The Innocent Moon (53 page)
Authors: Henry Williamson
The large eyes, brimming with tenderness, looked down at his face from the top step of the 'bus, an open affair with wooden seats. “You know,” she said gently, “I always thought that you and Iâone dayââ”
The engine roared, he waited until it was round the corner; and stood transfixed for a moment, feeling the sadness of all human farewells. How quickly the summer had passed; already the wheat was in stook, casting lengthening shadows upon the stubble. Tomorrow Bill and Doris would set forth for the long journey back toâwhat? And although Irene had taken the cottage for another fortnight, soon they too would be gone, like migrant birds following the sun.
*
One September morning he was sitting in his cottage when the postman brought a letter addressed in a hand which always seemed to bring a flow of life with it. He opened the envelope eagerly; but after reading it sat still, wondering how he should reply. When Barley came in he was still sitting there. “What's the matter?”
“Willie, my cousin, is unhappy. He loves a girl in North Devon, and she loves him, he says, but her mother's dead against him. He says it's all his own fault, yet whatever he says or does can't alter the situation. There's a desperate strain in the letter which alarms me.”
“May I read it?”
“I wish you would, Barley, and tell me what you think.”
When she had read the letter she said, “He needs help. Shall we go today and see him?”
“We've arranged to go to Dartmouth this afternoon, with your mother. It's her last day, we can't very well leave her alone.”
“Mummie won't mind.”
“It's a long way to North Devon and back.”
“You don't really want me to see him, do you?”
She was persistent. At last he said, “You might fall in love with him.”
“Oh, Phillip, is that what you think of me! Can't you see from the letter he's almost desperate?”
“I suppose I once wrote like that to Spica. Her reply was, âYour letters are so piteous.' Of course, I didn't really love her. Surely, if this girl, Mary Ogilvie, really loved Willie, and he really loved her, he wouldn't write like that?”
“But he does write like that, and so needs friendship all the more. The fact that you and Spica weren't suited made you all the more unhappy while it lasted.”
“Yes, that's true.”
“So I think you should go and see your cousin
now
. Leave me with Mummie if you'd prefer it that way.”
“But we must spend our last day together! I'll go and see Willie next week.”
And when they were gone he wrote to Julian Warbeck and invited him to do the walk over Dartmoor again, “for the sake of old times”. Julian came down by the next train, and the following day the two walked across Dartmoor and arrived at Willie's new cottage on the edge of the Great Field beside the estuary on what turned out to be the penultimate evening of cousin Willie's life.
Sept. 26. I hardly know what to write. We sat up all night of the 23rd; W. left us at dawn on 24th; he did not return, and last night his body was found off Crow Shingle Spit. Tomorrow is the inquest.
Sept. 27. No question of suicide was raised in the coroner's court at Barnstaple. The facts were barely stated: W.M. had gone to say goodbye at the Ogilvie's house, Wildernesse, and presumably went on to Crow Spit to get a salmon boat to ferry him over to Appledore. But the nets were “off”, and no boat came up with the flowing tide that night. A flare was seen on the Sharshook ridge, the gravel island in mid-estuary, from where the netsmen usually shot their draughts during the legal season. Burnt pages of his MSS. were found the next day on the tide-line. Verdict, Found drowned.
  I had already telephoned to Uncle John. I have made arrangements for the coffin to go by train to Rookhurst tomorrow, for the funeral. I go with it.
October 4 (in retrospect).
  I had several long talks with Mary Ogilvie, who made me promise never to tell anyone that her sister Jean had overheard Willie saying to her mother that he was going to cross by a salmon boat coming up from the South Tail (dangerous sand-bar at mouth of estuary) and would Mrs. O. tell Mary this. Mrs. O failed to give the message, not knowing what Mary knewâthat salmon netting was ended for the season. So W. waited in vain, and was swept off the mid-river gravel ridge by tide flowing at 6â7 knots.
