The Gale of the World (39 page)

*

Over the hills and far away, above a sea cerulean and fused with sky along earth’s horizon, other birds were flying, some too high to be seen by human eye alone. In lower airs the gulls were turning and changing direction as though without aim—stalling, flapping this way and then that as they criss-crossed the sky.

For this was the Day of the Ants. From miles around the Valley of Rocks, from every grass-grown ant-hump made of innumerable vegetarian and arboreal fragments compiled and tunnelled, chambered in food-storage caves and nurseries where young worker ants, white and sunless, lay within cocoons ready to break and release each its
imago
for a life of total work at highest speed—the chosen few, born with wings, were crawling to the light of day, to perform their brief, orgiastic fates.

What secret call made the winged females, future matriarchs of new colonies, to rise and shine together on their temporary wings? Only the spermed and ovaried ants alone received the impulse, to be borne into rising air. Those females returning shed their wings, each to seek a new habitation, bearing the sperm of a dead Icarus which should in due course launch a thousand ships for love of some dim, remote Helen of their perception.

The red-headed woodpeckers sloped from the oak-woods, each uttering yallery-greenery cries to announce claim to territory. And in due course each bird would leave its extraordinary little
all-white
cylinders, each one perfectly shaped, soon to dry in the sun. Those broken by inquisitive human fingers would reveal a faecal
composition of black ant skeletons bound together in pure lime.

*

In a time-space of one hour, including the changing of
leg-pads
, the North Devon Savages were all out for eighty-seven runs; and the Crimson Ramblers went in to bat. By four o’clock they had lost two wickets, two balls, and had scored
sixty-one
runs; and the pitch was deserted for tea. Miranda, Rosamund, and other young girls attendant on their mothers carried round trays of tea and cakes first to the Savages, then to the Ramblers. Overhead every rook and jackdaw from the cliffs above the coast from Bull Point to the Quantocks was airborne, glutting itself on flying ants under a sky no longer of enamelled azurine, but flecked, at immense height, by little streamers of high cirrus. Over Dartmoor to the south ‘Buster’ saw cumulus forming. Thither flew Falcon One and Falcon Two; to return high in clear air to the Valley of Rocks. There they saw a storm brewing up over the sea.

*

Play was resumed, the Ramblers returning to bat. The air in the Valley of Rocks had become cooler. With the drop in
temperature
came the dropping down of ants. The first ball
spread-eagled
stumps. An ant had alighted on the moustache of the
batsman
at the moment the ball was released: it started to crawl up and was about to enter a nostril. No use to protest! Out came another batsman, who promptly cut the ball and was caught by slip.

While the next man was going out, flights of swallows appeared twittering over the field, flying close to the grass. Ants were
dropping
everywhere. Hundreds of starlings alighted, to run about the pitch. The game was stopped, until the birds were chivvied away; then a fifth wicket was wrecked by the same bowler. Perry went in to stop the rot. He hit the next ball over the road. Six. The bowler was about to begin his run-down when the umpire held up a hand. All over his ancient panama hat ants were crawling and shedding wings. He cursed and swept them off. Play on! The third ball went up into the sky, to fall over the boundary. More cheers from the Ramblers.

*

Miranda saw Phillip, while the fielding team was changing over, get up from where he had been sitting cross-legged and walk slowly past the pavilion to rising ground choked by furze and thorn which led to steep slopes to the sea below. She must speak
to him. Lucy was beautiful, perhaps he still loved her; she could help him by telling him that she had not, as her father had told her, been ‘running after him, tongue hanging out’. This was the holiday she had so looked forward to; and everything had turned out the wrong way. She must speak to Phillip. While she hesitated she saw that a man carrying a rolled umbrella had caught up with him and they had stopped together. What were they talking about? She waited until they had finished, too far away to hear what was being said.

*

“You are Captain Maddison?”

“Yes.”

“I am from the paper of the times, in London. You’ve been a journalist, too, I know. So will you help me to get some facts right. By the way, I have a considerable admiration for the character of Sir Hereward Birkin. Have you see him lately?”

“No.”

“And you are also a friend of Lord Cloudesley?”

“An acquaintance.”

“Have you read the article in the New York
Herald-Tribune’s
Sunday magazine, by Osgood Nilsson?”

“No.”

“Mr. Nilsson has disclosed an idea to bring about the release of Rudolf Hess now serving a life sentence in Spandau prison. Do you know anything about it?”

