The Power of the Dead (13 page)

“I think all what you’ve told me is extraordinarily interesting. I feel that I’ll never be able to learn all there is to learn.”

“The progressive farmer learns something every day, sir. And if I may venture an opinion, you show that you have the ability to grasp the necessity of ley farming with both short and long leys. My father won’t have it, he says that milk will suck the fertility away, but I tell him that with the bail all the fertility is left behind to grow a profitable crop of wheat where before two rabbits fought for one blade of grass.”

The weather became grievous outdoors; so much the better when the north-west wind drove rain against the rattling casements, and at times the beechwood smoke wavered and bulged into the room. His farmer’s conscience was at rest, he could concentrate happily on the writing of his story of water, reed, tree, cloud, and stone. In imagination he was living with the spirit of lost love, his memories of sand and wave and tideless Mediterranean sea, where the cub, in Barley’s cage of hands, had known its first salt wave; where Shelley was of the corals and the dreaming weeds of the Mediterranean sea. Had drowned Shelley risen with her upon his Cloud, to outsoar, with Keats, the shadow of Night; to fall as rain
upon the granite rocks of Dartmoor and nourish the starveling lichens, mosses, and grasses?

*

He knew that such derivative thoughts had no value, beyond release of constriction before the true flow began.

He sat at the table with a map of Dartmoor before him. There in the fen between Great Kneeset and Whitehorse Hill five rivers were born. Should he ask Lucy to go with him?

When she came upstairs with the mail she said, “I wish I could, Pip. But there’s the Church Council meeting this afternoon, and I promised to go with Uncle John.”

He reversed an envelope addressed in Hilary’s clear writing. “Hide it! If I open it all feeling will go from me. What’s in this one?”

It was from his literary agent. Cowdray & Smith offered
£
50 advance for
The
Water
Wanderer,
subject to contract.

“I must finish the book,” he muttered, as Lucy took away the unopened letter; but he could not settle to work; and called down the stairs, “May I have some coffee, then will you open Nuncle’s letter and tell me if it’s adverse or favourable. No, don’t tell me what it says. Just say ‘adverse’—or ‘favourable’.”

The coffee took a long time to arrive, it seemed, while thoughts of Nuncle were his unsettling. He ran to the landing and shouted down, “Is it good or is it bad? Tell me, don’t keep me in suspense!”

“I am reading it,” she called up the stairs. “It’s good I think. Do you remember asking Uncle Hilary——”

“What does Nuncle
say
?” he yelled.

“He says he will be able to arrange two passages for Fiennes and Tim to go to Australia, if they are willing to work. The
Laurentia
sails from Tilbury, let me see—when was it—oh yes, here it is—it sails from Tilbury——”

“You’ve already said that! When, when?”

“He says next April.”

“Oh, good! I’ll come down and we’ll have coffee together. Afterwards will you cut sandwiches for two? I’ll send a telegram, and ask Tim to come with me to Dartmoor. I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

Lucy was happy. Fiennes and Tim were doing no good at home, now that the Works were more or less closed. The sooner they had jobs to go to, the better. Ernest would look after Pa; and Phillip need worry himself about the silly Works no longer.

*

While waiting for Phillip to arrive, Tim imagined the great liner
Laurentia
surging forward under the flashing stars of the Southern Cross, of which he had read in stories of his boyhood. Dolphins leapt out of phosphorescent waves as he leaned reflectively upon white rails shaking a little from the steady beat of the great engines. And then—Australia! He imagined himself building a homestead in the Back of Beyond for Pansy, his girl in the village shop, whom he saw secretly and shyly. Mocking Birds sang—or was it the Laughing Jackass? Anyway, there were kangaroos to bound away into the horizon of the setting sun. But when he thought that he might never see Pa again, and the home where he and Lulu had shared so much happiness, he felt sad, and then afraid.

