The Gale of the World (3 page)
Read The Gale of the World Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
The drummer caught Phillip’s eye again, gave another little salute and smile. He remembered Phillip as one of the original founder-members with Sir Piers Tofield, Mr. Archibald Plugge. and other gentlemen of what he called the ancient régime of the pre-war. He watched Phillip sit down at a table, unfold the evening paper, glance again at the front page; put the paper aside. The drummer thereupon leaned over and said to the pianist, “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.”
Hearing the music, Phillip re-entered the present. So the
drummer
remembered! He ordered a pint of bitter and a bottle of brown ale; put down the glasses on the top of the piano, and stood there, smiling.
“Good to see you again, sir!” said the drummer, taking the brown ale. “One of our stalwarts, if I may say so.”
“Thank you for remembering my favourite tune!”
The pianist drank from his pot, and then came Rachmaninov’s marvellous white music. Gone black thoughts of the ebb-tide swirling down under Chelsea Bridge to deep oblivion of Thames estuary. No, never yield to grief. Never hurt Lucy and the children. The divorce was to be heard in two days’ time. Empty formality, dead words, no contesting the charges of desertion and cruelty. The ghost of old times, when I lost my heart. I must see Lucy when it’s all over—if it will ever be all over—
O’Callogan came across the floor. “You’re wanted on the
telephone
, my boyo.”
The hall porter of the Barbarian. “Sir Piers Tofield has just called in. He says will you meet him at the Swallow Dive, sir.”
“How was he, George?”
“Seemed all right to me, sir. Shivering a bit, coming from the Far East, so I took him up to the bar where he had one drink and then left, sir.”
Phillip got on the wrong train. Charing Gross. Take taxi. Quick, quick! Down the stairs. German dugouts on the Somme had forty steps. Intelligence reports of thirty yards depth never reached Army staff. “The preliminary bombardments will destroy all enemy field-works.” They didn’t. Hence sixty thousand
casualties
on July the First. History hadn’t yet caught up with that. I must write my war novels—
“Sorry, sir, but your friend is barred after last night. Told me he was going down to your club, sir, the Barbarian, is it?”
When Phillip returned, the professor was handing an envelope, addressed to the Chairman of Committee, to the night porter who had just come on duty. Phillip said, “May I speak to you a moment, privately? I want to apologise for spoiling your supper.”
Whereupon the professor asked for the envelope to be returned, tore it to pieces, and turning to the younger man, said, “Say no more, my dear fellow! I must tell you that the war hit hard many of my friends who died in the concentration camps. Their genius lies in ashes.”
“I do assure you, Professor, that had I been in Germany during the war and seen little children being thrown into crematoria flames, I’d have gone in after them.”
The professor thought this to be of the lunatic fringe of the fascist attitude compounded of 1914–18 war-exhaustion, whence death-wish, megalomania and exhibitionism; but offered his hand warmly, having seen tears in the younger man’s eyes. Then he went to the lift, to play poker.
Jubilantly Phillip leapt up the wide main stairway, two and three red-carpet’d treads at a time, to the bar. He entered quietly, and so heard what a labour M.P. was saying.
“We’ve got Maddison! I’ve two witnesses who heard him
saying
that the horrors of Belsen were caused by Allied bombing, which destroyed all public utility systems including sewerage, transport, and food haulage which led to typhus! As peace isn’t yet signed, this is giving comfort to the King’s enemies, so he’s virtually in the same category as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’!”
Phillip returned down the stairs, quietly, to spend the next hour and a half—with several interruptions—composing a letter.
*
My Dear Professor,
I was much moved by your magnanimity towards me in the Club tonight. I thought your words had a Churchillian quality. Did he not say, after the Boer War, when speaking up for our (then) late enemies, Botha, Smuts, and others,
“The
grass
grows
green
again
upon
the
battlefield;
but
on
the
scaffold,
never.”
Churchill has written some of the splendid prose of the century, which means that he has received some of its finest thoughts.
In the days before the nominal rule of the commonplace, uncommon men were able to be uncommonly chivalrous; and thus the rancours of the South African war were transmuted into respect and amity—and loyalty. How proud I am as an old soldier that Smuts is now a Field-Marshal of the British Army!
