The Gale of the World (29 page)

An all-night journey from London had brought fifty to sixty members of the Eirēnēan Society. They had left the coach and were standing upon the stone-scattered site of a prehistoric barrow.

Mrs. Piston, facing east, was holding up her arms, palms to the sky. The semi-circle of young people—with a few adults—stood behind her also holding out their arms.

“Princess Eirēnē,” intoned the old woman, “we, your sisters and brothers greet you. We ask for your blessing for our prayers—to help restore to the world the spiritual values you taught us here below. We believe that the true basis of life in the visible world lies within the unseen forces all about us.”

“Amen” intoned the semi-circle of aspirants.

At that moment, across the Severn Sea, a scintillant white flame shot up into darkness from the direction of the Welsh Mountains. Its reflection dilated upon the clouds.

*

Unseen by the watchers on Oldstone Down, showers of sparks were raining down on cobbled streets and slate roofs of mining cottages. These people lived in a world of fire from the Bessemer Steel converters. Balanced on iron trunnions, high above but well apart from the rows of cottages, the great iron “eggs” had been slowly inverted, to pour molten steel, in dazzling streams, into ingot moulds below. Each square mould effervesced in a white rain of ferric oxide—the metal burning away to hissing points, and to specks of bluish light. The oxygen was released, and the main molten mass still within the converters, now fully inverted, poured down with a great roaring noise and the tongue of that
fire, seen across the sea, cast its light upon the mountains.

*

“They’re blowing the vessels,” said Piston.

“Let us keep our inward eyes upon the heavens,” said his mother. “There are young stars in the halo of the Milky Way above us of unmatched brilliance, could we but see them with mortal eyes. They are the Blue Galaxies, evidence of a cataclysmic universe which pulsates in a finite, closed system. The first light waves caused by the explosion have stretched through a trillion light-years—”

“Now let us stand ‘all Danëe to the stars’, in the words of the poet Tennyson. Let us, by breathing deeply, float from our bodies, and absorb the power of the Great Spirit flowing from our hands. Thus we receive the Spirit of Life.”

The old woman’s arms began to shake. Piston and another moved to support her. One on either side, they lowered her upon a mat.

“She’s in a trance,” said Piston. “Her spirit may now be
travelling
to a higher sphere.”

He whispered to Phillip and Laura, “She may be seeing Jesus, whose whole being is turned to love, originating from the planet Venus. It says so in the Bible. We believe that God cannot be limited, least of all by man. William Blake was despondent, I think, when he wrote ‘all human deities reside in the human breast’.”

Phillip said, “Blake was thinking of the clerics who take the New Testament literally, instead of taking it poetically; for the potential of deity resides in the human consciousness.”

The eastern sky became a vast flock of flamingoes above a sea enscrolled in gold. Larks were rising up to sing. All life seemed happy around the barrow, for it was being renewed.

Weariness set in with the risen sun. The congregation went down the wooded valley to Lynton, where a breakfast was
prepared
in a café. Afterwards Laura said to Phillip.

“Do let’s go for a walk. Take me to the Burrows of ‘Cousin Willie’.”

She was thinking, If I can exorcise the ghost of ‘Cousin Willie’, and Phillip’s guilt that he was not also killed in that old war, then he may be re-born, and able to see Shelley plain—and me, as I want to be with him.

*

It is well known how atmospheric variations affect all terres
trial life which includes fish and insects. Above the moor detached clouds of cumulus were dissolving as he glanced into the blue sky, his heart lifting with the colours of moor sedge, bell heather, and yellow flowers of furze.

They left the Silver Eagle in the village, and walked beside the Lyn, where waterflies were swimming up as nymphs, to split their pellicles and rise as winged creatures into what must seem to be paradise, he said to Laura.

“Their mouths are sealed, they need neither food nor drink, their year of underwater life is over. Now all is for love, a flight into the sky in the afternoon, followed by a sunset dropping of eggs on the shining surface of the river.”

They sat down on a bank among wood violets. “Tell me about them, Phillip.” She wanted to use the scene for her book.

“Well, as the atmospheric pressure lightens, what we call a
rising
glass, the nymphs are hatching on the surface of the stream. The trout are rising, too, for fish with their swim-bladders are most sensitive to air pressures. In close thundery air, which affects you and me, trout lie torpid, as though suffering, on the bed of a river. When the air clears, up rise nymphs of Olive Dun and Pale Watery; and whether one is a fisherman or not, one shares in the general lifting of the air, for the pressures upon the body always effect the mind.”

