The Phoenix Generation (47 page)

“Well, you must agree that wars arise from a need for food, work, raw materials.”

“And from damned gangsters who want what others have got,” said Runnymeade.

“Europe has been divided too long. International money would lose its power to keep Britain on the dole if markets were stabilised by an Empire customs union. One more European war will wreck, as Riversmill has said, Western culture based on the Greek ideal. Greece was wrecked by rivalries between the city states, and the barbarians poured in.”

“The modern barbarians are Hitler and his bandits,” said Stefania.

“The modern barbarians are the dupes of Karl Marx,” retorted Riversmill.

“Shut up,” said Mrs. Riversmill.

“You shut up yourself.”

Phillip turned to Stefania and said, “I respect you, not only as an artist; but surely, you, as a Polish patriot, do not want ‘Only Russian spoken here’ in your country.”

“You would prefer ‘Only German spoken here’ in your country, ‘Farm Boy’?”

“Of course not. English spoken here. I do not want to see another generation of British youths in their graves, head to head, boots to boots. I do not want to see German or Polish dead or French dead, while Oriental Commissars wait, like jackals, to grow fat on the killings.”

“The hyaena comes before the jackal, ‘Farm Boy’. For hyaena, read Hitler.”

Runnymeade, half-gloating as he looked with semi-distaste at his voided mistress, said, “Tell us what Birkin says, Maddison.”

“He says that Money is mainly in the control of those who have no national territory, whose virile qualities will always, until they
do have their own territory, be subverted. I do not know about this myself, except to say that all money should be controlled by the Government. You will forgive me if this offends, but I am trying to answer ‘Horse Boy’s’ question.”

“What you lack is a sense of humour,” said Runnymeade.

“I have no sense of humour about war. I lost some of mine in the first battle of Ypres, and again at Loos, and another little chunk of it on the Somme, and more at Passchendaele, and finally, in April nineteen-eighteen I found myself with no more humour whatsoever. At least, no
Punch
, or British upper-middle class humour. I except George Burper’s drawings, of course. They are not patronising, but human.”

“Go on lad, go on,” said Riversmill, while Runnymeade filled his glass.

“If I speak of myself, it is because I can know only myself, who found the love of his life among the soldiers of a regiment. I was fortunate to be in a good crowd, where I was shown great friendship, or, as I know now, love.”

“Now you are your true self, ‘Farm Boy’,” said Stefania
Rozwitz
. “I know what truth is, let me remind you. I—Rozwitz—who danced with Vaslov Nijinsky in ‘Le Spectre de la Rose’.” She put her hand on his. Phillip shook it before kissing it and returning it to her lap.

“One moment,” said Runnymeade. “Do you mean to tell us that you found this feeling of brotherly love for the Germans?”

“I found it first in the Christmas truce of nineteen-fourteen, then in my regiment, where the
camaraderie
helped us all to carry on.”

“Were you afraid?”

“Of course. But I was not alone any more.”

“Then why don’t you look forward to another war, to find more brotherly love for the Nazis?”

“I’d like to say one thing more, before the silence of personal opinion which may descend at the beginning of September.”

“Why September?”

“The corn harvest will be in. And how wise and foreseeing is Birkin, whom I have the
honour
to know—a soldier of
nineteen-fourteen
like myself—how wise is he about the Jews. For years he has declared that they must be given territory within the British Empire, where they can settle and find their soul again as a nation rooted in its own soil. This soil must not be Palestine, because that would upset the Arabs, whose territory lies south of
Russia, with outlets to the Mediterranean. Who holds the
Mediterranean
holds the world, says Birkin. No! The Jews can be settled in the British Empire somewhere, and so fulfil the age-long vision of their prophets.”

“Birkin’s a great man,” cried Riversmill. “I heard him speak in the Corn Hall at Fenton. He’s a man alone, he won’t work with other people, that’s his trouble.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Runnymeade. “I heard him, too, and thought it a lot of hot air. I knew his father, and he was a waster. And I say, A plague on all your politics. Drink up.”

“Birkin told me recently that every thug and crook in England had been through his party. Of course it’s easy to see now where he went wrong, and others with him left over from the
battlefields
. If he had remained in Parliament, he would have had a platform where his speeches would at least be reported. Now, as you know, practically no paper prints them.”

