The Gale of the World (19 page)

“Have you seen Mr. Maddison today?”

“No miss. He appears to have taken to the simple life like Leo Tolstoi.”

“Has anything happened to him?”

“Tolstoi? Oh yes. World fame, miss. And to think he never even bought a railway ticket for his last journey on earth!”

“I mean Phillip Maddison! Is he dead?”

“Dead? Not him, or should I say he? No miss, I was referring to the late Count Leo Tolstoi. He seems not to have possessed the wherewithal for his fare, and didn’t like to risk a platform ticket unlike that chap—”

“Cut!” cried Laura. “I must find out about buses!”

“You’ve got twenty minutes to get to the bus station at the Strand over the bridge before the next bus leaves, miss. Mr. Maddison’s right as rain miss, so not to worry. Will you be staying here? We need someone to cheer us up. Anyway, I’ll tell the temporary housekeeper, that’s me, to have your room got ready. And would you like the groom, that’s me too, to saddle-up the pony for you? I’m sorry I can’t bring the Bentley to meet you, I’m standing by to collect his Lordship on his return to
terra
firma
—”

“Is the turning off for Shep Cot at Barbrook?”

“That’s right, miss. You go over the bridge there and follow your nose up the lane. I understand it climbs steeply and twists about but when you go through the last gate to the common you’ll see Mr. Maddison’s hide out. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You can’t miss it.”

“Only half-wits unable to communicate say ‘you can’t miss it’. I
can
miss it! I’m
always
missing it!”

“You’ve got bags of time, miss. Now you get the bus from the Strand and I’ll bring the pony to Barbrook and meet you there. I need a walk to stir up the old phagocytes. As I said, I’ll meet your bus at Barbrook, it leaves in fifteen minutes, and it’s a quarter of a mile walk over the bridge to the Strand. At Barbrook you get off, see me, and I’ll put you on the way to Captain Maddison’s hermitage. Another poor fly in the spider’s web. No offence, miss, I didn’t make the world. Talking about flies, there’s a friend of Mr. Maddison’s down here called Major Piston whose mother saw one of those mysterious Unidentified Flying Objects above Oldstone Down the other day. It come down with a message from the spheres or stars, I forget which, anyway it took the old
lady up to the Seventh plane, about a book her son had written to save the world from the atom bomb—”

“You’re making it up!”

“I’ll spit through my hand and may it choke me if I am, miss. Major Piston said that the copyright belonged to Messrs. Jorrocks, or whoever it is prints the Bible, anyway the old lady took up a proof copy and our Lord gave it His blessing. It’s all right, you’ve got plenty of time for your bus.”

“And Mr. Maddison is really all right?”

“Looks very thin, miss. Doesn’t feed himself properly. So he can’t write, and it worries him. And others worry him, too, from what I hear.”

“What others?”

“Well, he’s an object of curiosity, if I can put it like that.”

“What are you trying to say? Has he got someone staying with him?”

“Not that I know of. I’ll meet your bus at Barbrook, it’s a lovely day, you’ll love riding up to the Hut Circles. There should be a thermal rising off The Chains by then—all that cotton grass
drying
—All right, keep your hair on, miss. I was about to say that if you look up you may see his Lordship going round and round like a falcon waiting on, as bird-watchers say. Are you still there? Hullo! Hullo! Oh, you’ve rung off, you bitch.”

*

The war-time bus, a single-decker, was slow and old. Gears grated, carden-shaft thumped, exhaust gases came through the floor. It was market day. The bus was filled with smallholders’ wives, many with baskets on knees, and shaggy drovers with sticks. What they said was unintelligible, weather-blurred speech amidst laughter revealing teeth rotten from acid-soil water. The man from Porlock who had stultified Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the innocence of incomprehension. Small hopes for Shelley, with his Declaration on Freedom, posted up in Lynton and
Barn-staple
, before being prosecuted for blasphemy. His children taken from him by law, driven to live abroad, to drown in the waters of Spezzia—

