The Phoenix Generation (49 page)

“If ’twas mine I wouldn’t do that,” Luke repeated. He rolled a fag. “I never seen it done,” he said, lighting the ragged fringe of British Oak shag.

“Because the ‘art and mystery’ of arable farming roundabout here is decadent.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Luke said. “But the moles on the meadow do want trapping, and Horatio Bugg pays
fourpence
a skin, unless they’re damaged by fighting. Father can catch them, if you buy the traps.”

*

Interval for tea. All the wheat was cut (by permission of Messrs. Albion Binder, Shut-Knife, Screw-Hammer & Co.). After tea they were going to set up the heavy sheaves.

“Blast,” said Matt, admiringly, “these sheaves are corny. Yar’ll git twelve coombe an acre, yar’ll see I’m right.”

Matt went down to milk the cow for the house, feed his calves, and visit the sheep on the meadows with the bullocks. Then he would return and give them a hand. As he went to the sharp descent by the walnut tree at the edge of the wood he passed Phillip. “Come a war, guv’nor, and barleys will be making——”

“There mustn’t be a war, Matt.”

Matt looked at Phillip with his dark, Brythonic eyes.

“Yar’ll see, guv’nor, barleys will be making three pun a coombe next y’ar. They did in the last war, ah, did’n’m tho’?”

He turned and walked away, like an offended prophet, for Phillip had repeated, “There mustn’t be a war, Matt.”

They carted for the first time by the New Cut. The lorry, driven by Brother Laurence (who had come for the harvest) came down with sheaves thrown into its body, the sides up.

On the way up again it passed the tractor with green trailer,
driven by Billy. Meanwhile a tumbril, with lades, was being loaded; the second tumbril waiting. Thus men in the stackyard and in the field were kept going all the time. They didn’t like the idea, since they were on wages, it was not a ‘taken’ harvest for a fixed sum. This wasn’t practicable, since amateurs were involved.

When the three fields had been carried—a small corn harvest that year—when the last sheaf was pitched on top of the last load, Matt threw his cap into the air. That was on 28th August, 1939. Phillip never saw such an old rite happen again. He thought that perhaps it would never happen again anywhere in Europe.

Phillip backed the Silver Eagle from its bay in the hovel, filled up with petrol from the underground tank in the tractor shed, and with bag packed, set off for London with Brother Laurence.

Before leaving he posted two letters: one to Sir Hereward Birkin; the second to Lucy, enclosing his
Last
Will
and
Testament.

The day was fine, with much holiday traffic on the roads, most of it little black saloon cars, so that the superior speed of the
sports-car
was of little advantage until he got to the long road leading through the Brecklands to Heathmarket and the south.

Even when Brother Laurence was not reading his office, he never spoke unless Phillip spoke first: which was seldom.

The wind on his face, the exhilaration of moving at seventy miles an hour through familiar rows of twisted pines and sometimes tall poplars lining the road, the sense of personal freedom—leaving the farm behind, corn safe in stack—made Phillip optimistic, and he felt there could not be war, despite the power to decide having been given, virtually, to the Polish Government, so that any local brawl at a frontier inn followed by shooting might be the start of it. The real cause of the guarantee to Poland, he thought, was entirely unknown to the British public. What newspaper would print an account of the cosmopolitan financial interests in the Polish mines, whose workers were paid about fourteen shillings a week? Polish coal was bought, and sold in Britain at a price far below that of British coal; hence the years of dereliction in South Wales. Money was paramount; the Welshmen might rot so long as British
rentiers
could draw a good rate of interest on their Polish investments.

Back to farming ‘interests’. The great Metropolitan Assurance Company—which twenty years before had owned his farm, then part of the estate on a foreclosed mortgage from the noble family which had possessed it for centuries—now had nine million
pounds invested in Polish utilities—electric light, trams, in
Warsaw
. Few realised what the Money System was; the minds of ordinary people were entirely occupied with their own affairs. No one set of people or class was entirely to blame for the
deteriorated
world condition, certainly not the Jews—they had merely taken advantage of it until it was, for some of their racial purists, the return of the Golden Calf. Everyone must be allowed to see all these factors plain, if the new world of so many diversified hopes was to be made real and actual. Had not Hitler himself declared, in a speech, that of two opposing sides in a quarrel, both sides could be right?

If only Hitler could be persuaded to extend that theme, with the understanding that he had shown in private, according to Piers Tofield, in the Kaiserhof hotel in Berlin, so that each opposing section in the European division might be able to say, That is our case put for us. But Hitler had done that again and again, towards Britain: and every gesture had been countered.