When Phillip didn’t reply, he withdrew a folded magazine from a pocket. “You know Mr. Osgood Nilsson, I think? I marked the passage where he suggests that the attempt to rescue Hess is to be made by gliders. Can you tell me if any, or all members of the Crimson Ramblers, visiting here today, served either as
Commandos
, or with the Parachute Corps at Arnhem?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“But you must have heard of the project? Between you and me, as one old soldier to another, I’ve reached the conclusion that it never pays to allow vengeance to run its course. Churchill loathed the idea of the Nuremberg hangings, didn’t he?”

“‘The grass grows green upon the battlefield, but upon the scaffold never.’”

“Did Hitler say that when you were his guest at the Parteitag at Nuremberg in nineteen thirty five?”

“My dear chap, it was said by Churchill in his prime of
inspiration
, that is, when a young man! Well, that’s all I know, except
that I, too, used to work on
The
Times.
Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll be on my way.”

*

Miranda watched the man with the rolled umbrella hurrying back to the cricket ground; and making her way into the pavilion she went through the main room to the door at the back of the ladies’ lavatory. Then through another door, and she was among brambles and thorns, to tread a way through and up until,
suddenly
, she saw Capella. With a series of bounds her pet was beside her. She knelt to put her arms round the goat while rubbing her cheek on the coarse hair of its neck. “Darling, darling Cappy!”

Then she saw Phillip’s little dog looking at her. She went on and saw him sitting on a slab of rock.

“Don’t you want to see me ever again, cousin Phillip?”

“Miranda! I haven’t seen you for ages!”

She saw that his eyes were screwed up. “What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”

“My left eye sometimes feels as though it’s been pierced by a thorn, and then I can’t open it. It’s been like that off and on for some weeks now.”

“Then you didn’t see me when you passed me in Lynmouth?”

“No.”

“Oh, I’m so relieved, my darling Coz,” she replied, as she put an arm round his shoulders, desiring but not daring to lean her head against his chest. She wanted to cry when he took her hand and held it beside his cheek. They remained so until Bodger growled.

Phillip whispered, “I know that growl, just sit still, Miranda.” He shifted away from her, still holding her hand. “It may be my fancy.”

She moved her glance as though casually and saw the head and shoulders of a man standing behind a brown furze bush. Bodger was growling again.

After an interval the man began to shout, “I see’d what you got this maid to do to ’ee! I’ll gi’e in charge, won’t I tho!”

“It was you who were doing it!”

“I see’d ’ee, di’n I tho! Yew wait till I tell your feyther!”

“I’ll give you in charge,” said Phillip, standing up. “Bodger, to heel! Don’t talk to the fellow, Miranda.”

There was a crackling behind them as flames leapt up the dead furze bush. Kedd followed them down a goat track through the scrub, shouting as to an unseen companion, “Come yurr, Isaak, come yurr and bear witness!”

“We weren’t doing anything but talking,” said Miranda, turning round. Flames were spreading.

“Yew wait until I zee the constable!”

They reached the north side of the pavilion, while Aaron Kedd continued to shout for all to hear. Faces were turned their way. The players were now walking over the pitch, depressing ants. Peregrine rested against the prop of his bat.

“Play on!” said the umpire.

The fast bowler of the Savages had the over. He started a long loping run and let fly a yorker. Peregrine moved forward, took a swipe and missed the ball; but reached for the crease just before the wicket keeper holding the ball whipped off the bails.

“HOWZATT?”

“Not out.”

The umpire was now wearing his sweater like a sloppy white knitted umbrella over his head, while fanning away ants with his hat.

The bowler, a tall man, was all angles as he ran. His ball appeared to have knocked the bat out of the batsman’s hands. But Peregrine had merely blocked the ball, then dropped the bat to leave the game and walk over to the pavilion. There, beside the table holding scoring sheets, he waited until the two came up to where he stood. He saw that Miranda had been crying, and with an upper cut to Phillip’s jaw sent him to the ground. The
onlookers
saw Phillip getting up slowly, and heard him say, “I beg your pardon, I didn’t see you, sir.”

“You filthy fascisti! Let that be a lesson to you!” He looked as though he was about to strike again, when his daughter ran forward and beat with impotent hands on her father’s chest. They heard Molly say, “That was naughty of you, Perry. That creature over there is a well-known psychotic. Cousin Phillip, I am so sorry.”

“Did you set fire to the furze?” Peregrine shouted, moving
towards
Phillip. “Answer me that!”

