Read A Test to Destruction Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
A Test to Destruction (48 page)
The concert came to a premature stop with the arrival of a stout park keeper, who said that all playing of unauthorised music was forbidden by the by-laws of the London County Council which were displayed at every entrance; so the barrel organ was taken down the gully, to be played outside No. 11, and again outside the flat, from behind the upper window of which the face of Mrs. Neville wagged about with laughter.
*
After handing over the organ in Randiswell, with an extra five bob for the man, Phillip suggested that they take the tram so far as Cutler’s Pond. It was by now closing time, a relief, with the thought that he might walk off the cloying effects of two pints of beer. They went up Whitefoot Lane, and through the woods, meaning to cross the Seven Fields to Brumley; and coming out beyond the trees, by Shrofften Farm, Phillip saw before him a great heap of stones, with standards of timber, tin roofed sheds, and other gear, near a notice board with the name of a London firm of contractors. A reservoir was to be made at the highest point, for a new housing estate to cover all the Severn Fields. Thrown oaks and elm trees gave the place a look of desolation.
As they crossed over the condemned green fields, where once flocks of lapwing and fieldfares had gathered, the voice of Julian became tedious, and Phillip felt the front of his head beginning to ache. Julian strode a foot or so in front of his left shoulder, talking away, either about his favourite poet, Swinburne, or one or another of the literary figures known from his immense range of reading—words, words, words, too often delivered in a scoffing manner as he declared that every source of art was materialistic, that all artists were decadent, that all ‘musings and hopes for the ideal derived from mere idle sentimentality, having a basis in masturbation.’
“Even Swinburne?”
“Certainly! Likewise Dostoieffsky, Tolstoi, and Beethoven. The slight hollows at the sides of the temple, to be seen in their portraits, show this clearly. But what does it matter how poetry is written, so long as it is written? The oriental races simply cannot understand most of our romantic Western love poetry.”
“Then you think that love is entirely based on sex?”
“What else? What free man would want to write of love, when he could enjoy it naturally? Herrick wrote his best verse when deprived of his mistress. He certainly didn’t want to write it when he was in bed with her!”
“But the great writers——”
“Mere
folie
de
grandeur
!
Consider Nietschze, and his masterpiece,
Thus
Spake
Zarathrustra.
It’s great prose, but it would never have been written if Nietschze had not been syphilitic, nor would Dostoieffsky have written
The
Brothers
Karamazov
without the condition of his epileptic fits! As for Francis Thompson, whom you believe to be a great poet, but I know has only a streak of genius, neuralgia and laudanum were the agents which induced him to write. Thompson was also sexually impotent; his
Sister
Songs,
with their fawning love for the Meynell girls, Monica and Viola, proves it. But nevertheless he wrote some great stuff.
Forlorn, and faint, and stark,
I had endured through watches of the dark
Th’ abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers’ scrutiny.
Stood bound and helplessly,
For Time to shoot his barbèd minutes at me …
Oh, it’s great stuff, Phillip! I shall live only for great poetry, by God! Let’s get a ’bus, it may be market day in Brumley, and the pubs open all day.”
Eight hours later the two, with wet feet and muddy shoes and trousers, were back in the Randiswell, Phillip drooping wearily beside Julian as he talked to Dr. Dashwood, who stood, his face the colour of magenta, before the mahogany counter of the saloon bar drinking the last of his nightly bottle of whiskey. Ten minutes before closing time Phillip went outside with Julian, who after mixing nearly a score pints of beer with whiskey, port, sherry and gin—drinks paid for by others in the bars the two had visited—was obviously going to shoot his bundle. Holding to the iron rail between white-painted oak posts, to which ponies and horses had once been hitched, Julian bent over towards the ditch three times in rapid succession. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, Phillip—who had drunk little, and then
only mild beer—said to him with sympathy, “I know how you feel, Julian. I’ve often felt like that. You’ve had too much, old boy, that’s the trouble.”