  I was with Mary and her friend Howard and Julian when the body was brought in. Willie's spaniel, Billjohn, had been found before this, and Julian had made a fire of driftwood to burn the body of the dog; he suggested burning W's body, too, like Byron burning the body of Shelley on sands of Lerici bay in Italy. Julian was greatly moved, chanting Swinburne's Itylus, weeping and raging by turns. Howard damned him for the effect this “maudlin” behaviour had on Mary, who cried that she had let Willie down.
  I told Uncle John that Willie had left no debts. “Proper gen'le'man, always paid his way,” said the sexton, a part-time netsman.
  Mary O. didn't come to funeral; too ill. She was brave and tearless until the flamy scene, like climax of Greek play, on the sandhills of Crow Spitâthe pale face of the dead in the well of the fisherman's boat. Several crews were out that night, shooting their nets from the ridge, knowing the body would be up and down with the tides. Might have been taken right up Torridge; the tides of the two rivers divide beyond the shingle bank, at the String, a patch of agitated water.
 Â
Note.
One of life's little ironies. The local correspondent of
The
Weekly
Courier
came up to me after the inquest in Barnstaple and said, “Bloom asks me to give you his sympathy, and says he remembers the article your cousin wrote for the paper, the plea for a better
relationship between late enemies. He will publish it as it stands if you can let me have a copy by tomorrow morning.”
  Alas, where is it? I said I didn't know.
  Now I recall, “with bitter tears to shed”, that the clairvoyant Barley urged me to help Willie. I have failed him.
Phillip saw some of his father's relations at the funeral. There was Uncle Hilary, Aunt Augusta, Aunt Victoria (âViccy') Lemon, and of course Aunt Dora from Lynmouth. The aunts all seemed kind and gentle, with their Victorian manners, each a little apart from the others, but never distant. He felt himself to belong to them rather than to the Turneys, his mother's people. They were gentlefolk, he could see that; never familiar with one another, and yet sharing the same close family feeling. He could understand fully why his father had never really been at home at Wakenham, with his mother; for these tall grey-eyed people spoke so precisely, and yet quietly, about all kinds of things afterwards, as though there had been no funeral.
When they had gone, Uncle John asked Phillip to stay the night. After dinner he told him that he was his heir now, and in due course the house would belong to him.
“But I must tell you that there are certain burdens that go with it, Phillip. It is mortgaged, to your Uncle Hilary, who has also bought up some of the land which belonged to your grandfather. It is his hope, and mine too, that you will decide to live here. He has no farm in hand, but he tells me that he is prepared to buy out one of the tenants, who at present farms what was the Home Farm, of about a hundred and fifty acres, including the brook, which still holds some trout. He is also prepared to put up some capital, to start you off, at a low rate of interest. I don't know, of course, how you will feel about this, but there is no immediate hurry. How are your books doing?”
“Not very well, I'm afraid, Uncle John.''
“You could perhaps write them in your spare time, as a hobby? That's what R. D. Blackmore did, didn't he? He ran a market garden at Teddington by the Thames, I fancy.” He offered Phillip another glass of port. “We Maddisons seem to like living alone,” he went on. “There's Belle at Westcliff-on-Sea, Dora at Lynmouth, and Viccy at Bournemouth; she left Hawkhurst, I expect you know. And I'm here, stuck in the mud, and Hilary talking of having a caravan made to tow behind his motor, and to live, during the spring and summer,
on the unspoiled coast of Pembroke, north of Milford Haven, where he says are sandy bays as fine as any in Cornwall, which is beginning to be a little too popular for him. And now there is our latest addition to the family reclusion, yourself in South Devon. How do you like it there? Isn't the air a bit relaxing?”
“I don't notice it, Uncle John, I'm out walking most of the time.”
“Do you see many people? You hunt, don't you, so Dicky wrote to me some time back. Isn't it rather expensive, hiring from a stables?”
“I have done only a very little, Uncle John.”
He told his uncle about the tennis club.
“The middle classes of any country town are rather prone, you know, to resent any newcomer, particularly if they think he or she is not quite up to their standards. I think if, I may say so, that your attitude to the various rebuffs is commendable. You wouldn't find the same thing among people who are sure of themselves, the established families. Of course, good manners are essential in any stable society, but your own sensitivity, I fancy, and experience of your fellow officers in your regiment, will have shown you that. After all, it is the man himself who counts, in the long run. Do you meet any young women where you live?”