“It’s the advertisers who control newspapers,” said Riversmill.

“It’s because Birkin strutted about in lion-tamer’s boots and copied Mussolini, who is a clown,” said Stefania. “But the Hyaena isn’t—he’s Anti-Christ, he’s the devil, he’s the modern Lucifer.”

“Lucifer is the light-bringer,” said Phillip.

“May I speak?” said Brother Laurence, quietly. “God had two sons. The elder, Lucifer, was arrogant, and wanted to usurp his Father’s place. The other son was compassionate, all-embracing. Lucifer wanted a better world immediately. God said, ‘You do not know my difficulties, the forces against me, my son. Your brother Kristos, has compassion for all life. He is love. And love will prevail when deep, dreadful night has absorbed all your light, my son.’”

“Did you hear that?” said Stefania. “After hearing that, never again talk to me of Hitler as a light-bringer, ‘Farm Boy’! A false light, a false dawn, ‘Farm Boy’—like those Northern Lights you told me about last winter, all electric storms. Very attractive, but no good as a steady constructive power. Your derided Money at least builds dynamos and power stations where electricity is harnessed, and not allowed to flash and terrorise and burn.”

“Very interesting,” said George Burper. “Very interesting indeed. I’ve never heard more interesting talk anywhere.”

“We must agree to differ, ‘Farm Boy’,” said Stefania; and before she could cover his hand with her own, Phillip took hers and shook it in a friendly fashion. The defensive feelings due to her proximity went from him, and he felt compact once more.

“Well,” said Runnymeade, “let’s all drink to the damnation of Schicklgruber and his gang.”

“To a Greater Britain!” cried Phillip.

As they left the table Melissa said, “Who’s for a swim, ‘on such a night as this’.”

“I am,” said Phillip.

*

In the dark days that lay ahead he was to remember that last peace-time party at Captain Runnymeade’s—George Burper and his wife so quiet and happy, truly joined together by God, and Riversmill and his wife, and Brother Laurence saying, “Do not turn your talent into salt, Phillip. Your inborn love of the Kristos is your greatest protection—as it is mine—and you cannot rid yourself of it if you would.”

*

There was the warm, moonless night outside, so still that it seemed natural to be walking in silence on the causeway across the marsh to the sandhills and the sloping shore beyond. At first he had been a little uneasy, for he had no bathing suit, and Melissa carried hers, with a towel; but the night was dark, the stars dim and small, and she seemed no more than a wraith as she moved unspeaking over the short turf of the golf-course beside him, and through a valley of loose sand to the shore, where the darkness seemed to be thick. Whither had the wraith disappeared? He did not know, he had lost her until her voice spoke quietly beside him and even the wet sands beneath the feet were unseen as they went towards the soft crashing waves; and entering, he saw that his feet were silvery, and wading farther in, that he had silver-green streaks for legs; and lying in warm water, in criss-cross movement with the short breaking waves of the North Sea, his hands were fins glimmering with silver.

He had no body, no feelings, he was a shadow, a water-sprite, the spirit had found its true home.

The tide was scouring along the shore to the east, and lying in two to three feet of water he was carried eastwards in the current, his face sometimes awash in a short cross-rush of breakers. The waves when rising were streaked electrically, they crashed in silver stabs and slashes on his body. Was that a seal with gleaming head rising near, was that a fish in the turmoil of waves? The silver streaks were Melissa. She was beside him in the wavelet rush, they were two glimmering water-things, drifting, drifting in the marvellous phosphoric sea of summer’s midnight.

Never had he seen such a liquescence of light. The naked body of the nymph beside him was of a rare greenish pallidity, a thing entirely apart from ordinary life as the wash of waves bore them along, caressingly in greenish-silver water which had no undertow, no power to hold or to misdirect those pale watery forms which moved with the tumbling tide aslant the shoaling shore. Sometimes she glimmered among leaping sea-trout, a dim seal-like shape blurring into invisibility and revealed by a hand, a lock of hair, a shoulder laved in silver.

And the marvel was that this beauty of light was only of the warm sweep of water; it belonged only to the sea; this was baptismal beauty of the waters of night; for when he rose to his feet, all was dark. And once again the water sprite was an invisible presence beside him.