Straightening up, Julian replied, “The trouble is I haven’t had enough!” and went back into the bar. Phillip slipped away home, to let himself in with his key, and tip-toe silently to his bedroom, which was now the end room, facing the garden and the early morning sun. By the window was a card-table, its green baize covering blotted and blotched with ink shaken from an old army wooden pen with a relief nib which he had used when acting as assistant adjutant at Landguard nearly a year before. He was secretly writing a novel with a setting in a far, imagined countryside, with imagined characters derived from memories of his boyhood with Percy Pickering and his village friends at Beau Brickhill and others of his own boyhood, including Cranmer, a ragged boy he had befriended. The foolscap sheets of this romance were hidden under the mattress of his bed, in the fear that if anyone in the house saw them, especially his sister Elizabeth, he would not be able to continue in what he was believing and living in with nervous exaltation as an escape from real life. It would be equally fatal, he thought, as he lit the candle, if Julian knew of what he was doing.
If night was a friend, day was worse than an enemy in its emptiness. With renewed optimism he sought Julian; and after one Saturday mid-day meeting at the Roebuck, when Julian did most of the talking, recounting his amorous and other adventures while with the R.A.F.—most amusing story-telling marred at times by derisive arrogance—they hired another barrel-organ and dressed in pre-war civvy suits, Phillip with his top-hat stove-in and broken umbrella, Julian in a grey frock coat and bowler taken from his father’s cupboard and worn with long sheepskin flying boots, hauled the thing on the Hill the next morning, and played it in mockery of the after-church parade with a few silk hats bobbing here and there in the streams of mainly elderly people walking up and down the path along the crest. Inevitably they were turned off by one of the keepers, who said that if they brought back the vehicle, as such it was within the meaning of the by-laws applicable to Open Spaces and Recreation Grounds of the L.C.C., they would be summoned.
Richard heard about this incident, but said nothing to either his wife or his son.
Tues. 4 Nov.
Mother, Doris and I went down from Euston for Polly Pickering’s wedding. I wore the suit of khaki barathea dyed navy blue, which I had made in Folkestone (and haven’t paid for), with a yellow silk tie bought in the Burlington Arcade. George Turney, her cousin twice removed, appeared after supper, and hung or rather lay about in the billiard room afterwards, a dazy look in his eyes as he slumped back in an armchair with Polly across his knees, fondling her before everyone as though we weren’t there, sprawling on the small of his back and murmuring endearments as though he were half tight. I thought it was pretty bad form.
I asked Polly when he had gone off on his motorbike, banging harshly with tappets not properly adjusted, if she had expected him. No, she said, adding that he had not got any friends left, and did not get on very well with his father, and so had come to see her, feeling lonely. I felt like U. Hilary. I asked her, Did she love G.? She said she was fond of him, but did not ever expect to find true love. I asked her if she had been hurt by my behaviour, after Lynmouth in 1916. “I wasn’t aware of any particular behaviour on your part,” she replied. Later I realized that she had something of the quality of ‘Spectre’ in her: a clay-like strength. S.’s father was a Gaultshire man.
The wedding. P. was in white wearing her gt-g’mother’s lace veil, and carrying a spray of lilies. G. was in uniform, with the M.C. Dozens of small dark farmers, most of them Turneys, black beards, bowler hats, with old-fashioned broadcloth claw-hammer coats, starched collars and dickies, and grey ties. I felt a bounder in my yellow silk tie, bought as a protest against the drab life of a soul-destroying suburb. Thought of writing a novel called
Soot,
but satire is superficial, therefore untrue; all human characteristics, as ‘Spectre’ used to say, come from environment.
No shortage of food among farmers. The wedding breakfast was spread over three rooms connected by open doors, reminding me of Hindenburg Line at Graincourt—hams, sausage rolls, chickens, a baron of beef, mince pies, cream meringues, jellies, blancmanges, chocolates, biscuits, cheeses. Napkins tucked in necks, the old clod hoppers knew how to do themselves well. I tucked in mine, and felt less a snob.
At the back of my mind a vague feeling that all was not well with Polly; and when later, after she had changed into a going-away tweed coat and skirt, she said to me privately, in the little conservatory where withered bunches of grapes hung above us, that she might need my help one day, I felt that, underneath her calm appearance of strength, her heart had broken when I more or less jilted her in September 1916, at the time when the telegram came that Percy was killed, and Doris and I saw her off at Euston.
Weds. 5 Nov.
