The Gale of the World (35 page)

“Mother, I’ve caught my first trout! Look, it pulls down to that notch just below the quarter-pound—to five ounces!” Jonathan held it up on the spring balance. “Put it on a plate in the larder at once, before a fly smells it. The box larder under the caravan I mean, where no flies can get in through the gauze. Cor, I what-you-call like this place! I’ll get some more for supper!”

Jonathan caught four more on that fly, and proudly gave them to Lucy.

That evening Lucy had a caller, announcing herself as a friend of Phillip. “I’m Rosalie, the wife of Osgood Nilsson. How happy you all look! Is that your little girl by the stream? She won’t fall in and be swept away, will she?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Lucy, colouring. “Jonathan has tethered her to a peg in the ground.”

“I can’t see any rope.”

“Oh, it’s green nylon cord, one can’t see it very clearly. It’s well short of the river bank.”

“What a good idea, my dear. Do you ever go down bathing on the beach?”

“It’s a little difficult, with the steep hill. My little car won’t take it, I’m afraid.”

“I’d be only too pleased to take you down, Lucy. May I call you Lucy? I’m afraid I can never be formal for more than a minute! Yes, do let me take you down, my dear—”

Lucy and the children (with Melissa, who had walked down) spent the following afternoon on the grey bouldered beach of Lynmouth. They looked in on Elizabeth, who seemed surprised that anyone should want to see her. She kept looking at Sarah, and was delighted when the child wanted to climb on her lap, attracted by a cameo brooch on her blouse—one of Dora’s
Victorian
relics. Once upon the lap, the baby wanted the brooch.

“So that’s what you came for, is it?” said Elizabeth, the
softness
gone from her voice.

“All children are acquisitive—and inquisitive,” said Lucy. “You should have seen Rosamund when she was that age.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Elizabeth, looking dejected. She wanted to be liked for herself.

The boys played with the little dogs. “May we take them for a walk, Aunt Elizabeth?”

Again, hesitation: they wanted the dogs, not her.

“Won’t you join us on the beach?” Lucy suggested.

At the end of an afternoon in the sun, by a gentle sea, Elizabeth felt herself to be happy again. How foolish she had been to think she might fall down in a fit if Phillip came near: that he had been telling people all about her past life! What nice children they were, so well-mannered, addressing her as Aunt Elizabeth and talking as though they had known her all their lives.

And what a pleasant young woman Melissa was! She took such interest in her little dogs, asking how they had been fed during the war, if she exhibited them, and where. Happy in sunshine, Elizabeth felt that if Phillip appeared suddenly, she wouldn’t mind in the least. Phillip, when he wanted to, could be a pleasant companion. However, he didn’t turn up, and in a way Elizabeth felt slight disappointment.

“Come home, all of you, to my cottage and have tea! We can buy some cakes on the way!” Fortunately there were sugar’d buns, with currants, too, in the shop, although both these things were still rationed Lucy had a pot of honey, one of several dozen she had brought from the farm, and with margarine, the split buns tasted delicious.

After tea the closet was an object of speculation between David and Jonathan, as to where the contents in the pan went when you pulled the plug.

“I reckon it goes straight into the river, with all those old motor-tyres, pots and pans and criggely old bikes. It’s polluted, like Dad’s river was, on the farm! So you oughtn’t to try for
sea-trout
,” declared David.

“Why should anyone want to pollute the river when there’s a sewer pipe set in concrete going right down to the sea the other side of the Rhenish Tower on the quay?”

“It looks very old and rusty, and may be cracked.”

“But Mr. Nilsson fishes for sea-trout, he ought to know.”

“I won’t eat any fish out of this estuary, ’bor!”

“But it’s only compost, and salt will kill any germs.”

“Not typhoid, not likely!”

The argument continued until a compromise was made. Jonathan declared he would buy a bottle of red ink, pour it into
the pan, pull the plug and see if any tell-tale stain showed in the river. They borrowed some red ink from Aunt Elizabeth, pulled the plug, and running outside, peered into the rapid flow of water past the mossy boulders.

