Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
And together with good grass and trees and flowers and cattle on the meadows, he wanted to see trout in clear water again—not so much to take them with a fly, as to see all was well with the brook. The willow trees would shade the water in the critical hot months. Their eddy-washed roots would give cover for trout. So Matt and he had planted a thousand willow slips one long spring day and evening. Very soon they were either pulled out or struck down by the men employed by the Catchment Board to keep the river clean, that is, bare as a canal.
Undeterred, Phillip experimented with an idea to scour the silt on the river-bed. At intervals elmboards were staked diagonally across one half of the bed, to quicken the flow and help to shift the silt downstream, and so out under the sluice-doors in the sea-wall at low tide. These boards, each only about a foot deep, were regarded almost as a personal affront to the mud-pullers, one of whom, the gaunt foreman with a cancerous lip, told him that he was not going to listen to any instructions from any foreigner, despite the fact that the Drainage Board had given Phillip a free hand for one year.
Phillip had tried to reason with him. “The wider the
river-course
is made here, presumably to drain away water, the slower becomes the water-flow. And the slower the flow, the greater the deposit of silt. In winter there is inevitable flooding, all because you will make the river into a wide canal, with a minimum turbulence. Make the water shift that filthy silt. Let the stream throw it about. My elmwood cruives will create turbulence. The water will whirl the mud about, and so lower the level of the bed. Thereby the river will carry more water in winter.”
“Now look you a-here! I’v’a’bin a-pulling mud for over
twenty year, and be frigged if I be going tew listen to a Denchman, or any other furriner!”
A neighbouring landowner, a fly-fisherman who had fished the water in the time of its health and heyday, told Phillip that a race of unique hybrid trout had lived there. They were a cross
between
native brown and imported Californian rainbow, he declared. Two and three pounders were common. The hybrids had a pale pinkish hue along their flanks, which he thought showed rainbow-cross. And big sea-trout came up in the summer.
“The river’s finished,” he said. “You can’t put back the clock, Maddison.”
Could the brook survive? It became a problem involving his personal living as the years went on. It seemed to him people were destroying themselves after a certain age; and that youth died for their lack of truth.
*
At the bottom of his garden he made cruives of stones to sharpen the flow of water and thus to oxygenate it. Gradually he cleared the garden of stones and bits of broken brick and tile, for once a bullock yard had stood there. He wheeled barrow-loads to the river and tipped them over the bank. Then with a rake he spread the shards as groins or cruives diagonally downstream to form a series of slight barriers, each two or three inches deep, to the middle of the river-bed. This quickened the flow on the further side, and caused a pleasing ripple on the layers of stones below the near bank. The faster running water began to scour the stinking black mud under the further bank, and soon new and deeper channels had been cut to the old gravelly bed of the river. The ripple made a music, the stream was singing. It made him immensely happy to hear it. He felt like a man resurrected.
Inevitably, the mud-pullers of the Drainage Board levelled the shallow groins. Some of the village children threw back into the river the pails, bottles, bully-beef tins, rags, and old green
sheep-skulls
Phillip had dredged out and pushed into holes of the opposite bank.
“If he doan’t like our ways, why do’m stay here? Level you out them ridges of flints, and holl you the trash back into the river again, the right place, for it. We all know what he is.”
Village youths, trousers rolled to the knee, were wading in the water, peering into the banks. Each had a long stick with a fork tied to the end of it. With these weapons they were prodding every hollow of the underhung banks to stab any sea-trout hiding
there. They were surly when Phillip asked by what right they were poaching in property belonging to someone else. One declared that the war was being fought so that everything belonged to anybody. Another said that the fish came from the sea and were free for all. It was no good arguing, so back into its case went the two-ounce split-cane rod unused since Dorset days at Flumen Monachorum.
*
The temperament of the artist is resilient. It is chameleonic. It responds to all objects and images. One morning as Phillip wrote in the Studio, he heard the footfalls of Lucy in the yard. She came in the open door with a tray of scones, and a mug of hot, milky tea.