Still, it would be some time before he would have to leave. And today Phillip was going to take him to Dartmoor, a most wonderful place, known since his boyhood for
The
Hound
of
the
Baskervilles.
What good luck that Phillip had come into their lives, a hero of the Great War. Tim always felt reassured when in the company of Phillip, who always knew what to do in any emergency. Not much could go wrong with the old home, with Phillip in the offing to keep an eye on things when he and Fiennes were gone. Oh no, there was no need to worry. Ernest would be able to support Pa with his legacy, and by Jove, when Pa had passed on, he might even be able to join him and Fiennes ‘down under’. The Copleston Brothers were by no means a thing of the past! Engineers would be needed in Australia, ‘the land of unbounded opportunity’. By Jove, he must telephone ‘Mister’ the good news.

*

They drove west into a dull morning threatening rain. There was a long drive before them, and then several hours’ walking
up the valley of Taw Head to Cranmere Pool, the loneliest part of the moor.

“I suppose Ernest will sell the Tamp after you and Fiennes have gone, Tim?”

“I have mentioned the matter, Phil, and Ernest says he will bear it in mind, when the fine weather comes.”

“There’s Fiennes’ ‘Peerless’ motor-bicycle as well. It’s almost unused, what about selling that? You’ll need every penny, you know, when you get to Australia. Work may not be too easy to find.”

“Fiennes hopes to take it with him, but I understand that the cost may prove prohibitive,” replied Tim, in the mid-Victorian idiom he had learned from Pa. “But Ernest will sell it, he says, if he gets an offer.”

“He’ll have to
find
a
buyer, you know, Tim.”

“Yes, I agree. I must remember to mention the matter to him——”

When they reached Exeter and turned south-west for the moor the rain was beating into their faces with the force of half a gale. Wet and cold, they left the outfit on a track of granite gravel beyond Belstone, and followed the valley below which ran the clear waters of the little Taw. The wind had dropped but it was still raining. Through moss and bog plashes their boots squelched, for they had descended so that Phillip might observe the mossy stones, the amber water, the diminutive trout of the stream which broadened where cattle and wild ponies had broken bays along its course.

Walking beside the stream meant water chronically in their boots, so they climbed out of the valley, coming to a dry wall of granite marked Irishman’s Wall on the map. A female
sparrowhawk
flew up from a small mound, its plucking place. There lay the remains of her kill, the skull and long beak of a snipe, its wings, feathers, and gizzard. The mound was also visited by a fox, Phillip pointed out to Tim: pellets of greyish fur and bone lay near it. “Perhaps the fox at night comes for what the sparrowhawk leaves by day.”

“By Jove, all this is most interesting, Phil. I used to be keen on nature when I was young, Lu and I used to explore all around our home before we moved to Down Close.”

“You don’t mind the rain?”

“Not in the very least.”

The hillside rose steeper, and they went down once more to the river-bed, now a succession of boulders. While walking
upstream
they heard a dull, far-away report, succeeded by a swishing noise, and with a loud plop a dud shell fell fifty yards away. Phillip remembered that this part of the moor was an artillery range; they were under the arc of fire. As they went on they heard behind them the familiar chromatic whining of heavy stuff. Near the summit of a tor on their left front there appeared the
fan-shaped
bursts of high explosive shells.
Womp-womp-womp-womp.
The heavy detonations of the salvo smote the air of the valley. It was a strange sensation, that of being two personalities at the same time: one in the past, the other in the present. He thought now that if the War came again, he would have no apprehension about death. It was only the very young who longed for
immortality
.

He thought himself back into the rain of Third Ypres, ‘Spectre’ walking beside him up to Zonnebeke, and beyond to the
Passchendaele
ridge, by way of the railway cutting. When, when, when would he be able to finish his book of those days? God, over twelve years had passed since the British Expeditionary Force had fallen back in exhaustion before the right wing of von Kluck’s army-group, and the London Highlanders were awaiting orders to go overseas. It seemed but yesterday that they were marching through the Surrey countryside, while villagers and farmers came out with baskets of fruit and jugs of milk and beer for the brigade. How hot was that August sun, how heavy their equipment, how sore their feet, how proud they were afterwards that not a man of the battalion fell out, although in the wayside shade many soldiers of other battalions of the London Regiment were lying there, pale-faced and exhausted. How they had longed for that burning sun three months later, standing all day and working all night in the flooded trenches south of Ypres.

Now the whining of the shells almost drew the heart out of his breast for those vanished scenes and faces. He
must
finish the otter book, and then write of the truth of the war. O, why had he allowed himself to become a farmer?

