Lucifer Before Sunrise (62 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Phillip went to South Devon, thinking that only one course was open to him, to go out with the ebb-tide while bathing. The spring tide had pressed high up the shore, and was lapsing as swiftly, leaving deep, irregular pits where more than one summer visitor before the war had suddenly found himself out of his depth and carried
seawards
.
Field
above
Malandine.
One thought recurring through the years has run something like this:—To arrange my death so that the body is never found; to be forgotten by family, relations, friends. My lungs quiescent after sighs: a vacuum in which forever I am lost: but a dim light to the living?
Billy
in
the
bomber
over
Germany
at
night.
The pocked, spattering, luminous-spotted pus opening on the earth below thousand-bomber raids. Strings of flak rising up like threads of
virus from the shining pus of hate; hate of the old for the new, of decadence for resurgence. Death, torture, the Black Plague became phosphorescent in the 20th century,
A.D.
Billy
over
the
Alps.
Bomber exploding amidst roar of flames out of which pop cannon shells and flares, streaming up and curving away from calcined bones glowing amidst fluttering flames gnawing away powdered white metal somewhere in those stony places just below the snow-line, where gentians are springing; but no longer for me in the footsteps of Proserpine.
When he reached the shore he saw two people in the sea. One was waving her arms while standing in water to her waist. The other was farther out in tumbling white surges. The woman cried, “My husband is drowning, please help him! I can’t swim!”
Phillip swam out. Waves were breaking and pounding at shoulder height. The sand below was pitted. One moment he could stand, another moment he was swept off his feet. Never a strong swimmer, he kicked out towards the man. Reached him,
shouted to him to hold his hand, and remain still. “Float upright!” Then he tried to tow the man in. The back-wash bore him under. He held to the hand by a climbing-grip, curved fingers to curved fingers. Wave after wave washed them under; then a large ninth wave tumbled them towards the shore. Phillip managed to stand up; and, bearing against an ebbing wash, and moving on with its bouncing successor, to come to shallow water.
While I was running into the sea I saw the face of ‘Spectre’ West before me. Was it my subconscious mind presenting a picture at that moment of shock? (for I thought I might be drowned, being a poor swimmer—I wasn’t in the least afraid, one isn’t when self is forgotten for others). The picture was of an incident in the spring of 1918, when our hospital ship
Persia
struck a mine. Westie gave his life-jacket to O’Gorman, my batman. His shattered leg was in a wooden cage and while floating, his head went under. He was drowned. I was blinded by mustard gas, and didn’t see anything. For months I thought it was my fault, because I’d told O’Gorman to remove all his equipment; but later I learned that O’Gorman never had a cork jacket in the first place.
I believe that Westie is saying to me,
Hold
on.
His new friends walked with him upon the cliffs he called Valhalla.
They sat with him in his field. With their help he began to tidy up the rubble of the Gartenfeste.
“You’ll get compensation, Phillip. Only put it in the hands of a good lawyer. See you tomorrow. And I can never thank you enough …”
That night he lay contented under the stars, on a groundsheet, in blankets. A rosy mist of dewy grasses and wildflowers outside the shelter, beyond the embers of his fire. He had the dark lantern beside him, where he could touch it; on top of the pile of his journals, faithful sentry. Lantern and journals—he was safe!
The bell notes of the church clock in the village floated over moonlit mist. He lay there between sleeping and waking, feeling the ache of failure lapsing from his bones. It was midnight by Greenwich time, two o’clock by Double Summer Time which had ruled the Island Fortress in war.
How fortunate he was, indeed! Most people had suffered more than he had, during the past six years. He had the dark lantern, the journals. He would be seeing his friends on the morrow. And with Joe the Dunkirk man as steward, and a milking herd under ‘Ackers’, the farm would pay well.
He drifted through Time. The reeling song of a nightjar
threaded the earth’s white cloak. Billy wandered into his thoughts, his love went out to the quiet, still figure lying on the snow-line below the Alpine precipice, baptising it anew in tears. ‘When we cease to weep, we cease to live.’
O
God
,
help
me
to
do
the
right
thing.
He touched the lantern; he would see his new friends soon.
