A Solitary War (21 page)
Authors: Henry Williamson
“Are they not your guests?”
“Laura Wissilcraft is, I suppose.”
“I am afraid I do not see any possible misunderstanding, Phillip. On the contrary, to me, and to others, the situation is only too clear. Do you mind if I speak frankly to you?”
“Please do.”
Penelope said that she had known him for a little more than three years, and had listened to him often during that time. She had sympathised, and believed that circumstances were against him, and not Phillip against circumstances.
“I have worried for you, always believing that in the right environment you would be happy in your work, and so help to create happiness in others around you. I considered you were associated with muddlers and incompetents. In your political activities I thought you were merely eccentric, but I don’t want to say anything about that, although it has a bearing on it—the
self-will
that must always have its own way, and would embroil others in its own aura, while resenting the consequent embroiling. I hope that doesn’t sound too confusing.”
“It’s what I’ve often thought myself.”
“Well,” went on Penelope with an attempt at cheerfulness. “May I make a suggestion? You have often given me your
confidence,
and I have respected it; and I’ve done my best, not to
advise you, but to reassure you in what you feel you must do. I’ve watched and spoken to those who know you well and who, despite everything, wanted to help you, but for various reasons found it impossible—Ernest Copleston, your brother-in-law, brother
Laurence
and Felicity, Lucy the mother of your children, and now Captain Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax. Who is to be the next, your friend Mr. Neville? At least I will waste no sympathy on him, for I have seldom disliked anyone more. Do help yourself to a drink, won’t you?”
Penelope’s voice was now brisk. “As I see it, this is your final chance to pull yourself up. I’ve seen what happens to people who allow fixed ideas to dominate their lives. It usually ends in their own ruin, and in unhappiness for those whose lives are involved with them. Particularly if they are brilliant people. I myself have suffered from it, and watched the wretchedness of others involved in it, too, so I know what I’m talking about.”
Phillip was thinking of Richard Jefferies. And his letter to Penelope, which she said she had burned, containing the phrase,
Of
course
he
had
an
awful
life
—then, one word, which Penelope said was
syphilis.
What
had
he written—if only he could think back to the act of writing that letter to her—
“Now, as I see it, the principle of a harmonious life is based on give and take,” continued Penelope, briskly. “These two you have brought down here are fundamentally decent people. I like them, I approve of them. I don’t like giving advice, but you asked me, so I’ll say exactly what I think. For the next six months you must try to stick it out with your new friends, and learn in that time to master the defects of your own temperament. It’s entirely up to you.”
“Yes.”
“Think for a moment of what
they
feel and think about it. Have you considered that Mrs. Carfax has given up her home to come down here and work for you as an unpaid housekeeper? She isn’t used to such a life. So it’s up to you to show appreciation of what she is doing for you.”
“Yes.”
“If ‘Yipps’ does blow upon the wood embers in the fireplace with the bellows, as you once told me, ‘raspingly’, what is that to you? Fire is a beautiful thing, you say. A wood fire should be treated with respect, you say. But isn’t that making an idol out of fire? Fire is a good servant, but a bad master. Anyway, it’s a means for heating a room. Isn’t it an expatiation on the trivial, or
‘pimmining’ as Mrs. Carfax says, to regard a wood fire as though it were a sacred thing? And if it upsets you to see bellows used the wrong way up, surely it hurts the worker of the bellows to feel that someone is silently disapproving? What does it matter, anyway, if the bellows are held upside down?”
“Well, the weighted flap doesn’t close the air-intake hole, and you don’t get any air to blow the fire with.”
“Then why object to Mrs. Carfax using them upside down, when there’s no air coming out, raspingly or otherwise?”
“I suggested that if the bellows be held the other way up, and used slowly, the fire is then not forcibly fed, like a chicken in a battery. Also, the embers, or the fire’s capital, are not unduly exhausted.”
“Well, you appear always to have an explanation for everything, but it is always from your own point of view. I have listened to you on innumerable occasions, and have heard, also, the points of view of others, including Mrs. Carfax and Mr. Pinnegar. So I see the situation in the round. You really must not feel put out if others have ways or even mannerisms different from your own, or because Mrs. Carfax has taken to using Lucy’s old tweed coat to stop a draught under the door. Economy is economy, and Mrs. Carfax is practising economy; as for Lucy’s old tweed coat, if she’d cared that much about it, wouldn’t she have taken it with her? And why this sudden consideration of an old coat, when often the opposite of consideration was shown to the owner of the old coat during all the years that the old coat has never been worn? It shows a lack of a sense of proportion, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I don’t like lecturing you in this way, Phillip my dear, in fact I don’t like spoken words very much anyway. But you asked me, and I’ve tried the best I can to be of help. I don’t want to
interfere
in other people’s affairs in the very least, please remember: only I
am
constantly being told this, that and the other, and
sometimes
I begin to wonder where other people’s lives end and my own life begins.”