Then he was thinking how good it was to be alive and free on the wild moor, life clear and natural as the water running on the rock all around him.

A herd of ponies moved away casually yet surely from their approach. They were small, shaggy, with bodies like little barrels.
Or was this fatness an illusion due to an almost permanent
distension
, caused by cropping grass that most of the year was wet? The entire moor was running with water. The soil was thin, compost of ancient grass and rush and heather, growths which slowly crept, thousands of centuries ago, from the sea to these granite hills. Had it not been for the Atlantic rains, had these granite hills been in another part of the world where rain was infrequent, they would be gaunt and dull glittering with crystals left by the crash of genesis.

Talking about these things to Tim, who listened and expressed his interest with an occasional ‘Ah!’, they climbed steadily up the narrowing valley of the Taw and came to a wilder and more broken aspect of the moor: peat hags like little islands in a lagoon of bog, extended everywhere across the misty summit of the Great Kneeset.

At first Phillip feared to tread in the bog, mindful of the many stories of strangers being lost on the moor and never seen again. After some minutes of hopping from hag to hag, followed by Tim, he trod gingerly on the black spread of bog, and pressing harder, to his surprise found that it was firm peat, the nailed impress of his brogues hardly penetrating a quarter of an inch.

“I remember reading now that the ‘bogs’ of fiction are the green ‘quakers’, hollows in the rock which are filled with water and poa grasses, with duckweed and starwort on top, Tim. This ‘bog’ is only dead heather layers, too soilless to rot down to genuine humus. I don’t suppose there are many worms up here to break down the acid peat, and precious few bacteria.”

“Ah,” said Tim.

“After all, if one thinks it out, nothing but rain comes here to increase the life of this high ground. However, rain or snow must add to the nitrogen in the peat. Look at the wind-harried
condition
of these peat-hags.”

He wrote in his note book,
Islands
of
desperate
vegetation.

With the 1-inch contour map set by prismatic compass, they went on to find Cranmere Pool. A mist was drifting across the hill; Tim acted as marker, advancing on the lubber line of the magnet to the point of fading visibility, then to stand as marker until Phillip caught up with him for the next advance. It was rather fun, Tim agreed; they were explorers.

“I fancy Pa has cousin George’s prismatic compass somewhere, just the thing for Australia.”

Soon they came upon the slight hollow which was Cranmere, an empty pool of about a rood, with broken grassy banks. There was a post driven into the turf, and below it an iron box containing a book with the signatures of former visitors, together with a post-office stamp and ink-pad.

“The idea is to post your letter here, and the next visitor takes it away to put it in a letter box, so Pa told me,” said Tim. “He came here once with Cousin Suff, and they brought back a small bottle of water from Taw head.”

“You mean the uncle of Mary Ogilvie’s mother?”

“I think it probably was, but blessed if I really know, Phil. Pa once told me that he had reckoned up that he had over eight hundred cousins, but we know only about thirty or so.”

They wrote their names in the book, a fairly new one; the original book, which had contained the signature of the Prince of Wales, had been stolen by some curio collector, Phillip told Tim. “I read about it in the
South
Hams
Gazette,
when I was living on the coast south of here. A pity; it should have gone to some museum.”

“I agree, every time.”

Phillip wandered around the dry tarn, while Tim waited by the haversack, not wanting to disturb Phillip’s thoughts. Beside him was a hummock, on top of which was a slight yellow patch and small dark blobs with specks of white in them. By Jove, they were an otter’s spraints! He walked over to tell Phillip of this tremendous find. Phillip hastened to the hummock and knelt down.

“You’re right, Tim.” He bent his head to sniff. “Yes, a sweetish smell. You know, Lutra may have crossed over the watershed here. We must look for his spoor.”

They found no tracks. Phillip wrapped the spraints in his handkerchief. “When we get back I’ll put them in a glass of water, as I used to do with owl’s pellets, and find out what he’s been eating.”

“By Jove, yes,” remarked Tim, gratified that he had found an important clue.

“Talking about eating, you start on the sandwiches, Tim. I want to take some notes about the source of the Taw, also of the Torridge, which must start near it—brother Taw and sister Torridge.”