The Gale of the World (15 page)

Riversmill said, “Lynton will want them, Molly, I fancy. All the other goats in the Valley of Rocks disappeared during the war. Poached, of course, and sent up to London hotels as venison. Some venison! Still, we ate anything in those days.” Then
turning
to Phillip, he said, “Where's Birkin now, d'you know?”

“Living in Berkshire, under police protection, or rather
surveillance
.”

“Good God! Can't the Government let him alone now the war's over?”

“They don't want him murdered by some fanatic,” said ‘Buster'.

Riversmill looked at Phillip. “Some madman may track
you
down to your shepherd's cot one day, and then—”

“Oh no!” cried Miranda, sitting on the floor, swaddled in the long gown, as she turned to hide her face against her mother's knees.

Chimney smoke veering to the south-west. Dragging nimbus overcast; water running everywhere. Runners a-splash with hen salmon, colour of bronze, attended by cock-fish with flanks of copper, some yellow-patched with fungus. Females extruding eggs while male fish shed their milt in water so shallow that their back-fins were exposed.

One morning a man with clotted hair arrived, in a butt drawn by a moorland pony, beside the head-waters. With a four-tined dung fork he began a search for fish. Soon he had transfixed a decayed salmon, and jerked it into his small cart.

So this was Aaron Kedd, owner of the little dog. Phillip had heard of him from the farmer’s wife across the common: a ‘local preacher’ of no denomination whose mind had turned to hell rather than to salvation: a most unhappy man, living alone, his moods varying between bitter silence and near-raving distress. Rather like one of the men on his war-time farm, Jack the
Jackdaw
, thought Phillip; but Jack never took it out on horse or dog. Jack had kind moments; he could still weep, whereas Kedd seemed to be charred beyond tears.

Phillip went to talk to him, thinking that perhaps he might be able to aid him in some way or other, and so directly help the odd little dog which stood watching each action of its master in an attitude of detachment and without cocked ears, as though it were thinking about what it saw.

“These fish have spawned by the look of them, Mr. Kedd. And they’re too far up to be able to get back to the sea, judging by their condition.”

“Aiy, they’m unclane!” cried the fellow. “They brocks and varxes, aiy, and they craws, wull get’m if I don’t!”, while with turns of wrists he flipped fish after fish into his butt. “They’m unclane, I tell ’ee, like the swine of Gadarene!”

“What are you going to do with these fish? Rot them down for compost?”

“What be thaccy?”

“Dressing.”

“Noomye! Feed pigs on’m.”

“That yellow fungus on salmon is the same kind that grows on dying trees.”

“I don’t know naught about thaccy! I ban’t no ’igh-class gentry, with their flim-flam talking.”

“Otters come so far up the water, I suppose?”

“Aiy, they arrters be hellers! They be! One of they girt mousey-coloured fitches stole one of my ducks t’other night! The bliddy dog beside ’ee stood watchin’ of ’n, didn’t even holler!’ A be no more use than a mommet!” He made as if to throw the dung fork at the dog. “You’m no flamin’ gude to me! Yar!” he yelled at the animal cringing among rushes. “Tes no bliddy use to me! Hangin’ around where nought be doin’ save idleness.”

“A writer works hard, too, in his own way.”

“I ban’t blind, midear. I see what be goin’ on wi’ visitors.”

“I’ll give you ten shillings for this dog.”

The man touched his arm. “Done!”

The dog stood still as Phillip approached, and wagged its tail stump. It followed him up the slope, and waited in the doorway. It had never been inside a cottage. When Phillip called, it
remained
outside, the line of its back curved. It looked pitiful, so he picked it up, while it held itself stiff, trembling. He nursed it on his lap. It remained still for awhile, then slowly got off and walked away to a far corner. It returned, with a couple of stump-wags, to a saucer of milk. But it stopped lapping when Phillip felt the lumps on its ribs. Had kicks broken the bones, which had set irregularly? He spread a corn sack in front of the hearth. BODGER was the name stencilled on it—relic of Phillip’s farming days—a hundred second-hand corn sacks bought at auction, during the pre-war depression. Bodger dead and turned to clay, to stop a hole to keep the wind away.

“‘BODGER of GREAT SNORING’. Genuine name, genuine place. I dub you Sir Bodger of Shep Cot, and declare this sack to be your territory.” He transferred the dog to the sack, and lay on the floor beside it, arms round the little body. When Phillip got up, the dog returned to its corner.

So Phillip moved the sack there. Bodger left to eat bread-
and-milk
, thereafter returning to his sack. Again Phillip lay beside
him, stroking him; then moved away slowly, as though he had forgotten the dog; who remained, on its new territory, its base, curled tightly upon itself.

“Here we are, a couple of crocks together, old Bodge,” said Phillip, as the dog’s eyes slanted upwards from head on paws, and a tail stump wagged once.

Comforted by the presence of Old Bodge, Phillip sat at the table, trying to free his mind of the smallholder Kedd, so that an idea might come—a theme—for the editorial of his first number of
The
New
Horizon.

The idea came. He began writing.

THE LOST LEGIONS

‘One morning, in the winter of 1919–20, I went into a Public Library in a suburb of London, and drew up a chair to a table whereon lay magazines and periodicals. The library, one of many founded on the generosity of a Scots-American millionaire, Andrew Carnegie, was a place where shabby old men and nondescript out-of-work ex-soldiers like myself went to rest and find interest away from drab pavements and street-movements outside, which had little or nothing to do with their lives.

‘Usually in that place a magazine soon lost its attractiveness; indeed, it was likely to be soiled within a few hours, for most of the old men, I noticed, were preparing, while reading laboriously down a page, to turn it over, by rolling its lower corner between an occasionally licked finger and thumb. By the afternoon of the day of its first appearance a magazine or journal was in a repulsive state. To my critical self it was a detail of that state of
unselfconsciousness
of which Somme and Passchendaele were the apotheosis.

