The Power of the Dead (2 page)

Thrust of two, three sheaves on the long-handled pitching fork: eight feet of polished ash-shaft, enriched by linseed-oil, the two prongs burnished by emery paper: O, one day the farm would be the best in the district. It was good to be alive. What luck he had had, to have come through the war—all the faces he had known, enriching his life: a wonderful war, really, only two slight wounds, and a small dull patch in one lung which he had healed by walking hundreds of miles about the South Devon country after the war.

As he pitched sheaf after unending sheaf, he wondered when he would be able to re-create the wonderful days of the war. Yet were they
truly
wonderful days—that period before the post-war loneliness of youth? The real war of the front-line soldier had been a delirium of dust and heat and hell; the real war beyond the candle-light in the dug-out, beyond the rotting parapet, among the lip-to-lip craters of Third Ypres, water-filled, where the dead and the living slowly sank into the featureless swamp with tanks, mules, limbers, guns—how could it ever be re-created in words? And yet—in that time—the war as one experienced it was not the gashed and limbless trunks in shredded pink woollen vests,
ruddy-swollen
necks and faces of internal bleeding, strewn all across the old uneven grass-grown wilderness of the Somme country in the retreat of the Fifth Army in March 1918. One was somehow above, or apart from, that general post-war picture: the real war was the comradeship, the great chance to know the best of
friendship
; even as the war at home was hateful, mass-ignorance led and fed by lies that were the negation of the truth and beauty of the comradeship of war—comrade and enemy alike sharing the same spirit shining in the deep, dreadful night. Once—only once in Europe—only once the lesson, only one generation to pollinate with its spirit of self-sacrifice the lilies of the night. Not again, Englishman and German: that would be blasphemy.

“Take it easy, guv’nor, yar’ll wear yersel’ out if you go on like that. Yar all wire, Maister.”

“Only part is wire, Ned.”

“A-ah.”

It was during the preliminary sweatings, after sedentary work, before the slow rhythm of body-work returned, that thoughts were like barb-wire within the skull. Whether of the personal scope, or the jump-off into the abstract of war, all thoughts were grievous at the re-start of the body being broken-in: complaints of the little ego.

Another waggon arrived. The young carter went up the ladder to help the rick-builder by passing the sheaves, a comparatively easy job. If he were boss, he wouldn’t pitch, he thought. Hadn’t the boss any money, that he needed to save a man’s wages?

When Phillip was breaking himself in to hard graft, as the men called it, after a period of intense thought-feeling at his writing desk, mental torment was always most active. He had known for years that writing day after day despoiled the body; the creation of an imaginary world had its satisfaction, but it was gained at the expense of physical life. Whenever he started to work with his body after such a period, it was always with dragging reluctance; the work itself was so slow, the first sweatings weakening, the pores of the skin irritated, prickly; the mind was sharp and resentful of the slowness of others.

There were two ruling rhythms of his life that he was beginning to recognise: the one of body-work, the other of the perfectionist mind. Uncle Hilary was a perfect example of this mental attitude, with his insistence upon a sense of form—ever exhorting to tidiness, exactitude, observance of the letter of the smallest detail. But when Hilary was swimming in the sea, his body again naturally accustomed to an active life, he was quite a good chap: his
overbearing
attitude was shed with his clothes. But did Nuncle see his previous exhortations as part of a bad dream which literally had vanished in sunlight?

The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue—and peace of mind.

“Shall Jim give you a spell, guv’nor?” asked the bailiff, leaning over the edge of the rick.

“Oh no, I can stick it. Sweats the nonsense out of me.”

The sweat dried on his bare back and arms and legs, and was salt to the tongue when licked. He was getting clear, thank God.

After two more days in the harvest field his sweat was sweet, almost with the smell of Barley’s tame otter, which had been faintly of violets. When winter came he would finish the book of the otter’s wanderings; meanwhile he must strive to live in the actual moment, to be thoughtless, in the sense of having a calm mind, to deal with every moment as it came; and seal-off his retrospective mind, with its periods of melancholy, and at times despair that he would never again see Barley coming to him.