He went on to tell her how larks arise, the chaffinch sings in the hawthorn, turtle doves send their throbbing notes under the trees. “Oh, my heart lifts with the sun, and the vapours, actual and psychical, are gone! And suddenly what Jefferies described as ‘the blue-stained air’ is without flaw. What’s the matter, Laura?”

She was looking around, as though expecting to see someone looking at her.

“It’s so gloomy and out of the sun here. Take me to the sea, to the sands! I love the sea, even if it did drown ‘Cousin Willie’! That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Why can’t you emulate Jesus, and let the dead bury the dead. Or are
you
the more dead, because you’re still alive?”

She got up and walked back along the path they had followed. Bodger whined, and looked at Phillip. “Let her go.” But she came back, all gentleness, saying “I’m sorry,” to be greeted by Bodger rolling on his back.

“We go at once to the Santon Burrows.”

Bodger pranced, and led the way to the Silver Eagle.

They drove inland, to avoid the main roads and holiday traffic, and were soon lost in a maze of narrow sunken lanes which led past farmhouses and cots of slate or thatch; and driving by the sun, which was high in the south, came at last to what had been, before the war, a little moor of furze and heather, but now was all cornland or grass. And after some turning and reversing, came suddenly to a view of river estuary widening to a miniature Arabian desert, and the sea beside a long dark-blue headland. The headland, he told her, was called Hercules Promontory by the Romans, who knew the power of ocean waves rolling wooden galleys to wreckage upon the bouldered shores and pinnacle’d rocks of its twelve-mile ‘arm’.

And there, this side of Hercules Promontory, lay the Atlantic, open to far Labrador. They breathed the sea-air, stood absorbing the azure of ocean fuzed with the sky.

And turning south, saw the hills of Dartmoor, a darker blue rising under the sky forty miles distant as the falcon glides.

“In my young days, three of us walked from the South Coast across Dartmoor to the fishing village over there, built round that conical hill. That’s Appledore, where the salmon fishermen live. It was a haunt of mine in pre-war days, with Piers Tofield and his first wife. Do you see the dark ridge, half-covered by the tide, in the estuary, by the lighthouse? It’s called the Shrarshook, after a sailor who was washed off it and drowned, called Charles Hook.”

“God! Can’t you get away from death?” she cried, and ran down the hill.

*

How still it was, how vacant now upon the hill. A wood lark singing somewhere on a stone wall below. Afar the slow murmur of the sea.

When she did not return, he walked on with his dog, making for the Burrows, or what was left of them. For during the war the churning tracks of American tanks, practicing for the invasion of Europe, had done some damage there.

East of the Burrows lay the Pans, an area holding brackish water where grew the first vegetation of the land proper.
Worthless
to the farmer, the Pans remained in their primeval state. Here were mosses, rushes, the pink bog-pimpernel, and the dwarf willow … onwards to a no-man’s-land where every species of wildflower known to grow in England had its home.

A haunted land for Phillip: here had walked Willie with Mary
Ogilvie, in that tragic summer before his death; here, too, had followed himself with the ghost of Willie between him and Lucy Copleston—days long past, recalled with sudden stillness of the heart, for that they were of Time lost, yet waiting to be brought back from ancient sunlight—

Now before him lay slopes of sand, wreckage of former hillocks once crested with marram grasses like great, green-quilled
porcupines
; but here military manoeuvres with live shell and other explosives had taken place on and through what, in 1940, had been wired, mined, tank-trapped and set with poles against enemy airborne landings.

And yet, how trivial it all had been, when seen against the eternal war of the elements! Sand originally of rock and sea-shell smashed by sea-wave, harried by air when washed upon the land, to be dried in summer and sent spinning in vacuous ropes by the screaming gales of ocean. How are the mighty fallen! Vast rocks from the Promontory of Hercules himself, rolled by tides along the foreland until they rested awhile as smooth pebbles; but always trituration by wind and wave, from quarrels by Fire and Water, brother ousting sister upon the faces of land and sea—until the bastion rocks were no more than dry skeins of sand faintly hissing, piling drift on drift until the hills were formed, and bound by marram grasses.

Phillip dropped down, to lie on his back, face to the sun,
feeling
himself slowly to be consuming within.

*

Laura crossed one valley after another amidst the rust and bleach of army litter until she felt to be lost. Above her arose a pyramid of sand which appeared to have escaped
disintegration
. Up she struggled, to look around from on high, with views of the sea whose cool airs were drifting past. No sight of Phillip. She sat down, she tried to think what she could do. Thought, or rumination, led to incipient turmoil, so she ran down the northern slope amidst the bleached bones of rabbits and a large kind of snail-shell, perhaps one brought by the Romans?

