Authors: Henry Williamson
He shouted for the groom, whose face he could not remember, or his name, for a facelessness had no name. He could not find the way out of the bell-tent. Then a shell burst near and put out his eyes; he felt splinters enter his body, particularly his arms, as he lay on the ground. The shock awakened him, and he saw that he was lying half through a wooden frame, jagged with glass of the french window leading into the garden, which had been shut owing to heavy rain of the thunderstorm the night before. The stings on his arms were cuts, and with relief he cried out, “Thank God, O thank God!” to find himself in a world of peace once again.
He pulled on an old pair of grey flannel trousers, tied string round his waist to keep them up, got into a jacket and brogue shoes, scorning socks, and letting himself out of the empty house, wheeled his motor-cycle from the porch and through the small front garden to the road. Coasting down the hill, he opened the throttle when he came to the hamlet of Randiswell, and was soon turning into the High Street, while the sky above had the faint pallor of dawn rising upon a cloudless morning.
At sixty miles an hour, the engine sounding like a Vickers gun firing at treble its normal speed, he passed the Hippodrome and roller-skating rink at Fordesmill, fleeing on down the Brumley road and up the hill into the town; and opening up to nearly seventy m.p.h. across Shooting Common, turned right up the straight incline, past the Falcon Inn and cross-roads to Reynard’s Common and the Fish Ponds. Time for the seven and a half miles, eight minutes.
The eastern sky was now rose-coloured, and hiding the bus in a coppice of silver birch and rising brake ferns, he climbed the oak-paling fence into Knollyswood Park, last entered on the Saturday before August Bank Holiday, 1914, in the company of Willie, and his two friends Desmond and Eugene.
May 3.
Mirabile
dictu!
This morning, soon after dawn, while listening to four nightingales singing in the undergrowth around the Dowager Countess of K’s Lake Woods, among the tall nettles and the umbelliferous plants, I heard a cuckoo calling with the identical cracked voice that I first heard seven years ago. He called
wuckwuck-oo,
followed by one plain
wuck,
followed after a pause by a broken-sounding
oo.
I saw him, too; he looked to be a very old bird, his plumage had lost most of the grey-blue on the back. He
looked to be a sort of aged feathered skeleton; I am
sure
it is the same bird I heard in 1913, with Desmond!
Ergo,
he has been coming to and fro all through the war years. I felt it was an omen, and myself to be a squirrel with growing claws, able to run and spring and clutch a high overhead branch after sailing through space. Life seemed to flow back into me, a wider life than before.
On arrival at Foundry House Square some hours later he found that four advertisements had been sent in, two of them addressed to himself. His theory that by keeping from bothering harassed house-agents, and sending the clippings by post, he got more business, seemed to be sound: to pay periodic visits, show himself to be diffident, polite, the opposite of thrusting, and make quick exits; this also gave him time to sit on park benches, and in coffee houses when it rained, and write more of his country dream book, which excited him as the scenes built themselves up, as though some spirit were writing through him.
It was the day in the week when the whole of the back page of the paper was taken by the leading West End firm of estate agents. There were boxes of up to quarter pages of space bought on other days by half a dozen similar but smaller fashionable firms: why could he not get Mr. Hollis, the Golders Green go-ahead builder, to advertise extensively in the paper? He saw that he had many advertisements in both the
Telegraph
and the
Post
—why not in the leading British newspaper? He cut out a number of these scattered Hollis ‘adverts’ and sent them to be made up into a half-page spread, with the name of William Hollis in large type across the top. With a proof of this lay-out, he could see the old fellow who had waved him away, and suggest that as many of the larger country houses were being sold, and Golders Green fields going under one of Mr. Hollis’s housing estates, the firm of William Hollis should move with the times. He would say something like this, “Mr. Hollis, when your clients see your name right across the top of the back page, they will know that you are potentially equal with Messrs. Knight, Frank & Rutley. The times are changing, why not be the first to move with them?”
While he waited for the advertisements to be set up in the compositors’ room, the second post came in, and with it a letter from the girl he had met at the Parnassus Club, saying that unexpectedly she found that she had the whole day free, and if he were free also, perhaps he would take her into the country for the promised walk? She added that she remembered what, on
one occasion, Tennyson had said to a young woman who had accompanied him on a walk,
Don
’
t
talk,
fool!
and promised to hold her tongue.