*

The sun in Virgo burned over the downs, and swinging above the plain of Colham, inclined to the south-west, so that every aspect of his body was made brown, and given strength to force tired muscles to lift beyond aching, to empty a waggon of barley sheaves without pausing—three, four, five together pushed up on the long polished handle of the pitching-fork, six feet over his head to the edge of the stack.

The carter took them on his shorter-handled fork and served the bailiff, who laid the sheaves, keeping the middle always
well-filled
as he trod round and round the sides of the rick, splaying ‘chuffs’ at the corners. Up—up—up—driving himself ever the harder, hoisting the long-handled fork. The barley awns were everlasting, creeping through his socks, pricking his skin, working round his belly, into his ankles and between his toes. By now arms and legs were impervious to the scratches of the harns; he had ceased to sweat with the final dissolution of his fat; he was sinew and muscle and bone, burned by the sun, the
strength-giving
sun of August.

Every day the welcome sight of Uncle John and Lucy with Billy and the tea-basket—nine days of burning sun and clear blue sky—the corn harvest nearly over—well-saved, thistles and all. Now he could get down to a spell of writing the book which had been dragging itself along through the pages, with constant irruptions, for more than a year.

How blessed was the tea interval, never early, never late, exactly at 5 p.m. every day. Lucy and her basket of lardy cakes, butter and honey, shared with the men to give them all a feeling of comradeship, as in the war.

Even so, the three men chose to sit apart, seldom speaking, along another side of the rick. They preferred it that way; as they wanted their own bottles of weak tea, with only a colouring of milk. It had always been like this for them; regularity was their security. They had seen masters come and masters go; the land remained, and without them the land was nought.

The bailiff regarded his new ‘guv’nor’ as a man too keen, who wanted to get everything done in a hurry; but he was a good man, he would learn. The bailiff knew the land, he had worked on it since boyhood; the land would remain, but the guv’nor wouldn’t, if he didn’t go easy.

*

Phillip, sitting on the other side of the stack with Lucy and Billy, felt that he was almost back in his boyhood again. He told
himself
that farming was the only life: that this was Father’s country: his grandfather’s and many forefathers’ going back before the Wars of the Roses: he belonged to this land. And one day it would belong to him: Phillip Maddison,
Esquire,
painted on the waggons and carts. Why then was that thin thread of fear, as of a dry-rot fungus moving over airless wood, always at the back of his mind? It was nothing to do with Barley’s death, to be honest; he had always felt like that. Why?

He told himself that he was a free man: he could sit at night by the open hearth of Skirr Farm where he had first sat in that wonderful time before the war with cousin Willie and Jack
Temperley
, Willie’s great friend. The white owls still nested under the thatch at the eastern end of the roof, flying in and out of the dark triangular nesting hole as they had done for hundreds of years. Father had first told him of these owls when he had been a small boy, walking with his two sisters to Cutler’s Pond, before the electric trams of the L.C.C. ran along the road, and the elms were thrown; he remembered the very moment when Father had told them, and he had shivered with a strange thrill, imagining the scene so vividly that it had remained the dominant of his inner life until, staying with another cousin, Percy Pickering at Beau
Brickhill
, and sharing the same bed—a wonderful experience, for they could talk in whispers in the darkness—he had heard an owl
hooting
just outside the window, part of the mysterious Night and the Stars entering his secret life. It was later on that he had visited Skirr Farm, and Rookhurst, in his seventeenth year.

Jack Temperley had been killed two years later, in 1914. Mr. Temperley had carried on, working harder than ever after the younger labourers had been called up after the battle of the Somme. In 1919 his elderly wife had given him another son; that had provided momentary hope, despite the loss of fertility in his fields, owing to war-time need to grow corn-crop after corn-crop without the essential potash and its equivalent of bullock muck containing the residues of linseed ‘cake’.