My feet are purring in the hot sand, and is it fancy, do I hear a rising and falling music—? Is it the hot grains of sand slipping down, their sounds multiplied—Is it
really
music—the music of this magic place? The glare of the sand is eye-tightening under the sun; but a sun in declension, alas, for soon it will move out of Leo into Virgo, which for all the good this relationship is might as well be me.

I am alone in a hollow where four plants of the Great Sea Stock grow. And over there is a Sea Holly, whose spiny leaves are as formidible to my naked foot as they are beautiful. Glaucus may be the word to describe their hue. If it is a wrong word I do not care, I do not bother about words while I am in this still and hanging air. And, O Great Pan, there
is
a strange, remote music!

She listened, and a line of poetry came to mind—her own line—
the
dunes
were
dulcimers
—

Is Ariel come again? Those eyes of melting blue, the gentle lips of Phillip, why do I still whisper the name Prospero? This dull ache within—But all life is a dream. There it is again—one note seeming to descend an octave before rising again into the sky.

Does he see only footprints of Willie leading to the wind’s oblivion? I must ask the sea, I must let myself drift, drift, for on such a day as this the ocean’s pulse is all gentleness. Each wave rises thin, and its leading edge falls gently, to tinkle its white drops upon my face and back. I have miles of sand to myself and only the ring-plovers and shore-larks to see my naked body. I am the wave, the sea-shell, I am known to Botticelli and Milton—

And sitting naked among little waves, she murmured to herself,

Now the sun had gone down below the smouldering rim of ocean, night was coming to the earth. Then as she wandered along the tideline she saw flames on the beach half a mile away.

There Phillip was kneeling, feeding drift-wood to the fire,
thinking
of the beacon built by Julian Warbeck in the night of the recovery of Willie’s body from the sea.

“Find Laura, Bodger! Goo’ boy—find Laura!”

He sat under the peering stars, the drift-wood fire burning yellow with salt in the wood, and was about to search for more fuel when he saw a dark form coming towards him, and he was comforted a little by Bodger’s cold nose touching his hand.

Miranda brought to her mother in the kitchen a letter with a Suffolk postmark. “Who do you know who lives in Bussdall?”

“Oh, it will be from cousin Lucy, I expect, to say when she’s coming down with Melissa.”

“Who’s Melissa?”

“Lucy’s cousin, as well as mine, darling.” Molly always tore open envelopes. “They’re coming down with the baby the second week of August. Oh dear, just when we’ll be preparing for the cricketers.” She read on. “That’s better! Cousin Lucy and the three boys are going to camp out in tents and caravan. I do hope it won’t rain. August is usually a wet one on the moor, I’m afraid.”

Miranda looked to be downcast. “Penny for them, Anda.”

“Oh nothing.” The girl’s lips quivered. She was liable to tears, this ‘green girl’, for that was all she was, after all—“Darling, we all felt what you are feeling now, when we were your age. It will pass—”

“I don’t want it to pass! I want to go on helping Cousin Phillip, don’t you see?”

“Darling, we’ll be able to see him just the same. But I don’t think it advisable for you to go over by yourself any more.”

“But he needs help! And why doesn’t his wife live with him?”

“He’s a little difficult, I suppose.”

“That could easily apply to me. You know I don’t get on with anyone at school, except some of the mistresses, who are all older than I.”

“‘Older than me’ surely, darling.”

“Older than
I
am old, Mother.”

“Darling, you have a fine mind, we all recognise that.”

“Then why can’t I help Cousin Phillip? I
know
he wants me to.”

“Well, you have helped him quite a lot, haven’t you? But it’s more than that, Anda.”

“What do you mean?”

“Darling, you mustn’t become indispensable, so that Cousin Phillip will be unhappy when you have to do other things with your life.”

“What other things?”

“You may fall in love, and want to get married.”

“I shan’t want to get married. I love Phillip.”

“Of course you do, darling, we all love Cousin Phillip. But there are other things than affection and admiration, you know.”

“You mean that Cousin Phillip may be wounded like ‘Buster’ was?”

“That was never in my mind. Now tell me, what made you say that?”

“Well, one of the reasons why Laura isn’t always happy is because she loves ‘Buster’, and he’s practically a cripple. Well, Cousin Phillip isn’t.”

“Darling, I wonder if you know what you’re saying.”

“I know that Cousin Phillip doesn’t want Laura in his bed with him, because she’s frightened him off.”

“I wonder if you know what you’re talking about, Anda.”

“I know that she discourages him spiritually. And spirit and sex are the same things basically.”

“D. H. Lawrence—,” began Molly.

“I don’t agree with his theories. Most of the time he was fighting his wife because she wasn’t his mother.”

