The Innocent Moon (20 page)

He looked through old tattered copies of illustrated weekly papers, searching for faces of beautiful girls while awaiting roast beef, baked potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and brussels sprouts. Outside it rained steadily.

At half-past two he left the warm room and went out to the dripping motor-cycle. His trench-coat was buttoned tightly over several newspapers tied by string around his jacket. The sodden flying helmet was replaced by a cap whose peak would keep the rain from his eyes. If only he had brought some anti-belt-slip solution! The local garages had none. Well, it was no use watching the water in the gutter eddying around the tyres. Petrol turned on, plug-porcelain wiped dry, pack-webbing straps adjusted around shoulders, throttle lever left open half an-inch: push off. The engine fired at once. Tuck ends of coat round knees. Turn left to the bridge over the Avon, up the street and under the railway bridge, the road bending to the left sign-posted 
 MERE. Mindful of skids, he went along at thirty miles an hour, to Wilton with the main road twisting through its cottages, the rain now lashing aslant his face. Soon the engine was racing while forward movement slowed. Friction heated the pulley flanges, dried the belt, and the machine shot forward suddenly. But rain made the engine race once more. To continue would mean the belt quickly wearing out; besides, he could average only about ten miles an hour under such conditions. So shelter
was sought in a barn by the roadside, and sitting on a chopping block he read Blake’s
Songs
of
Innocence.

Later in the afternoon the grey skies became lighter, the rain ceased. On again. After half a dozen miles the rain returned so violently that spray was beaten upon the tarred road almost as high as his knees. This time there would be no stopping; let the belt wear out. The tarred road ended, and the belt gripped again when no spray arose as he serpentined round chalky puddles. He passed through a village of mellowed stone cottages built beyond a small brook running clear and rippling-swift with emerald green weed down one side of the road. The road led up a hill to the left beyond the last house, between hedges. Slowly to another village, the afternoon growing dark. It was hard to imagine that it had not always been raining. Water was inside his riding boots, which became soft and shapeless—his lovely boots which so often had been boned and polished until they were more shiny than an old walnut table-top.

Now the dark grey road was stretching away into a light grey landscape. A straggle of rooks flew slowly overhead. With engine alternately racing and gripping the belt he moved westwards up a long and gradual incline. Towards the top of the slope, where fir-trees were planted in lines beside the road, the belt broke. As he walked back to pick it up rain fell so heavily and coldly that he had to shield his face with his sopping gloves. How lucky that Julian hadn’t come on the carrier, as he had at first suggested! Only the need for luggage to go by train had decided otherwise.

The business of unpacking tool-roll, then cutting the ragged belt end, making a new hole with the belt punch, before searching through pockets for the fibre spare-link, was done with hands of cold wood. Afterwards so numb was his body that the machine seemed too heavy to push, but he continued, slower and slower, the engine not firing, until he fell over and across the machine, to lie there while the rain came down ‘like aught out of a sieve,’ as the baker had said in Salisbury. The water was now coursing down the side of the road in a muddy stream a yard wide.

He tried again, pushing desperately while the valve-lifter was dropped and raised again a dozen times in fifty yards. Still the engine would not fire. He pushed until his heart seemed to rise and fill his throat, and his sight darkened. Then, screaming a curse at the engine, he fell over and lay uncaring in water rushing over his right arm and shoulder.

After awhile he got up, telling himself that it was nothing; he was a free man, he could sleep in a dry bed that night whatever happened:
for
the
War
was
over.
He was his own master; his book was accepted; he was going to his own home; henceforward he would live according to nature, in the elements! What was one rainy day, now that Third Ypres was a thing of the past?

With the unwet portion of his handkerchief taken from dry breast pocket he wiped the porcelain insulator of the plug, and pushed again with determination. The engine fired at once, he vaulted into the saddle to crouch, shivering but happy to be on his way once more.

The long narrow road over the Great Plain joined the upper road lying east and west across the downs, and there the sky was darker, as though the wind were curiously dirty. Soon sleet was falling, and only by nearly closing his eyes was a forward sight possible. The wind was as a fleshing knife. Part of him cried out to stop, to abandon the machine, anything to escape the pain of ice now within skull and arm-bones; another part of him determined to continue; a third self strove to obliterate the mental picture of a room with a fire.

Now he was going downhill—too fast. He must force his right leg out of its rigidity to press on the brake pedal, to go slowly lest his wooden body steer helplessly into the grassy bank. He went on like this for some miles, until, the pulley racing with no forward movement, he dismounted by a limekiln, to swing his arms and try to blow breath through senseless fingers. There was no warmth from the kiln, it had not been kindled long, judging by the least vapour blown over the rim above; but it was at least a shelter from the north-east. While he stood there, a little owl,
athene
noctua,
lit on the stonework above, stared at him with yellow-ringed eyes, howled like a peacock, and flew away.

At twilight he sought a bed for the night in the Ship Inn at Mere, sitting dulled before the fire in the bar until supper time, after which he returned to the bar, drinking beer he didn’t want while trying to keep warm.

*

The next morning he went on under a bright cold sky, thinking that his telegram to Julian, sent at six o’clock the previous night and telling of the delay, would have been delivered with the morning’s post. Filled with porridge, kippers, eggs, bacon, toast, marmalade, and four cups of coffee, he wasn’t going to hurry.

Wincanton was passed; he came to Sparkford with its steaming milk factory at the bend of a road deeply rutted by the solid tyres of lorries. The road was impassable; he wobbled to a standstill and had to push the machine through the grey slough dragging at the engine sump.