The letter had an address of a ladies’ club near Marble Arch, where she said she was staying with a sister. He decided to see Mr. Hollis of Golders Green another day.
May 4. Tabitha T. and I took a chocolate-coloured pirate ’bus, which roared past two red Tillings-Stevens, one guarding the rear of the other, and scooped up people at the stops, most of the way from Victoria. We got off at the Squire’s woods opposite Shooting Common. Four young stoats and their parents hanging, fresh victims, on the keeper’s vermin tree. We wandered everywhere—I climbed up several trees. The kestrel is nesting in same elm as seven springs ago, when I got two eyesses for my pets … everything is the same. Why, therefore, should a man’s mind “grow up”? My dear relations, especially the Viking Maddisons, say it is time I “grew up”—to become like them? Poor things, their ideas are encrustations of disappointments. Also, is not “growing up” a sign of weariness, of youth fading, of disillusionment? Faugh! that is what I think of Uncle Hilary, Aunt Viccy, and all the others.
The bluebells are still glorious. We visited all my nests—the jackdaw is nearly hatched; the bottle-tit is laying, the nest moulded and compact; the chaffinch has placed her cup on the bough of the yew tree near the pond, and the salmon-coloured nestlings rear their downy heads for food; another chaffbob has started to build; the nightingale has woven her cradle of dried grasses with the briars around the cut hazel stub, shaded by nettles, while in some secret hide her mate translates the voice of the wind, the pulse of the sunbeam, the sadness of the moon.
We sat on some faggots: chestnut, hazel, silver birch. A small green insect with horns came on her finger. She showed it to me—a bright atom of life that felt the sun as we did. Then it opened translucent wings and flew away, and a moment later came another creature, this one coloured like a peacock, with two long curving antennae waving in the wind. It was a joy to watch these insects, part of the earth-passion with the infinite armies of green leaves and succession of flower-life.
A whitethroat gurgled huskily to his mate as he followed her through the hedge at the boundary of the covert. The old keeper came up to us, and said the ‘little grass-bird’ was building again. I felt the sun sending love in a great flowing flood to the earth—the earth that will always keep the heart young.
The keeper said that the nightingales did not seem to be singing so well this year. “Most of them seem to be young birds,” he said.
I made a fire, and we had some tea in a small tin kettle I had
hidden there. We lay one on either side of the hazel embers and were silent under the elms while the night grew darker and the stars came nearer, it seemed. The tawny owls are still nesting there. One owl flew to the tree and watched us—swaying head first left then right with a queer pendulum movement, which I thought was to discern branches and twigs in the imagined path of flight—— I do this myself when walking through a wood at twilight. Also it helps one to focus.
The moon rose up through the corn field, deep and yellow, partly hidden in mist. As it swam higher, atoms of light mingling with clouds formed a golden haze. Then, free of cloud and mist, she climbed up, and became smaller and silver, with a sheen of lavender light about her. Passing by the large pond, we heard the wind sighing in the dead rushes of last year, and saw the stars shaking on the water with the broken image of the moon through dark and grotesque trees. We disturbed a wren, which began to sing brilliantly, but soon stopped.
Then low on the horizon I saw the planet Mars, with its tinge of red, below the constellation of Spica Virginis, and thought, not seriously, that it was an omen.
The following Thursday, to his relief, Tabitha was again at the Club meeting at Caxton Hall—the old premises in Long Acre had become too small to hold an increasing membership on that rickety floor. Caxton Hall was near a pub for which a little group of the men members made in the interval between the lecture and subsequent questions. Tonight he did not dash out with them, but sat beside Spica, as he called her to himself, and discussed the address by a Press magnate, Lord Riddell.
“What did you think of it?”
“I thought what he said was typical of the very low level of journalism. I’ve read his beastly weekly record of adultery, crime, and murder for Sunday reading. One of Lloyd-George’s two hundred mushroom peers, isn’t he?”
