How Dear Is Life Page 13

  *

  The dreaming boy walked many miles every day. He followed the cliff path to Wooda Bay, and continuing along the twisting shaly track to the beacon of Highveer Point, turned inland above the valley of the Heddon stream. Here sheer leaden screes gleamed dully on the opposite side of the valley—hundreds of thousands of tons of flaky rock slidden down the side of the hill. He scrambled down to the river below, and followed a flowery path to an inn where he had bread and cheese and beer, sitting outside with the sweat drying on his shirt, face to sky, to get all the burn he could from the loving sun.

  By following the stream up to near its source, he came to Parracombe. His shoes were shiny at the cap with heather and bramble. After tea, he caught the same train back to Lynton that had brought him that afternoon which seemed to be so long ago—far back in the hourless summer.

  Every morning he set out to climb the long hill up to Countisbury, and onwards across the moor, wine-dark with heather, yellow with furze, to County Gate. He was in Somerset! That wonderful, romantic name! He went down to Badgeworthy Water, excited that he was in the country of Jan Ridd and Lorna, and Carver Doone, and actually having tea at the farmhouse where the great Jan had lived. His long legs, seeming tireless, carried him up the valley and through the Doone stronghold, past thorns holding ever so many old magpie nests, and up to the wild moor, walking hour after hour with the burn of the sun upon his face. He wanted it to be black by the time he returned home. Onwards, onwards! Up coombe sides steep with the sounds of his own breathing, feet swishing through heather, while pipits flew up from among the rocks with faint cries at his passing. No one but himself, in league upon league of empty moor. He felt clear and happy as running water.

  He came to a stony track, strewed with dried droppings of moorland ponies, and plunged through knee-high bell-heather down to water and drank from cupped hands. After a rest, up again, with pounding heart, to find once more the cool breezes of the highest ground. This must be somewhere near Exe head; for southward lay mile upon mile of lower moorland, and beyond a shimmering prospect of woods and patchwork fields dissolved in sky.

  Westward lay a molten line brimming upon the moor. With a shock of delight he knew it for the open Atlantic. He held out his arms to it, closing his eyes for joy of the discovery. Then off with clothes, to dry them. Sunshine seemed to buoy his naked body, so that he had no self left, only something looking out of his eyes, part of the sky.

  Spreading his clothes on wiry bushes of heather, he lay back, eyes closed once more, while a pipit flitted with chipping cries. He wondered if he should look for the nest, though it was bound to have young so late in the year. He would not distress the little mother by searching for it. But supposing he was near the nest, even lying on it? He got up, moved his clothes to a comparatively bare place on the edge of a bog, marked by white tufts of the cotton plant in flower, and settled down again, to enjoy his sun-bath.

  Faint white wisps of cloud floated still in the height of the sky; he felt his eyes absorbing the blue space, until he was part of it, part of the remote blue thought of the sky, and in that most pure thought was his vision of the soul of Helena, for ever unattainable, like all beauty, all thoughts of the soul. Why was beauty always sad—because however much one loved beauty, it was forever unattainable? Yes, that was the answer.

  *

  One late afternoon in his second week he was jumping from thick tussock to thick tussock of purple moor-grass growing in a dry bog with shaking white tufts of cotton grass, making for Hoar Oak Water which, according to the map lent by Aunt Dora, lay at the bottom of the unseen coombe somewhere in front of him. He was on his way back after a twenty-mile circuit. By this time the toe-caps of his brogues, and the heels, were worn rough and thin by nearly two hundred miles through hard heather-stems of the moor. He was lean and brown as the heather. Day after day had been hot—bright in a dream of summer, of all summers that had ever been, and would ever be, for the world was now timeless as it was remote. He was one with the sky, he had found completion. A holiday into eternity, he thought to himself, again and again.

  Coming down from the high ground of the moor, making for Hoar Oak Water, he thought that all the north-running streams ran to the sea at Lynmouth; so if he missed Hoar Water, he could find his way home by any other stream. His friend the fly-fishing cobbler said that he would know it by the old grey oak which grew at the bottom of the coombe, near the headwaters. The tree was a boundary mark between Somerset and Devon, and was probably four centuries old.