“Cousin Phillip has gone blind!” screamed Miranda. “That’s why I was crying!” as she struggled against her father’s hold. “I hate you, I hate you!”

King Billy, startled by fire, had jumped upon his rock, from where he looked down upon the figure of a man with white woolly face and head and carrying what looked like a cake. The old goat uttered a noise between bleat and rattle, being not altogether
prepared
to charge such an apparition, but the cake (which was the
panama hat) looked eatable. King Billy had watched many cricket matches in his life, but this was the first for five seasons, and the spectacle brought to mind the heyday of his power. While he stood there, other goats which had seen flames and heard Peregrine shouting were appearing at various points overlooking the cricket field. Some uttered little grunts as they saw a red ball being lightly tossed from one hand as the bowler waited to continue.

Led by Capella, a dozen goats ran upon the pitch to share in the game.

In the meantime, Aaron Kedd had gone back into cover; to
reappear
elsewhere shouting, “You’m all damned to hell fire, you’m all corned from Sodom and Gomorrah. And they bliddy goats ought to be kicked to flames! They’m bin and stole all my flat-poll cabbages!”

At the noise of shouting King Billy charged the umpire. That official promptly removed his jersey and used it as a cape. He kept off the animal, which succeeded in hooking it on a horn;
whereupon
King Billy retired to his rock with the trophy, which he attempted to eat.

In the sky alto-cirrus, those summer breast feathers of the dove of peace, gently hued in grey and pink, were about to be struck by swifter falcons of those winds which were bringers of blood and the pallors of death. One man alone, in the crowds which had been watching the cricket, saw what might be coming. Osgood Nilsson said to his wife, “You want to know something? That fire might trigger off a tornado. I've seen bush fires in Africa …”

Flames were spreading swiftly, fanned by a twirling wind
induced
by rising hot air and smoke. And, curiously, the hanging drift of strato-cirrus was being hidden by a milky gathering of flocculent cloud through which the orb of the sun appeared to be enlarged, deprived of its radiance, becoming a mere circle, pallid and dull, without heat or shine. All this change had occured, it seemed, while the game had been held up.

The umpire declared that it was no more than a land-drifting sea-mist following a day of torrid heat. But Osgood Nilsson, as he scanned the sky, remarked to Rosalie, “If we were way back in Florida, I'd say a bitch was on the way.”

“But we're in England, not your beloved South, my dear!”

“The old British weather is passing away with the Empire, I guess, but they haven't caught up with the idea as of now. For one thing, the polar ice-cap is melting. The commies are planting eyed-ova in Siberian rivers, hoping to get runs of sockeye salmon. Also they're figuring out to grow a short-strawed wheat on land that fifty years ago was under ice all the year through. And shall I tell you something? That ice is now cold water streaming into the North Atlantic and pushing back the Gulf Stream two hundred miles west of Ireland. And that's only the beginning.” He stood up. “I guess I'll go to The Marksman and draw my trailer way up above the river.”

“I'll come with you, and give you a hand.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Nilsson,” said the reporter who had pretended
to Phillip that he was from
The
Times.
“May I have a word with you?”

“On what?”

“Your article in this New York magazine, Mr. Nilsson.”

“It speaks for itself.”

“It certainly does, Mr. Nilsson. I've had a word about it with Captain Maddison, who spoke of Winston Churchill's generosity to defeated enemies, including Rudolf Hess, who flew against the Royal Flying Corps, with whom you served, I believe, in the First World War.”

“I did.”

“Would you agree, Mr Nilsson, that any attempt to kidnap Hess by gliders, on the lines of the abduction by Skorzeny of Mussolini at the end of the recent war, would fail?”

“I should say it's my opinion that it will fail today.”

“Today?” cried the reporter. “You mean the attempt is to be made today? May I quote you as saying that?”

“May you hell!”

The man with the rolled umbrella ran to his motorcar, thinking, A scoop! A scoop!!

*

In the drift of fiocculent cloud ‘Buster' in Falcon One had lost touch with Falcon Two. And he had no idea where he himself was. Under the perspex hood he inhaled a steady hiss of sweetish-sick oxygen. Below him a whole mountain range of peaks and ravines was being formed and reformed as by the concealed giants of some new Valhalla: a shining new world in being, held on the back of a vast mythical terrapin—its movements heaving up new peaks around a central pattern—the tallest peaks being the centre of a strange and terrifying new universe—the globe turning on a new axis. A circular pyramid of reforming movement, pure white.

