The Power of the Dead (25 page)

Consider the case of Lucy. She was seldom, if ever, free of house-work: her time spent in cooking, collecting the eggs, pouring the milk into large shallow earthenware pans to stand first in the larder, then on the stove so that the cream on top of the milk began to crinkle, and turn yellow as it clotted: to be scooped off, and the scalt milk put outside the kitchen door for the pigs. On the go all the day and half the night. Then church work; visiting old
cottagers; taking eggs and jelly to the sick; riding on her bicycle to return the calls of local people who had left cards.

*

In fact, Lucy was happy to be left alone. In her own way she was neat and methodical, and enjoyed ending one job to begin another which was equally enjoyed. She did not mind how hard she worked, or how long; she would drop what she was doing to help Phillip, although by now when he called her up to his writing room to hear what he had written, she went with a shade of apprehension lest she be unable to answer a question quickly, or to give an immediate opinion. His mind worked very fast, she knew, and she admired him for it; but her mind was slow, like Pa’s, and if people expected her to reply quickly, she felt flustered, and then foolish.

When Phillip began to walk every afternoon she was glad, not that he was out of the way, but because when he came back he was calm, and liked to sit quietly in a chair with a book, or play with Billy. It was his writing, she knew, that worried him; whenever he had been able to write, he was always happy.

Sometimes of an evening when the children were in bed he would run down from his writing room to call her upstairs to hear music, or a play, issuing from the six-inch tin horn of his Cosmos 5-valve wireless set. One night she heard him crossing the floor above rapidly, the door opened and he called out, “Come quickly. It’s
Peer
Gynt,
with Russell Thorndike as the poet! I’ve never heard it before, it’s marvellous!—come now, drop everything. This is how writers really are—mixtures of selfishness and greater love.” He was startled and vitalised by the play’s penetration of reality to the spiritual truth beyond.

“Isn’t it marvellous?”

Lucy had stayed for a while, he looked so young, his whole face appeared to be shining: but she must go down, or the cake would spoil. She was making it for Pa’s birthday, and had been wondering how she could get so many candles on the iced top without damaging the pattern. So Phillip heard
Peer
Gynt
alone, the poetry—the spiritual truth of events—unshared. He felt
devastated
. The set could not be moved down to the kitchen because the aerial came in through the window and the earth-wire was fixed to the pipe bringing water from the new ram beside the brook.
Peer
Gynt
ran on until well after midnight, when he walked up the borstal alone, seeing the autumn stars flashing over the
downs, and feeling himself to be part of the greatness of the earth; but alone, and returning, the afflatus gone, he felt himself to be aching with unshared love.

This longing was paramount in
Tristan
und
Isolde,
he alone in his upstairs room, deeply moved by the theme of honour, love, and death, while longing to share the noble music with Lucy. But her iron, upon the kitchen table, went thump periodically as she worked to make his shirts look like new.

“Can’t you spare a moment?” he pleaded, looking round the kitchen door. “The music of Tristan’s delirium, as he tears off his bandages and stumbles to meet Isolde in his mind, is
marvellous
. Drop everything!
Who
wants shirts? Nothing matters but this.”

Lucy hurried up, to listen quietly as though patiently, then she said, “Oh, the milk for your coffee is boiling over. I forgot to turn down the wick!” and down she went again; the music spoiled, as well as the milk.

After the
Liebestod
he was irritable from exhaustion, and
wondered
if the real reason was that the music was based on unnatural feelings, in that it led to the longing for death. Or was it
true
,
from the spiritual world; was heavenly love a reality? Yes, yes, every feeling in him, beyond those of his little ego that chilled poor Ernest, said yes, yes, this is the truth.

