It Was the Nightingale (28 page)

“So am I! All artists in England feel they’re outsiders, whatever class they come from. I’m a suburbanite, camouflaged as half a countryman.”

They drew up in the crescent outside the station.

“Thanks for the lift. Don’t believe that your stuff isn’t good, for it is,” Phillip said. “It has feeling, and sensibility. Please keep on writing!”

He raised his hat, and saying goodnight, walked away into the station, and hid himself at the suburban end, intending to wait there until all the arrivals at the boat-train platform had left.

Faces of City workers passed in stream, most of them set dully in the fatigue of bodies which were tired because they were not used naturally. These were the weary City workers pressing home to their suburbs. He looked at the face of every girl that passed, seeking a look of Barley. Most of the faces were pale, the lips pale. Then a girl went by with a calm, self-possessed walk, beautifully dressed, poising herself apart from the City-worker-rush. He followed her to the Arrival Board before which she stood, coolly inspecting it, while he remained a few yards away; apparently finding what she sought, she turned casually and gave him a glance, at which he felt himself to be integrating once more, though he was still feeling hollow. She sauntered away, and he moved to the board, wondering if she were waiting for the next Dover train. An idea for a romantic story began to arise in his mind. He imagined the beginning: bright bustle of station, beautiful girl waiting for handsome, strong, bronzed, clean Englishman to arrive, dressed in immaculate Savile Row evening clothes, ‘faultless Lincoln Bennett’ silk hat, ebony stick with gold top, and ‘monocle’. Just come from the Great Open Spaces (via Paris) after Big Game Shooting to cure a broken heart.

The hero arrived, with stiff upper lip and unfathomable blue eyes. The beautiful girl smiled. What then? Ah, they were being watched by a thin, somewhat morbid artist from the Café Royal; member of impoverished British aristocracy. His threadbare clothes were well brushed by ancient retainer living in Shepherd’s Market. Dikran Michaelis had done it already.

Why were so many of the literary critics derisive about his work? His reputation had fallen among beeves: the sharp Armenian goat herded among dull British beeves.

When he looked round, the girl was gone. So was the story. So much for the idea of writing romantically about men and women for Mr. Dock. And now for some food, lord he was hungry, and then back for some serious work. He must not break his habit of writing in the evening. But the face of Mr. Dock persisted; he writhed away from its stupidity; cursed it, washed it away with two large whisky-sodas, when satire replaced desperation.

After eggs and bacon at the buffet, hope came back to him as he sat in the train and thought of the estuary and the sandhills which he would revisit in spirit later that night. His tin of hand-made Gold Flake cigarettes; a cup of char out of the kettle; sitting by the fire until the small hours of the morning. He wondered with secret excitement what would happen that night. The book was writing itself, no need to strive to imagine into the future: he had only to trust the inspiration which always came from outside himself.

*

“Hullo, you’re home early!” said Hetty, gay with relief. “There’s a letter for you, my son.”

He took it with him to the ‘Gartenfeste’, his old name for the room next door when he had left the army in what seemed now to be another world.

Lucy’s letters were tender but simple. This letter was a reply to one enclosing, from
The
Daily
Crusader,
a series of articles on Arnold Bennett written by his wife: an appeal, it was said in Fleet Street, by the wife to get her husband back. A.B. had gone off. The articles were of much interest to Phillip, who had seen himself in them. They disclosed that Bennett was meticulous and easily upset, easily disbalanced by the writer of the articles. Phillip had sent them on to Lucy, asking her to read them carefully, “because I am exactly the same sort of creature”.

Lucy’s reply chilled him.

Phillip paced the bare boards, in doubt and disquiet. He talked to his idea of Lucy. “I asked you to read the articles as a barrister reads a brief! Or as a sailor studies the chart of a rocky coast! And all you say is, ‘We will be different, won’t we, dear?’ for all the world as though you are my mother over again! I tell you that
only if both of us can see things plainly, both cause and effect, can we be happy!” O God, was it to be Father and Mother all over again? Poor Lucy: ought he to break it off? Was he changing his nature, becoming like Father? Ought he to go on with the engagement? It would mean a return of the darkness for him; but what mattered was Lucy. Poor innocent Lucy, without a mother, yet so cheerful, kind, and willing to help anyone in trouble. But pity was a snare; a poor substitute for compassion.

