The Gale of the World (36 page)
Read The Gale of the World Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Phillip was trying to build up a fire from the smallest beginning of one match, with which to enliven one spark on charcoal, then to blow it gently to a yellow, gem-like star; and having placed a second pennyweight of charcoal in the star-like flame, to add a wisp of dry grass, a leaf—and finally a pinch of broken larch twigs from a dead tree fallen in the plantation above Barbrook. The exquisite scent of larch smoke, redolent of boyhood
summers
and the chaffinch singing … Such child-like play with fire within a hide of little sticks would entrance him, sometimes for hours, adding stick to stick while staring into tiger-bright flames. Every fire must start with one match only—otherwise he would never be able to begin his novel-series.
Fire to Phillip was a friend: companion of frozen nights in a Flanders wood in 1914, by which he avoided frost-bite, while reliving days as a Boy Scout in Kent, always with his lone and familiar little fire, heating water in his billy-can or frying sausages in an old Boer-war collapsible pan.
*
Through the open casement Melissa saw the white-headed figure kneeling before the hearth. She tapped on the glass, the figure arose and came to the open door, saying, “Good evening!”
She thought that her face must be repugnant to him; he had not looked at her directly.
Divining her feelings, he kissed gently the scars on her cheeks. “That’s what I know you by—the stigmata of a saint.”
All she could think of saying was, “Are you sure I shan’t disturb your work?”
“Oh, I’m not working. I suppose I’ve got what Freud called a complex and your man calls a block.”
“Caspar Field is on the right track, Phillip. His philosophy is based on Blake and Jefferies.”
“Yes, Laura told me about him. Also about your accident in India. You could not act otherwise than with magnanimity.”
He put more sticks on the fire. Being dry, they soon flared. She sat on the sack before the hearth, saying “How good to see
BODGER OF GREAT SNORING is still with you! This sack, I mean. I saw it last seven years ago, in your Banyards cottage. You lit a fire in your room, and were anxious because there was no blackout curtain across your new wide window. Is this your dog?”
“Yes, called after the sack. Bodger didn’t growl when you tapped on the pane. He knows what a person is at once. You have the stigmata of a saint,” he repeated, touching the scars on one cheek. “You didn’t wash your hands of that ruined Indian soldier.”
He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand; instinctively, for a moment, she held the hand to her cheek.
“I’ll make some tea.”
He poured boiling water from the cast-iron kettle hanging from the lapping crook, into the teapot; and put three large logs on the fire. In flame-light he felt comfort; he sensed in her the same calm self-possession as of old; and taking her hand, laid it against his cheek-bone, holding it there while she turned to him, and said, with an unguarded smile hovering as though helpless upon him, “I love you.”
These words made him feel estranged. He said, “I wish I didn’t feel always so isolated, Melissa. I suppose all feeling is sublimated in me.”
“That is how all artists feel, surely, when they are in the flow of creation?”
“When one is not writing regularly, the spiritual flow rots in one.”
The tea warmed them.
“Phillip, I want to help you. May I ask questions?”
“Of course!”
“What is stopping you writing?”
“I suppose a general sense of loneliness and failure.”
“Haven’t you felt like that nearly all your life?”
“I started very young to draw away and live in my own world.”
“From your parents?”
“Yes,
and
my two sisters.”
“That’s unusual. An elder, big brother—”
“They used to laugh at my feelings. In childhood my eyes easily brimmed with tears—”
“They do now!”
“May I give my reasons, even if they are camouflage?”
“Of course.”
“I remember one reason, or rather cause. When the swallows were about to fly away one autumn, I felt it was summer’s end, and I was desolate. I told them this while we were having
breakfast
. My younger sister pointed at my eyes and said ‘Cry-baby, cry-baby!’ She was, of course, merely imitating our father, for my being unmanly. In his Victorian eyes I was creepy-crawly,
namby-pamby
. My consequent evasiveness was a mark of degeneracy in his eyes.”
“You resented your sisters’ attitude to your tears?”
“Yes.”
“But not your mother, who was gentle and sensitive, you once told me.”
