It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  Apart from birds, what was there to talk about? He sat beside her, feeling the inanity of his new life. Sometimes he was sharp with her—exasperated—she did not understand—he felt lonely as they wandered through the heather, or toiled to the top of a hill to look at an ancient tumulus.

  *

  On the third day he found her reading The Psychology and Practice of Successful Marriage, and saw the sentence

  Most pre-marital sex-knowledge on a casual basis is worthless, for it merely augments the primal male selfishness which is devoid of tenderness.

  “Not bad! Where did you get it?” He read the passage which ‘Mister’, an inveterate commentator of library books with the aid of a pencil, had side-lined.

  “It seems to me that the author had in mind to appease the puritans of the Victorian age. Don’t you think that the wording is more violent than the thing itself? Do you want this wedding present?”

  “Not really!”

  He ripped up the book and burned it page by page in the hearth. “You see, I am exactly like Pa! At least he didn’t burn someone else’s book! You can plead The Married Woman’s Property Act, Lucy! I’ll plead guilty now, and give you a set of my first editions as compensation!”

  “I have a set already, you know! Don’t worry any more—I know that you want to write so badly—we won’t be here much longer, anyway——”

  “You do understand! You are really a very kind and unselfish girl! Please don’t take any notice of my stupid ‘moods’!”

  *

  They walked for miles every day across the moor, sometimes climbing to Dunkery Beacon, whence the hills of Wales were visible across the Severn Sea; while in other directions lay valley after valley until all was melted in mist. At evening they returned, foot-weary, sun-burned, and hungry for dinner.

  At the end of the first week came the bill, a bit of a shock: four guineas a week for the use of the rooms and attendance in addition to the cost of the food, which the farm widow bought for them. The knuckle of ram dressed as mutton had reappeared on the table for the first three days, finally to disappear with the terrier dog, Spot, who trotted away over the moor to bury it.

  “I know—she thinks we’re rich, because of that picture paper!”

  On the third morning the landlady had come into the sitting-room with a copy of a picture paper in her hand, to point at a photograph in ‘Mr. London’s’ column—dear old Martin Beausire.

  “So you left the church in a barrage of rose-leaves,” said Mrs. Tidball. “It must have been a lovely sight, they roses!” There they were, holding hands, Peeress’s Niece Marries Author.

  She went on to talk about the great grief of her life. Her husband had been a well-known local preacher, “chapel through and through”, she said.

  “And now my youngest has become a Roman. There’s none of them sort in heaven,” she said dolefully, while a tear stood in her eye.

  “It killed Father, aye, it did! He died in your bedroom last March did Father!”

  Phillip listened to her with apparent sympathy, while hoping that the unhealthy-faced woman in black widow’s weeds would not remain too long at the open door, since the eggs-and-bacon were getting cold.

  There were three sons of the house. As soon as he and Lucy arrived Phillip had noticed pelts of deer lying on the floors, and knew they must have been shot; but it was a surprise to learn that the middle son objected to deer-hunting on the grounds of ‘privilege for the rich’ in one breath, and in the next breath told them how he got compensation for damage done to root-crops, while also snaring and shooting deer. Phillip could understand shooting the deer that did the damage, and claiming for the damage, but not the ‘ethical’, as the ranting farmer sometimes called it.

  He was a pale-faced young man who described himself as an atheist. The veins stood out on his forehead when he argued, his thin lips curled with scorn, his voice often exploded with derision.

  The youngest boy, the Roman Catholic convert, was smiling, red-faced, and pleasant in manner. He took life easily and worked hard. His mother’s frequent sighs and doleful head-shakings about ‘them Romans’ left him serene and smiling as before.

  One evening after supper they were invited into the kitchen, a low room with a smoke-dark ceiling crossed by a rough-hewn oaken beam. There was an open hearth where the cooking was done on split lengths of beech wood. A black iron kettle hung beside a black cauldron. The three sons were there; the eldest had come up from the village garage where he worked. The reason for the invitation was soon clear. A day or two before Phillip had remarked an old and rusty flint-lock gun in the passage, which idly he had said might have been used by the robber Doones, well knowing they were but characters in a novel. They had not been long in the kitchen when the eldest son, who claimed the gun, asked Phillip if he would like to buy it.