He was preparing to continue when the door into the Silence Room opened and a tenor voice was heard singing softly,
“Your tiny hand is frozen
Let me warm it into life”
and the tall figure of the night porter, who had just come on duty, entered. Phillip ignored him. That night bird, who called himself Globe-Mornington, could be a nuisance. He was an oddment of the times, which were in polluted flux. Before the war a minor operetta star, the night porter now cleaned the club premises, and some of the members’ boots outside bedroom doors, in an erratic manner. Thus sometimes he was to be seen, by some late reveller, wearing a grey-blue Ruritanian hussar’s jacket and dolman,
together
with trousers of the same shade, with broad red stripes down the outside seams. While he did not treat those members of the club who had been elected under Drama (which included all sorts from Shakespearean actors to panto comics) with
incivility
or in an over-bearing manner, Globe-Mornington was wont to assume the air of a superior
artiste,
with added advice to members to enjoy themselves on all nocturnal occasions. (He sold miniature bottles of black-market spirits). Sometimes snatches of Italian opera were to be heard about the corridors of the upper bedrooms, once attics occupied by the servants of a most noble marquess.
“Bless your heart, you’re working late, aren’t you? What is it this time, seagulls behind your plough, or your defence as a club criminal? Though it’s none of my business, of course. I suppose I’m paging you, one of your friends has just rung you up, I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, seemed a little
incoherent. Sears or Cheers I think he said his name was, anyway he’s on his way to some club or other, what was it now? You know more about these places than I do, the Medical Club I think it was. He says if you’ve nothing better to do will you meet him at Piccadilly station at half-past eleven. He doesn’t want to miss you this time.”
“Thank you”, said Phillip, and went on writing; while the porter picked up a copy of
The
New
Horizon,
saying, “May I look at this, sir? I heard from Mr. Osgood Nilsson that Wallington Christie, the editor and pacifist, wrote in here that the atom bomb should be dropped on Moscow and the sooner the better.”
“I’m going to edit it now.”
“My word, sir, aren’t you taking on another load of mischief?”
“Of course I don’t agree with that! May I read what I’ve just written? ‘O, if the war could have been stopped when Hitler went into Russia! Hereward Birkin, then in prison, wrote to me to ask Churchill to consider withdrawing from the war, arming with the might of the British Empire, and then await the victor of the Russo-German clash—if any. For myself, I did not want any nation to lose the war; I wanted all the peoples of Europe to be friends, to be purged of their intolerances. And yet it seems that I, in my own small orbit, have not only failed in harmony as the head of a small family, but I have despoiled what I set myself to create on a few hundred acres of a farm in East Anglia’.”
“You’re trying to save the world, I can see that, sir. Well, the best of luck to you. Now about that telephone call. I think it was the Medicine Club, or something like that. To tell the truth, I couldn’t make head or tail what he said. Of course, the call may not have been for you at all, the lines get so crossed these days. It’s all these Americans in London, they will put florins and half-crowns into the telephone booth boxes. I got a haul one day when I went to telephone and pressed button B. Showers of silver, nearly half a quid, not bad considering.”
With the patience of the defeated, Phillip made a show of listening.
“Yes, as I was saying, the telephone system has more or less had it,” went on the night porter. “The other night someone asked me if I was Attlee the Prime Minister, would you believe it, and told me to scramble. Still, members of the Government are like anyone else I suppose, liable to fits of absent-mindedness. It’s the awful food we get, don’t you think? Though you as a farmer are doing pretty well, I suppose. Anyway, just in case, I thought I’d
ask you if you knew Attlee. Perhaps it was his personal secretary who wanted to ask you to accept a Cee Bee Eee. Like many other famous writers, I suppose. Commanders of the British Empire. Well, as there’s practically nothing left of the British Empire, it means you’ll be a Commander of Nothing. Not very polite is it, to infer that so many writers are as good as Nothing? Anyway, if the call was for you, this fellow said he’d meet you at Piccadilly tube station—there’s a place for queers if you like, and he’d wait there for you. Glad it’s you going and not me, at this time of night. London’s full of spivs and cosh boys, isn’t it?”