“There you are, no sign of red ink anywhere!”

“It may still be inside the pipe, so let’s follow it down and see if it comes out of any cracks.”

The pipe went into the wall of the quay, and reappeared on the beach. The tide was low, they slithered over slimy boulders.

“Ugh, it’s pretty foul,” declared David.

“It’s only algae, you fool!”

David cried with a laugh, “Algae met a bear. The bear met Algae. The bear had a bulge. The bulge wasn’t Algae, but crap!” He staggered about acting the clown as he leapt from one boulder to another, pretending to save himself from falling by tottering on to the rusty pipe, while screeching. “It will crack, it will crack!” Then he found an old broken umbrella amidst other village rubbish, and opening its ribs and tatters, did a balancing act on the pipe, to the amusement of children hastening down the beach to watch.

“Blast, we’re having what you call some sport!” said Jonathan. Then they were all looking up to watch two gliders passing in straight flight three thousand feet overhead to the Porlock marshes.

Later, at supper, ‘Buster’ told Melissa that Laura, with Brigadier Tarr as passenger, had reached 18,000 ft., according to the sealed barograph.

*

That evening, on the way back to the Castle, Melissa called in to say good-night to Elizabeth, who greeted her with smiles.

“How nice to see you, Melissa!” said Elizabeth. “Come and have some coffee.” Later, she said, “Why don’t you stay the night? You’d be most welcome! I’ve got a spare bedroom, if you don’t mind sleeping in the one my aunt died in, during that awful winter. She was frozen to death, you know. And Phillip never bothered to go to see her!”

Melissa listened for over an hour to the poor woman’s
complaints
. The condition of Elizabeth was frontally adverse: attributing motives to Phillip which were her own motives. The weight of a deep-seated insecurity was the cause of an imbalance of lovelessness. It would take some time to approach the block which had estranged her, as all growth denied under a glacier.

When Elizabeth is free, Phillip will be free, she thought as she lay in her small room, hearing the sounds of flowing water, and the wind in the trees outside the open french windows. Water and air were playing on stone and leaf and branch in the wan light of a moon fretting above high cirrus clouds. She could not sleep, she floated in a reverie of the past, seeing a lean, dark-haired Phillip with the soft voice and delicate profile of one born in full harmony with life and its creative purpose: a gracious presence which, when his unbandaged eyes had looked at her in her
grandmother’s
hospital for wounded officers for the first time, she had felt to be the nicest man she had ever seen. And that feeling had remained with her ever since, with what frustration and sadness only a woman, who had always longed to have children by a man she loved, would ever know.

She lit the candle by the bed-head, and read over a letter she had received that morning at Oldstone Castle. She read
halfway
, and paused, sighed, and read no more; but took up her diary wherein she had copied from an old book a poem which she had altered in places to fit her own thoughts.

From subjective feelings, her mind moved to Phillip’s vision, as revealed in his books, its confluence with Birkin’s thought—both streams of thought flowing with Diaphany—the firm belief in the positive, creative evolution of man: service not
in
vacuo,
as priests in their devotions, but an amalgam of creative science with the Christendom of tomorrow, which would fulfil and fortify Man’s
deepest aspirations. Eugenics must raise the general level of
intelligence
to a higher empathy, or Man would meet his doom through malevolent application of the strayed ‘wonders’ of science.

She blew out the candle, and lay in darkness, before moving the camp-bed on to the balcony beyond the french-window. She was now over the river, listening for the undertones of the stream below. Ripple-echoes were fading out, but to return: a fast
flowing
succeeded by a sudden lull, an individual gushing of water, subsiding to a quietness of following streams preparing to gather strength again as though to assault that certain large boulder immediately beneath the window, to push it seawards: a hollow pause of water breaking back in bubbles on a large mid-river rock.