“I became offset from all at home, and lived in my own private world, giving my affection to wild birds. I was so happy, too, in the countryside, alone with my bicycle. Yet self-knowledge, as your Diaphanetic ‘processing’ reveals, cannot help, by itself, to replace what is lost—a natural spontaniety in love. I can love, in my head, any girl who attracts me, but I am stopped still, unlike most men, when, I suppose, I am expected to go further.”
“Because you are afraid of being, in your father’s word, ‘unmanly’?”
“Not when I was adolescent. I could be ‘manly’ by allowing myself to feel triumphant towards a girl, if she were acquiescent. To pay her out, even to make her pregnant. That was a fine feeling!” He saw that she was biting her lower lip, and said lightly, “Proceed, O Diaphanetician.”
“Do you still enjoy being cruel?”
“You asked me that eight years ago, on your twenty-first birthday, when you were having a bath at your old home. In fact you told me, then, that I was a sadist.”
“Did I? So young? I must have heard the word somewhere, probably on my father’s lips. You haven’t answered the question.”
“‘Am I cruel?’ I don’t think so. I have perhaps self-knowledge, and so remain as it were
in
vacuo,
with a more or less chronically aching heart. Now have I ‘processed’ myself, as the much-derided Caspar would say? As though I were a breakfast food.”
“‘Processed’ means ‘a method of scientific research’, among other things. I wonder if I may ask you something rather
personal
?”
“Very well.”
“You told me once you used to set fire to dry grass in summer, and then run away in terror, when you were a small boy. But
why did you set fire to a wooden building soon after the Great War, and go to prison for it?”
“So that’s what Elizabeth told you,” he replied. “And did she tell you, also, that I tried to shoot myself, after returning from prison? Well then, you know all about me. Oh yes—I ran away in the light of the blazing windmill on Messines Ridge, during the battle on Hallowe’en, nineteen fourteen.”
“I’ve tired you, Phillip, I’d better go.” She took his hand. “I expect you want to rest.”
“Must you go?”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Of course I do.”
“Oh darling, I do so want to help you! I knew why you weren’t writing. I knew also that people wouldn’t leave you alone up here. I guessed you were in thrall to Miranda. She is a sweet girl. And I knew, too, that while you remained alone you would never be able to sustain any prolonged imaginative work. The creative man, or woman, surely needs reassurance all the time, at least until one regains confidence by working, and discovering, so that one surprises oneself by what comes, and how it grows and builds itself up, to fulfilment, because one is increasing with true life. A creative writer gives so much out, yet he
gains
when he feels it is good, when it returns with compound interest, an increasing interest in what he is living in, and by. I learned a lot in India from the
gurus
I used to talk to.”
“True-true-true,” he said.
She cooked the herrings she had brought with her, for supper. They sat by the fire, talking with concealed restraint; and towards midnight, she dared to say, “It’s rather late, may I sleep here?”
“Of course. I’ll take you up some washing water from the kettle on the hearth.” And leaving the can outside her door, said goodnight, and went into his room, to sit on the bed for several minutes before beginning to undress. After lying uneasily in bed for some minutes, he felt that she was expecting him; and with a divided mind he got into bed beside her, feeling blank, devoid of desire; and fear, when she put an arm across his ribs.
He must do something, he told himself: be ‘manly’ (O God!) so he turned over and held her in both arms: but with no life flowing from him to her.
After an uneasy interval she said, “I must leave you for a while. Have you an electric torch?”
He felt under the bed and switched it on. While she was
going down the stairs he went to his own bed, to lie as though asleep when he heard her coming up the stairs; and remained still when she shone the torch for a moment upon him, before she went into the other room.
In the morning, when he took up a mug of tea she said “You were very tired last night, going off the moment your head touched the pillow, and snoring loudly!”
“Yes, I returned to my bed, otherwise you’d have had no sleep.” He added, “I’m ashamed of my snoring.”
“Everyone snores at times.”
He sat on the bed; she drew him to her as he lay beside her, aware of her tenderness, her clarity, her simplicity—but feeling nothing more.
The day was already open and shining, though not yet six o’clock.