Thenceforward the road surface was poor, having been cut up by traffic in the War. His boots were clotted with mud; the papier mâché suitcase on the carrier was now flapping; his arms ached with holding the handlebars steady against a continuous series of shocks. By the right-hand curve of the churchyard wall before Langport he nearly came off, taking the bend too fast; then through the narrow archway, and down the steep short hill into the town. Bread and cheese and beer at The Black Swan, while feet and hands were warmed before a fire before going on through a flat land of rhines, or dykes, beside which withies grew for basket-making. This must be Sedgemoor, he thought, recalling the name as an unrealisable battle of Monmouth’s peasants’ scythes against the King’s muskets. And then, at Taunton—a shock. He had come too far north. He must turn south for Exeter; Queensbridge was a matter, on the map, of only seventy miles.

The chalky grey mud of the Great Plain rough-cast on boots and motor-cycle was covered by the red mud of South Devon when at last he saw the church and stump steeple on the Passchendaele ridge, as he thought of it, and with a smell of the sea wearily descended to Malandine.

The single window of the kitchen was closed, so were the two bedroom windows above. He tried the door, it was locked. Then the head of Mrs. Crang appeared around her doorway, simultaneously with other heads from the stone cottages up the lane. All peered cautiously.

“How are you, Mrs. Crang? How’s Walter? And who’s this?” Yet another face was staring up at him: a small, white, jam-smeared face looking out of a bundle of black rags on the floor. “Nice baby. Hullo, cat. Have you seen a gentleman in my cottage, Mrs. Crang?”

“No, zur. But a telegram corned for ’ee last evening. ’Tes with the postmistress, Miss Potts. ’Er’ll let ’ee ’ave’n.”

Bodies now appeared. After shaking all available hands he unlocked his door, took a quick look around upstairs, and opened the casement windows.

The post office was shut. An elderly man in the street said
that a telegram had been brought up and taken back to Clayborough. It was post-office rules, he explained. Having cursed post-office rules Phillip went to Clayborough, with its church and spire looking to be a petrified warning against the salt gales of the coast.

So that was that: not a very good start of a new life, he thought as he returned to the cottage, to look over it thoroughly. His mother had advertised it as Furnished in the
Evening
News
during the previous July, asking
£
1 a week. Two lots of tenants had occupied it during the past summer. The first was a woman with several small children. She had stayed during the month of August, and left the place dirty with some crockery smashed. Her husband had afterwards sent Phillip a letter in an unstamped envelope abusing him as a swindler for misrepresenting a soldiers’ billet as a furnished cottage. As he had paid nothing at all Phillip thought this use of the word
swindle
an original one. The second tenant, a woman with a small baby, had taken it for six months at a rent of five shillings a week, staying only two months during the winter and writing for a rebate of rent, which was given.

Perhaps the word Furnished had been a euphemism, he thought, seeing the cottage with new eyes. Going upstairs he saw that someone, possibly the unstamped letter-writer, had scrawled across a photographic enlargement of himself, as a very new 1915 subaltern wearing an hour-old uniform, the word
Swank.

From the second outgoing tenant Phillip had bought about two hundredweight of slack coal at the price of nuts. This should be in the cellar under the stairs; but upon opening the door, preparatory to lighting a fire, he observed only a couple of shovelfuls of slack under some mouldering newspapers. Crouching in the cellar, holding a lighted candle in his hand, he read with haunting melancholy an official communiqué telling of the British advance through the forest of Mormal; and was recalled to reality by a queer noise in the open doorway, through which most of the kitchen light came. There, a few inches from the ground,
was a bundle of rags about a small pallid face set with two staring dark eyes. As he gazed back the bundle advanced towards him with crab-like rapidity; it stopped and stared; and reversing the movement, disappeared as it had come. Phillip thought that it seemed to be familiar with the location of the coal-hole.

The next visitor at the open door was an old dog of the collie sort. It stared at him sadly until he went towards it holding out a hand in friendship, when it fled swiftly at this unfamiliar gesture down the bed of the stream.

Searching about outside he found some damp twigs, and with these tried to make a fire in the rusty kitchen range. Two boxes of matches were used before a core of fire was rising, with weak blue flames and much uncertain smoke, into the shut-door obscurity of the kitchen. Deciding that the flue must be choked with soot, he attempted to scrape it out with a soup-spoon tied to a stick. Further inspection revealed that the iron was rusted through at the corners of the oven. The sheet iron across the chimney also was eaten away, giving in several places a glimpse of sky above the chimney. Having pulled the sheet iron down, with about a sackful of soot and mortar, he made a way clear for draught and smoke; and when his third and last box of matches was used, the flames took hold of the wood. Selected knobs of what coal remained were placed with care at strategic points, and soon the kitchen became cheery.

Mattresses, blankets, and pillows were then brought down to air before the fire. Julian’s aunt had warned him to look for possible nests of mice in the mattresses; but the only marks on them were of rust from the bed-springs.

He put more wood on the fire, and went to the shop. Returning with a new kettle—the old one was rusted out—some eggs, butter, marmalade and bread, he met the postman searching in his brown canvas bag by the pump. Gubbacombe seemed glad to see him, and held out a letter and a parcel.

“I wish you very good health, sir, now you’m come among us all.”

“Why, is there a plague in Malandine, Gubby?”

“Aw no, tes ’ealthy like now the sun shineth,” he replied, wheeling away his red bicycle.

Soon the new kettle was singing like a starling, the eggs were chirruping like crickets, and the occupier was sitting happily by his own hearth and opening the parcel from home. Inside was a Dundee cake, three pairs of woollen socks obviously knitted at
home—judging by the little cul-de-sac at the end of the toes—a rubber hot-water bottle, and a bottle of Mother Seagle’s Syrup, a medicament concocted by Leo the chemist, spoonfuls of which he had had to take during the winters of his childhood, against croup.