The Innocent Moon

On a bright February morning towards 9.20 a.m., a number of more or less elderly men were standing on the Up platform of the Randiswell station of the South-Eastern & Chatham Railway Company. Almost without exception they wore dark clothes and bowler hats, nearly all were smoking pipes while reading newspapers. There was a suggestion of relaxation, of self-containedness in each figure, an acceptance of life as it was—a condition denied to the occasional young woman standing detached and unnoticed among them.

No one spoke to his neighbour; tobacco smoke arose in the quiet sunny air; only the shabby peeling paint of the station woodwork served as reminder of the late war.

Then upon the platform was heard the sound of laughter. Heads were turned in the direction of two young men come among them and talking to one another with an animation unusual upon the Up platform. At first glance they appeared to be brothers, for both were tall and lean, with the same square set of shoulders, the head leaning slightly forward and suggesting a studious turn of mind. There the resemblance ended; for while one was dressed for the City, the other was in tweeds, hatless, and carrying an army pack on his back as though bound for the country. Those near him observed that he had light brown hair and large hazel eyes alight with some eager thought; while his companion, having removed his bowler, was seen to have black hair and eyes of a pronounced deep blue—a colour which drew glances, again and again, from the young women standing by.

“You haven’t forgotten your passport, Willie?” The younger man, he of the hazel eyes and brown hair, felt the inside pocket of his jacket.

“It’s here, thanks, Phillip. Also my money.”

The train came in, the carriages were full; the two cousins had to stand in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke which made Phillip cough, at which Willie asked the two men in the nearest corner seats if they would mind opening the window.

“You’ll only get smuts in under the tunnel,” said one, lifting his paper to reveal settled eyes, while the other made no response.

“Don’t bother,” said Phillip. “It isn’t far.”

Soon the train was swaying and rattling through the denser and dingier suburbs south of the river; and after two stops arrived at London Bridge. There the exodus began, men pushing past one another while the two young men waited for them to pass, Phillip standing beside his cousin with an air of detachment during the rush to the ticket barrier.

“I think I’ll take the tube to Victoria from here, Phil. Remember the Hindenburg Tunnel at Cherisy?”

“I was a bit south, at Bullecourt.”

“We’re clearing the area around the tunnel now, and taking the bits and pieces to the Concentration Graveyard above the Labyrinthe. I suppose there’s no chance of you coming out to see the battlefields? There are plenty of details which you’d find of tremendous interest for your book.”

“How long are you going to be in France, Willie?”

“I’ve signed on for two years, but I’ll have periods of leave, of course. You can always find me through the Imperial War Graves Commission here in London. Anyway I’ll write and let you have my address from time to time. Do come over if you can manage it!”

“I shall. Meanwhile, I’ll write to you, Willie. Well, I must be going now—it wouldn’t look too good to be late on the first day of my new job! By the way, if you stop off at Folkestone, and happen to see Eveline, give her my regards, won’t you?”

“Yes,
if
I see her, but it’s doubtful! All the same, if you particularly wish me to, I will, of course!
If
she’ll see me!”

“No, don’t make a point of it, Willie. Well—all the best, old chap! I can’t tell you what your coming has meant to me.” Phillip hesitated. “Partings should be swift, like executions! Goodbye—no, au revoir!” He smiled uncertainly; he was much moved under his pose of calm. “I wish you weren’t going so far away——” Then shaking hands firmly with his cousin, Phillip gave a wave of the hand and went resolutely to the barrier. Yes, it was always so: every parting with friends was a little death.

*

Phillip arrived at Foundry House Street correctly dressed, he thought, for his new job as canvasser in the Classified Advertisement Department of the leading morning newspaper in the world. He carried an umbrella kept neatly rolled by a black rubber ring,
and a pair of dog-skin gloves. With his new bowler hat he wore a raincoat with raglan sleeves made from a length of purple-grey tweed which had seen slight service as an army blanket at the Rest Camp on the Leas at Folkestone where he had been posted as adjutant during the spring and summer following the Armistice.

A blanket coat gives the idea of something thick and shapeless; but as a fact, it was one of the original Kitchener Army blankets, cut from bolts of Harris, Lovat, and other tweeds of the finest quality commandeered by the Government in those early days of excitement, idealism, and confusion throughout the country, when the unexpected was confronted by the unprepared. The overcoat, fashioned from a little-used length of Donegal cloth, was superior to those of new, post-war material.