*

He joined the men on the farm at irregular intervals, his mind beyond the horizon. Yet in both field and writing-room
self-reproachful
thoughts arose, because he was not doing what he had set out to do; neither a real farmer nor a real writer, but that barren thing, a hybrid. His guilty conscience persuaded him to that harsh judgment; but as a fact he kept an eye on the work which at this time was mainly of improvement and reclamation: miles of overgrown thorn hedges to be cut to the stub; the borstal ruts levelled with flints picked off the arable. At other times the men were used by a professional builder making new cow-sheds,
relaying
rotten rafters; retiling; thatching. This work was under the supervision of Mr. Hibbs, whose cultivations following the bare fallows on the land ploughed by the Iron Horses had produced a fine tilth in which the new leys of rye-grass and clover mixtures, between those fields sown with mustard, had taken well, following the rains.

Phillip’s bad conscience in the matter of his ‘neglect’ arose
from deeper impressions of himself, relating to the irritable, yet at times justified, anguish of his father when confronted by the mental inability of his mother to face facts where his father was concerned. To avoid a direct clash with Lucy, who so resembled his mother, he had to suppress the truth of his own nature; in bed with Lucy he had to act the infant, imitate the little boy; her sexual tenderness could only be aroused by diminishing himself to the level of her child. With Barley it had not been like that; she had enjoyed love-making for its own sake, and even encouraged him by laughing at his occasional bawdy jokes, sharing his desires and nearly always welcoming them in a way which had remotely shocked him, although he knew the slight feeling of disapproval arose from his early repressive upbringing.

Lucy was too good for him; she did not share that side of him; he lived basically withdrawn from her, and had to suppress in his mind comparison with Barley, whose imagined presence when he was making love to Lucy was often a necessity; a spur.

*

The draft of the prospectus for the private edition of the wander book had been sent off some weeks before to Mashie & Co. One morning, to his delight, the proof of the prospectus arrived. He returned it with a list of all names to be canvassed, including those likely relations and connexions of Lucy and himself. In due course Hetty sent a cheque for
£
3/3/–, so did Dora and Hilary; on Lucy’s side Mrs. Chychester, Ernest (whom Phillip jostled into giving him a cheque), Mrs. à Court Smith, and four others subscribed. Pa, declared Phillip, should have a special copy, in white vellum quarter-bound in dark blue, the colours of the hunt of which he was the oldest member.

At the end of a month, when the copies were stacked in their cardboard boxes in a ramshackle building in Paternoster Row, he had had orders for twenty-nine. One morning he saw the name of the Colonel of his Regiment in the newspaper. Would the Duke of Gaultshire have known about the wretched manner in which he had left the first battalion at Cannock Chase in September 1919? And about his month’s imprisonment, later? And if he wrote, wouldn’t the Duke think that he was ‘using’ a war-time acquaintanceship to further his own career (as indeed he was)?

Supposing, instead of to the Duke, he sent one to the Duke’s cousin, who had commanded the reserve battalion on the East Coast during the last year of the war? Lord Satchville, that tall
Viking of a man, Henley rowing champion, genial and
imperturbable
, veritable paladin and patriarch with his large
china-blue
eyes and golden beard streaked with grey—the only colonel, with the exception of a few specialist doctors in the R.A.M.C., to have worn a beard during the Great War in England. Dare he? He asked Lucy.

“Why not? I am sure he will be glad that you have remembered him.”

“What an admirable level mind you have, Lucy. I wish I had your common sense.”

*

The
£
50 advance in royalties for the book had been accepted, at Phillip’s insistence, by Uncle John as part repayment of the loan for the hiring of the Iron Horses. He was equally determined to pay the bill for the fodder seeds which had failed at last year’s sowing. He was determined to get clear of debt as soon as he could; so while the wander book was being set-up in Caslon Old Face Type, he wrote to Anders about the Donkin novel. Could he get Hollins to pay the
£
25 advance now; he realised that Hollins only had an option on it, with no liability to accept the book.

His agent replied enclosing a copy of the letter received from Hollins, who thanked Mr. Maddison for his offer to send the novel later, but they did not propose to exercise their option. They were about to remainder the other books, and would Mr. Maddison let them know if he wanted to buy any copies at
remainder
price for himself under the terms of the agreement? The price was 6
d.
a copy.