The abyss receded: death-wish wherein Billy was lost.
God
help
me
to
do
the
right
thing.
Sometime later he left the shelter and watched the moon hanging in the land-drifted vapours of the Channel, thinking it was slightly pink, like a great salmon-egg. Those tall fronds of bracken on the incult sandy waste above the high tide; the peace of the summer day, filling the vacant places of the heart. The pale face of the over-worked, over-strained man whose strength had run out in the white water beyond the shallows, a manufacturer of coal-mine equipment in Yorkshire. The darkness would pass from the world.
Dolor
decrescit
—all grief passes. The old
clichès
were true.
Lighthouses
were flashing on ocean’s rim: along the far coast of France, from the headlands of England. The war in the western hemisphere was over; lights were appearing, hesitantly, in the villages and towns of England, France, Germany …
But the struggle between Light and Darkness, between Heaven and Hell, continued among the constellations and their satellites, as in the souls of men who were artists. Such men were, in Hereward Birkin’s words, the lights of humanity. By the grace of God, only.
The grace of God is poetry—the spirit of love—the major spirit of Evolution …
Summer lightning, wan and silent, playing across the black stark sky. Sudden flaring sheets of soundless glowing, which
revealed
trees leaning all ways like a wood on the Somme battlefield: but with no rolling barrage of thunder: only the lisp of wind through the one pine which remained standing, lonely as a sentinel, in the south-west corner of the field.
*
The dark lantern, faithful companion of his father’s youth! He would write by its light! And returning to the shelter he fell asleep before he could light the wick.
In the morning he climbed the pine tree and listened to the summer breeze singing in the branches, while the crow cursed him from afar. He saw the Channel to the south; the tors of Dartmoor behind him. To the west lay Bodmin moor, with its strange white pyramids of china clay, like the snow peaks of the Alps.
Beyond Land’s End he saw a faint shining that was the sea horizon dipping to the tide-rips off Newfoundland, where he imagined salmon swimming up ice-cold rivers, and gerfalcons ringing above the rocks of Labrador.
The old feeling has not gone from me, the old feeling I thought dead arises again as in youth, the elements have renewed my life.
Yet the thoughts of the penumbra returned; for one morning, while the air of summer England lisped with the tongues of the pine, and whispered in the long grasses below, the same sun shining was affronted by a malevolent glint over Hiroshima in far Japan.
How strange to feel without body again, to lie with the murmur of distant waves coming from the blue of the sky, to be content with only the wavelet lap upon the sands.
Around me are many empty acres set with posts upon which the tide is gently advancing.
Rusty barbed wire lies embedded in the loose deltas under
wind-carven
dunes where my body receives the plangent sunshine, my eyes closed against the white light of the sky.
Here is peace: a man alone on the sands with the song of the larks, the cries of gulls flying high overhead, the murmur of sea on the rocks.
Each wave breaking tranquilly upon this deserted shore ends a pulse from ocean primeval. Convoys, depth-charges, agonies of men in open boats and rubber dinghies, colossal flash and spout of bomb and torpedo—I have drowned with them, I have drooped with them over oars they are too weak to move. I have known both the courage that breaks and the spirit that bears a man beyond the heaviness of air. I have lost honour and betrayed myself, I have felt affection for my enemy and been thoughtless and cruel to my wife, to my dead son—all states of one man who yet knows that such things are but momentary and slight if he be able, at last, to trust to the grace within which is his liaison with the Creator, who is, despite all, Love.
I pray, but beyond words, through what Keats called the
Imagination
, that I may arise from my entoiled and entombed self, that I may put all self-willed thought away, that I may be simple with the sun above the mirage-shimmer on the sands when the mist arises and the wavelets are seen to break in thin and fragile lines of white—my life is of these and the friends I have laughed with; of beauty seen in curve of cheek, breast, shoulder, thigh—a smile, a soft voice, a glance innocent and gentle; dark silhouettes of fishermen with their net at night when the moon is full. These and many other visions are of me, of this moment while grains of sand idly trickle through my fingers.