Saw Jack Smith. I remembered him as a quiet, rather lonely boy walking home from Wakenham Road School down Ivy Lane, always by himself. He lent me Edward Carpenter’s
Towards
Democracy.
Most of the sentences in every page were heavily underlined with purple copying-pencil. He asked me to go to their party next Friday evening. He lives with his younger brother and sister in the Randiswell Road in one of those yellow-brick houses built about 1904.
Thurs. 6 Nov.
Walked alone over the old places, and through the woods. Along Shooting Common, and through Brumley and down to Cutler’s Pond and so home. Noises of motor-buses, cars, hooters etc. spoiled the tranquillity. I walked through Randiswell in gathering fog, eyes filled with sulphurous specks, which affected my breathing. I felt exhausted, and was sulky and rude to my patient, silver-haired mother. I am conscious of being a perfect swine,
but
can’t
help
it.
Her cheeks seem to glow, and she always eats humble pie. I feel hurt as I write; eyes are brimming—yet why am I conscious of the pig I am, and
still
remain reserved and curt?
Thought all day of ‘Pauline’ … and wondering if I shall attempt to portray her as the iconoclast or not, later in the book. No, I don’t think so. I find my thoughts still dwelling on her. Girls like her are filled with ‘earth’ force, the life-force, vital as the sun’s ray; that is why they have such a terrible sway over men. At the other extreme, poets have the spiritual fire within them; they are of the aetherial force, perhaps of the after-life. Who knows? God help the clashing of earth and spiritual forces.
I realize that the pain is still deep within my heart. And Eve? Never remembers. The sun’s warmth comes again; I may die tomorrow, still the sun will shine. At times I nearly despair. However, I have my
work
to love—my book. Now for more of it!
Fri. 7 Nov.
The Smith’s party was pretty awful. Gas fire, cuckoo clock, oleographs of Pear’s Annual Faunteleroy child figures on walls, etc. We sat around playing Consequences, Charades, Hunt the Slipper (jokes about smelly feet, etc.) and other wearisome games. When the ‘ladies’ went out to get supper, Bob Smith the young brother, said ‘Come on’ to the men and at once they got into a huddle like flies in an attic—except that numbed flies crawl and these men hastened to clot around Bob—eager for what I wondered. An exchange of smutty stories! Jack the elder brother stood aloof, a smile on his face as he glanced rather pathetically at me. I behaved badly, no doubt,
also keeping aloof and not troubling to conceal my dislike of this aspect of lower middle class depression or repression. When I spoke to Jack, he asked me rather timidly what I thought of Edward Carpenter, blinking slightly as though fearful of possible derision on my part. I thought it was thin, rather vacuous stuff, the work of a self-enclosed man without real urge to write of the world as it is, with true understanding of opposing forces always in play in nature; but I said Carpenter struck me as one who had seen through the dross of civilization. His face lit up, and glancing round he whispered, “Don’t tell the others about it, will you? They won’t understand.”
Tom Ching came in later, after the pubs had closed. He said his mother had come out of Peckham House, cured, but was v. frail, after a stroke. I walked home with him, he comparatively sober, and rather boring, as he kept saying that he had no friends. “I get such strength from you,” he said. I didn’t say that what he got from me I felt I had lost. He asked if we could go for country walks together, he wanted to know more about nature, hardly knowing one bird from another. We arranged to walk on Sunday, and explore the Randisbourne above Cutler’s Pond to its source.
Had the Nunhead dream again and awoke to see Father by my bed asking what was the matter, why had I been groaning and muttering to myself. I apologized, said it was probably due to indigestion. He said it was more probably because I had nothing to do, except to lie in bed half the morning, turn night into day, etc.
“You should have gone back to the Office!” he said, querulously.
I asked if he had to bring that up now, when the matter was finished.
“Yes, I do! You were in receipt of full pay for nearly five years, including annual increments, and if you did not intend to go back, the honourable course was to have paid back the money.”
I said I would pay it back, and he went away.
Downham is now second-in-command of the Wine Vaults Lane branch, under Hollis, old Howlett having retired. Some hopes for me, under D., who must know I know that Teddie Pinnegar nearly shot him for wind-up in Sept. 1917, at Proven. I bear no ill-will to D., but he must dislike me more than before, for knowing what I know about him.