Was it an illusion, because he was flying in a wide circle? Hardly so.

He peered intently below. Massive cumulo-nimbus was definitely forming new peaks upon a central axis. He banked and turned, to be on the same spiral direction. He was keeping pace with the turning movement: it was a spiralling storm formation.

Then he flew across the diameter of the circle; and saw in the centre a deep hole, with cloud breaking away, whirling, filling the tunnel which sucked in more vapour by centrifugal force. The eye of a tornado!

Great dark clouds were opening slowly to form new patterns.
Banking to change direction he saw ragged cloud, rising up to swamp him. He turned back, to remain above the swirling funnel, and found himself in a vast blue hall of winds which bore him, ever circling higher in a rising spiral,—twenty-six thousand feet—then he was being flung about in a greenish darkness now at twenty-seven thousand feet—hail—and suddenly he was in
blinding
, shining light while just below the top of the cloud swirled and curled like a Medusa-head.

He could see below him, far right, the revolving suction of the hollow elephant-trunk which seemed to be the eye of the hurricane. He looked below and around and up for sight of Laura and The Brig, then removing the oxygen mask he sent out a call through the microphone.

“Falcon One calling—Falcon One calling Falcon Two—come in please—come in please—Falcon One calling Falcon Two—come in please—”

He switched over to receiving, but only an intense crackling abraded his ear-drums. He turned the switch again, and was leaning back in his seat when the sailplane was hurled over.

*

While Molly was sitting with her daughter within the pavilion, Phillip was walking away from the field accompanied by David holding his arm. “I am not hurt, David,” he said to the boy by his side. “Thank you for your help. Perhaps you should go back, to look after Mother and the others. Don't worry about me, it is all a misunderstanding.”

“Where are you going, Father?”

“Back to Shep Cot, to drive the Eagle up to The Chains, to light the pyre. I must get there before the storm, while the ground is fairly dry.”

So David went back to his mother and the others, while Phillip followed Bodger partly by sound-echo: he could hear movements of the dog's feet and just discern the blur of the body a little way ahead. He began to feel pain; the blow had opened a scar on the flesh of the cheek-bone below the left eye, which for some days had been in a semi-fluid state, at times accompanied by pain so intense that it had been impossible to unclench the lids. How brave Jefferies had been, suffering internal pain until his body was almost a skeleton, while being told for months that his illness was imaginary: that hysteria was the sole cause of the body wasting away! Perhaps the deterioration of his own sight was due to suppressed hysteria—a condition of self-frustration, self-denial; of
cowardice.
Yes, that was the cause of every disaster and
non-fulfilment
in his life. As Osgood Nilsson said,
A
no-good
man.
A failure …

He stopped, remembering that his father had once said to him, I am a failure. Poor Father, finally dreaming of resurrection with the girl called Myra—

His last words in the nursing home,
So
you're
against
me,
too,
are
you?

Yes, I abandoned you, Father. ‘He who is not with me, is against me.'

*

In the sky greyer, lower clouds were moving in, giving only glimpses, between gaps, of high strato-cirrus. These lower clouds began to turn the colour of copper, then darken to sullen nimbus moving along a curving course, vying away from the higher parnassian snows.

A heavy black wall was closing down on the Valley of Rocks, the bar clouds dreaded by airmen, packing the air below the twenty thousand feet level. A darkness to scare people, a cold shutting-down of the day, a reversal, a negation of summer's kindness.

*

“Darling, I must leave you now,” said Molly in the pavilion. “I'll be back soon. I expect they'll shortly draw stumps. Just you rest and relax, and don't worry yourself. I understand how it all happened. You are not to blame, nor is Cousin Phillip. It is all a misunderstanding, Anda my pet.”

“Oh Mummie, it is so unfair! Daddy should never have done that, he should have thought about himself, and know what he was doing to someone who was not like himself!”

Molly kept a smiling face, while wondering if there was more that the girl hadn't told her.

She looked at Miranda. Obviously the child was trying to keep back the tears from running down a face which had glowed with such joy and youth when Phillip had first come to see them—a face now hurt and desolate. “Darling, do not grieve. All will come right, I promise you.”

As soon as she was alone again Miranda got up to look through the open door. Play had been resumed. Once again she climbed through the lavatory window and set out for The Eyrie along the path at the top of the cliff, followed by Capella. She meant to get her cob and ride up to Shep Cot. On the way through the
oak-
woods 
she passed ‘the man from the paper of the times', who had started for The Eyrie, but changed his mind and turned back. He began to speak to her, but with set face the girl continued on her way.