But night, yielding to all motion and bearing effortlessly the spirit over the shore to the sandhills a mile and more from where they had left the sea, had its wonders, too. There was no self, no thought, no problem, no feeling: only a calm everlastingness of the elements which, of their immense generosity, had created life. Desire, hope, striving, all were solved: the spirit was paramount, beyond even the beauty of words. For no word had been spoken between the time of coming on the shore, and leaving it an hour, or was it two hours, later. So it was, he thought, before he was born; so it would be, after he was dead.

He took her hand outside the garden gate of Marsh Cottage, whispering, “I won’t come in. I expect they have gone to bed,” for the upper windows were lit up. “Good night, Melissa.”

“Good night, Phillip.”

Covering the hand that he still held with his other hand he drew her nearer, kissed her cold cheek before touching her lips with his, then he was walking away in the soft dust of the lane, drawn by the thin wire of pain.

He could not face another heart-ache, which was all that falling in love had ever meant to him. Except with Lucy, whom he had never truly loved, or so it now seemed.

He wondered if Runnymeade, in alcoholic impotence, was in love with Melissa, a mental mistress of the hopeless spirit.

O Melissa, Melissa! Perfect sensibility; wordless understanding. Dare he still hope that his loneliness, his melancholy, his lost-
ribache
, would be salved by union with one of the generation
following
his own, a generation of sun, not like his own, of half-sun? Had he found his Isolde, Lily incarnate, Barley come again?

Looking back from rising ground, he saw that the sitting-room window was now alight. After hesitation he returned down the lane, giving himself the excuse that he must thank his host.

Re-entering the garden he had to pass the window. There was a gap between the curtains. He looked in, to see who was still up. He saw Melissa sitting in a chair. Runnymeade was kneeling before her. He was holding her two feet in his hands to kiss them. All this he saw in a brief glance before he turned away and walked over the lawn, keeping his back to the lighted window.

*

He drove along the serpentining coast road through the warm air of the summer night, jacket flung in tonneau, tyres
whimpering
on corners, headlights revealing the flint wall of the great park and then the cottages of the back road of the town, and home past fields of barley and sugar beet.

*

Watchers of the Observer Corps, Air Raid Precaution volunteers, regular members of the Police Force, Special Constables, and others reported by telephone that an open car, approximately one hour after midnight, was being driven at speed, with headlights full on, between two points on the coast—references and other particulars being given. An abbreviated report in due course reached M.I.5 in London.

The barley was not yet rotten-ripe. Thistle-seeds were floating, set free by King Harrys, the twittering gold-finches of the East Anglian legend of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

To Phillip delay was relief. Harvest time was crisis time: war when the harvest was in? He was troubled by doubts about the man whom for years he had thought to be the only true pacifist in Europe.

He carried in his pocket a copy of a speech made by Hitler to the Reichstag on May 21st, 1935. Reaching the creek where his dinghy was moored, he sat down and re-read the peroration.

To escape—to be free—to be young again—to live, to love for ever. Sea-lavender, the misty blue of Melissa’s eyes. The sea drew him, with memory of the phosphoric night. Why had he not come more often to this water which gleamed with sky as it moved up the channels of the marsh?

He set mast and rudder, put the anchor in the bows atop the coiled rope, and with leg-o’-mutton sail gently shaking glided down the creek, centre-board drawn up because the lapsing water was barely a foot deep. Lying back with tiller under arm, clad only in khaki shorts, dreaming of hair pale like the fine-ground sands of his destination. The bow touched, and leaping out he pulled the boat beyond the wavelets curling silently upon that windless shore. A whiteness of terns with scarlet mouths screamed and flapped a few inches away from his face as he walked among their young almost ready to fly.

There were Arctic terns, the colour of chalk and soot; and one roseate tern, a lone hen which had mated with an Arctic bird. From the watcher of the Yarwich Naturalists Society he had learned that the President, an aged man of eighty-two years living in the town, had ordered that the chick be killed when
half-grown
. It must not be killed when small, the parents might lay again, and so manage to bring off another hybrid, unwanted by the Society.

