A Solitary War Page 18

  I think of you. Often. Oh so often.

  L. W.

  He had replied, urging her to write. Only thereby would her spirit come to flower.

  Let your story grow like mushrooms undisturbed in heat and darkness. The darkness is there all right; it is discernible in your eyes, in your very soul sprung from the dark clay of Suffolk, which, properly drained and cultivated, grows twenty sacks of wheat an acre. You should think steadily of Treherne’s ‘orient and immortal wheat, from everlasting to everlasting’. Only you are stopping yourself; nobody else; let nothing stand in your way; write, write, write yourself clear and free and uprising as Ariel out of your dark experience, your aloneness. Let your light come clear from under the stifling bushel measure, let your spirit rise to the sun and upper air where poets feed.

  Letters from Laura Wissilcraft, which had arrived about once every four weeks, as the moon was waxing full, were laments, veiled cries of pain: passages of vivid prose describing the constriction of life by day in a small thatched cottage where she lived with her parents; and the agonies of darkness spent in the same bed with her grandmother. For the past twenty years, ever since her childhood, she had lain awake, in agony, enduring snoring, snoring, snoring; even as during the day she had to feed her father’s pigs, the noises of which were but a continuation of the darkness noises.

  Her last letter had come a fortnight before. He had replied, urging her either to join one or another of the Services, or to write, write, write.

  Dear Laura,

  Agarics and other fungi called poetry often arise directly out of a permanently distressed human frustration, from a deficiency of love in childhood, from mortification similar to the pearl bubbled up to close perforation in an oyster’s shell. A minor literature comes from opposition, which refines experience beyond the agony of the commonplace to truth and beauty. Sometimes a major literature, but that is rare—Dostoievsky—as the compassion that suffering engenders.

  I am much like you. My present unhappy position is due wholly to my own defects of character. My wife and children have left me. I write this sitting with my feet inside a corn sack stuffed with straw and labelled BODGER GREAT SNORING: while the more the fire roars in the hearth of this floorless room—a mere pit in damp earth, for building was stopped at the outbreak of war—the greater the refrigerating effect of the draught rushing to gate-crash the flames. Nothing is what it seems, remember; the most fortunate people, so considered by others, are often the most unhappy. So please take heart and write the book I know you have it in you to write.

  To this pit-like room, where Phillip sat writing, Billy brought a telegram. It was from Desmond Neville. He was to arrive that night at Crabbe station on the 7.12 train from London. Phillip drove the Silver Eagle to the station, taking Billy and ‘Pinwheel’.

  “The man who is coming used to be in my Bloodhound Patrol of Boy Scouts.”

  “Good heavens, sir, what are we coming to. Well, one more won’t make any difference to the ‘Convalescent Home’,” said ‘Pinwheel’.

  The approaching lightless train hooted in the crepuscular night. Rattle of wheels around a curve was borne through to them, a ruddy glow throbbed on low clouds. He felt nervous and uncertain as the train clanked to a standstill amidst a cloud of steam.

  A few shadowy figures alighted and hurried away, their faces looking like masks. Phillip, hidden behind a loaded trolley, recognised the outline of Desmond’s head. Overcoming reluctance, he went to meet him. After a brief greeting he took the other man’s suitcase and they walked together to the ticket office and passed under a masked light, by which he saw that Desmond had not altered in any way. He was as lithe and fit as ever, without a grey hair.

  “I expect you would like a drink?”

  “Yes, there was nothing on the train.”

  They drove down to the quay and pulled up at the Schooner Inn.

  Over a pint of beer the visitant declared that he had received a shock in the dimness of the station. “I saw a skull-like grin through the steam, and heard a voice which I did not recognise.”

  “You look exactly the same.”

  “I can’t get over your changed appearance,” went on Desmond. “Not only is your hair grey, but your whole attitude and personality are different.” He repeated, “I didn’t recognise you when I heard you speaking, and saw before me the grin of a nervous death’s head.”

  Evidently you have not learned that ‘words are given us to conceal our thoughts’, thought Phillip. Aloud he said, “I’m probably inside out by now. That inside was always escaped from in the old hectic days. I am conscious now with my subconscious mind. Which means I live outside time.”

  “‘The asylum of time’,” quoted Desmond. “I forget exactly what poem that comes from.”

