Lucifer Before Sunrise (25 page)

The wind blew through the casement and billowed the black Italian cloth curtains; the casement had to be closed. For the first time in his life, at least since he had grown up, he slept with the window shut, crouching in bed behind the refuge of black
curtains.
Night after night it was the same throughout the hours of darkness. Within the cave-like dark of the room there was safety, where he could lie during the cold nights and dawns, secure for a while from the dreaded light of day.

*

Many years before, in the old days of single living and single thinking in Valerian Cottage, at Malandine, when, as a young writer does, Phillip was measuring himself and his imagined powers against established writers, he bought the three-volume
Everyman
edition of Tolstoi's
War
and
Peace
,
putting it on the shelf that held volumes of Jefferies, Hardy, Shakespeare, Shelley, Francis
Thompson,
Conrad, Barbusse, Wilfred Owen, Wilfrid Ewart and other writers who quickened life for him by their pages. Of
War
and
Peace
,
he had never managed to read beyond the first few pages. He could not settle to them in those days. His own work pressed upon him. But now, twenty years afterwards, he read what had generally been claimed to be the greatest novel in the world, and found that the entire motive for the Napoleonic War was missing from the work. The original impulse of genius, the vision of Napoleon clenched to his clear and unequivocal will-power, where did it appear, in character, upon the pages of the book? Since it was non-apparent to the author, the gradual divergence in time between Napoleon's spiritual ideals and the physical reality of his actions as the drama of the world entoiled him was not shown in the book. Yet
War
and
Peace
brought sharper into focus thoughts which for some time had been growing within his mind, which he had formulated and expressed years before and had seceded from: a conviction that the man of vision and imaginative powers
beyond
the ordinary must remain an artist, and resist all calls to direct action, however leaderless and unhappy the times. His powers must go into the world through his art, not be applied directly.

During the years between the wars Phillip had often thought of the series of novels that one day must be written—tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow—while reproaching himself for being
indolent, wasting his talent on immaterial things. Now as the second war was rasping away the flesh of Europe's skeleton he began to see that the self-reproach for indolence had perhaps been mistaken: the comprehensive novel had not been written because he had not developed the comprehensive vision to see the war of 1914–18 and the decades preceding it as a human entity.

And, reading
War
and
Peace
,
he found that Tolstoi's
comprehension
of the ordinary human scene was magnificent. His portraits of schemers and spongers, of simple men lacking in courage, of generals and ensigns and wranglers and common soldiers were true, because he understood them. But he did not understand Napoleon, or why Napoleon had gone to war. And it seemed to him that Tolstoi's powers of endurance were fatigued by the time he arrived at the third volume, where he argued and propagated ideas rather than re-created life as it was.

Tolstoi's canvas depicting a great war was large and diffused; his own was to have been circumscribed and intensely focused. In one family, almost in one man, he had dreamed of revealing the causes and effects of world war. But the years had gone by, and little had been done, beyond the experimental and romantic Donkin novels. Now in the nights of this dark winter, his
personality
occluded, Phillip sat at the table, withdrawn from the
blacked-out
world, writing scenes and making notes while the frozen fields and woods of the Bad Lands echoed the crowing of pheasants disturbed at roost by distant reverberations of bombs or aircraft exploding. He began to feel again the old longings to escape from the world which was too much with him, to live in a world of his own imagining, peopled by human beings who would respond to the most subtle and flexible variations of truth. In that world ideas which were life to one and death to another could be made flesh. The imagination could cross continents and illumine facts which in every moment of present living were distorted and falsified by broadcasts into the ether which surrounded the earth.

Dare he begin his work now—despite the labours of the farm? The thought was quickening like a candle shining in darkness: but counter-thought smothered the point of light as effectively as the bushel measure in the Corn Barn had hidden the light of a candle he had lit one evening when searching for a tin of mercuric
corn-seed
dressing. From outer darkness had come cries of
Put
that
light
out!
The voices were those of newcomers to the Searchlight Camp as they walked past from the village pub. He had put the measure
over the candle stump at once; even so, the inevitable and
indignant
voice had shouted out,
Do
you
want
us
all
to
be
bombed
?
O God, it had come to this—after the five infantry battles in which he had taken part in 1914–18. But his suppressed feeling was momentary; of course he knew all the causes of such fake acts.