“I think you’ve been far too considerate and patient with all of us, particularly with me.”
“Anyway, Phillip, if by disciplining yourself to listen to and respect the view-points of others—especially those diametrically opposed to your own—then there is some hope that you will find true freedom and happiness, for yourself and those about you. And as I said just now, this seems to me to be your last chance.
If this association goes the same way as the others, then I am afraid I shall be so disappointed that I shall feel I may not be able to see you again. Now if you’ll forgive me, I’ll go to bed, I’m rather tired. Would you ask Mrs. Treasure to come up as you go out?”
“Penelope,” said Phillip, controlling his voice, “may I ask you one thing, in case I do not see you again?”
“Certainly. But I hope I shall see you again.”
“Will you believe me that I could not have written that Jefferies had syphilis?”
“Well,” said Penelope, after a pause, “may I say that I wish that the misunderstanding had not occurred? You
did
write that word, I remember it distinctly.”
The telephone bell rang. Penelope listened, then said, “Mrs. Carfax wants to know when you’re going back. Apparently that young woman continues to be a bit of a problem. Goodnight. You can see yourself out, can’t you?”
*
In bright moonlight Captain Pinnegar was trying to start Mrs. Carfax’s motorcar.
“The bloody carburettor’s choked,” he said as self-starter cog and flywheel-ring ground together in vain.
“The bloody plugs are wet with petrol,” as he swung the handle once more with no result.
“‘Yipps’ has an idea to take that crazy girl of yours to a hotel in Crabbe.” Again and again the cogs jeered together. He gave up.
“I told her to get a new contact-breaker. No spark. Let’s see what the others are doing.”
“I’ll fetch the Silver Eagle.”
*
Mrs. Carfax and ‘Pinwheel’ were standing by the chair to which Laura Wissilcraft now clung. Ever since the departure of
Penelope
Mrs. Carfax had been exorting her to pull herself together, to stop being ridiculous, selfish, impossible, stupid, imposing, a genii, and a little ray of sunshine.
Teddy said gently, “Let me handle this, dear. You deserve a rest, after the wonderful dinner you gave us. We are all very grateful for it, dear. Aren’t we, ‘Pinwheel’?”
“Wonderful, simply wonderful, Mrs. Carfax! Honestly, I mean it.”
The retriever bitch lay on the floor as though dead. Mrs. Carfax had poured the glass of hot milk and rum, which she had prepared for the girl, into the special enamel bowl marked DOG. Draughts
and deprivations forgotten, the retriever had, as ‘Pinwheel’ said, temporarily passed into the next world.
“At least someone seems happy,” remarked Mrs. Carfax, giving the bitch a nudge in the ribs without result. “Now, what can we do about this creature?’
‘Pinwheel’ had an idea. “Shall I ring for the vet, Mrs. Carfax?”
“I’m referring to Miss Wissilcraft, my dear boy!”
“Sorry,” said ‘Pinwheel’.
“Try a glass of cold water,” said Teddy.
Mrs. Carfax went into the kitchen. She returned with a glass of water. It was refused in silence.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve been offered soup, tea, hot milk, whisky, coffee, hot rum and tea, hot rum and milk, port, and now a glass of water. What more do you want? Have the goodness to reply.”
When the girl remained unresponsive ‘Yipps’ retired to the kitchen where Teddy, ‘Pinwheel’ and Billy were already in conference.
When Phillip returned, he found Laura alone. “I suppose, speaking only for myself, as a frustrated writer, that the death of the heart is a necessary prelude to maturity.”
She made the surprising, the hopeful reply, “If only my heart would die!” After this flash of spirit she relapsed into a silence so oppressive that he left her, and went into the kitchen.
“What is the secret, ‘Little Ray’?” said ‘Yipps’. “Are you a Bluebeard? What have you done to fascinate that wretched young woman? You may as well tell us. Nothing further about this household could possibly shock me.”
“Did you ever get to bed with her?” asked Teddy.
Yes, thought Phillip, for a few moments only, but nothing
happened
, so I left her, because I was as reluctant as she was—and as passive. “I wrote to her,” he said.
“What did you write to her, ‘Little Ray’? An offer to replace me as your housekeeper?”
“Oh, just a few little rays of sunshine.”