Phillip had written an article about that, ending with an ironical supplication to the President of the Society, which neither owned nor leased the sandhills of the Point and certainly did not own the wild birds of the air, to spare this solitary chick which was not responsible for its parents’ sin.

The article, printed by
The
Daily
Crusader
, had made him locally unpopular. Who is this fellow from nowhere to lay down the law to us, the President had asked at a meeting convened to see what could be done about such unwelcome publicity. The paid watcher had made it known in the local inn that if the man who wrote the article came on the Point again he would pitch him back into the sea.

The fledgling was not in the same place. He sat down to watch for a tern’s breast with a pale pink tinge. He focused his Zeiss monocular. There she was, sprat in bill, dropping behind a dune with its fringe of marram grass. Walking there he saw the print of feet smaller than his own. Topping the dune he saw Melissa.

She was pale. He sat beside her. She said, “I’ve hidden it. That’s it over there. It can almost fly.”

Cries of redshank and greenshank, curlew and stint, sandpiper and dotterel filled the morning air. And the larks. The steel of the sky was being drilled by a hundred drillings, bright minute steel dust sprinkling down.

“It takes after the hen,” she said.

“Poor little Shicklgruber. He took after his mother, too.”

The tide went out. The river-water in the channel was now shallow. They walked along the sea-wall in the direction of the harbour, which was silted. No ships ever called at the quay, which was of rubble and clay raised behind trunks of oak trees driven in as piles, with hand-sawn planks spiked to the posts. Beyond stood a malting of red brick and pantiles. It was empty and silent, with other warehouses. The walls were of flint and flaked brick rose-red in the intense clear light of the sky. The port was the home of small yachts. There had been a race that
morning
; the sharpies had just made their moorings against the ebb. Now the harbour was a prospect of mud, sand and reeds.

“Are you staying on at Marsh Cottage?”

“My last day tomorrow.”

“I shall miss you, Melissa.”

“I saw your face at the window. ‘Boy’ was warming my feet, after you’d gone. He’s a kind man.”

“I should have warmed all of you, Melissa.”

“Darling Phillip——”

Hand in hand they walked back to the dinghy. The sands of the Point shelved, the ternery was afloat in mirage above the line of the sea. As they came near the end of the sea-wall a fresh breeze sparkled incoming waves. The tide had set north. It carried the dinghy at seven knots, soon leaving behind the drift of terns. The Great Barrier Sand lay to starboard. Upon this mound timbers of wrecked sailing ships stood up. Above one tatter of seaweed sat a cormorant.

Beyond the Great Barrier Sand the waves were smoothed stretches of foam.

“You’re brown all over, Phil. Why does a woman have to ‘observe the so-called decencies’?”

“Hold your arms over your head.”

He pulled off her jersey, she wore nothing under it. She was chaste, she was beautiful. She took the tiller while he uncoiled the mackerel line and dropped overboard weight and spinner. Soon a fish was tugging.

Dropping the tackle over the thwart he took another fish. He stopped fishing when six were threaded on a string, enough for the family. Then he thought of Luke and Matt and the two other men who worked on the farm. Mackerel were cheap, a penny each, he told her, sometimes two a penny, from the monger who came round in his horse and trap.

“But a gift of fresh fish is always acceptable, better than boughten fish.”

“
Boughten
, that’s a good old English word.”

She was beginning to feel small. Why did he avoid looking at her? Oh, why had she said what she had about the so-called decencies? But if he had been a little shocked, then why had he taken off her jersey? She felt cold.

“You look cold, Melissa. No wonder, with me, I’m no good.”

“You are too good, I sometimes think.”

“Why do I allow myself to be constricted, to be driven by this incessant idea to tidy up and to renew all the let-go things on the farm? People in the village are untidily happy, apart from their chronic anxiety about being out-of-work. They get by somehow, they’ve got cockle beds, and butts to spear in the creeks. Good fat fish they are, too. They get a bit of fowling in winter. And their gardens for vegetables.”

“Yes, and they’ve got the night-cart, with its smoky red lantern,
clop
clop
up the street in the darkness, tired horse, weary man—I thought he looked something like you, a good, little-boy face under his grey head—slopping contents of privy pails and creosote. All this poison spread, with ashes and broken glass and tins and other rubbish, on the glebe field, together with the blood and guts of the local slaughter house. Flies, rats and stink. Now do you see I’m with you, Phillip Maddison?”