  “Yes, I think I would.”

  “What will you bid for it?”

  “You tell me what you value it at.”

  “Oh no, you tell me what you’ll bid for it.”

  It seemed clear to Phillip that the owner wanted to ask too much, but was reluctant to reveal his greed; while he himself, not wanting to pay more than ten shillings was reluctant to expose himself to a suggestion of meanness. He started cautiously.

  “But if you have offered it for sale, you know what you want for it, surely?”

  “Maybe, but you said you’d buy’n, zo you must make me a bid. That’s fair!”

  “I don’t see that fairness comes into it. I don’t know the value of the gun, and you do. But if you want to bring in fairness, I suggest it would be fair to tell me the value.”

  “But if you want ’n, you ought to know how much you are prepared to pay for ’n.”

  “Well, you tell me your price, you’re willing to sell, you say. If I come into your garage for a gallon of petrol, wouldn’t you tell me the price?”

  “But this ban’t petrol, noomye! It be a val’able ole gun, what London museums ’ud pay a great deal of money for!”

  “Well, I doubt that, with all due respect; for most museums exist on presentations.”

  For the best part of their stay in the kitchen this wretched situation continued, with long pauses and sometimes changes in the conversation. The youngest boy, sitting apart near Lucy, told her how baskets were made out of brambles from which the talons had been stripped, then the bramble split. Phillip spoke of badgers on the moor, and ravens; of chars-à-banes that were increasing every year, of the bad situation in the coal mines—then back to the gun. But the one would not make an offer, while the other would not name his price. At last Phillip mentioned ten shillings, to which the owner responded as he had forethought, with a mixture of anger, contempt, and derision.

  “I be an ethical man, I be! And no man wull cheat me by trying to get this gun from me, not for ten pound!”

  “Very well, coming from the ethical to the financial, tell us what you paid for it, at the auction where you said you had bought it!”

  “Ah, wouldn’t you like to knaw? But I ban’t tellin’, see?”

  *

  Phillip kept up his journal, and one evening gave it to Lucy to read. “Tell me, truthfully, what you think of it. I shan’t mind if you agree with my self-criticisms!” She read the entries, sometimes laughing, at other times serious.

  “I think you are far too severe on yourself,” she said. “You are usually a pleasant companion, and although you may not believe me, I am enjoying our holiday here very much! Anyway, I always remember the happy things of life and tend to forget the unhappy moments.”

  Owls called beyond the open window.

  “Anyway, don’t forget to put in the lovely walks we had with Spot, and how you insisted on carrying me nearly a mile because I had a blistered heel. And you have become quite gay as the time to leave approaches, and get on well with the landlady, who is really quite a nice woman, as you have said in your diary.”

  The widow had taught Lucy how to make butter: first scalding the han
d to remove every bit of natural grease from the skin; then turning, almost flipping, the cream in the earthenware bowl with the hand until the cream set; then squeezing out the butter milk, and working it up in platters of beechwood, with a little salt.

  “Yes, she is a nice woman. So is everyone under their defensive crust.”

  “Isn’t it a pity she is so unhappy, about her son being a Catholic, I mean. It made him happy, and that is all that matters, I can’t help thinking.”

  *

  The summer holiday season was beginning, with the great inroll of coloured monsters, now called motor-coaches, to the West Country. The visitors’ book in the church of Oare was renewed for its annual seven thousand signatures. They walked there on their last afternoon, and had a ‘Lorna Doone’ 1s.6d. tea in a barn at a long trestle table which, had it not been well made, would certainly have groaned, as a Victorian novelist would have written, with its load of bowls of scald cream—fifteen inches across, with the yellow crust hiding the thick liquid—the ham, the stewed fruit, the cake. Everyone to help themselves.