Yes, Lucy was right; it was up to him so to discipline himself that he kept his sensibility inside a routine, or code. Now to work. The novel must be finished by Christmas! Then he would be returning to the friendliest people he had ever known, outside Irene and Barley; a home of warmth and kindliness. Had Wildernesse House seemed to Willie as Down Close seemed to him now?

Now he, the necromancer, must raise from the rose-ash the ghost of the rose: Willie to be transmuted to Donkin: Donkin risen from the grave to live in the eternity of sea and air and sunlight, to be found by others as truth, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Mr. Teddy Dock, bless you for your good intentions! Now I beg to be excused; my way lies, not with docks and thistles, but with the goodly grain and the sun-hazed sleeper.

It was cold in the garden room, the frost had come, bringing yellow London fog and the dull reports of detonators upon suburban railway lines. He sat there, writing fast, until the red sun of dawn hazed the ice-flowers on the eastern windows.

It was already dark when he arrived at Shakesbury station, but as he gave up his ticket to the porter at the barrier he saw Lucy’s
face in the lamplight, framed in the grey felt hat, smiling towards him. Tim stood by her, a mild benevolence on his face.

“I’m frightfully glad to see you,” he said earnestly. “What fun we’ll have, now you’ve come!”

Lucy was smiling gently, “He’s come, too,” she said, looking to beside the taxi-driver’s seat where sat Rusty, beating a tail-stump. He felt he had come to his ultimate happiness when he found Moggy curled up on a cushion in the chalet, beside his bed.

“She’s such a good little cat. I hope you don’t mind that we went over to fetch her. Tim and I went in the Tamp. We saw Billy. He’s a darling!”

After tea Lucy and Phillip retired to the scullery to be alone with an accumulation of cups, plates, and cooking pots. He washed up as usual, then taking the cloth from her kissed her on both cheeks. Her warm sweetness made him say, “Well, if it’s to be ‘bother old Arnold Bennett’, then I must train myself to be a normal, healthy person. The trouble is I’ve tried to reform before, and never seem to have succeeded. It’s my kink, I suppose, as the editor of Pa’s favourite magazine told me.”

“Oh, Pa reads anything and everything, then forgets it all immediately,” replied Lucy. “Anyway, I like you as you are, so don’t let my silly remark bother you any more, will you?”

He had brought a present for each of his new relations-to-be; a pair of leather motoring gloves for Ernest, a scarf for Fiennes, a pair of woollen stockings for Tim, an anthology of W. H. Hudson’s writings for Lucy; and for Pa a book,
The
Impatience
of
a
Parson,
by the Rev. R. L. Sheppard, priest of St. Martin-in-the-Fields who was beginning to be known and loved for his broadcast services.

While he and Lucy were getting supper he said to her, “Dick Sheppard is a clear man, who lives in the spirit of Jesus.”

He had bought the book for Mr. Copleston, knowing that he was a devout Churchman, vicar’s warden of the little Norman church in the hamlet. Lucy had told him how Pa had repaired and restored some of the old woodwork; they always decorated the font and pulpit for Easter, Harvest Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

As a foretaste of Pa’s delight at receiving the book, at supper Phillip said casually, “What do you think of Dick Sheppard, sir? I went to the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields while I was in
London, hoping to meet him, but he isn’t well, he suffers from asthma, brought on by frustration.”

“Hey? Oh, Dick Sheppard! I’ve no use for the fellow.”

This was a shock. Later, sitting in Pa’s chair (the only comfortable one in the room) while Pa was having a bath, he glanced idly at the copy of
The
Church
Times,
which ‘Mister’ had brought over. ‘Mister’s’ wife, Lucy had told him, took the paper for its advertisements for paying guests. In the current number was a literary criticism disparaging the very book he had bought for Pa’s present.

He would send the book to Mother; she would appreciate it. But what could he give Pa? The shops were now shut. A copy of Housman’s
Last
Poems,
which he had bought for himself? No, not that, Pa would prefer a detective story. Ah, cigarettes! He had a tin-box of a hundred hand-made Gold Flakes: but had smoked two in the train. Could he put two ordinary Gold Flakes among them? Borrow them from Tim, and trust that Pa would not detect them with the others?

After supper of bloater-paste sandwiches, with Bivouac coffee, and healths drunk in sherry, the family played their usual games of rummy, snap, and Mah Jong. Phillip did not care much for Mah Jong, so he listened, marvelling, to voices and music from far away in the ether through the head-phones of the wireless set Ernest had made. It was romantic to hear, far out across the dark sea and distant fields and forests, the Morse of ships like the high piping of birds migrating through Arctic zones where icebergs clashed and jarred, and whales spouted in lonely seas glowing with Northern Lights; and moving the dials, to bring in the plainsong chants of priests in some remote monastery or cathedral at Midnight Mass. How Mother would smile her childlike smile as her spirit was set free.