Phillip bought a hundred copies for
£
2/10/–, meaning to keep them until they were worth something, and then give sets to all his friends and relations.

*

The ordinary 7
s.
6
d.
edition of
The
Water
Wanderer
was published late in November. It had a good reception among the critics. Encouraged by that, he determined that the novel of the ex-soldier Donkin should be finished. Nearly three years had wasted away
since he had started to write it, and seven since the idea had grown into his life. He sat in the small room while the rain beat on the window, feeling secure in the dumpy little chair his mother had given him for a wedding present—the very chair he needed to keep him at his desk: for, once drawn up at the desk, it was impossible to get out, since it had no castors. One could wriggle oneself out in stages, each with a lift and a hop and a shove all in one movement, while the flat wooden feet rucked up the carpet, and his knees, raised in each effort to push backwards, lifted the top of the desk and threatened to shower pens, papers, and ink-bottles upon the floor. So it wasn’t really worth while trying to get away from the job, until it became urgent to leave; then, calmly, one might, while sitting still, lift up the desk top, set it back on its two supporting rests of drawers—excellent for
strengthening
the stomach muscles—and then writhe out like an eel. It really was more effective as a work-compellor than Carlyle’s cobbler’s-wax on the seat of the trousers.

A pin from the local one-man brewery stood on a box beside the desk, within arm’s-reach. Now and again he drew ale into the battered pewter pint-pot. The poker was already in the fire, ready to be plunged in to mull the ale. All done while fixed in the chair.

It was at night, when the darkness came, that the story really began to flow. The beech-logs gave out slow lilac flames; three candles burned on a diamond-shaped base of dark oak, part of a Jacobean floor-board which had been taken out, to split and
fracture
, when hot-water pipes were laid under the floor. The lozenge of wood was thickly coagulated with grease: it looked like a frozen ship, a star above each white funnel. As the candles burned down, so they were replaced; and a new light shone upon the gutters of the old.

One midnight of the dark of the year, with a feeling of the appalling imminence of fate as the B.B.C. went off the air, he pressed down fresh candles, and braced himself for what was to come. The tapers burned, steady and faithful, like the riding lights of the ship in Conrad’s
Secret
Sharer,
while the tide that was to bear Donkin away began to flow in from the Atlantic. He wrote steadily, unconscious of time: the tragedy was nearly over. The candles came down to wick-falling stage, dark particles were swimming about in the liquid grease. One wick fell over and died as the last word was written. It was done, Donkin was drowned.

“Willie! Willie!”

He pushed back his chair, tears streaming down his face. The top of the desk lifted, scattering pens and paper. He went to the window and opened the casement, to look at the stars and to feel their greatness in his breast. It was ended; now Willie could rest.

This feeling gave way to the thought of what would he himself do now? What was there to look forward to? Could he get back among ordinary people, and change the trend of his thoughts? Was he not on the same pathway as Willie had been, and perhaps others of their generation who had survived the war?

He crept into Lucy’s bedroom, to stand beside the dim-seen head breathing softly on the pillow, and to whisper, “Are you awake?”

She did not stir. He looked down at Billy sleeping in the cot on one side of the bed, then at the baby in the cradle on the other side. There lay her whole thoughts, her love. No, it would not be fair to awaken her, and to tell her—what?

Downstairs there was the noise of claws scratching wood. Rusty was awake, and wanting to come to him. Did animals feel
emotion
, without power to rationalise their feelings? Had he broadcast his emotion to the dog? He went down quietly and the dog went happily up the stairs and into the writing room, to lie before the fire, head on paws, eyes upon Phillip getting under the rug of the couch. Only when his master’s head was on the pillow did the spaniel give a sigh of relief, and settle to sleep.

Phillip lay still, feeling the flow of time to be rushing silently in the room, while the embers made their small tinkling noises, and the old aching sadness possessed him as he thought of Barley, lost for ever and for ever. Yet love
is
resurrection, the thought came: love is from everlasting to everlasting.