  Afterwards the idea of a return walk across the moor seemed formidable, for it had taken them all day to walk there. They had said they would sleep in the heather, and watch the moon rising over the Forest: but here was a coach, about to start, which would be passing the cross-roads only a mile or so from the farm. Should they? Would it not be a betrayal if they succumbed to the monster? Was it, after all, worse than the Norton, which some artist on the moor, painting in yellow, purples and emerald greens, might have cursed as its pale-blue exhaust flames stabbed the twilight by Brendon Two-gates?

  “Come on, it will be fun to ride in it!” said Lucy.

  They rode home side by side, while he began to feel a content come upon life, and with it a memory of the bull and the cow grazing together near Farbus village below the Vimy Ridge, during his pilgrimage of a year ago. Their return was greeted with yelps of joy from the terrier who had accompanied them on all their walks except this one. They were his new friends, said Lucy, who patted him, spoke to him, and invited him into the sitting room.

  “Poor Spot, he doesn’t seem to have any other friends but us.”

  After she had given him the leg of ram, which Spot had buried, the terrier had become their faithful friend.

  On the morrow, when the Trojan rattled to a standstill in the lane, with Fiennes and Tim come to fetch them home, the terrier whined and barked when through the window he saw his friends going away with their bags. He managed to escape and came rushing over to leap into the car and press himself low on Phillip’s lap, eyes looking back at the pale atheist coming to remove him by the scruff of the neck. Spot gave a low sobbing howl as they drove off, and the last they saw of him was walking dejectedly, tail between legs, behind his master.

  *

  After a day or two learning to steer with the Norton shackled to a cumbrous sidecar, Phillip felt confident to proceed to Devon with Lucy, where they picked up Billy, Rusty, and Moggy, and made for Rookhurst. In the morning, leaving dog and cat with Uncle John, they went on with the sun in their faces, stopping for midday rest on a high grassy hill overlooking Portsmouth with its gantries and ships and smoke faintly diluting the summer colours of the sky. Should they stop the night at Worthing, and call on Martin Beausire and Fiona? Or go on through Brighton, making for Folkestone, to get the early boat to Boulogne?

  “Just as you like,” said Lucy. “But is there any great hurry?”

  “Not really. I quite like old Martin, you know. Let’s call on them. No hurry, Martin won’t be home until about seven.”

  They lay upon the grass of Portsdown hill, while the hours went

  “Won’t it be fun when we’re in Skirr Farm?” said Lucy. “I do so love it. And those white owls nesting in the roof! Billy loves them, too, don’t you, darling?” She smiled uncertainly at the child crawling naked in the grasses, then glanced tenderly towards Phillip, who lay on the sward with his face to the sun.

  She sat there so happily, touching the grasses, picking up the empty shell of a small banded hill-snail to show Billy, while blue butterflies and red flying beetles passed in the sunshine. Phillip, eyes closed against the bright sky, was re-living his first visit to the farmhouse one starry night with Willie, in that time now gone for ever. Perhaps it was right that the place was being altered: a new bathroom added, a new water-system put in, the tank in the loft to be filled by a ram fixed beside the stream, and a water-softening plant. The new outside boiler was to be fired by coke. Captain Arkell, the estate agent, had shown him the plans. It was a queer feeling, that he, a nobody, was now almost a country gentleman. Could he play the part? He was a little afraid of it all, regarding what he considered to be luxury as almost hostile to the simple surroundings needed for writing.

  But need one change? A farmer was an ordinary person, trout in the brook were but trout in a brook. He saw himself, after the day’s work, lying beside long bines of water-crowsfoot in the gravelly channels kept clear of weed by chain-scythes.

  *

  They called on the Beausires. Martin greeted them with enthusiasm, both he and Fiona insisting that they stay the night.

  “How do you like my new house?” asked Fiona.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “What did you think of Martin’s novel?”

  “I felt honoured to have been chosen to sit for my portrait by a great litterateur, one of the cognoscenti!” he said with a straight face.