“Well, anyway,” she said, “someone is on your side, for in the Women’s Institute Meeting last evening, it was remarked how nice the stream looked after you had cleaned it out.”
This encouragement led to a visit—Phillip’s first—to the Village Whist Drive, where faces were friendly. Among them was ‘Scroggy’, the old cavalryman of Le Gateau. A beneficial levelling of the mind followed. So Phillip continued his work of clearing the stream, raising the cruives or shallow stone-bars as before. When the Catchment Board Engineer came out one day he was sympathetic and helpful, adding that he could only protest, like Phillip and others, against the pollution, since his Board had no power to stop it, despite the Rivers Pollution Act, and the Public Health Acts; but when Drainage and Sanitation were under one control, things would be different, he declared.
“This is a wonderful occasion,” said Phillip. “I was falling into the error of thinking myself to be a man alone.”
A morning or two later, listening to the sounds of the stream at the bottom of the garden, he became aware of a brownish-purple movement in the water, and as his eyes became accustomed to the dance and swirl, saw that fish were moving just under the surface. A reddish-brown fin cut the water, and at once a dozen fish jostled after it. Backs and flanks were to be seen. There was a splashing in the run. They were roach come to spawn. They had found a clear area of gravel, of water enlivened by ripple and flow, and had chosen the place to lay their eggs.
A female roach of about a foot in length was attended by half a dozen males. The splashing was made as she turned on her side to flap in order to extrude strings of jelly-like eggs. At once the male fish dashed forward to cover them with their milt. He saw nearly a hundred fish cruising about, or lying in calmer water below the
run. And farther downstream were half a dozen of Lucy’s ducks eagerly quapping the eggs in the water-weed where they had lodged. He did not mind, for he wanted to see trout in the river rather than roach.
*
As the sun rose earlier and moved higher in its curve, so the level of the river rose slowly with the growth of green water-weeds. And walking by the meadow, with Billy, on leave, now so keen to see all that had been done while he was away, Phillip told him that he saw this phenomenon from several aspects: as a grazier, for when the tidal sluice-doors were closed the water in the dykes brimmed higher and moved up the shallow ditches and so checked the growth of the good grasses: as a fly-fisherman, for weeds gave off oxygen in sunlight, and also provided cover for the few trout which otherwise in a bare river-bed would be easy prey for herons and poachers prodding under the banks with their flat-fish tridents; as an amateur botanist, he noted the white flowers of the
water-crow’s
-foot, the clumps of water-cress at the bends, the rare emerald starwort, darker green of Canadian pondweed.
“That weed, Billy, is to English rivers what the rabbit is in Australia. It spreads and finally can choke a stream. But it’s the black sludge I dread. It’s the devil. One day you’ll fish for trout here in a pure water brook. You’ll see the water-birds sporting on the faster, wimpling stretches. It’s comic to watch the courtships and rivalries of moorhen and dabchick. And beautiful to see the delicate fluttering, crook-winged flitting, of summer sandpipers. And the snipe flying in throbbing flight over the meadows thick with
persicaria
and meadow-sweet …”
“Well, I think that some of the weeds should be cut, Dad, but not all of them. But the water-cress at the verges should be left. If the centre of the river is kept clear it will quicken the flow and scour a channel there.”
“A good idea, Billy. I’ll get on the blower to the engineer, and tell him your suggestion.”
The engineer replied that all three men would be put on the job at once.
*
It was said that ideas come hard to the East Anglian head. Old ideas died hard, too. Seeing the river brimming two feet higher by excessive weed growth, the authorities were, as recounted,
informed
by telephone. The engineer acted immediately, saying the weeds should be cut that very day. A telegram to the river-men
was sent off. The river-men, who lived in the village, were
dismayed
. For the only knives owned by the Board to cut weeds were twenty miles away.