“I must go back to Ionian Cottage, Phillip. I’m staying with Elizabeth, she’ll be wondering if I’ve fallen in the water last night, for I sleep on the balcony over the river.” She touched his face, and said, “Why don’t you look at me? Is my face simply awful?”
“It’s my eye, Melissa. It can hurt suddenly, as though a vein or an artery in the ball somewhere gets swelled. You know how it feels when you get an eyelash sticking in a corner? Or as it used to feel, to me, when I
had
eyelashes. Mine got burnt out at the roots when mustard splashed my face. If you look closely, you’ll see the scars on my cheeks—the skin came up in huge blisters—”
With shut eyes he yielded to her scrutiny, feeling again her tenderness as with finger-tip she traced the bones of his cheek and brow; followed by touch of lips upon one cheek; and seeing his smile, as gently took his head upon her breast, holding him thus until it seemed he was asleep. Then, withdrawing herself from the bed, slowly, making no sound, she dressed, and crept down the stairs, watched by Bodger on his sack before the hearth, one eye opened above folded paws. She stopped to pat him, and then, still watched by the eye, unlatched the door and entered the shine of the sun above the eastern line of the moor.
*
Phillip had not been asleep. When she was gone he lay blankly still, until into his mind arose the image of Miranda, dark hair covering a face downheld before him, while he started to take her with sensations of selfishness and triumph.
*
Melissa walking across the common. Why did he
have
to pretend that he had fallen asleep, when I looked into his room last night as I came up the stairs? Why is he still covering up
before
me? Or is it really very simple: he is in love with that girl Miranda with the large brown eyes? That would explain why he keeps his distance.
At her table in the Castle, awaiting her first aspirant, she wrote in her diary.
How much I love him he will never know, for he has the kind of lonely pride which consists in relentless self accusation. And he holds
so
closely to himself: generous to all but to me—wholly selfish. So it seems I must for ever hide myself, and pretend less than I do feel for myself—but bleed as quietly as possible—and so give the least trouble to others.
When she saw Caspar again, he asked her how the auditing was progressing. She gave him her report.
His sister when young was a dark girl with large, dreamy brown eyes. She was very fond of him until an act of his caused her father to reject her when she was twelve. She and a boy had a poetical rendezvous in a field of grass near their home. The self-righteous Philip, unconsciously in the pattern of his father, got a bigger boy, who used to fight his battles for him, to thrash the boy with whom she was once seen lying beside in long grass. The father was
puritanically
Victorian, and told her he no longer loved her. She ran away and was found late at night weeping alone on a hill.
Long before this, Phillip, the first-born, had pushed her into the fire of the day nursery, an instinctive, atavistic act stemming from feelings that she had replaced him in his mother’s arms.
Elizabeth has never married, and Phillip is a failure with women. His love appears to be all in the head, a romantic or unnatural love. He forced himself to be brave in the 1914–18 war, and did well; but was lost after the Armistice, the world had gone, in which he had stood up for himself. He took refuge in writing an idyllic story, reliving his early chaotic life nearer to the heart’s desire.
As for his sister, she had heard stories of his supposedly bohemian life in the West Country, and dreads that anyone will find out the relationship between them.
“A hydra-headed stigma,” remarked Caspar, putting down the written report. “Phillip’s obsession with fire comes from guilt as yet only superficially recognised by him. From guilt stems his fear-hate of her image, and consequent transference to a Faustian
imprint of that young girl with the dark hair and brown eyes of his lost mother.”
Later, he left a note for Melissa.
The long periods spent lying before his hearth giving himself the labour of a minimum Sisyphus might be due to weakness from lack of proper food, inducing masochism from guilt that he is escaping from a task which will need a steadfast and prolonged dedication to the wearying solitude of writing down what scenes and actions from lost Time are being relived by the power of the Imagination.
Piers Tofield and Beth drove in an open green sports-car along the Somerset coast-road to Lynmouth; on their way up the steep winding valley road they met Peter, David, and Jonathan, who told them where they were camping.
So Piers drove to the Green Meadow where, under the canopy of trees, the echoes of cascade and waterfall floated up from the glen.