  As he strode down a cleft in the moor, beside a runnel of water, walking on a path in the heather trodden by ponies, he heard thunder behind him, and stopping to look back, saw a flash coming out of a rock-like cloud that was drifting, and even as he stared, tumbling through the sky, solid-seeming yet breaking into fragments in silent weight. He had never seen one move with such speed. Its presence seemed to chill the whole moor with livid light.

  He began to run as the thunder came in heavier blows. The cloud might be a colossal iceberg, so cold was the air rushing from it. Several birds, which he thought must be blackcock, glided over the line of the hill, uttering cries when they came nearly over him; then shifting direction they beat away across the coombe.

  Before him lay a grey stump, with splintered top; the dead Hoar Oak. A track led away from the brook. He hesitated whether or not to follow it. A hissing purple flash of lightning upon the brow of the hill behind decided him. He began to count, while hastening along the track, and had reached ten when the thunder broke; and glancing back, saw only obliterating grey.

  He ran full speed down the track. He had been caught in thunderstorms on the Hill, and much enjoyed them from the shelters there, or the Refreshment House by the elms; but this was different. It was frightening. Behind him played several kinds of lightning: long jagged electric blue threads forking into the ground; rose-coloured fan-like effusions which made everything a momentary glowing pink; green slashes that hissed a moment before the sky broke.

  The ground was jumping with water. He gasped with icy shock. Shirt, shoes and trousers were heavy with water, dragging shapeless. He could see nothing beyond the smaller stones of the track dancing knee-high. He knew not where he was walking, but walk he must, or perish in cold.

  Thunder rolled continuously; reddish burnings arose upon the watery earth, or hovered as balls of fire, or shot sideways like expanding flares illuminating the massive sheets and torrents of the rain. White streams of water, suddenly suffused with pink, were everywhere gushing down through the heather; while through all was a roar that was frightening until he realized that it was the little Hoar Oak Water rolling its bed of boulders to the sea.

  By the time the lightning had moved further away, and rain settled to a heavy fall without turbulence, he could see to walk again. His shoes squelched, so he lay down and held them over his head to run out brown liquid and small stones. It made walking a bit better, but there were blisters on both heels.

  *

  The track turned into a lane between banks of lichened stone walls, on top of which beech trees writhed in many old cuttings and layings. While he walked up the enclosed track the rain suddenly ceased; and looking back, he saw blue sky in patches, with high white clouds moving above. Their shadows raced over the sunlit moor. It was so surprising a transformation that he stopped to watch it; and while he watched, instantly he was surrounded by warmth and light. Tiny, jewel-like glints of purple, blue, green, and red trembled in the grasses and on the beech leaves beside him. Already his clothes, like the earth, were steaming.

  He took off his shirt, and wrung it out; and whirling it round his head, walked down the beechen grove, singing. Then in the pleasant grove he got out of his trousers, wrung them out, and continued to sing to an audience of bullocks watching through a gap in the beech hedge. They backed away, heads low, while the trousers went round like the sails of a windmill.

  Saying goodbye to the bullocks, waving shirt and trousers, he went on up the
grove, which ended at a sunken red lane arched over by trees. The lane was extremely steep on a surface of bare ribbed rock, so that he had to walk gingerly, to prevent himself from slithering.

  Seeing a green valley below, and a road beside a river, he put on his trousers, and continued downhill until he came to a group of white-washed cottages, and a high arched stone bridge under which thick brown water was rushing. There was a monkey tree growing in the garden of a cottage. He put on his shirt reluctantly.

  A farmer told him he was at Barbrook, and the lane he had come down was Beggar’s Roost. Lynmouth was down the road. He went happily on his way, sun hot on back until he entered the shade of trees upon the road cut through rock; and all the rest of the walk was in shadow through the forest until the bottom of the long steep hill into Lynmouth, through which he hobbled with blisters, but rejoicing in his adventure.

  *

  Where had he been? Was he quite sure he had not caught cold? Good heavens, no! Then, going upstairs to change, he noticed two gladstone bags packed and standing under the dresser, side by side.

  He looked at the labels. Passenger to Dublin, via Holyhead. Perhaps Sylvia was going away. For some days she had been talking about Dublin, a name known to him chiefly through Father reading bits out of The Daily Trident. He had neither listened to nor cared what it was about. Something about Carson, F. E. Smith, Orangemen, and Home Rule.