There was but one other set of chain-knives they knew of, and they belonged to a rum feller who not only would not have the weeds cut, but would as likely as not mob them if they went to him and tried to borrow his knives to cut the weeds. Nevertheless to Phillip they came, and learned to their surprise and even dismay that it was he who had specially asked that the weeds be cut.
“Blast, that’s a rum’n!”
“Well, the main thing is to get the spoil pulled out.”
“See you here, master, we dursen’t ask you for the loan of yar knives. Yar’ll mob us if we do, woan yew?”
Without further words Billy poured out five pint-mugs of cider from the barrel in the Studio—Herefordshire cider. Healths were drunk. The sack holding the chain-knives was on the floor. Cider is a loosening drink.
“Now, ’bor, take you these knives, oh, I can’t talk East Anglian. Gordarn, ‘ave zum more o’ thaccy cider, ’tis proper tangliligs stuff, and then take they bliddy knives and cut the flamin’ weeds, but leave zum for th’ faish tew bide in, yew! And that’s a bit of B.B.C. Dummersetshire talk.”
Did the head man (the cantankerous foreman had died)—who must have pulled more than a million times his own weight from water to land in his time—think this was talking Jarman? He looked up at Phillip as though he were thinking. Ah, there’s a catch in it somewhere, be sure of that! And as they went away Lucy heard him repeating, “That Phillip be a rum fellow, ’bor. First he woan’t hev them weeds cut, and now he say ‘Cut you them flamin’ weeds!’ What dew yew make of that, ’bor? Blast, Phillip’s a rum’n!”
“They call you Phillip among themselves, my dear. They’ve accepted you, don’t look so sad.”
“That’s right,” said Billy. “They think you’re okay, Dad.”
Appreciation—fame—how fortunate I am to have been ‘neglected’ by the world—a ‘neglect’ that has enabled me to remain, like a mole, underground. Or, to vary the simile, mushrooms at midnight grow best in heat and darkness.
The moles and mushrooms—Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room, withdrawn from the social round; Tolstoi in peasant garb, self-reduced to the safe level of the soil (the ‘marther’, or mother, of the East Anglian peasant before mechanisation, or the robot, took over); D. H. Lawrence
in the open hurrying away, away, all his life; Conrad and ‘the cries of pain’ in his letters to Edward Garnett; Turgenev, in exile, dreaming of the land of his heart amidst the alien streets of Paris and London.
One of my favourite quotations comes from Conrad’s letters—not a cry of pain this time—to Edward Garnett, in 1917.
‘I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives, and the peace of his conscience—no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive
Revolutionaries
went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of
all
his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy—and all that in perfect measure. There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer.’
The chief character of my novel-series will be a man deprived and insecure, having suffered in childhood from his father, and the
consequent
leaching away of courage. He will grow to boyhood revealing, in the eyes of his elders, traits which are the reverse of virtuous—mendacity, cowardice, constant tearfulness, and mischievousness at times near-criminal. The boy sets fire to dry grass in summer, fires corks from a loaded horse-pistol at the neighbours’ windows. In truth, as a human personality he was nearly destroyed before he arrived at puberty. But these signs, to his father, of degeneracy, of his son being ‘a
throwback
’, are but the unsunned side of the moon which, with the innocence of the dead, turns a bright face to a sister planet.
His face, its light generally obscured in his home, shows gleams during the Great War. There the loveless youth, the solitary under-aged soldier, will carry the weights of war alone, and break, not away, but into another dimension of the mind. In 1914 and 1915 his feelings are displaced; but when, later on in the war, he finds himself accepted in his Regiment, he begins to live for others, for his men, and thereby evades the agitations of solitary fear.
Thus the war on the Western Front becomes for him the Greater Love War,—with its never-to-be-forgotten generosities and comradeship with the Germans during the 1914 Christmas truce in Noman’s land.
And after the war, when the battlefields are silent by day, and
lightless
by night, he finds himself back where he started; but with a burning desire for a new and better world.