  “Someone said to me I looked as though I’d really died in the war. It wasn’t that. The war hardly touched me.”

  “Then what was it?”

  *

  That night as they lay in bed with the door open between the bedrooms, Desmond told his troubles. Estranged from his wife, he had fallen in love with a younger woman who had recently left him. She had gone home from Africa to her parents in England with a child that was his. He had followed her to England. Being a Catholic he could not get a divorce. He had not slept for many nights, thinking of her.

  He added one more night of sleeplessness, for he talked on into the small hours.

  Phillip was tired. He knew if he did not sleep he would be jaded and prone to anxiety the next day. He lay awake, acquiescent in his own hopelessness while Desmond’s voice went slowly on and on: how his father had deserted his mother, and now, his uncle having died, his father, being a crook, would do him out of an inheritance of fifty thousand pounds left to his only brothers’ eldest son subject to his father’s life interest, which meant the income.

  “For I’ve had found out,” went on the voice, “that my father had never been married to my mother, and therefore my father’s son, by a legal marriage, will inherit. And I have no funds with which to contest the case. Also my father’s a solicitor, so I’ve not much hope. Look how he treated my mother.”

  “How is she, Des?”

  “She died of cancer while I was abroad. Two years ago.”

  There was silence for a while, then Desmond went on with his story. And the slow voice continued heavily from the next room at intervals throughout the night. All his capital was in a gold mine. If the mine were worked properly, he would make his fortune. At the moment he was very hard up. He had spent his last pound note on the railway ticket from London.

  Phillip began to wonder if after all he were not dead: if the events of the last few months were but parts of a phantasmagorial variation of the past returning in the distorted etheric vibrations of the death-released spirit of the world. In a higher sense he himself was more than half-dead; so was Desmond; Teddy and ‘Yipps’; his sister Elizabeth was dead. Lost to life. Hitler was dead. None of them knew they were dead. The black-out was that of the nether world. They were all in purgatory, unaware of their deaths, struggling to get through to the living world through the veil of daemonic possession. Hitler was Faustus, trying to bring a millennia of youth to the dying Western world.

  Back to Desmond. There was neither art nor culture in South Africa among white men. So Desmond had not developed intellectually in what to a white man was alien country, possessed by the spirits of innumerable dead Africans. So Desmond had stayed spiritually static, homesick for lost life. More fantasy. Indigestion. Worry. Be sensible. You know, you can’t help feeling a liking for Des. They were almost like brothers again, as he had felt in 1922, lying in the little bedrooms of the cottage on the Devon coast, where Desmond had come to visit him. It had been a calm and serene September; and through most of the darkness they had talked as in the then-far-off nights of the war when on leave together.

  But the break in 1916, over Lily Cornford, had remained. And in 1919, when he had written to ask Desmond, then set-up in Essex b
y his uncle, if he could pay back some of the money he had lent him, Desmond’s reply had come on a postcard, calling him a swindler. Poor Des, how he had felt betrayed by himself over Lily Cornford. Especially after she had been killed by a Zeppelin torpedo.

  *

  Giving up the idea of sleep, Phillip told Desmond of the farm, of how the family seemed to be falling apart, and what was left of life with it. He told him of the underlying facts of the war, as he saw it; and prophesied that at the end of it the European markets would be closed to Britain: that when the gold reserves were gone, and Britain was forced to turn to the Empire under a new system—or perish as a first-class power—British land would be the precious heritage of the nation, and with stable markets farmers would bring back a healthy England.

  “We thought after the last war that would happen, you know,” the weary voice replied through the open door. “When I was farming in Essex, I went broke in the depression. Farmers could not afford even to plough their lands. When my tractor business failed I bought a saw-mill, but my partner let me down. Then I got pneumonia, and had to sell out at a loss. My uncle helped me again, and I went to Rhodesia, and had a tobacco farm, near two other fellows, both ex-soldiers, one of them a gunner like myself. They went broke, too, I think, in the bad years. I remember I sold one of them a bath. After that I went south to the Cape and bought a hotel, but that wasn’t much good. It was the worst of the depression by then, and I lost most of my remaining capital. Then my son died and my wife and I drifted apart, and I met this girl I told you about, and we had a child, but she left to go home to be with her mother.”

  “Does she still love you, d’you think?”