Potash, before the war, had come from Germany; slabs of crushed linseed from the Argentine. By 1924 the farmer was exhausted, like his land; for a farmer’s heart is the heart of his land. It had taken some time before the break-down, the acceptance of final defeat. Skirr Farm, a yeoman holding in his family during several centuries, had come on the market. Other farmers, selling up just after the war, had made good prices for their land; but with the repeal of the Corn Production Act land values had withered away, and with it had begun the decline of the old order of peasantry which had helped to put back into the land what had been taken out to feed the towns.

*

Hilary Maddison was driving east in his car, a 14 h.p.
two-seater
Wolseley painted a bright red. It was a fine day, but even the green solitudes of mid-Wales could not dispel unhappy thoughts about the future of the country, and the threat to his plans to complete the restoration of his estate should the Socialists get back into power and impose a capital levy. In his imagination he was driving through the growing desolation of blast furnaces and docks twenty miles or so south of the Black Mountains. This coastal area to him was more than ugly and squalid to look at: it was a hotbed of all that was opposed to the qualities which had made Britain a great nation. He could not forget the General Strike in May of that year. It had been called off, certainly, but only to postpone the final reckoning.

For the reality of the situation had to be brought home to the workers sooner or later: the inescapable fact that no one section of the community could be allowed to throw the productivity of the nation into chaos ‘by holding a pistol to the head of the nation’, as
The
Daily
Trident
had declared in its leading article. Had the General Strike in May run its full course it would have meant starvation, and worse, in the mining areas of Wales, Durham, and the North; but it would have saved a coming greater catastrophe.
The sooner agitators like Cook, Tillett, Bevin and others of their kidney taking orders direct from Moscow were shown up for what they were, the better it would be for the genuine working man.

Hilary had left the fishing village of Solva an hour after sunrise. Taking it easily, he arrived at the Chepstow ferry two hours before noon, with another sixty miles to go, just as one of the two
paddle-boat
s was being warped to the little stone quay. The tide was nearly at the flood, making a pleasant prospect of pale blue water reflecting the sky; but he could not forget that the Severn estuary was everywhere foul with untreated sewage. Even so, by now he was less pessimistic; and leaning on the rail of the ferry boat as it crossed to the other shore, he looked forward to his arrival at Rookhurst in the early afternoon, where he hoped to hear good reports of the progress made by Phillip.

The fact was, this elderly man had centred all his hopes on his nephew. Phillip was, in part, an extension of his life, a
compensation
for a growing awareness of his own inner distress. He had bought Skirr Farm, to add it within a ring fence, when the inflated prices immediately after the war had gone down. The Fawley estate, with the woodlands, including the war-wreckage of
Rookhurst
Forest, consisted of a little over thirteen hundred acres. All this land, with the exception of Skirr Farm, had been sold by his father forty years before, under conditions which had led to the break-up of the family.

Later, his own family life had been broken. He had divorced an unfaithful wife, and disowned the two children by her previous marriage for whose education, the boy at Winchester and the girl at Eastbourne, he had provided, only to meet with, in his eyes, crass ingratitude from both. Neither had bothered to keep in touch with him—not so much as a postcard from either since the divorce, in which their mother had been proved to be the guilty party. There had been several men during the war, while he was away at sea, in service to his country; he had found out about one, the co-respondent in an undefended case. And for all that he knew, Phillip might have been one of her paramours, according to his sister Viccy, whose maid had seen Bee go into his bedroom when Phillip had stayed at the Hampshire home in the spring of 1915; only to leave, abruptly and without notice, very early on the
morning
following his arrival of the day before.

However, that was neither here nor there. If Phillip, his only nephew surviving from the war, showed himself capable of
assum
ing
responsibility as the future head of the family, he would in due course become tenant-for-life of the estate; and when his son or sons came of age, they would, if they proved themselves capable and of good character, become trustees and in time Billy, the heir, would become tenant-for-life in his turn.