asked Mary to come to the wedding. He could give her a lift there, and she could return in the same motor. She thanked him, and said that her mother was not very well, and in bed, so she must decline his most kind offer.

  “I’ll write to Lucy, of course, and explain; but you’ll give her my love, won’t you? Dear Phillip,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “You both deserve every happiness, my dear.” She smiled, and he knew she was thinking of Willie. “Look after Lucy, she is made for you, I think. Be gentle with her, Phillip, and don’t try and do too much. She adores Billy, as we all do! I often go and see him when I’m in the village. Now I mustn’t keep you, you will have so much to do just now.”

  *

  Pots and brushes were ranged neatly on the table. First the rooms must be cleared of junk. He began, tremulously, conscious of the rushing of time, to fill a sack with his old shoes, boots, threadbare jacket, shapeless trousers, worn socks, newspapers, and tipped them in the centre of the garden. Should he burn her shoes, too? In two minds about this, he set them aside, thinking that he would take them, with her clothes in the trunk, to the Infirmary, for poor people. Or should he burn them, give them ‘the honour and purity of fire’, in Warbeck’s words?

  His idea for the best part of a year in Willie’s old cottage had been that nothing must be disturbed; all must be left as when Willie had lived there. The barest room; the simplest furniture; the grandfather clock which had never been wound up since Willie had gone; no food whatsoever in the larder; no curtains over the windows; on the wall a solitary picture of Queen Victoria presenting a Bible to a kneeling Indian Prince; the Prince Consort standing behind her, and the quotation below, This is the Secret of England’s Greatness, England’s Glory—the picture Julian Warbeck had scoffed at during that evening before Willie had been drowned.

  He took out two worn rubber tyres and started the bonfire. As the rubber began to frizzle and thick black smoke to unwind itself into the air the large, pale face of his neighbour at the end cottage of the row looked over her garden wall and cried out that the thatch would catch fire, whatever was he thinking about, he would burn them all out of house and home, it was dangerous, it was making an awful smell too, couldn’t he put it out?

  “Sorry, it’s rubber, and can’t be put out!”

  The flames were becoming fearsome, with the dark red flaring of the rubber; and in alarm he ran upstairs, pulled the clothes off the bed with Moggy asleep with her kittens, and began to heave and shove the lumpy old mattress through the narrow casement window. It fell at last, and he leapt downstairs to haul it on the fire, hoping it would smother the flames. White smoke was soon pouring from its four corners, joining the black smoke of the rubber.

  Mrs. Mules, passing down the lane, cried out, “What hivver be the man about now, what hivver is it you be up to, what hivver be you a-doing?”

  “Burning this old crennelated mattress!” he yelled through the smoke.

  “Aw, there be no sense in what you’m doin’!”

  “I was saying Mr. Maddison will burn us all in our beds, Mrs. Mules,” ejaculated the neighbour still watching anxiously over the top of her wall. She was the widow of a small retired shopkeeper, and considered herself to be an educated person, above the rest of the village.

  “Then I suggest, with great respect, that you don’t go back to your beds for the time being,” said Phillip.

  “A proper mazed man!” cried Mrs. Mules. “I allus told’n ’e was mazed as a brish! How be ’ee gettin’ on?”—to Phillip—“You won’t vinnish that yurr place by tonight you know, not likely! Better if you’d let me and Zillah tidy’n up for ’ee, and gived that old mattress to Mules to rat (rot) down for his raspberry canes! ’Tidden right that you should be bringing your best man to thaccy ould place, you know! You can’t go on living like a moucher now you’m about to be a married man once more!”

  “That’s right!” said the neighbour. “My friends all say to me, ‘What, that man an author! If he is, why does he go about in such old clothes?’”

  “Only my characters can afford to wear ‘faultless Lincoln and Bennetts’, Burberries, shoes by Lobb, and eat caviare on toast for every meal,” said Phillip. “Someone’s got to pay for that, you know!”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying, and I don’t suppose you do either, Mr. Maddison!”

  “And you didden ait your breakfast, only a mouthful! What sort of weddin’ groom will ’ee be like, and your wife zaying us starved ’ee! ’Tidden sense, you know, goin’ on the way you’m goin’ on, ’tidden no sense at all! You’m got to settle down now, no more midnight rinnin’ about the viels, or sittin’ by a candle all night ’till cockcrow!”

  When the lady and Mrs. Mules had shut up, Phillip went into his cottage and opened his letters. One from his mother said that Elizabeth was unwell, and would not be able to come to the wedding. His relief at this news changed to doubt when he read that his cousins, May and Topsy, had said they would like to come. May was on her honeymoon at Swanage, and Topsy was spending her holiday there, too; and since they were not far by train from Shakesbury they would find their own way to the church, so there was nothing for him to worry about, wrote Hetty.

  So May had married Herbert! Supposing Herbert came to the wedding with May and Topsy? Nothing to worry about——? Why did the weak always destroy the strong?