“You appear to know more about it than I do.”
“I say, you referring to me? Well, I suppose I am a bit of a spiv. I’ve got something to drink if that’s what you mean. How about a nip of brandy, or whisky?”
“I’ll have brandy, please. Don’t bother to come up with it now, I’ll come down to you.”
“Your consideration touches my heart, sir, but I cannot take advantage of your generosity. One double brandy. That’s set you back ten bob. Cash first, please. Thanks.”
“I’ll come down for it,” said Phillip, taking the lift to his
bedroom
Do you remember the events of December, 1944, when the Prime Minister, then Winston Churchill, flew to Greece, having left his bed where he was convalescent after pneumonia?
The
Times,
and most of the other British papers reproved him for interfering in the war of liberation in Central Europe. I had a card at that time from Birkin, then ill and under house arrest. He, too, like Churchill, was a man anguished for his country, lest it ‘sink into eternal night’. The card said,
Trust
Churchill;
he
knows.
For Stalin is a dictator more terrible than any that has arisen in Europe for centuries; and owing to
American
inexperience it looks as though there is nothing to stop the 200-odd Soviet divisions now in Poland and East Germany from advancing to the northern coast of France, There were 11,000 guns bombarding Berlin during the last battle. When the city fell, rape and sadism preceded slow murder. Neither those ‘war criminals’ nor their Russian Generals are being tried at Nuremberg.
A knock on the door. Mr. Globe-Mornington entering with tray holding tumbler, miniature bottle, and large jug of water.
“Don’t let me interrupt your love letter.”
And singing
The
flowers
that
bloom
in
the
spring,
tra-la!
the night porter left the room.
What of the so-called Allied War aims? We are impotent to do anything about the loss of Poland’s integrity; Czechoslovakia also is absorbed; and Jugo-Slavia (by correlation). Greece, going that way, through civil war, meant the end of Great Britain, or her spheres of trade and influence maintained by her naval and other powers.
From the view-point of those who feel that such powers as finance and service-strength are the only realities and basis of life, of Britain ruling the waves, the signs were, to both Churchill and Birkin, alarming. For if a Napoleon, a Hitler, or a Stalin, unites the economy of Europe and makes it self-supporting, independent of bills of lading and loans and imports, it spells the doom of Great Britain. For this is what the war was about; it was not directly about
Synagogues
burned down or heads shaved or Catholics saying Mass or anything else which the man in the street was told, since that was ALL he can comprehend. The war, was, and remains, an economic war; and historically speaking, the misery of a generation is less in eternity than a wave expending itself on a rock. The European wave breaks; and is no more.
A whistle pierced the attic. It was the blower—relic of servants’ quarters from the butler’s pantry in the days of the most noble marquess. Phillip pulled out the whistle and listened at the rim of the pipe.
“Globe-Mornington here, sir, from the bowels of the building. I’m worried about your friend Squeers—someone has just rung up to say he’s about to resume his ride of the Inner Circle—all on the same fourpenny ticket, round and round, I gather, until closing time. Marvellous isn’t it what you can do underground on fourpence. Anyway, Steers will look out periodically for you at Piccadilly, on the Inner Circle, he’ll wave a banana at you from the open door of his carriage. Right? Right!’
The pipe ceased to whisper, and Phillip plugged back the whistle, before reading aloud what he had written.
“‘With Stalin holding the Dardanelles and Gibraltar, Britain becomes ‘a disused air-craft carrier lying off the coast of Asia’, its power minimised, its ports decaying, its factories idle, its people in civil war. Where will the socialistic sympathisers of the ‘gentle classes’ be then? Where was the tolerant Kerensky in 1918?’”
The whistle gave a bleak note.
“Sorry for troubling you, sir, but I feel I must correct a faulty impression I think I gave you—to wit, in one word—banana! Shows how reading the papers brain-washes you, doesn’t it? Bananas are ‘news’ just now. It was a
bandanna
Squeers said
he’d wave to you. Bandanna—an Irish potato-pickers
handkerchief
, I think is the right description.”