He was too shy to speak about Barleyâbesides, the engagement was secretâso he said, “I've met one or two summer visitors, Uncle John.”
“Perhaps you'll meet your lady love when you settle down, Phillip. Meanwhile, I'll say only that there is no life like farming, it's the natural life. The only fly in the ointment, so far as I can see, will be if that scamp Lloyd George has his way and repeals the Corn Production Act, letting into the country another flood of cheap foreign food. Free Trade very nearly broke the real England during the three decades before the Kaiser's war.”
Phillip was touched by Uncle John's gentleness, and promised next morning before leaving to visit the old man again before long. “Do send me a line, now and again, when you can spare the time. And bear in mind Hilary's offer, won't you?”
“Yes, thank you both, I am most grateful for the very kind offer.”
“I like your book of essays, and also your story of little Donkin. It was too realistic in some places, perhaps, but a genuine work of the imagination. That is where some modern young authors
seem, if I may say so, to go wrong; but it is understandable, your generation was exhausted in the war, and so criticism of society has taken the place of the imagination. Such books will soon âdate', I fancy. Human nature, you know, remains much the same from one generation to another.”
“Well, Uncle, Hardy wrote, âIf way to the better there be, it enacts a full look at the worst'.”
“That is a brave attitude, Phillip, but it is by his country scenes, rather than his predisposition to repeat the themes of Greek tragedy, that Hardy will live as a writer. By the way, I have here Willie's collection of the works of Richard Jefferies, I would like you to have them. I will keep them here for you. Well, my dear boy, thank you for all you have done, and do remember to call on me for help if at any time you feel you need it, won't you?”
*
In all directions the old life was changing rapidly: could it be more than three years since he first rented Valerian Cottage? As for the war, the fifth Armistice Day Two Minutes' Silence had gone; and nothing written of those scenes and faces which lived with him, their medium, to appear during many times of every day and night, often with a phrase of Willie's found among his papersâ“Speak for us, brother, the snows of death are on our brows”.
But the snows dissolved with thoughts of Barley: the gentians were under the snow, awaiting the sun. She was coming to stay at his father's house after Christmas.
He had no fear of his old home now, the life of which had seemed to be in eternal discord, so that all were tone-deaf to one another.
Barley arrived one early January day. He met her at Victoria and took her down to Wakenham. She slept in the little room which had been his as a boy; and seeing her head on the pillow when he went in to kiss her good-night, and again in the morning when he took in a tea tray, Phillip could scarcely believe his luck. He was living again in boyhood's summer.
Richard, too, felt to be young again, as he looked forward to his nightly game of chess. Barley beat him sometimes, which added to the keenness of the tournament, as he called it. Others in the family felt new life, too. One Saturday Phillip took Barley and Elizabeth to a
matinée
; Phillip discovered a new personality in his sister. They returned home in high spirits, to
Hetty's happiness. Barley was, in Richard's words, a general favourite. Phillip took her to see Mrs. Rolls, Mrs. Bigge next door, and Mrs. Neville, the mother of his boyhood friend Desmond, from whom he was estranged. Mrs. Neville, when Phillip led Barley into the flat, took the girl in her arms and with tears running down her large powdered face exclaimed, “Phillip has been dreaming of you all his life, dear!”
*
But Phillip was not yet clear of the past. Morbid thoughts sometimes arose out of time remembered. The first day they went for a walk in the country he took her to the new housing estate beyond Cutler's Pond, to show her where Tom Ching, accompanying him soon after the war, had set fire to a builder's office hut. But where had it stood? Was this the foundation road of red and yellow crushed bricks once lying through the felled treesâthis macadamised dead thing between rows of houses, a bewilderment of slates, bricks, unmade gardens and wireless poles and aerials behind stringy private hedges?
He hurried her back to the new main road, and caught a bus going to the country.
“I think I ought to tell you that I went to prison, just after the war, Barley. I was âdone', as they said in the Scrubs, for arson.” He told her about it, and she said, “But why did you take the blame for Ching?”