  *

  Phillip’s first thought was to send a telegram to his mother asking her to send a telegram to cousin May advising her that the wedding had been postponed for a fortnight, by which time Herbert Hukin would be safely back at his Nonconformist printing shop. He drafted several messages, then threw them on the fire in despair and started to scrape the upstairs ceiling. He soon gave this up as hopeless and tried washing off the thick layers of lime-wash. The water ran down his arm; he had covered less than two square yards in a little over half an hour when he gave it up: the loose flakes came off all right, but the firm patches were too hard. He tried with a knife, making shallow ruts and scratches which made the ceiling look worse than ever, before abandoning the idea.

  As the hours tolled from the church tower he drove himself to work faster. He was now on the walls; the ceilings were done. White splashes were all over the beds, on his hair, face, and clothes. His right arm was white to the elbow. At two o’clock Zillah came over to ask him whenever was he coming to lunch.

  “Mother’s put it back in the oven, it’ll be all zamzawed, then you’ll complain it’s all her fault, like when she washed your breeches for you, remember?”

  “Zilla
h, I honestly haven’t any time to eat anything!”

  “Why didn’t you let Mother and me come to help you? Look at you! A proper sight you look! Come on now and have your lunch, you were up most of the night, too. Aggie over the way saw your light from her bedroom window go on and off and on again all night, she told me. Come along, won’t you?”

  She was concerned for him; he yielded, and said, “I’ll come when I’ve washed off this muck! You’re a kind girl, Zillah. You’ll make a fine wife for someone, one day.”

  “Niver ’appen!” she cried, sharply, turning her back and walking away.

  *

  Mrs. Mules and Zillah set to work to sweep and swab the upper floor, while Phillip covered the kitchen floor with old newspapers before tackling the downstairs ceiling and walls. In the middle of this work the carrier stopped outside. He said he had a heavy package to deliver. Whatever was it, asked Zillah out of an upper window, as the two men carried it into the kitchen.

  Phillip ripped off the hessian to reveal a round and dumpy armchair upholstered in thick tapestry. It had very short legs, and when he sat in it the top of the back and sides, about ten inches thick, came only to the middle of his back. He remembered telling his mother once that he liked the shape of the old-fashioned cock-fighting chairs; this was apparently a local upholsterer’s idea of one.

  It was so heavy that the two men with Zillah’s help failed to get it up the stairs, Mrs. Mules calling down from above that the stairs were hardly so wide for take down a coffin. Mules came from the graveyard to help. The chair, shaped like an enormous dough-nut, got wedged at the turn of the risers, and they had to get it down again into the kitchen, where it was lifted against one wall—the castors were too small for the weight—and left there, covered by newspapers.

  Later Rusty climbed upon it and settled down amidst old Times Literary Supplement, Manchester Guardian and Westminster Gazette weekly editions, and Brex’s new Sunday Crusader. Moggy joined him, and the two slept peacefully together.

  Phillip was dipping the brush in the pail of distemper, about to start on the boarded ceiling, when the railway van arrived with three packages, also sewn in hessian. They were the table and supporting drawer-sets of a mahogany knee-hole desk which had once belonged to Thomas Turney, his grandfather. A card pinned inside the main drawer below the desk said, in Hetty’s handwriting, For Phillip from his loving sisters Elizabeth and Doris. The chair is from me, I hope it will keep off the draughts.

  He turned out the animals and sat in the chair again. It fitted so tightly around his back that no draughts would ever be able to get near him, he thought, either inside or outside the cottage. The trouble would be, when he wore thick clothes in winter, to get out of it. He would have to walk about like a snail. The fancy made him laugh, and Zillah upstairs asked what he was up to.

  “‘Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’,” he said as he lifted Moggy and Rusty into the chair.

  “There you go again!”

  “It means that it is better to laugh when things go wrong, rather than to cry.”

  “My dear soul, what be the matter now?” called down Mrs. Mules in her panting voice.

  “I think I know what it feels like to be a snail.”

  “Aw, you’m mazed as a brish! ’Tidden no sense what you do say!”

  At five o’clock his helpers went home to get ‘Feyther’s tea’. Phillip went over at five-thirty and returned after ten minutes to work on until with feelings near to panic he realized that the sun was going down. Swifts were whistling around the church tower, a golden haze hung over the cottage roofs. The church clock struck nine. He got the tubby armchair upstairs by careful movements and sat before the knee-hole desk, in a kindly light from the open casements reflected upon wet walls and ceiling. What a fine character he would make out of Thos. W. Turney one day, and a sympathetic, otherwise true, one at that. The old mahogany knee-hole desk was kind and thoughtful: there was a spirit in the worn green leather top, in the hand-polished nobs, even in the dust in the corners of the drawers. The artist must always think steadily why people were as they were. He must live alone in the wilderness; or be lost to truth.

  Below in the garden the bonfire was still smouldering. He went to throw earth on it.

  “About time, too, I must say,” remarked a voice from a bedroom window.

  “That old mattress was full of worry, pain, and fear. Its sufferings are nearly over. Thank you for watching over its last hours!”