  When, during tea, Aunt Dora said that she felt she must go with Sylvia to Dublin, in case civil war broke out, he began to take interest.

  “Do you think you could look after yourself, Boy, for the remaining three days of your holiday?”

  “Rather! I can cook, you know. Trout, eggs and bacon, toast, anything! Anyway, bananas and bread and butter are enough for me.”

  “You see, Boy, the news today is very grave. Our national living has been wrong in England for some years, and if those of us who know this don’t act now, we may all be plunged into something which might very well be the final catastrophe of Armageddon, foretold in the Old Testament.”

  What rot, he thought: like the Salvation Army. He cared only that he would be having the house to himself. If only Desmond were with him!

  “You may be wondering why we are going to Dublin, Boy. You see, Sylvia heard when you were out this morning that our soldiers, to their shame, have been firing on an unarmed crowd in Dublin, most of them children. One little boy was shot in the back, there was a little girl with her ankle shattered, while several parents were killed, and many more wounded.”

  “Our soldiers did it? But why, Auntie?”

  “Well, you have heard of the Home Rule Bill, have you not?”

  “No, Auntie.”

  Dora looked momentarily helpless.

  “Well, Phillip, the Orangemen, or Irish Unionists of Northern Ireland, have armed to oppose the Home Rule Bill. And, you see, while arms for them are virtually permitted by our Government, they are forbidden to the National Volunteers, the Southern Irish that is. So they landed some secretly. The Viceroy sent soldiers to seize those arms, at Louth, where they were landed. On their way back to barracks the soldiers opened fire on an unarmed, jeering crowd, and some of the bullets killed the children.”

  Phillip was only half listening. A fisherman on the quay had told him that salmon would be running in the “fresh”, and they would take a lobworm among the boiling water of the boulders. The thing to do was to water a lawn with mustard and water, then up would come the lobs. Could he ask Aunt Dora where there was a lawn?

  “ … you will be mobilised, won’t you, Boy?”

  “War, Aunt Dora? You mean civil war in Ireland? Father said something about it, I remember now. The Terriers are home defence, you know. We’re really more a sort of club than anything else.”

  She looked at him with a gentle smile. He was so young, so unaware of the world. Pray God that he, and thousands of boys like him, would not be drawn into the threatening cataclysm.

  “Do you ever read the newspapers, Phillip?”

  “No, not much.”

  “You have heard about the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo, surely?”

  “Only sort of, Aunt Dora. I say, do excuse me, I want to ask the cobbler something, before he leaves his shop. I won’t be long.”

  When he had gone, the two women sat there in silence for awhile. Then Sylvia said, “That poor boy is typical of the European millions, Dora. What does he know of the dark forces?”

  “It is the backwardness of time that conceals the truth of the present, Sylvia.”

  “We are all part of it, Dora. Even the warnings of that noble man, our great friend Keir Hardie, seemed to me to be exaggerated, when he told me, a year or two ago, that Haldane’s Army Bill, then before the Commons, meant, finally, war and conscription. I listened to him with sympathy, of course, but being involved in moment to moment problems of our own struggle, I thought that his attitude was too remote. I suppose Keir Hardie found me wanting.”

  In the morning the two women left by the early train, and Phillip, to his satisfaction, was left in charge. He had instructions to leave the key with a neighbour, who would come in and clean up the cottage when he had gone.

  *

  On the following Sunday night at nine o’clock he caught the return excursion train from Barnstaple, and arrived, after sitting upright in a carriage all night with nine other people, at Waterloo station shortly before six in the morning. On the way home he had a carriage to himself, and turned inside out between the luggage racks in sheer exuberance of being alive. August Bank Holiday lay only a week ahead; Desmond would be coming home from school, and cousin Willie be living with him by then. What fun they would have together! He would take Willie to his secret Lake Woods, with Desmond, and they would fish for roach.