*

The morning joviality around the breakfast table dissipated his vague thoughts of the dismissal of Dick Sheppard; and afterwards they went to church, sitting among half a dozen other people of the hamlet while the vicar, who came from two miles away, conducted the service. Mr. Copleston, looking unusually serious in his suit of early Edwardian cut, with high lapels to the jacket, took round the collection bag. After the final hymn to the tune of the harmonium they filed out into the crisp air, and so back
to a meal of scraps; the main feast, with turkey, pudding, Stilton cheese, nuts, mince-pies, crackers and port-wine was to be eaten in the evening.

This was followed by games—ludo, draughts, and Mah Jong—during which Ernest went upstairs to get the ‘prizes’, from a large box of chocolates, Ingpan and Bounderbury’s best, which Mrs. à Court Smith had given him for a Christmas present. The box was taken from its hiding place under Ernest’s bed, and each person was invited to make one selection, after which the box went back under Ernest’s bed, where it remained until emptied by the owner while lying in bed and reading, night after night, one of his presents—
Stories
of
Horror
and
Mystery.

When the others had gone to bed Phillip walked alone under the stars, thinking of that Christmas night in the wood below Wytschaete, the perforated jam-tins filled with glowing charcoal, the frosty moonlight, the miracle of silence over the battlefield broken only by distant singing from the German trenches. He thought of the lonely Christmas his parents must be having, and returned exhausted, longing to be with Lucy as he lay alone in the chalet.

*

There was a party on Boxing Day at the house of the Squire. Thirty guests for dinner in a lofty panelled room lit by silver candelabra; merriment and laughter at the long table; hide-and-seek in the great warren of the upstairs rooms; rushing down corridors and landings where statues, armour, and other objects were likely to crash dreadfully as one fled away from capture or in pursuit of other players. He felt happy to be in such free-and-easy company, proud of Lucy’s beauty, reassured by Mr. Copleston’s handsome and distinguished demeanour. How foolish he had been to feel depressed because the old gentleman had merely indicated that his taste in spiritual and literary matters was his own!

After the New Year there was the Hunt Ball of the local pack. The Boys did not dance, also they were having what Tim called “an all-night session” in the Workshop. Phillip took Lucy in the borrowed Tamplin. It was the first car he had driven since Bédélia in France. The roads were icy; the tyres of the car were narrow; the burners of the acetylene headlights sooted up, causing the light to be weak and uncertain; he was nervous of the long and flimsy wheelbase, which so easily could overturn into ditch
or hedge along the narrow, winding road to Shakesbury. They left for the dance not having had dinner, after a sandwich lunch and scarcely any tea; supper would not be until midnight. It had been his idea to go alone, and not in a party with some of her friends. As they drove slowly through the frosty night he knew that he should have taken her first to dinner at the Royal Hotel, and gone to the dance happy and fortified instead of hollow and doubtful. In his low physical state the misery underlying the privileged, gay assembly was apparent to him—the unemployed in the coal fields of Wales, and the general sense of frustration among the workers already talking of a General Strike.

On the way home in the early hours of the morning he stopped the Tamp by a coppice and began to talk of how he had failed Willie at the crisis of his life, even as he had let down Barley by not acting on what he had felt all along—the utter incompetence of both doctor and midwife. “I shall no doubt behave in exactly the same way to you, neither one thing nor the other, but a half-and-half person in all I do or don’t do. I even allowed your very natural and kind reassurance to me, that Arnold Bennett remark, to stop the writing of my book.”

Lucy sat quietly beside him, and when he said he was sorry she put her arms round him and told him not to worry. They drove home, had some hot milk, and the ghosts temporarily departed.

The next evening, determined to make his life orderly and regular in habit, he went on with his book from where it had been broken off before Christmas. Mr. Copleston had allowed the use of his library (for some reason the dining-room which had been about to be an office was now the dining-room again) and while he and others sat at night in the far room, reading or playing games, Phillip retired to the other end of the house, and sat in a small space surrounded by shelves of books; cabinets of eggs, shells, coins; guns, swords, daggers, animal heads and other relics of a full life about the world. There was a model railway-engine, to scale, in copper, brass, and iron, which Pa and ‘Mister’ had made in days before their friendship had become commonplace and then void. There was a walnut cabinet of drawers filled with trays of salmon and sea-trout flies, many eaten by moths. There was a glass-covered case of fossils and geological specimens. Among the prints on the walls was one of Pa’s old home, with its lake, deer park, and house of half a hundred rooms.