“Wherever do you get all these extraordinary ideas?”

“I read in the school library. Anyway, Lawrence’s theory about the sexes needing to fight is unsound. Laura says he used sex to get rid of his childhood repressions, because she does exactly that —when she can. She can’t with ‘Buster’, and Cousin Phillip doesn’t want her, so she’s in a mess most of the time.”

“A woman must be loved, you know Anda, to be happy. Physical love is ever so important to a woman, darling.”

“Age does not affect affinity, Mummie. And affinity is not
infirmity
. And I
know
Cousin Phillip is normal.”

“Miranda, have you let him make love to you?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s frank anyway, darling.”

“Dear Mother, you’re so sweet and understanding that I can tell you almost anything.”

Molly resisted asking what was being held back. “Darling, you will be careful, won’t you? There’s Cousin Phillip to think of,
you know, as well as yourself.” She kissed an unresponsive daughter. “Of course we all love dear Phillip. He’s so gentle and
understanding
. But he belongs to an older generation. So we must both think of him, mustn’t we, and not let anything interfere with his writing, don’t you think?”

“But the point is, he and his writing
are
interfered with, all the time.”

“Then we must all leave him alone to get on with his work, surely?”

“It’s not you or me, I’ve told you—it’s Laura!”

“Well, as you said, he is not able to return her love.”

“I don’t wonder at it! She
cows
him, deprives him of spirit, so he simply daren’t start his novel series! The other day he took her to the coast, the Burrows of Santon, and what did she do? Just because he had many memories of the place, where Willie was drowned years ago—his cousin, you know, the one whom the Ogilvie girl, Mary, wasn’t it, was going to marry, only he was drowned. Phillip took Cousin Lucy there before he married her. Well, the point is, just because it is a special place for him, a sort of pilgrimage place, Laura leaves him flat, and goes off on her own, so that he was looking along the coast half the night, and finally lit a fire. Then she turned up.”

“Did Phillip tell you this?”

“No. I heard it from Cousin Hugh’s man, Mornington. She didn’t get home until after four o’clock in the morning.”

“Perhaps they enjoyed themselves by the fire, darling.”

“Then she never spoke a word to Phillip when he said
goodnight
. She’s paying him out for what her father did to her when she was young.”

“Miranda, what are you saying?”

“She tells everyone that her father raped her when she was small.”

“That was hardly her fault.”

“That’s not the point! And anyway, I don’t believe any father would do such a thing to his child. The point is that Phillip needs to feel that there are months and months ahead of him in the clear, before he
dare
begin his life’s work! He had a terrible time in the first war, he wasn’t cut out to be a soldier, but a dreamer, like Shelley and Francis Thompson. Even so, he forced himself to be a good soldier. Then in the last war they didn’t treat him well where he had a farm. They thought he was a spy—someone on whom to vent their own deprived feelings. Some workmen beat
him up on the quay at Crabbe, and if that wasn’t enough, Brigadier Tarr sent some commandos to fire live ammunition on his meadows without permission, and wounded him!”

“Yes darling, I heard all about it from Cousin Hugh. That sort of thing happens to many people in wartime.”

“Can’t you see how he felt when his first wife died when she was only nineteen? He’s never loved anyone since! Then his son, the child of that love marriage, was killed in the last week of the war! And now Phillip is like the Unknown Soldier, shut up in a tomb! And will remain so until he is rescued by true love, and can get back to the sun again, like Persephone from the dark blue halls of Dis!”

Miranda hid her face in her hair, and ran upstairs.

Molly was alarmed, she had never seen her daughter so
distressed
. She found her lying on the bed, in calm aloofness.

“You are a good girl, darling. A very good girl. I know you’ll be a good, steady friend to Cousin Phillip. Be his chum, but
nothing
more. Then, when you are older, perhaps—”

“Why are mothers afraid to let their grown children love?”

“They don’t want their children to be unhappy, I suppose. Or to make others unhappy. Cousin Phillip is so vulnerable. And as I’ve told you, he isn’t a boy, darling. He’s a mature man. He’s fifty.”

“Fifty-two. What does age matter if, as I said, there’s affinity? And what is affinity but attraction? Look at Daddy! Women still think he’s wizard.”

“He’s a butterfly, darling.”

“What’s wrong with that? Anyway, I suppose I take after him. I wish I could see more of him. Not only for a couple of weeks in summer and a few days at Christmas
if
he isn’t in Africa shooting big game. What went wrong between you two? Was it his women?”

“Not altogether, Miranda.”

“Then tell me. I want to know.”