  Chapter 9

  SOMETHING IN THE AIR

  IT WAS very hot in London, though cool in Wine Vaults Lane. No artificial light in the downstairs office now; but upstairs, in his narrow frosted glass partition, Phillip worked under an electric bulb as he sat before the tall Remington machine, making out Fire and Combined Household policies from proposal forms, and at moments pausing to imagine the sun upon the heather of Hoar Oak Hill, and the clear gravelly runs of the Lyn.

  When he got home he found the front door ajar. He stood on the hall mat, listening to Father’s voice in the sitting-room.

  “You mark my words, Hetty, Lord Roberts knew what was to come as far back as 1908 when he said at Quebec—I cut it out of the Trident at the time—here it is—‘They refuse to believe me, and we sleep under a false security, for I do not hesitate to affirm that we shall have a frightful war in Europe, and that England and France will have the hardest experience of their existence. They will, in fact, see defeat very near, but the war will finally be won by the genius of a French general named Ferdinand Foch, professor of the Military School in Paris’.”

  Phillip crept silently away. It was awful to be home again. He went next door, and had tea with Grandfather and Great-aunt Marian.

  Later that evening, when he had told him of the Dublin journey, and Father said, “Preposterous idea! Dora’s a muckraker,” Phillip got up and left the room. They heard the front door close behind him.

  “Curious chap,” remarked Richard. “You can’t tell him anything nowadays.”

  *

  “In 1908 Lord Roberts, in Quebec, said we would have a frightful war in Europe, and come near to defeat, Mr. Hollis. Hark, what’s that paper boy crying? Perhaps it’s started already!”

  “I hope not,” said Mr. Hollis. “I sincerely hope you and Lord Roberts are not right, Maddison. Here, Edgar, stir your stumps, forget your pictorial harem, and go out and buy me an evening paper!”

  “Yessir, certainly, sir!”

  The messenger went smartly out into the narrow sunlight of the Lane, disappearing in the direction of the distant voice.

  “Though I must agree with you,” went on Mr. Hollis, “that things look pretty bad. Ev
en so, we ought to keep out of it. We’ve got a Navy, haven’t we? And we’re an island! As Napoleon once said, we’re a nation of shopkeepers and tradesmen. While we rule the seas, we rule the world, my boy! We’ve also got most of the world’s gold. Nations, like families, can’t exist without money. A modern war would soon exhaust the European nations’ gold reserves. In three months any country at war would be bankrupt. Contractors have to be paid for their armaments and supplies, you know! Take my word for it, there won’t be any war. So get on with your work, young feller-me-lad. No martial glory for you, you sunburnt trout tickler.”

  Downham was at luncheon, so was Mr. Howlett. Mr. Hollis was dressed in his tail-coat and striped trousers. He was going to meet young Roy Cohen at the Piccadilly Hotel, and, he said, get the new clothing factory insurance of Moses Cohen, Ltd.

  “Someone in this Branch has got to get new business, you know, Maddison.”

  “Quite right, Mr. Hollis.”

  It was Friday, the last day of July. Desmond was home from school, with Eugene his Brazilian friend who was a nice fellow; Cousin Willie was arriving that afternoon at Waterloo; Monday was August Bank Holiday. Then, very soon, camp at Eastbourne! Life was tremendous fun, really.

  And yet—and yet—somehow, under everything, a feeling of coldness, of longing, of dread, was growing; and the feeling became centred on the talk of war, which, stealthily, and in secret, was a thing to be desired. War—everyone spoke about it: the fellows at Head Office; Father; Mrs. Neville; Gran’pa; Mr. Bol ton—everybody. The tobacconist spoke of it when he had gone to buy a sixpenny ounce of mixed cigarettes—yellow Russian, fat oval Turkish, strong black French, red-silk-topped Ladies, Italian with streaky thin rice-paper, African with paper ends screwed up, violet-tipped for passion. Secretly, awefully, fearfully, one part of him desired the excitement that was war to become more and more; while another part of him quailed before a vast, fathomless darkness. As these feelings grew side by side in his mind there persisted a vision of hatless French soldiers slouching along a road, treeless, houseless, bare, a road leading nowhere, from nowhere. There was no fighting in this picture: nothing like the pictures of Valour and Victory, stories of the Boer War: only an endless straggle of ragged soldiers, some without arms, others with rifles slung on shoulders, all walking very slowly, listlessly, from nowhere to nowhere.