What a luciferic phenomenon was that man. His self-will: a gem-hard flame of oxyacetylene cutting through steel underwater. His gaze, his double-handclasp on greeting, the instant
appreciation
of himself in that hotel at Nürnberg: as though he had been given oxygen, so that his mind had felt clear and direct: master of himself, without strain, without aspiration.

And yet, behind all the self-built will, was—fear?

Whoever
lights
the
torch
of
war
in
Europe
can
hope
for
nothing
but
chaos
…

That came from the better, truer side of the
man
behind the phenomenon of the clenched will-power, that amalgam of so many agonised contemplations upon a nation when it was in
disintegration
and dying. Behind the tensioned spring there was great sensibility, a dream of art and craftsmanship to replace mere counterfeit for greater profit. That was the side which, hearing that Chamberlain had offered to fly to see him a year before, had instantly offered to fly to England to save an older man possible air-sickness and exhaustion. Magnanimity, hope, generosity floated in that sensibility: a sensibility that easily became writhen when confronted by—professional chicanery.

What
was
the truth? People who knew said that Hitler had changed since 1935, more so since 1938. Was he, the
ragged-voiced
man, inextricably confronted by the implacable opposition
of Money, being forced on to march … through
fear
? Money’s economic blockage—‘the strangulation’—had been on some time.
Germany
must
export
or
die;
and
Germany
SHALL
NOT
DIE,
the
blue-green
flame had screamed at the last Rally. Seven million out-
of-works
had been put back to work on armaments: the vacant middle of Europe had been filled: the jigs were changed, the factories turned over to consumer goods, to … whither could they be exported? No one would, or dare, trade with such a system. Barter—or Batter.

Batter of guns, shatter of flying muscles …

How
could
that dilemma be resolved? Hitler, please do not march. Do not deny your
true
self. God, why am I not a ‘Spectre’ West, V.C., D.S.O., M.C. and bar, one eye gone, one hand off, and nine wound stripes? I would have prestige, I could hang myself up as a scarecrow, a scarewar.

I must think. If I could see Hitler, as the common soldier of nineteen-fourteen who fought the common soldier of his Linz battalion at Ypres, might I not be able to give him, the German common soldier, that amity he so desired from England—to beg him to halt his troops, and so save the two white giants of Europe, as Birkin has said, from bleeding to death, while Oriental
Bolshevism
waits on, to bring Asia to the chalk cliffs of Normandy?

It was said that Hitler now had only those about him who were afraid of hurting his feelings—afraid of precipitating one of those appalling moments of frustration and fear which came upon himself at times, as they came upon all sensitive men. Without reassurance, how could a man believe in his inspiration, that evanescent vision, indefinitely?

Hitler had said he believed in miracles; he had indeed achieved their equivalent. Would he then dismiss the offer of the common soldier’s mite?

*

And yet—would he immediately be swept aside as a nonentity if he managed to get to the Templehof airfield? Hitler had made many gestures; and every one had been snubbed. The only Englishman of the first magnitude who had treated him as an equal and been treated as an equal had been Lloyd George. But then Lloyd George had been assailed on all sides for writing, in the
News
Chronicle,
several thousand words of the highest praise and appreciation of Hitler. That had just about put paid to the
Liberal Party. Lloyd George had retracted; but he had known the truth. Lloyd George, an opportunist—a bit of a twister, but still a great man. He said one thing, he did another.

Hitler said one thing, and
did
another, it was knowledgeably said. Was he the only human being who did so? To how many men would that apply if they looked into their own souls with steady eyes? They would have to blink in the light of the inner truth. It was so much easier to blame the other fellow, to find a scapegoat, than to admit one’s own weakness.

And yet, if minds were out of tune, only disharmony could result. Once again the words of gentle, innocent, unknowing Lucy passed through Phillip’s mind. She had told him, laughingly, of what Ernest had said to her on his return to Dorset.
If
I
lived
to
be
a
hundred
years
old,
I
would
never
see
eye
to
eye
with
Phillip.
And as he thought of that final judgment of himself and his ways by one whom he had only tried to help, a sense of frustration came over him, and with the need to hold himself against the thoughts that made him mutter to himself, as he felt strength being drawn from him.

“Just a little slower, d’you mind, Phillip?”

“Of course, mon père.”

He drove steadily at fifty miles an hour, and lifted his goggles to feel air rushing past his eyes as they went between the grassy gallops before Heathmarket. By the Belvoir Arms they stopped and looked about the placid sunlit scene. Father Laurence left Phillip alone: he knew what the other man’s thoughts were.