Or were the splashing noises made by salmon, or large sea-trout, which had come into fresh water with the tide: the slashing tail-swirls of vigorous, clove-spotted silvery fish eager for
spawning
in the little waters of their moorland birth?

Perhaps the origins of the water-noises were deceptive, being echoes pulsing over the surface of the stream, and combining, as nodes of musical vibrations, to a sudden loudness? Water noises were coming direct from many echoing places—from boulders, from hollows of banks, washed-down tree-roots, leaf-masses, caught up on a particular stone in the shallows?

To these night echoes within the room, she listened. The river in its broken flowings and gushings upon its bed of shillet and boulder had a rhythm or recurrence of water-pulses. Every so often the water swilled surging into some miniature bay or
backwater
, and made a hollow, chuckling noise; and the same pulse of the river, a temporary gathering of the many streams, sent a wave of water lapping over a part-submerged boulder, causing an equal back-wash which in daylight had sometimes looked, to the boys and herself peering over the wall of the river, like the swirl of a large square tail—the familiar tail of salmon or its cousin the sea-trout.

Noises of water on stone flowed past her, and then through her, as the short hours of darkness ebbed away. She could not sleep. Had Phillip’s Aunt Theodora listened in the same way, so that the vibrations of her
feelings
were recorded in the walls and
ceilings
of the cottage: the vibrations that were the spirit of a place, of human thoughts—the spirit of life, invisible and unheard, lying behind all movement, all friction which were of the forces of creation, of all terrestrial life?

Inevitably all came back to Phillip. Could she but bring Elizabeth and him together, it would release in him forces of creation, so that he would no longer feel frustration, but become whole again, and live in happiness, and serenity.

And lying there, Melissa felt a surety moving upon her … and awakened into the light of day, feeling herself to be strangely remote, and not unhappy.

Early next morning she walked up to the Castle, to continue the interviewing of aspirants who wanted to take the first course of Diaphany. Caspar Field, the Principal, was wary of accepting an aspirant except for a trial period. It was not always easy to detect hysteria emanating, possibly, from some deepest block which, unrecognised, could upset other novices. Like the black witch of pre-radio villages, a psychopath could communicate a spiritual malaise to members of a community unaware of its origin.

Melissa was an esteemed disciple of Caspar Field. That
morning
, during the coffee break, he saw that she was a little
distraite.
They had known one another for almost a year, and shared a mutual esteem. Caspar was happily married, with four children, to a wife whose face, many said, seemed to shine.

“Problems?” he asked. Melissa looked at him; he knew she was hesitating lest she impinge on his work. “Come into my room, and have some coffee.”

“I’m wondering if it’s a case with me of ‘Physician, heal
thyself
’,” she began. “Can one be of real use to others when one is worried continually by a personal problem?”

“The poet wrote that he ‘learned in suffering, what he taught in song’, Melissa. At the some time, to do one’s work properly, one must be clear. A surgeon—and surgery is necessary
sometimes
—with problems is liable to slip—”

“May I tell you my problem, or rather, dilemma? I don’t think I can resolve it by myself. It’s of long standing, or
deep-seated
: what one would call a block.”

When she had told him he replied, “I think I know to whom you refer. I’ve seen him occasionally; and of late he has appeared to be not so much preoccupied, as a writer is by nature of his work, but withdrawn.”

A flight of fighter-bomber aircraft thundered over the castle. When they had passed away he said, “Soon the whole of
mankind
will be beset by material vibrations kyanizing the entire psychic force of this planet. The next few decades will be critical. The services of all writers, poets, musicians, and spiritual leaders
of all races and creeds must come together in the services of Diaphany, the power of transmitting Light.”

*

The weather being so fine that evening, such a sky of the Field of a Cloth of Gold, Melissa decided to walk up the lane and across the common to Shep Cot. She arrived as the colours of the sky reminded her of Turner’s
Fighting
Temeraire.