“You seem to make a habit of arousing sympathy, then of repelling it. Well, I’ve rung for a room for the night at the Cheffe Arms in Crabbe.”
“I’ve got my tumbril outside.”
“I’ve telephoned Penelope, she’s going to bring round her motor. We’ll have to transport your genii bodily to the hotel. What they will think, goodness knows.”
Penelope’s saloon car arrived. The girl was lugged out of the chair by the arms, Teddy hauling on one side, ‘Pinwheel’ on the other. She was finally carried to the car, and so to the bedroom of the Cheffe Arms. Half-an-hour later Teddy and ‘Yipps’ returned.
“Well,” said ‘Yipps’, “one section at least of the air about this place is cleared. Thank goodness for it.”
But while she was frying eggs and bacon for breakfast the next morning the Wissilcraft, as ‘Pinwheel’ now called her, walked into the parlour and seated herself once again in the armchair. This action caused no disturbance to the golden retriever, since the bitch still slept soundly in Mrs. Carfax’s bed after being carried there drunk the previous night.
At intervals during the following two hours Mrs. Carfax tried to persuade the visitant to get on her feet. As she had eaten nothing at the hotel and nothing in the parlour Phillip gave her a crown piece for food on the way home. The coin was immediately flung away, to bounce off the table and roll upon the floor.
Finally it was Billy who induced her to mount the saddle of her bicycle in the road outside. Before the final push off by Billy she said to him, “I suppose you think my behaviour is unconventional?”
“Oh, no,” replied Billy, “I think it is quite conventional for our farm.”
With a good fire and a skep-ful of sticks gathered in the woods for his hearth, now improved after being raised on bricks, Phillip went on with his book in River View. It had become his habit to start writing as soon as he had risen and washed every morning. The ice had to be broken in the enamel jug. Teddy, invariably kind and friendly, brought him a mug of tea and some toast and marmalade. For his lunch he had brown bread and cheese, which he bought for himself at the village shop.
In the late afternoon, an hour or so before twilight, Teddy usually came to visit him. Invariably he ended by saying, “I think I’ll go down and see if I can get a duck.” Once again at dusk the old army blankets were hung on the nails above the windows. About seven o’clock Phillip stopped writing—it was an effort to leave the world of the Imagination—and went into the farmhouse, to be greeted with the inevitable enquiry, “And how is our ‘Little Ray of Sunshine’ to-day?”
And Teddy would say, “I think I’ll go down to The Hero. Coming, Phillip? Won’t you come too, dear?” And as Teddy went out he said, over his shoulder to ‘Yipps’, “I’ll bring something back for you, dear.” He returned in due course with a miniature bottle of whisky.
*
One night after dinner Phillip read a chapter of Jefferies’
Hodge
and
His
Masters
to Teddy, ‘Pinwheel’, and Billy, as an example of first-class reporting. He explained that the book did not sell five hundred copies during the author’s lifetime and hardly at all during the fifty years after his death.
“This is the last chapter—the end of ‘Hodge’ the labourer.
“‘In the workhouse there is of necessity a dead level of monotony—there are many persons but no individuals. The dining-hall is crossed with forms and narrow tables, somewhat resembling those formerly used in schools. On these at dinner-time are
placed a tin mug and a tin soup-plate for each person: every mug and every plate exactly alike. When the unfortunates have taken their places, the master pronounces grace, from an elevated desk at the end of the hall.’
“Is this boring you, Teddy?”
“I can’t tell yet, I’m listening.”
“‘Plain as is the fare, it was better than the old man had existed on for years; but though better it was not his dinner. He was not sitting in his old chair, at his own old table, round which his children had once gathered. He had not planted the cabbage, and tended it while it grew, and cut it himself. So it was, all through the workhouse life. The dormitories were clean, but the ward was not his old bedroom, up the
worm-eaten
steps, with the slanting ceiling, where as he woke in the morning he could hear the sparrows chirping, the chaffinch calling, and the lark singing. There was a garden attached to the workhouse, where he could do a little if he liked, but it was not his garden. He missed his plum trees and apples, and the tall pear, and the lowly elder hedge. He looked round raising his head with difficulty, and he could not see the sign-post, nor the familiar red-bricked farm-house. He knew all the rain that had fallen must have come through the thatch of the old cottage in at least one place, and he would have liked to have gone and rethatched it with trembling hand. At home he could lift the latch of the garden gate and go down the road when he wished. Here he could not go outside the boundary—it was against the regulations. Everything to appearance had been monotonous in the cottage—but there he did not feel it monotonous.’”
Phillip felt that Teddy was not responding. He asked again if he was bored.
“I can’t tell yet.”