The
real
danger, to him, lay in starting a work, and not going steadily on until it was finished. Once begun, his novel-series must be continued, day after day, week upon week, month after month, year following year.
Dare
he begin, being so involved and rucked in the black currents of the present?

The Italian cloth hung slack upon the window. Black frost ruled without. It was time to go into the farmhouse for tea, and afterwards play games of Rummy, Beggar my Neighbour, Draughts and Snakes and Ladders with the children. The nearer he could creep, as himself (not that anxious and often tense creature called Father) to the children, the safer he felt.

His literary ambition must wait. He must be patient, learn to endure all things.

Someone was coming up the stairs. “Dad, can you spare the time to play ‘Happy Families' with us? We all want you to,” said Roz.

*

At six o'clock the next evening, over the radio from London, Phillip heard that Japanese troops had entered Hong Kong. British prisoners-of-war, their arms and feet tied, had been forced to kneel before their captors, and been bayonet'd. The conquerors had made a public spectacle of it. An entire Chinese quarter had been turned into a brothel, went on the voice of the announcer. ‘White women have been publicly raped'.

Perhaps Melissa was nursing in Hong Kong? Be quiet, be calm, he told himself, remember that courage is grace under stress. He tried to thrust away the thought that this had been made inevitable by the lazy ruling class which had always put money first; that their indifference and apathy had ruined England. No no, I must not blame the Coplestons, it was not true, they were the innocent effect of causes beyond their control. He went into the kitchen.

“I've made you your favourite apple pie,” Lucy said.

“Did you hear the news?”

She nodded. “The children——”

“Yes, I understand.”

He sat quietly in his chair, recalling Conrad's phrase, ‘the terrible tyranny of a fixed idea'. The farm was the world, where
human ideas were struggling for mastery as crystals in a volcanic flow attempted to shatter rival patterns.

The supper came in. He could not eat.

“Cor, the Japs are what you call tisky, bor',” said David to Jonathan.

“Now, David, eat your supper,” said Lucy.

“Yes, David, young men are now paying for the sins of their fathers.”

“‘The international fin-an-seers',” said Boy Billy, at the other end of the table.

“You can jeer, Boy Billy! But let me tell you this—as a family we shall fail, because of the very same ideas now causing the ruin of Europe! This war was caused, not by Hitler wanting return of the German provinces taken from Germany by the treaty of Versailles, but by those who wanted things to remain as they were! All Europe rotting on the dole, except Germany, which was raised from the dust of defeat by the vision of one ex-soldier of the Western Front!”

“Uncle Willie,” said David, pale and serious.

“Yes! And Britain could have raised the Empire to be the finest the world had ever seen, if Birkin had been listened to!”

“Like your farm,” said David huskily. “I mean—Father—sir—like you try to convert the slobberers.”

“That's me,” muttered Boy Billy.

“Do eat your supper before it gets cold,” said Lucy.

“Your Uncle Willie's ideas were regarded as a nuisance and a bore by most people, as mine were and are by nearly every member of my family! My family relations had no use whatsoever for what I tried to tell them!” He got up from the table. “And now those ‘blind, blunt bullet heads that long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads', have re-shattered Wilfred Owen's England! And if your cousin Melissa is in Hong Kong, Lucy, she will be fortunate to be dead—dead—dead! Her death was prepared here in England during the last ten years! The
mortmain
,
the dead hand of selfish,
laissez-faire
pleasure-seeking, decadent British ruling classes wrecking all Birkin's, and Maxton's and A. J. Cook the miners' leader's attempts to create a greater, a fairer Britain! Just as, on our little farm the same decadent spirit prevails——”

At this point the pale and innocent face of Mrs. Valiant appeared at the door. “Now don't you talk like that, sir! The missus do her best, sir! Missus is not against you, sir. And not everyone in the village either, sir.”