With determination to succeed in his new life Phillip tramped unfamiliar streets of the outlands of the north and north-west—the suburbs of Highgate, Hampstead, Hendon, Willesden, Ealing, Hammersmith, Balls Pond, and even Hoxton—hopefully carrying slips of paper with the title and device of his newspaper, and the words, in Roman type

With
the
Compliments
of
the
Advertising
Department

to which were gummed advertisements, clipped from
The
Daily
Telegraph,
and
The
Morning
Post,
of House Properties for sale in those suburbs. It was his job to persuade the advertisers to duplicate the advertisements in his paper, after explaining its great and growing advertising value under the direction of Lord Castleton.

During the first week he walked over a hundred miles on asphalt and paving stone and brought back one advertisement, which he thought had been given to him by Mr. Fred Varley, F.A.I., of Finsbury Park more for his encouragement than for the advertiser’s own advantage. By the end of the second week he had abandoned bowler, umbrella, and gloves; while his manner of aloof geniality, imitated from his late colonel, Lord Satchville, was replaced by an anxious disclaimer of his own importance lest junior clerks come towards him as to an important client only to discover, after advances with bright and respectful expressions, that he was not only not an important customer, but merely another canvasser. To avoid all such false hopes he entered quietly, slips of cuttings in one hand prominently displayed, velour trilby
hat (brim pulled down all round, like the similar hats of country gentlemen seen in
The
Field
in free libraries) held in the other; to be told that his paper was not exactly the best medium for advertising the properties on their books.

Occasionally the quiet entry into an office was met by a principal’s hand waving him away, and once, in Golders Green, there was an irritable dismissive shake of a large red face under white hair and the loud words, “Don’t want you!” Preparing for immediate retreat, he inclined his head with understanding, telling himself that the many anxieties in a competitive civilised life wore away the outward geniality of most fellow men; and jumping on a pirate steam-bus, thundering to a stop outside the estate agent’s office, he decided to spend the rest of the day in the country, before returning in the evening to the lecture at the Parnassus Club, where once a week he met other aspirants to literary fame like himself.

He kept a journal, believing that one day it would be valuable, for, like many of the young writers he met at the Long Acre premises, he had a driving belief in his own powers.

Phillip’s entries in his journal were not always so matter-of-fact. His moods were often ruled by the weather.

This journal of the year 1920 contained many similar observations, but few were so pessimistic; for he was ever on the lookout for any detail of beauty in what he called ‘soul-destroying London’. After the day’s canvassing he was usually weary, often exasperated, a condition aggravated by a tubercular lung, for which he received a partial disability pension of a retired captain of infantry, £80 per annum. Most of his evenings, with the exception of the Thursday night visits to the Parnassus Club, were spent in an empty house adjoining that belonging to his father in
south-east London, not far from the Crystal Palace. There Phillip enjoyed a secret life, his footfalls echoing in bare rooms and corridors once filled with his grandfather’s presence. His dug-out, as he thought of it, adjoined the garden, and was furnished sufficiently with chair, table, camp-bed, gramophone, and a small stand for books. Best of all—a fire! The house, now his mother’s property, was up for sale.

On March 21, second anniversary of the great German attack to destroy the B.E.F. and reach Paris and the Channel ports, Phillip appeared as usual at 9.45 a.m. in the Estates Office at Foundry House Square—a small room with two sides of glass partitions dividing it from the rest of the Advertisement Department—and then took the train into Kent, to celebrate ‘the last day of winter!!’, as he described the occasion in his journal. At first he was haunted by memories of that morning, two years before: of the bombardment by gas and explosive shell by 6,000 guns along the 40-mile front of the Fifth Army, and in particular of the battle zone called the Bird Cage: after which stunning period he had gone through the gaseous white mist of the morning with a message to Brigade, where he had been ordered to remain through the drag and depression of waiting until sent forward with a sergeant and a Lewis gun to bring back the survivors of his battalion, who had held out for thirty hours, while the zone on the right flank was over-run; and after another night in the non-existing (reserve) Green Line, merely marked out, he had found himself in command of the battalion without ever having commanded a company. During the next three weeks he had carried on until blinded by mustard gas, which ended the war for him.

Memories of that time, and of comrades lost in battle, haunted him until he got to the woods south of Shooting Common, seven miles or so from London Bridge: and then boyhood memories superseded war memories which were at that time too much for him to face in his mind, not because of their horror, which did not then exist for him in retrospect, but because of the ungraspable magnitude of the events he hoped one day to re-create in words—a dream that must become reality soon, because he was getting old: soon, he reflected, he would be 25.