“It’s true, sir, the real stuff,” said ‘Pinwheel’. So Phillip read towards the improver.
“‘At the workhouse the monotony weighed upon him. He used to think as he lay awake in bed that when the spring came nothing should keep him in this place. He would take his discharge and go out, and borrow a hoe from somebody, and go and do a bit of work again, and be about in the fields. That was his one hope all through his first winter. Nothing else enlivened it, except an occasional little present of tobacco from the guardians who knew him. The spring came, but the rain was ceaseless. No work of the kind he could do was
possible in such weather. Still there was the summer, but the summer was no improvement; in the autumn he felt weak, and was not able to walk far. The chance for which he had waited had gone. Again the winter came, and he now rapidly grew more feeble.
‘When once an aged man gives up, it seems strange at first that he should be so utterly helpless. In the infirmary the real benefit of the workhouse reached him. The food, the little luxuries, the attention were far superior to anything he could possibly have had at home. But still it was not home. The windows did not permit him from his bed to see the leafless trees or the dark woods and distant hills. Left to himself, it is certain that of choice he would have crawled under a rick, or into a hedge, if he could not have reached his cottage.
‘The end came very slowly; he ceased to exist by
imperceptible
degrees, like an oak-tree. He remained for days in a
semi-unconscious
state, neither moving nor speaking. It happened at last. In the grey of the winter dawn, as the stars paled and the whitened grass was stiff with hoar frost, and the rime coated every branch of the tall elms, as the milker came from the pen and the young plough-boy whistled down the road to his work, the spirit of the aged man departed.
‘What amount of production did that old man’s life of labour represent? What value must be put upon the service of the son that fought in India; of the son that worked in Australia; of the daughter in New Zealand, whose children will help to build up a new nation? These things surely have their value. Hodge died, and the very grave-digger grumbled as he delved through the earth hard-bound in the iron frost, for it jarred his hand and might break his spade. The low mound will soon be level, and the place of his burial shall not be known.’”
“Wonderfully true, sir,” said ‘Pinwheel’.
“Ah, ’bor,” said Billy.
Teddy said truculently, as he sat up,
“How
many copies did you say that book sold?”
“Hardly more than five hundred in fifty years. Would you believe it?”
“Would I believe it? I certainly wouldn’t! It didn’t deserve to sell five!” Teddy snorted. “Damn rotten boring tripe in my opinion.” He was almost angry.
‘Pinwheel’ and Billy slipped out of the room. Teddy spun the dials of the radio to find Haw-Haw. Chopin filled the room with
beauty. The beauty ended when a French voice broke in,
speaking
apparently to the Germans on the theme of Hitler’s insomnia. It referred to a recent speech in which the Führer said he had not been asleep during the winter months, and that if his opponents thought he had been, they would soon find out their mistake. Slowly the French voice quoted the words to the beat of a
metronome
, illustrating the agony of insomnia.
You
cannot
sleep,
insinuated the suave French radio voice,
for
your
murdered
comrades
are
on
your
conscience.
“Bloody fools!” cried Teddy, jumping up to switch off; but at that moment Chopin returned, brilliant with gaiety, courage, and the sadness of a people which could not call its soul its own, since the soul came from the soil then held by the Russians. Phillip as a child had been impressed by what his Aunt Theodora had told him about Chopin, and the pot of Polish soil he had carried with him throughout his concert tours in Europe’s capitals.
It
is
watered
with
tears,
you
see,
little
Phillip.
The entire surface of the world was watered with tears—to the world’s honour, since the world still strove.
“Bloody fools, yes,” repeated Teddy, as the propagating voice cut in. “What Hitler meant about his opponents soon finding out their mistake was that he intends a blitzkrieg from the West Wall. Hitler never dissimulates.”
Billy and ‘Pinwheel’ came into the room.
“Hullo, Billy!” exclaimed Teddy, seeking another wave-length. “We’re just going to make some tea.”
“No thanks,” said Billy, “I never mix drinks.”
“I hope you don’t mind, sir,” said ‘Pinwheel’, “but we dashed down just now to have half-a-pint of beer at the Hero.”
“Your honesty is always stimulating, ‘Pinwheel’. I used to give Billy stout to drink when he was eighteen months old to augment his milk supply. Most children in England drank beer for breakfast before the Industrial Revolution.”
“I’m going to bed, goodnight all,” sang out Billy, anticipating more reminiscence from his father.
“Goodnight, Billy, old boy,” cried Teddy. “Goodnight, ‘
Pinwheel
’.” His eyes shone genially. “I like that boy,” he said, when the youth had gone. “He’s a cute little beggar.”