Phillip was then on the road to Lynton, just before the ornate Town Hall. He was aware of the presence of his father, living again in the last walk they had gone together during the last year at Fawley, more than ten years before … It was a wonderful walk, Father. We followed the Roman road over the downs, on the sward under which it lay buried. You told me how your father had taken you over the same way when you and your brothers were boys. When we came to arable fields, there the white-brown-black braided flints lay, turned and returned by the plough all during the centuries since the Romans had left. That was your country when you were a boy walking, walking, for miles happy and
carefree
in the open air, mile upon mile to far Cranborne Chace lying blue above the southern horizon when you had set out from Fawley at dawn. And you saw it again with me, on our only walk together since I was a small and disappointing boy on the edge of London.

He stopped to fasten the lead to Bodger's collar, for the sense of failure was returning, despite his knowledge that the direct cause of depression was lack of food. Even so—he would take a gun and two cartridges with him to The Chains, and there Bodger, Silver Eagle and he would go together.

*

Both spectators and players in the Valley of Rocks were taking occasional glances at the sky. A cold drift of air caused the umpire to untie the love-knotted arms of the woollen jersey—retrieved, in a somewhat chewed condition, from King Billy by the bold pea-shooting boy—in order to pull the garment over his head. In doing so, he forgot that he was wearing his panama hat. Thus he was not in a position to judge a fast ball which struck the padded leg of the batsman at the wicket. The interval
between
temporary lack of sight and hearing was brief, due to the wool being pulled over his eyes at the same time that his ears were being pulled over their holes by a near-verticle
hat-brim
. Before he could recover or rather uncover there arose all around him a mass-cry of HOWZATT? co-incident with a hissing in the air which seemed to be all over the field at once, with many blue serpents arrived about the grass. The effect was queer: no one was burned, or received a feeling of being struck by this odd
sort of lightning without detonation: but it was enough to end the game. A sickly pallor lay upon the valley. Soon little wisps of dusty wind were rising about the trees and rocks: stumps were drawn, a rapid making for motorcars, while players streamed
towards
the pavilion, looking at one another and seeing one another's faces in a clear gloom of light. Engines of the motorcoaches, which were to take them back to the Lyndale Hotel for the dinner dance to end Festival Week, were started.

*

Twenty thousand feet above the moor a strange wool-like clottage was moving across the black peaks of cumulo-nimbus, now ranged like a vast ampitheatre as though for the gods to appear in a final judgment before Götterdämmerung, ‘Buster' was thinking: for the chains of the peaks might have been keeping guard all around the invaded summer heaven, ready for Donner to hurl his tremendous lightning bolts.

As he banked for the turn, ‘Buster' saw many sea-birds whitely afloat above the vortex of clouds, tiny winged specks risen up out of danger of lower spinning winds that would suck them from the sea's surface and dislocate the joints of their wings.

*

The very air was waiting, while heavy bombards of nimbus clouds approached like a curtain of doom: among them a black whale floundering amidst sudden squalls of tearing, sea-whitening lesser winds which had crossed the bay between Hartland and Lundy and were now screaming over cultivated fields and coombes filled with primeval oakwoods; rocking slate roofs of isolated
farmhouses
and lifting the thatch of cottages—scattering, in the Valley of Rocks, a jangle of bicycles, whirling away banks of deck chairs, ripping canvas from wooden frames.

Confronting the storm like a quadruped Druid, King Billy
remained
on his rock, blown shaggy and not knowing which way to put his behind as he pattered on cloven feet shifting for security of tenure.

Puffs of hot air struck the cricket ground. And all of a sudden the roof of the pavilion, a jerry-built affair, was wracked off and sent, upended, over the bracken and rocky outcrops of the incult ground: to rest awhile, before being hurled up again and, after floating level for some seconds, to whirl upended and find rest among the rocks bordering the Severn Sea.

*

I suppose this is a breaking moment, I am leaving Shep Cot for
ever. Have I really given up hope, except a black hope, a
Tristan-like
longing for the suns which have burned black after falling in rains of fire. A longing for Francis Thompson's ‘after-sleeping.' Is it mere false pride, am I destroyed by the fear which is beyond pride, which seeks a ‘noble' condition of a forlorn necessity?