“I suppose so. He looks like an undertaker to me, in that seedy frock-coat! ‘We give the public what it wants’, pouff! I wonder why Mrs. Portal-Welch invited him to come. Sorry it’s such a boring evening, when we might have gone to the opera. Have you ever been to Covent Garden?”
“Unfortunately, no. I’ve always wanted to go.”
“I go nearly every night. How about tomorrow night? It’s
Tosca
.”
“I’d love to, but I am going down to stay with my parents in Folkestone tomorrow.”
“Folkestone!”
“Yes, d’you know it?” She thought he looked surprised—and guilty.
“In a way—yes. I was stationed there after the war.” Pause. “At one of the Rest Camps.”
“Oh, really? Which one?”
“On the Leas. Number Six.”
She said eagerly, “My parents live near there! I remember watching the rooks nesting in the chimney pots of some of the hotels. It seemed so odd somehow, and in a way comforting. Soldiers marching away down that steep hill to the docks, singing —at least they did until the end of 1917—while the rooks were contentedly cawing on the roofs! It seemed somehow to restore the balance. No, not the balance—that’s absurd—but to a small girl it gave some sort of comfort.”
He met the look of her brown eyes seeming to glow with inner light. She had a strong chin, the lips were parted in an eager smile, a wisp of mousey-coloured hair fell over the level brow which held such eager and penetrating thoughts. At his glance the eyes lost a little of their light, the smile hesitated, as though responsive to his own thoughts of remote dereliction. She was all concern for him, tremulous to his spirit, wondering what it was that, in a moment, could quell his eagerness and enthusiasm. She suffered; she could not get near him. It had been the same in the woods; he was frank and open, she had seemed always on the point of knowing him fully—and then he was withdrawn, as though by some fear which both puzzled and hurt her.
She noticed that he was clenching his hands, as though tightening himself against memory, and had to resist a desire to put her hand in reassurance upon his.
“I wish I didn’t have to go home tomorrow, Phillip.”
It was the first time she had called him by any name; and the address emboldened him to say, “May I call you Spica, after that star? Oh, let’s cut the rest of the evening here, and hare off to the opera! There’s still time. It won’t start for ten minutes. Are you game?”
“Rather!”
As the taxi took them down the Strand he said, “I was going to ask a question: ‘How does the golden dustman riddle his garbage and why does he call it world news?”’
“Good for you!”
“By the way, Spica, are you hungry?”
“I am, rather.”
“There’s a sandwich shop near here. Do you mind sandwiches?”
“Of course not!”
“An old soldier, a deserter who attached himself to me at Loos, used to work there. He had the odd name of ‘Twinkle’. It’s a place where market men go for ‘thicks’. Ham, beef, cheese—I’ll stop and get some. What would you like?”
“Cheese, please. Any onions? They help to digest the fats.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I work in a laboratory at Cambridge, and hear the others talk. I look after mice, among other things. Tragic creatures. But it serves mankind, I suppose.”
“Here we are. I won’t be a moment.”
“May I come with you? I’d love to see ‘Twinkle’.”
“He was shot as a deserter, I’m afraid.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I am sorry,” she whispered.
“I’ll soon be back.”
The queue under the glass roof over the north side of the Opera House in Floral Street had already gone in. So far Phillip had come here alone, and while waiting up to a couple of hours had made acquaintance with a number of regular galleryites, most of them young people of the poorer classes. Now he put down two florins at the box and leapt up the stone steps two at a time, easily leaving her behind, and meaning to surprise her by hiding round one of the corners; but she came up unexpectedly fast, and seeing him pressed against the wall held out a hand and took his, rewarding him with a little smile as though to say, I knew you would wait for me.
Far down below, the orchestra was tuning up, beyond the wide arc of grand circle and unseen dress circle. They saw one aspect of the boxes, and part of the stalls, all upholstered in red. They were in the gods, a place of iron railings and wooden seats—in one of the side-galleries, with the pink-painted Doves’ Nest. It was unoccupied. He whispered that, as soon as the fireman had gone his rounds, and the lights went out, they would get up into the Nest.
“What is it tonight?” he asked a crippled girl, one of the regular galleryites, with whom he had struck up a sort of friendship.