The next morning Phillip tried to shut away his thoughts, to be passive-minded, to avoid even the least thought-interference with Mrs. Carfax. He must ignore all outside things for the sake of his book, payment for which might yet save the farm and the family.
A day or two later Luke came to the door to say that now the frost was gone Dalling Gogney’s threshing tackle was coming to the village, and would set-in by their wheat-stack early in the coming week. Teddy was interested in this, and enquired about the cost of such cumbersome Victorian machinery.
Phillip told him that a day’s hire, with driver, bond-cutter, and feeder, was
£
5
.
Before the war, it had been
£
45
s
. They had to hire extra men, he said, the casuals of the village, to make up a team of twelve. The casuals demanded, and got, eight shillings a day; the regular men got six shillings.
“The previous year, when I used the little tractor to drive the drum (everyone being sceptical of its power to do so) it used daily only one quart of water in its radiator, and four gallons of petrol. It weighs fifteen hundredweight. The steam-engine weighs fifteen tons, and uses sixteen hundred quarts of water each day and burns seven hundredweights of coal. Why not work on the stack, Teddy, and see how we do it?”
It was tiring work for one unused to the pitchfork, picking out and lifting the heavy sheaves. Soon Teddy’s sweating face was begrimed with coal-smoke. On the second day he had learned enough to place himself on the straw-stack, away from the engine, and where the work was comparatively light. On the third day he was absent; the team could not progress without him. Luke sent Billy to fetch him. Teddy’s eyes were still blood-shot; but he came, and finished the job. It was an easy half day, only six acres of oats.
The threshing of the limited 1939 harvest was over in three days.
Dishevelled straw-stacks, braided at both ends with wire netting to prevent the wind from strewing straws over the countryside, stood offset from where the neater corn-stacks had been, The barley and oats of this first war-time harvest lay in separate yellow pyramids on the asphalt floor of the barn. A new lot of chalked tally-marks had been added to the oaken arch above the postern door of the lewkem. This was a raised wooden platform fixed against the outside wall of the Corn Barn. Here full sacks of corn had been trolley-wheeled off the tumbrils, and their contents shot through the open door to the floor below.
The tail corn was in heaps different from the head corn.
BARLEY, Great Bustard: 104 head, 11 tail.
OATS, 6 acres: 72 head, 15 tail.
The wheat had not been shot in the barn; the sacks, weighed to 2¼ cwt. as they were filled under the spouts, had been taken away
by the miller of Crabbe on a three-ton lorry, in two journeys. The Government-fixed price for millable wheat was 15
s
. 9
d
. a coomb of 2¼ cwt. The yield from 10 acres of the Steep field was 102 coombes, 100 of which had been head-corn, or
£
78 15
s
.
With the tail corn, kept for hens, the return worked out at
£
7
18
s.
an acre, he told Teddy, who thereupon made some calculations in his pocket-book.
The threshing had broken into Phillip’s habit of writing; the broody hen abruptly had been compelled into a hare, to operate among tortoises of continuous strength. The hare’s muscles were soft; the work was painful, as for Teddy; but he drove himself, as always he had driven himself. Anyway, the time was come to take Rosamund to Tim’s for Christmas, so it had been well to break off the book.
Looking out his presents for the children one morning, Phillip had an idea which made him chuckle. He purloined the bellows from the parlour, and with the old brass motor-horn, went down to the workshop. Lighting the blow lamp, he put to heat the soldering iron, the while cleaning the end of the bellows-pipe with emery paper, then the thin tube of the horn above the reed. The neck of the horn should have been brazed on the iron pipe to make a proper job of it; but solder would hold it there.
Having fixed it, he waited for the metal to cool, then worked the bellows. Air pushed through the reed caused a hoarse blare to come from the horn. He adjusted the reed so that a mild draught would not make it vibrate; only a fierce thrust would produce the blare.
Having made this instrument, he thought to test it on Teddy. Before twilight he went down to the meadows, and when he saw Teddy approaching along the verge of the woods, he hid in the Osier Carr. As Teddy passed, on his way to the main dyke called the Old River, he worked the bellows.
Teddy stopped and loaded his gun. That was not so good; but Teddy was not the sort of sportsman, like Cabton, who would shoot at a bird on the ground. The blare was not unlike the booming of a bittern, though without the parchment-like rattling timbre when heard at close quarters, ‘the bull with paper lungs’.
Teddy picked up a stick and flung it among the willow wands.
Bla-aa-r!
came the reply.
There was a plank across the dyke, and over this Teddy walked carefully, obviously meaning to come nearer to find out more about the bittern.