Hardy in September 1920, writing
At
Lulworth
Cove
a
Century
Back
, where Keats had embarked for Italy in September, 1820—

Francis Thompson, in his
Shelley
essay
—

I am a puritanical harlot and my own posterity, I am weeping large-size tears for my own bones—my unwritten novels. Where, O where, am I going, and why? People are looking at me;
looking
away; back again. Two small boys on the cracked imitation-leather of the seat opposite are staring at me like a pair of
constipated
little owls. Stuffed with gurk-making greasy Devonshire pasties; staring like two forked-radish freaks with umbrellas and bowler hats and F.R.Z.S. after their names on a Sunday morning in Regent’s Park.

She stared back at them until their gaze dropped; then she said, “Do you like riddles? What is the difference between a constipated owl and a poor marksman?” When there was no reply she went on, “Don’t you know? Then I’ll tell you. I heard it on the Children’s Hour of the B.B.G. Well, speaking only for the poor marksman, he can shoot, but can’t hit.”

The owls stared, waited unblinking.

“I’m too high-brow, perhaps? Well then, are you mechanically minded? Yes? Then here’s another question for your Brains Trust —that’s you. Tell me if the thumping under this bus is due to a worn carden-shaft, or to a loose gear-box with chipped gears—or both?”

The larger of the two boys continued to look unblinking at her, then raising crooked elbows and shoulder-blades until the lobes of his ears were touching the collar of his jacket, he spread his
hands in a slow gesture disclaiming all knowledge of what she was saying.

“They two boys be Frenchies, my dear!”

The over-weight farmwife across the gangway leaned sideways and said, while her bosom quivered with her words, “They boys be French boys, surenuff. Ay, they be. They’m on holiday like, come yurr vor learn our English.” She quivered over a basket and pulled out an apple turnover.

“Goo on, my dear, you ’ave it! You’m looking ’ungry like, you come a long way? You’m pale, my dear, now don’t ee deny your stummick, there be plenty more apples whoam!”

The food made her realise how hungry she was. The journey along winding valley lanes became pleasant, she was no longer isolated. Up and up the bus groaned and bumped its way,
following
the old coach road until it descended steeply to a village, with cottages on either side of a narrow road leading to the high moor. Grinding up in low gear, eye-smarting exhaust through the floor, steam from radiator. Her mind turning with the wheels, heaving them round—quicker, quicker—more and more
desperately
as the carbon-monoxide fumes polluted her bloodstream. Christ, let me get out, let me get out, and walk! Shoving herself past knees fat and knees nobbly, baskets and rush-bags, Laura jumped off and breathed deeply of sunlit air. And looking into the sky she saw ‘Buster’s’ glider, in a serene circle at three thousand feet. Thank God, thank God he was safe! And if
anything
had happened to Phillip, ‘Buster’ wouldn’t be gliding!

She got on the bus at the top, and sat happily looking through the window as it moved past a prospect of heathland, and afar, of azure sea and the distant coast of Wales below woolly clouds calling to mind Bards and Druids, and the magic of Merlin.

Then down, down, all the way down the valley of running waters, and there at the bend, where the bus stopped, was dear, dear Mornington holding the pony’s head, saddlery polished and even the irons shining.

*

Miranda crossed the northern slope below The Chains with Capella in attendance. Seeing smoke above Shep Cot, she laid the reins on the cob’s neck to direct it to the northern slope. Down, down a fairly steep descent, and so to a thread of water moving through swampy ground rough with clumps of purple moor grass and rush. Thus, unknowing, she crossed the West Lyn river at one of its sources.

The door of the cot was open. She found Phillip sitting by the open hearth whereon sappy oak logs hissed and fumed. He jumped up when he heard her, and took the reins to loop them through the rusty ring on the door post, saying gladly, “Do come in, dearest Coz! It’s lovely to see you!” while wondering if he dare hug and kiss her.

“I’ve baked you a plum cake, cousin Phillip. Have you finished the first number of the magazine?”