  Fiona looked pleased. “Of course, it wasn’t all true,” she said. “But K. G. Wiggs wrote Martin a letter, saying it was a very good study of a genius.”

  “The book, you mean, or the author?”

  “Which author?”

  “Well, both you and Poogs, of course!”

  After a 7 a.m. bathe on the shingle they enjoyed an excellent breakfast and left just before noon for Brighton, where they had lunch in Sam Isaacs’ fish-shop; then up and over the downs, bumping upon a flinty road past a formless scatter of bungalows and suburban-type houses and empty wilderness plots of the housing estate formed on war-time slogans; and leaving behind this scene of his mother’s investment which had so exasperated his father, they ran down to Eastbourne and on to Hastings, where they had another bathe, declaring as they lay on the shingle afterwards that it was as good a day as that one on the Burrows when they had begun to know one another.

  At sunset they stopped at an inn by a little village on a hill overlooking a coast of silted and lost little ports, with its associations with Henry James, Conrad, and other writers; and a poem on Night, read in The Oxford Book of Verse by a lady who bore the romantic name of the place where they were now staying. The inn had wisteria in full bloom growing over its front. Such quietness, such peace as the sun went down in an aquamarine sky.

  “We’re only an hour’s run from Folkestone,” he said, at dinner. “I wonder if they have rebuilt the basilica at Albert, with the Golden Virgin on top. I meant to visit the Ancre valley last year, but somehow we never went that way.”

  He looks lost, my poor boy, thought Lucy. She remembered how Pa had looked after Mother’s death, and wondered if she dare ask him to go for a walk with her, it was such a lovely evening.

  “I’ll tell the maid to keep an eye on Billy, now and again.”

  Leaving the child asleep in the bedroom they walked through the fields. Lucy took off her shoes and stockings in the dewy grasses, and he saw for the first time that she had feet like Barley’s; the two toes of each foot, being slightly longer than the big toe, made them broad-splayed. Their beauty drew his glance again and again as they returned in the twilight, she going on upstairs barefooted, holding shoes and stockings in her hand, lest she wake the child.

  “The darling,” she whispered, leaning over the cot.

  “I believe you love Billy as though he were your own son!”

  “I do. Didn’t you know?”

  “I thought once that you might not really like a step-son.”

  “I woul
d like him to have a little brother to play with,” she said, lowering her eyes before him.

  “You don’t mind my still thinking about Barley?”

  “No, of course not!” She added with a blush, “You see, I am not really conventional!”

  *

  Winchelsea—beautiful name, in harmony with the stars of the dusky summer night—Antares low on the horizon, cuckoo calling afar over the marshes, moths fluttering in the open window by which he stood, absorbed in the calm peace of the night. While he stood by the open window, watching the rim of the rising moon, a nightingale’s notes rang with startling clearness, as though the bird were in the room. It was singing in the garden immediately below. In the pause of the deep throbbing notes, tereu, tereu, tereu, another answered in the distance, and soon a third had joined in the singing, and a fourth far away across the fields. He thought of Keats, of Stravinsky nights in the Doves’ Nest above the gallery at Covent Garden; he thought of the poem Heraclitus in The Oxford Book of English Verse; he thought of Willie, and the spring nights of the vanished world while the guns were flashing and ‘thy nightingales awake’ in the valley of Croiselles before the Hindenburg Line; he thought of ‘Spectre’ West; and of other faces in that hopeful June before the Somme; and it seemed as though his heart had opened to all life through the friends he had known in the war.

  Then to his side in the warm twilight a form moved, seeming strangely shorter; primitive with dark hair loose over dusky shoulders and breasts. The smooth-brushed head touched his tweed coat, leaning there a moment before his arm was taken above the elbow to enclose the head pressed against his ribs, as though for shelter, as though for claim upon his being. He leaned his cheek upon the dark head, his arm enclosed the warm shoulders, he held her there while her face was hidden in his jacket.