The waves fall gentle in summer, the sun shines, gulls cry, jackdaws beat above the jetsam line. Over my head fly a pair of ravens—those
birds always in company with each other. The cock bird croaks as he looks down on me; he croaks again and half-rolls on extended wings and flicks back again all in one movement. He is happy, he calls reassurance to his mate.
Two buzzards soar above the ravens. I hear plaintive cries from the blue halls of the wind, and once again my heart lifts with that phrase of Richard Jefferies—
I
am
in
the
midst
of
eternity;
it
is
all
about
me
in
the
sunshine.
When his friends had gone back to Yorkshire, Phillip walked far every day, striding into sunlight flowing upon cliff and hill and headland. Hour after hour above sheer cliffs, seeing below him heavy Channel waves lipping over the rocks at the base of Valhalla. There the bodies of drowned airmen, soldiers and sailors had drifted during the past five years, to sink into caverns where lobster and King Conger ruled.
Then the south-west arose, to crash the tides upon those rocks, and hurl up the spray hundreds of feet, so that he felt the taste of salt on his lips. His eyes winced from fragments of schist in scree, for the sea-winds were now whipping and scouring subsoil and rock upon the sheers of Valhalla. He went sideways, sitting down, like a crab down one path, and found shelter from the main blast. There among hummocks of sea-thrift on the green turf he lay and watched the gulls seeming to be flight-broken along that wild and jagged edge of the planet.
The south-west was blowing, a hundred currents met and clashed, spun and eddied and rebuffeted against stony facets of the precipice. It was a battle, the rocky cliffs assaulted by invisible rocks of air tumbling, cascading, and heaving in the vast and complicated barrage of the winds.
And as suddenly as it arose, it was all over. Ravens and jackdaws appeared, to play and sport; falling and diving, side-slipping, snooting up vertically, twirling and half-rolling, and letting out joyous croaks while the gulls had only their salt complaints to the sea.
It is as I knew it in early youth before the sky had turned to iron above that Flanders battlefield in the autumn of 1914.
It
won’t
be
the
same
ever
again
—how many times during the war had one not heard, and echo’d, that remark? Did that not mean, rather, that one felt one would never be the same again? I blamed the change on the cares, anxieties, and frustrations inherent in the so-called civilised world, which, I said, had caused the ageing of the body, and therefore
of the mind. I forgot that one has a soul, and that it lies within a man’s choice whether the soul or the little selfish ego rule his mind.
If the ego rules the mind, then the machine will rule the body. Is that what has happened among men? Mankind mastered by the machine; even in this wild and lonely place the slaves of the machine were ordered to do what no man truly wanted to do. Here they
rehearsed
invasion tactics, or patterns which were to be laid upon the foreshore of Normandy. In a few seasons sea-thrift and grasses will have filled the craters of shells which exploded here; the dove’s-foot,
crane’s-bill
and wild thyme will grow in the bullet rips across the turf; nettles spring from slit trenches, salt spray gnaw away iron stakes and barbed wire.
Within a few seasons the metal will have infiltrated as ferrous oxide and ferric chloride upon the native rock; jute of sandbag, fretted and decayed, nourish the thrift. Man makes mistakes; the earth and the elements are ready, as it were, to forgive. Air, sun, and water; the seals below me are as during all the centuries; a millennium passes, the gulls still sit on their ledges and look no larger than white dew-drops across the vast inverted cathedral of the cliffe.
Over the Channel, clouds sail in from the Azores. How then is life essentially changed? And where is the ghost of myself, of my lost youth? Am I not the same person as the boy who came here all those years ago, but with this difference: I am less unsteadfast now, because now I know what was then uncertain.
Sitting among the flowers of the sea-thrift, buoyed in sunshine and salt air of ocean, I know that the simple, the fundamental truths of life are not altered by experience, if a man keep faith with his inner belief, or essence. But I have also learnt this: that the truth of life is not to be sought when a man is tired, or stale.
For however sophisticated or disillusioned a man may think himself to be, he is, and always will be, an elemental creature: made of the elements, maintained and restored by the elements. At least that is true for me, and I am an ordinary man, composed of normal flesh, a vehicle of ordinary hopes and fears.