  He finished painting the upstairs woodwork by candlelight about half-past one in the morning. He lay on the wire-mattress in his clothes, so to be sure of getting up early, and fell asleep at once. When he awoke he examined his painting. It had looked even and shiny by candlelight, now it was seen to be uneven and dribbly. He had until four p.m. to finish painting downstairs. But before that he must go to the station to see if hat and morning suit had arrived. It was Y/Z day. Tomorrow he was to be married. Mother, Doris, and Anders Norse were arriving that afternoon. He had eight hours.

  He felt Barley’s wedding ring, tied round his neck. At one time he had wondered if it would fit Lucy’s finger, but had recoiled from the thought.

  “Do you mind my wearing it round my neck?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I shall give it to Billy when he’s bigger.”

  “Poor Billy, never to have known a real mother.” Soft voice, eyes downheld, a genuine feeling. He recalled to himself what Conrad had written: that a writer should write as though he saw things for the first time—‘as a child sees them—or an idiot’.

  Dostoevski’s Idiot.

  Wondering what he should do if the wedding uniform wasn’t at the station he found, to his relief, that the two packages had arrived with the first train.

  The hat brim touched his chin, having first pulled down his ears, which had apparently flapped back in the roomy space under this ‘tile’. He folded several bandages of newsprint and fitted them inside the leather band, as stuffing. Four were required to fill the gap between his skull and silk-lined cork interior. Even so, the damned thing wobbled as he rehearsed a slow walk down an imaginary aisle. But relief came as he thought that one did not wear a hat in church. He would not need to wear it at all; he could carry it in his hand when he got out of the hired motor taking them to Shakesbury.

  The suit fitted. This was pleasing, unlike the bill, which was lying in the box. £12/12/- for the coat; £4/4/- for the vest; £2/2/- for pair of white spats; £1/1/- for white slip; £4/4/- for a pair of striped trousers. It was a swizzle! The lining of both coat and vest was ordinary cheap cotton fabric—white with blue stripes for the vest, black for the coat. Both should have been of silk for that price. He would send them back after the wedding, plus the hat.

  He finished painting by one p.m. All was done, not very well, but there was a new look about the place. Now he would put the blue ribbon guarding the ring into the Bible-box for Billy one day. Having placed it there, feeling light of heart, he closed and locked the oaken box with the big hand-made key; and broke into tears, for something seemed to be crying remotely from the darkness of the box, it was so final. He took out the ring at once, and placed it round his neck.

  *

  The new ring was also of red gold, engraved inside with his initials and Lucy’s. He gave it to Anders for safe keeping. After dinner of roast lamb, and a bottle of burgundy, Anders said they ought to go to bed early. They said goodnight to Hetty and Doris at ten p.m. He was glad that the calm, sensitive Anders was with him in the adjoining bedroom of the cottage.

  They went for a walk in the morning, and bathed in the sea. Anders said, “Don’t keep looking at your watch. You’ve looked at it a dozen times since breakfast. Leave everything to me.” At last came the moment to dress.

  His hands trembled as he pushed gold cuff-links through stiff starched linen. The tie got stuck in the collar: pulling it round to even the ends, it burst collar from stud. He fitted a new collar. Anders fit
ted the tie. It remained at an angle. “It doesn’t matter, Phillip.”

  Phillip tried again. It ended up as before, with one end of the collar bent. “You’ve got the wrong collar on.”

  “But this kind is the latest fashion, Anders.”

  “Haven’t you got a wing collar? Yes, here’s one. Try it.”

  “It’s an evening collar.”

  “What does that matter?”

  At last, feeling slim and natty in tail-coat, vest with white slip, striped trousers, and white spats over boots feeling to be thin after nailed brogues, he got gingerly, on account of his wobbly hat, into the hired Daimler landaulette, to sit opposite his mother and sister in an atmosphere of trepidant unreality.

  “We’ll stop on the way there,” said Anders, “and buy ourselves each a red carnation.”

  “Doesn’t the groom wear a white one, Anders?”

  “Right, wear a white carnation. It’s up to you.”

  They stopped in Taunton High Street; and coming out of the shop, Phillip noticed his mother’s hat for the first time. It was of dark blue stiff cloth, and adorned by sprays of small artificial flowers, like those seen growing in Switzerland, where she had spent a holiday with Elizabeth. She saw Phillip looking at her hat, and smiled at him, while anxiety came upon her for the remote look in his eyes. Had she, after all, bought the wrong sort of hat? The assistant in Dickins and Jones had assured her that it would be the very thing for a country wedding.

  Phillip was thinking of the burning sun of Spain over the Col d’Aubisque, of gentians in bloom where the snow had melted; he was hearing a voice saying I am all your friends. He smiled at his mother, and looked into her eyes, thinking that she, too, needed all her friends.

  “That’s a pretty hat, Hetty!”

  “Oh, I’m so glad you like it, Phillip!”

  It was sad that so little could make such happiness. If only she did not depend on him, but on impersonal things like poetry—art. But could he? Did he? Before he had known Barley?