“His father came home a cripple from the first war, and when he died, lots of death duties had to be paid. Then the second war meant higher rates and taxes, forcing Daddy to sell Brockholes to the Somerset Asylums Board.”

This was a reference to Brockholes St. Boniface Abbey, seat of the Bucentaur family since the Tudors.

“You see, Anda, Daddy thought, at least in the Second War,
that he was fighting for his home, as Churchill said, and not merely for the tax collector.”

“Well, someone has to pay for the Gads’ War.”

“Wherever did you pick up that expression, darling?”

Miranda had heard it from Phillip, but she said, “Someone told me it was used by Lord Hankey when we started bombing civilians in Germany.”

“Well, to come back to your father. He’s never really settled down, and after the war he simply couldn’t face living in this poky little shack, as he called it.”

“I think it’s a wizard home, Mum. Even with the goats on top of us. I wonder why they smell more at night? The pong in my room is fairly strong sometimes.”

“They’ll all be gone, thank goodness, when Daddy hands them over to the Council.”

“May I keep Capella?”

“That’s for your Father to say, darling. He’ll be here with his Eleven fairly soon. I suppose we ought to be thinking about camp beds and tents for them.”

“Would you like me to see about it?”

“It would be such a help it you would, darling. I’m going into Minehead to shop this afternoon.”

The girl got off the bed. “Mummie, would you mind very much if I first rode over to see Cousin Phillip?”

“Of course not, darling. Do ask him to come over in his
wonderful
old motor, it will be so useful for collecting tents and things.”

“You won’t talk to him about me, will you?”

“There’s nothing really to talk about now, is there, darling? I’m so glad we had this out, it’s cleared the air, hasn’t it?”

“Well, sort of.”

“At your age, one takes one’s fancies so seriously, Miranda darling.”

“Like you did, mother dear, when you were seventeen?”

“Things were simpler then, darling.”

“Did you elope?”

“It wasn’t necessary. My papa gave his consent.”

“And if he hadn’t given it?”

“Well, until one is twenty-one, one’s father is the one to say, you know.”

“Say what, Mother darling?”

“If a child should want to marry before coming of age, when the
law regards her or him as an infant, the father can withold his consent.’’

“If Daddy ever did that, I’d use my switch plan.”

“And what is that, darling?”

“As you said, Mother, we must think of Phillip.”

*

One day, as Phillip sat at the open door, mending a willow log-basket, the behaviour of some crows over by the farmhouse across the common—the constant cawing, black ragged shapes
flapping
up and dropping again—made him hasten over the heather to the gate. Four birds were flying down, and rising up again from a particular place on the opposite side of the hedge. Like all the moorland hedges, it was a raised bank of earth and stone, topped by beech, thorn, ash, bramble and furze. The bank was tunnelled by rabbits. Aaron Kedd, the smallholder who lived down the coomb, set his traps along the hedge.

Opening the gate, glancing down the bank, Phillip saw a lean crow hanging by a foot, head downwards. On seeing him, it flapped about. The leg was held by a gin-trap on a pegged chain. It was a thin, scared-looking bird, with comic eyes; and the other crows were its nestling brethren, which still flew about with their parents. It looked pathetic, and was too frightened to peck the human hand taking it out of the trap.

Phillip stroked its poll, while it gasped with open beak, and its three companions circled in the air above, cawing. He threw up the bird, which uttered a gawping cry and flew down the coomb, followed by its companions. Then Phillip saw the two old birds, flying high in the sky above their agitated young. After watching them away in the direction their young had flown, he went back to the gate, where Aaron Kedd was waiting for him.

“Thaccy be my bliddy craw you took out of my gin, and I’ll hev ’ee to Town for thievin’, you zee if I don’t!”

“Let me pay for it. Here’s a shilling.”

Kedd took the coin, and said in a less disturbed voice, “They bliddy craws, they’m all flamin’ thieves! My Gor’, wan last year found a yaw (ewe) of mine on her back, and before you could say knife, her pots (intestines) was pulled out yards and yards. Bliddy craws, they’m worse than thievin’ bliddy rats or magpies! And I’ll tell ’ee another thing! Thaccy young leddy what rides over vor zee ’ee, what do ’er want vor bring a goat wi’ her allus? The bliddy thing snatched at my flat-poll, ah I scatt ’er wi’ a long stick, di’n I tho! They gentry riding about think they can
do what they’m a vancy for, but not likely! What for do ’er come yurr, I know why, and you can’t deny it, grabbin’ seaweed, that be your game! Us zees lots like ’er about in summer—”

He was left complaining to the wind, for Phillip was walking away. Back at the table, he wrote in his journal.