Mrs. Valiant wept silently as she stood, her thin hands folded, just inside the door. She looked deathly.

“You will excuse me, won't you, sir? But I can't help thinking of my boy James, gone out there with all the County rig'mint, sir. Now do you eat your dinner, sir, so I can wash up the plates, and get back to my Tom. He's old, and I don't like to leave him alone just now, if you'll excuse me telling you, sir.”

The children were eating their food in subdued silence. Jonathan was being comforted by Rosamund. She looked pale. Then David said huskily, “Sir—Father—I mean Dad—don't you think they were really only dummies like the straw sacks the Searchlight soldiers play rugger with, when they're supposed to be at bayonet practice, sir?”

The small boy's attempt to ease the tension moved Phillip to his better self. “Yes, Davy, that may be what really happened.”

Boy Billy had already disappeared before his father's tirade, to find escape from reality down with the tractor boys gathered in Horatio Bugg's barn.

Mrs. Valiant wept silently as she washed the plates in the little kitchen converted from a wood-shed. Phillip went to comfort her, telling her that those Japs had probably been criminals let out of prison, the type found in every army: that it had been an isolated incident: that the news had been released deliberately as
propaganda:
that it was an historical fact that in the Russo-Japanese war the Japanese had treated their Russian prisoners decently, and with good manners.

“Oh, sir,” she sobbed. “Everyone else except you and missis have bin coming to say to me, ‘O, your poor boy! Isn't it awful!' They all come and say that, sir.”

“Mrs. Valiant—dear Mrs. Valiant—you are not to believe what people say. There are blackguards in all armies. You must believe what I tell you. Keep your heart up, my dear.”

It was all he could say to repair the selfish violence of his former words. “Things are never so bad as they seem, you know. And as David said, it may be all propaganda, and the so-called prisoners were painted dummies.” He added, “For photographs. That was done in the first war.”

He remained with her, helping dry the plates and dishes, but she told him he must go and rest, so he went back to the parlour where the children were now drawing tractors, aircraft, maps, and birds with pencils and paint boxes on the table. David was making a small dummy parachutist, with wooden Bren
gun, while muttering, “You'll see off the Japs, ‘bor, ah, won't yar!”

Lucy had gone to the village hall, where she was helping to organise a whist drive for the Red Cross.

*

Perhaps the civilian English public, through suffering, thought Phillip sadly, had never felt so deeply as they did at that time. By now the war was right inside the heart and flesh and bone of the Island Fortress, whilst those actively engaged outside it, beyond the encircling sea, were yielding up heart and flesh and bone.

Hitler, some of the more thoughtful were beginning to say, was an effect, rather than a cause, of the malaise of Europe. That might be the beginning of clear sight. Every situation so far, except General Wavell's drive in North Africa, had the same pattern. There was no authentic Idea abroad in the country—indeed it was locked up in prison with Hereward Birkin—to replace the creative Idea of Germany, or of that of the British Government's Machiavellian ally, Stalin. The Germans and the Japanese, the Russians after their great defeats, had a crusade, a fervour, a cause. Before the war British
laissez-faire
was frustrating creative Ideas beyond the shores of the Island.

Some popular newspapers began to print daily the slogan REMEMBER HONG KONG. Mrs. Valiant, so tidy and conscientious a worker, said (to Phillip's surprise) that if she hadn't believed what he had told her ‘that night', she would have lost her reason. Thin and pale, she was thinking all her conscious moments of her son, James. Daily she awaited a letter to be brought by the postman, addressed in his handwriting, telling her he was safe. Such, thought Phillip, were the hopes of millions of mothers—British, French, American, German, Scandinavian, Jewish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese. How tremendous had been the task taken on by Jesus of Nazareth—in his life-time a figure ridiculed and detested by the old order, and finally destroyed! The Nazarene had attempted to purify human minds of the decadent materialism of his age.