‘There was one weekly lying on the long oaken table that was usually clean, seldom if ever picked up: an old-fashioned sixpenny called
The
Athenaeum.
I had heard the editor spoken of with reverence by a literary acquaintance, who declared that the finest literary critic in England wrote in it every week. So I sought it; and the first thing I read has remained in my mind ever since: an essay with the title of
The
Lost
Legions
, by John Middleton Murry.

‘Fortunately I bought a copy of that number, which lies beside me on the table as I write. I quote:—

‘The above passage is the beginning of a review of
The
Letters
of
Charles
Sorley
, who, a captain of 19 years, was killed on the Somme. Sorley had begun to write when at Marlborough. It was the breath of life to him, and with the oxygen of newly-discovered writers—Masefield, Hardy, Goethe, Jefferies—his mind shone with the brilliance of a magnesium ribbon in flare.

‘It was about three years after that review in
The
Athenaeum
that
The
New
Horizon
appeared on the London literary scene. I bought it eagerly: H. M. Tomlinson writing of a Devon estuary in prose that was the reality of the place itself—the haze of summer heat upon the sand-dunes and the level forsaken shore, the white crinkle of Atlantic rollers upon the sand-bars of the estuarial mouth, the North and South Tails, dreaded ‘white water’ of sailors; D. H. Lawrence, always a little wry, seldom serene, in his descriptions of elemental human nature and the life beyond his eyes; Wallington Christie, a scholar-critic whose ‘gods’ were Shakespeare and Hardy; Arnold Bennett, penetrating but urban in outlook; H. G. Wells, praising
Lady
Into
Fox
, by a young writer, as a great book; Middleton Murry, editor of
The
Adelphi
, whose writings seemed to change after the death of his wife, Katherine Mansfield.

‘I met one of those famous contributors during the recent war. Wallington Christie had instituted a community farm where nearly all the communiteers, as they called themselves, had conscientious objection to war—young men and women who went to work on
the land within the Island Fortress, as Churchill called Britain in the early period of the war.

‘Often I wondered how they were affected by the spirit of those dark days. Were they able to live the more serenely because of the expenditure of others? For some people of the first war had changed their ideas in middle-age, and recanted from the ideals of their own youth; some indeed in my presence declared with pride that in that war soldiers and civilians were in it together. The 8th British Army in Africa and the 14th in Burma must have been amused at that idea.

‘During hostilities, and shortages everywhere,
The
New
Horizon
inevitably got thinner, but still kept its platform from which a man might proclaim his faith. And recently, after nearly quarter of a century since he brought it to being, Christie decided to ‘bring it to a tidy end’. It so happened that I was with him just after the time of this decision, and hearing it, I begged him to let me carry it on.

‘For what the lost legions of another generation died for must not be lost. They died, in all armies, for the brotherhood of Europe; for the true, the constructive resurgence of the European spirit. ‘The grass grows green again on the battlefield; but on the scaffold, never’.’

*

Here the unfed editor’s energy petered out. The doldrums of depression succeeded. I might be in Valerian Cottage all over again, the year nineteen twenty one, on the south coast of Devon, only cups of weak tea for breakfast. Yes, I am still the same pattern.

Bodger growled. At the same time Phillip heard the slop of horse-feet on the cobbled pattern outside the cottage, saw a shadow across the casement followed by a brown slouch hat and recognised Molly Bucentaur.

“How glad I am to see you!”

“I’m on my way to Lynmouth, and smelled your wood-smoke, and had to drop in to see how you were getting on. Do tell me to go away if I am disturbing you.”

“Not at all! It was time to stop. Have you had lunch? I can offer you eggs, cheese, tomatoes—”

Two shirts, part buttonless and torn, hung inside the open hearth. He lifted them off their nails, and put them away.

“Do let me make you an omelette, Phillip. I don’t eat lunch as a rule, but rules are meant to be broken. Thank you so much for
your letter after our little party. Is this the little dog Miranda and Fred Riversmill told me about?”

“Yes. He belonged to a somewhat odd smallholder, who hangs out in the next coomb.”

“That must be the odd creature I passed, with a half-load of dead salmon in a ricketty old butt. I asked him where you lived and he eyed me as though I was something out of
The
News
of
the
World
.”

“He reads that in conjunction with the Old Testament, I expect.”

“Is this the frying pan? How clean you keep it. Now leave things to me, my dear, and carry on with your writing. Would you prefer tea or coffee?”

“I’ve only got tea.”

“Much better for you. Oh, before I forget it, ‘Buster’ asked me to lend you Hereward Birkin’s book. He sends greetings, and you are to regard it as a review copy. That is, should you want to mention it, of course. Now you return to your table, and I’ll make you an omelette.”

Jubilantly Philiip returned to the table to read the preface.

“It’s just what I wanted for the magazine, Molly!”, he cried. “I am so glad you brought me this book.”

It was a most succulent cheese-omelette in the thick, cast-iron pan.

“I’m in touch with life again, Molly! No, I’ll wash up. I know exactly where everything is.”

“I’ll be able to do some typing for you, if you bring it over. Come any time, we are nearly always there, and make yourself at
home if we’re out, won’t you? Oh, your shirts, my dear. Do let me repair them for you. May I take them? I’ll let you have them back very soon.”

And so saying, Molly rode away; and Phillip continued typing his Editorial.

*

‘I have just received for review a book by Sir Hereward Birkin, called
The
Alternative
. It was prepared during the war, while the author was in prison, and written after his release in November, 1943. He was then held under house arrest. Sir Hereward and I both served as young soldiers with the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders in 1914, during the battle for Ypres and the Channel ports