By now he had an idea of the declining fortunes of the family. Pa, being a younger son, had inherited nothing from his father; but from an Aunt had come the Oxfordshire mansion, together with a dozen farms comprising the estate of two thousand acres; but the inheritance was subject to various charges, which, in the decline of agricultural values in the later decades of the nineteenth century, could not be met without reinvestment of capital produced from the sale of some of the land. Grandpapa, said Lucy, had been rather extravagant, and when he had died Pa had had to sell the rest of the estate with the land and the house, to pay his debts. Even so, he had been able to live as a country gentleman until the war of 1914–18.

“Ah,” said Phillip. “I remember Aunt Dora telling me that Napoleon, when he was captured in 1815, made a prophesy. He said, ‘Britain will rue the day, in a hundred years’ time, that she refused to work with my system. For there will arise a nation, Prussia, who will challenge the British sea-power for the second time.’ Napoleon was only a year out, Lulu, for 1914 was ninety-nine years after that prophecy! Do you remember telling me that the greater part of Pa’s money was invested in Russian bonds?”

What a story, he thought, as with imagination stirred and flowing freely he prowled about the room staring, under the large hanging oil-lamp, at the relics of a bygone age, finally to sit down at the oak table to continue his story of the family in the house by the sea.

But nothing would come. He got up from the table, glancing half-seeing at the books, at the birds’ eggs—Mr. Copleston had said he might look at them, “if you care to do so”—and crouched down by the hearth to alter the coals in the fire. Anything but write. He could not write in that room; it was stored with too diverse a life; it was too rich with the past; there was too much for present distillation by the imagination. So he sat at the table again, feelings of frustration growing in him.

Was it because too many voices were speaking from the past? Or was it because Pa, trying to read Dostoevski’s
The
Brothers
Karamazov
, which he had lent him, had put it aside remarking that it was “the most frightful nonsense”? It was a copy of the Everyman edition; Phillip had not yet read it himself, but only of it, in a magazine called
The
New
Horizon,
where Wallington Christie had declared it to be a book of deep spiritual significance.

It was so with other books; half-hesitant attempts to discuss
them had met with no response among his new friends, except Tim, the youngest, who was always ready to listen, but had little to say beyond occasional exclamations such as, “By Jove, I must read that!” “Yes, of course I see what you mean,” and once, “Absolute confounded ass!”—this last referring to the reviewer of Keats’ poems in
The
Edinburgh
Review,
who, said Phillip, had “advised Keats to go back to the gallipots”. Phillip liked Tim, an attentive and willing younger brother; and yet, even as they talked together alone, in kitchen, workshop, or the potting shed, he felt himself becoming weary, and a suggestion of impatience came into his manner. After all, Tim’s life had been so different from his own. But was that the only reason?

In the sitting-room at night among the others, Phillip had ceased to utter the thoughts that held him. References to Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Barbusse, Bernard Shaw—whose play
Saint
Joan
he had seen in London, and been deeply impressed by its balance and interpretative fairness to all the characters—watching the scenes on the stage with wonder and emotion, while ideas for his own work clarified in flash on flash—references to these writers induced monosyllabic utterances of “Ah”, or “H’m”. From the mental habit of transposing himself so that he might see from the eyes of others (a process started on Christmas Day of 1914) he saw himself, if not as a bore, at least as one who interrupted the settled ways and thoughts of the family. This did not upset him unduly: but it was the cause of evening retirement to the library.

*

One night as he sat in that musty room his thoughts wandered to the sky of the snow-fields above the Pic de Ger; the azure sky above the peaks with their immense loneliness; the sudden deep blue of the gentians growing out of the grey grass where the snow had melted, the clear blue air far above ordinary human life, the clear and deep blue eyes of integrity, of beauty that was truth, a clarity he would never find again, far surpassing the tenderness of a charitable woman. With the feeling almost of levitation he felt the room to be full of the dust of things, of life outworn, of the spirit uncreated; and as he got up from the chair with a stifled groan, to seek Lucy with whom to plead for understanding, he saw the door opening, and she was standing there, a little hesitatingly.