“Yes, and it’s gone to the Minehead printer. Sixty-four pages, to be sold at half-a-crown!”

He opened the parcel, to see a dark brown shrunken object that looked as if it had never seen a baking tin.

“My favourite cake! Do sit down.”

“I love this little milking stool, and the polished fire-dogs Cousin Phillip.”

“I’m going to rebuild the hearth, and bring the back forward four-fifths of the way up, and then sharply back, to limit the amount of cold air being drawn across the floor. You see, flames and smoke should enter the chimney proper through a narrow throat, like a pillar-box’s opening for letters. There’s room only for flame and smoke; no gate-crashing cold air.”

“We’ve had to have a plate glass put up below the lintol in ours, to stop it smoking. Didn’t you live like this when you first came to Devon?”

“Yes.”

“You appear to have travelled in a circle.”

“Yes, I’m now trying to round off my life.”

“Have you started the novel series?”

“My little galaxy is still nebulous.”

His eyes looked tired, so she said, “Surely a candle isn’t enough to write by at night? I mean, doesn’t it strain the eyes.”

“It does, rather. I’m thinking of having a small propeller fixed to an old motorcar-dynamo on a pole, to charge my car battery for extra light.”

“Cousin Hugh has an oil-engine to charge his batteries at The Eyrie. Have you seen his searchlight? It’s wizard. He’s got all sorts of gadgets.”

She began to feel nervous, her mind quested for something to say. They both said together, “Do you like gliding?” and laughed. Animated now, she said, “Did you see ‘Buster’ going over? He may be over again now! Come and see!”

Child-like, she took his hand and led him outside. There the
silent movement was, slowly involving itself in a wide circle on wings that seemed calmly indifferent to all life below. Then those long and narrow wings appeared to fore-shorten, to shrink, as it banked at the. turn, to resume slow movement while appearing to be not so big.

“He’s rising fast!”

“Let’s go up to The Chains!”

Hand in hand they scrambled upwards, animals following, to reach, after nearly an hour, the crest; and there to see gossamers everywhere linking stalk and fluff of cotton-grass: myriads of silken lines from tiny spiders which had cast off into the warm airs of early afternoon. The sun’s rays were everywhere in
reflection
along the threads, which in multiplication appeared as a golden tunnel ever receding before them.

“Why, they’re little money spiders!” said Miranda.

Still holding her hand, he laid it for a moment against his cheek.

“Oh Miranda, if only I could write what I feel. I can see my father now, explaining that Linyphia, the money spider, releases gossamers from its spinnerets, which the wind bears up, taking the spider with it. Do you know where I last saw them, Miranda? And thought of my father, with all the love that I never had for him when I was a boy? It was in the chalk trenches of the Bird Cage, on the twentieth of March, nineteen eighteen, the day before the great German attack on a sixty mile front. It is all around me now!” he said, tremulously, his eyes strangely bright. “That
morning
of quiet sunshine, I sitting with ‘Spectre’ West, my Colonel, after an inspection of the Brigade battle-zone, which in a few hours was to be destroyed and overrun in the German assault. Their code name for it was
Michael
. I remember thinking,’ he went on like a man possessed by the most innocent thoughts, “how your shadow went everywhere with you, it was always with you, it fore-shortened when you were asleep, it arose with you when you got up, but when you were dead it did not last long, but broke up with you. How strange I should remember it so—I feel it with almost a shock! I can remember exactly how my thought seemed to flow like poetry—it remained your shadow until leaving you it was given back to the earth of your genesis, and then your
earthbound
self was drifting on like a gossamer, beyond the wooden crosses of the dead.”

He walked away from her, possessed by happiness, feeling that soon the impulse would come, and he would bring back all, all to
life; then, returning, he saw tears in her eyes, and heard her say, behind the visor of her long dark hair, “It is all so beautiful.” She shook away the hair, and looking at him, said, “Darling Cousin Phillip, I’ll help you—I’ll do anything—so that you can write your novels!”