Here Phillip had been stationed as a junior subaltern in
nineteen-fifteen
. He tried to recall the details of the outbreak of that faraway war. In London there was much excitement and cheering. There was, in the man in the street, an unspoken but implied feeling of the Royal Navy’s complete superiority over the Germans. Was there also a sense of impending tragedy? He could not recall any doubts, other than those in himself.

Was it the same war-psychosis in Europe now as in August nineteen-fourteen? Those cheering masses in London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin—the masses which, like himself, had no glimmering or comprehension of the other fellow’s point of view—were no more. Piers Tofield, who knew Germany well and who spoke the language fluently, had written that it
was
there, among the German storm-troopers: as well as a blazing determination to
resist Hitler among the young Poles of the Corridor. Poles would always march to rescue Poles, Germans to succour Germans. And atrocity stories—mob-rousers—had already begun on both sides.

He was glad that Brother Laurence was with him, as they went into an inn with a gilt ham hanging over its green door. Inside were several York hams and barrels of ale. He sat down with a plate of sandwiches, and a pint of Burton, and tried to recall how the town looked when for a month or two he had been stationed there before going out to the battle of Loos. Twenty-four years ago, almost to the day! Strings of horses being exercised by thin small lads of all ages; Royal Naval Air Service men with
Rolls-Royce
tenders fitted with pom-pom gun or searchlight, dashing about the countryside at night supposedly following Zeppelins, and sometimes stopping to fire. The R.N.A.S. mess-room was in the Belvoir Arms. Beyond the open door one could hear a Decca trench-gramophone playing
They’d
Never
Believe
Me
from the Gaiety musical comedy
Tonight’s
the
Night.
‘Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire’ the senior subaltern, over whose head in the bar he had emptied a jug of water after Baldersby had poured a whisky-and-soda over his own, and then squirted a syphon at him.

Those splendid days would never come again, or their like, he told Brother Laurence as they went out, Phillip feeling rather proud of the Silver Eagle’s lines until a small boy standing by said to another small boy, “Cor, there’s a funny old-fashioned car, ain’t it?” On the other side of the street a newsboy, running with a bundle of London mid-day papers under his arm, was crying, “Poles mobilise! Latest crisis!”

They reached the area left ugly by the maulings of London: speculative hire-purchase housing ‘estates’—all trees cut down—tens of thousands of cubic yards of coke-breeze blocks and pink heaps of fletton bricks piled up. Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is chromium fittings, radio, love with pessary, rubber girdles, perms, B.B.C. gentility and the sterilising of truth, cubic international-type concrete architecture.
Civilisation
is white sepulchral bread, gin, and homosexual jokes in the Shaftesbury Avenue theatres. Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world. Hoardings, brittle houses, flashiness posing as beauty, mongrel living and cosmopolitan modernism, no planning,
all higgledy-piggledy—thus the spiritual-material approaches to London, the great wen, Cobbett called it. Was the wen about to burst and pus to run throughout the body politic for the second time in his life?

At last the wearisome journey through dirty congested, narrow streets was over. Saying goodbye to Father Laurence—“I’ll meet you at the Barbarian Club at half-past six”—Phillip drove over London Bridge, on the way to see his father. Richard, after returning from his world cruise, had declared that he was a new man. He spent his time in the garden, and flying his box kites on the Hill. He was cutting the lawn when Phillip arrived.

“I can’t stay long, Father.”

“Well, sit down awhile, old man. How is the farm going?”

“Oh, literally uphill work. I’ve just finished the corn harvest.”

“Keep your corn in rick, take my advice. Prices will go up if there’s a war.”

“Father, if anything happens to me, will you keep an eye on Lucy and the children?”

“Why, are you thinking of going back into the army?”

“I might go abroad, Father.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Anyway, you will keep an eye on Lucy if——”

“Of course I’ll do my best, my dear Phillip.”

From Hillside Road he went to the flat in Charlotte Road where his sister Doris was living. He drank a cup of tea hastily, after being reassured that she was all right: she was teaching again, as well as receiving a small income from the money left to her by their mother.

*

Returning to the Barbarian Club he left the sports-car under the plane-tree and walked up the stone steps. It was quiet and cool inside. Nearly all the members were away on holiday. The porter was not in the lodge, so he put down his bag and walked up the stairs to the reading-room, with its wide windows overlooking the Park. No life here: only an occasional form on sofa or in
armchair
, eyes closed. There was three-quarters of an hour before Brother Laurence was due, so he went downstairs again and out into St. James’s Park.