“You’re a bloody fine girl, Melissa.” He felt his blood beginning to thrill.

Scylla
slipped and wallowed past a seal that stared with opaque eyes. The sands of the Point were now remote. Inland the
heat-misted
Great Bustard Wood quivered above the line of the
sheep
walk
bordering the marshes—the woods that would be Billy’s one day, and Billy’s son after him—and perhaps more land until it was a sizeable holding of five or six hundred acres—and a house built among the beeches and pines above the chalk quarry. And forsake poor Lucy?

She drew the jersey over her head, she seemed to know his thoughts. Then he saw they were coming near to Marsh Cottage. He poled the boat up a creek. Got on the turf with the anchor.

“Do you want to see ‘Boy’, Phillip?”

“Not particularly.”

“Let’s go back then!”

They returned down the creek, and came to a strand of shingle, and lay on their backs among pink crab legs, the white and blue and grey of shells, amidst feathers and corks and dry seaweed under the bright stare of the sun.

*

This was what he had dreamed before he came to the East Coast. Here he was at last on the marshes with Melissa, among water-filled crevasses in the salt turf, the piping of birds, remote flicker of terns dropping to rise with sprats into the pale-blue sky above hundreds of acres of sea-lavender covering innumerable islets and peninsulas made by the wandering sea, which lay in the wider creeks wherein brown ribs of ancient wrecks rested.

They were alone with the sun. The breeze had left the earth. He sat up. The marshes were vacant. Far away, half-lost in mirage, a few lone figures on distant mud-beds bending over as they scraped for the ‘blues’, the dark-winged shells of fat cockles. He lay down again.

He dreamed of the time when Billy, helped by Peter, would be old enough to take over management of the farm, of the pedigree dairy herd and the modern equipment he would build up: and he would be free to come every day and wander in the beautiful desolation of this strange archipelago of the tides, to wander at will to the salt water, and sail out to Point of Terns.
Scylla
slipping and slapping against the tide. And when the sun was risen hot, to sail inshore and sit by the marram grasses, beside the shells and corks and bleached crab-legs in the sand; lie on his back, sun on face, thinking of what he would write in the books that had lain twenty years in his mind, and always on his spirit. Wavelets grating gently on shingle, farm in order, harmony dwelling there, all British men working their best at their jobs, flag of St. George floating over Merrie England again.

“Sir Henry Royce once said, ‘Whatever is rightly done,
however
humble, is noble.’ By myself, I dream of the past, or the future. With you, I live in the present.”

*

At home there was a letter from Hurst. It was on writing paper with embossed address and armorial crest.

“I’ll have to go to London, to prevent Hurst coming here again,” he told Lucy. “Or down to Kent, where he is working for Major Bohun-Borsholder and incidentally using his employer’s personal writing-paper. I don’t want to go,” he repeated. “At the same time, this is a crisis in history. I often wish I had kept a diary all through the last war, instead of in spots. I’ve been keeping one for two years now, but most of the entries, except those dealing with farm details of crops, are what a critic of Conrad’s letters to Edward Cornelian, published about nine years ago, called ‘cries of pain’. Hard facts are best, they last longest. Though not the ‘hard facts’ of that columnist in
The
Daily
Crusader
, Tom Gamm, who is a Communist and loathes Birkin. I saw what he wrote about Birkin last week at Runnymeade’s. All observed details,
clawing
the
air
,
the
bull-roarer
,
the
contorted
face
, et cetera, but nothing about the ideas behind the words.

“It reminded me of what H. M. Tomlinson wrote about Kipling after the war, or during the war. It was to the effect that if Kipling had been the only recorder of the crucifixion ‘we would have had a picture of the smells, the crowds, the physical scene, the three uplifted figures, that would have been immortal for its fidelity to common experience; but we would have known no more about the central figure than that he was a cool and courageous rebel’. It’s
a beautiful bit of writing, but might also with equal truth be turned around to prove that Tomlinson knew no more about Kipling than he declared Kipling knew about Jesus. The fact is, Kipling hated the war. He saw it as the old men’s subconscious hatred of the young, their own fear of impotence with young women. Is this boring you?”