  He asked the question to find out how experienced Desmond was: if he still had—as he looked to have—a conceit of his own male infallibility.

  “I feel it all the time that she loves me, and is suffering equally with me. I can feel the etheric waves passing from my spirit to hers.”

  Phillip didn’t know what to say to that: he knew the dull pain and hope and perplexity of one seeking, in spirit, lost love.

  “She and I were deeply in love, and I can’t believe she has changed. She is younger than I, sixteen years in fact. A man younger than I wants to marry her.”

  More pages turned of The Oxford Book of English Verse.

  After a deep sigh, Desmond’s voice asked, “What’s your farm consist of?”

  He told him; and of the dilemma of Teddy and ‘Yipps’, whom Desmond had met at dinner.

  “How can that fellow succeed at farming, when he’s starting nearer fifty than forty?” said the weary voice from beyond the doorway. “I’ve only seen him for an hour or so, but it was apparent at once that he has no drive. Look here, let me look round in the morning, will you? I’ve got an idea. I won’t tell you now, I’ll think about as I lie here.”

  “You don’t mind if I go to sleep?”

  “Oh, no. What time to you get up?”

  “About seven. In four hours’ time. Is that too early for you?”

  “Oh, no. I never sleep. I read The Oxford Book of English Verse all night. It helps me to forget. Do you still like the music of Tristan and Isolde?”

  “Yes, it still brings back my own black, burnt-out sun. The Bayreuth Festival records are stored down on the farm premises somewhere. I say, do you mind if I close the door? The light stops me sleeping.”

  “Not at all, old man. Don’t let me worry you.”

  Phillip got out of bed and before gently shutting the door looked round it and said, “Goodnight, Des.”

  “Goodnight, Phil.”

  How strange it sounded, the old-time address. He was glad Desmond was there.

  Before he fell asleep an idea came to him. Perhaps his old friend was the partner he had been needing? The thought was like a rescue flare suddenly seen by a man swimming in darkness miles from land. But the light died away almost at once. He couldn’t face any more trouble.

  Melissa drifted through his heaviness. Thank God he hadn’t committed himself to her, only to be inevitably abandoned as Desmond had been by his young woman. Love is sexual; William Blake wrote, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’.

  *

  In the morning when he awakened he heard the soft turning of a page of the thin India paper of Desmond’s book. Whether Desmond had slept or not he could not tell. Desmond ate nothing at breakfast in the farmhouse. He sat in one leather armchair while the old bitch lay in the other. He spoke seldom to Mrs. Carfax, but admitted that he felt the cold greatly after Africa. Poor Des, he was suffering both in body and mind.

  Afterwards, in Phillip’s cottage before a roaring fire of pine branches—which needless to say made the room feel colder, owing to those bloody draughts across the floor—Desmond said, “A partnership on a farm is the most difficult relationship in the world. Why, in Africa, partnership is a scientific thing! From the point of view of getting along, I mean. You may be the best of friends with a man, but the moment you set up in partnership there is conflict, however restrained. It’s fatal, in the first place, even to live near your partner. One house at the near end of the farm and the other at the far: that’s the usual formula. Even so, most men find it difficult to get on. Each wants a thing done his own way. Compromise ideas are no good, for in a compromise neither party yields the essentials of his plan.”

  “As Napoleon said, ‘Give me one bad general in charge of an army rather than two good generals’.”

  “Quite. As you are placed now, Phil, the position is palpably hopeless. What does this man Pinnegar know of farming anyway? He just hangs about. What is he doing here? You tell me he’s been here nearly two months and still nothing is decided. It’s obvious that he’s sponging on you. You asked me to be frank and I am frank.”

  “Let’s go round and see a friend of mine called Penelope. She knows all about the position here. You know, Des, your coming may be providential. You understand farming. I’ll telephone and ask her if I may bring you.”

  *

  That evening they went round to Penelope’s house. They arrived just as Mrs. Carfax was leaving. She also took her troubles to Penelope; so did Teddy Pinnegar.

  “Her ladyship says will you go straight up,” said Mrs. Treasure.

  Phillip led the way to the blue boudoir, where before a blazing coal fire Penelope was curled on the sofa, her two white borzois lying asleep on the end of it. She greeted them with the quiet and slightly vague manner she had learned by imitation of other young women in London pre-war society.

  After Phillip had explained that Teddy’s idea of a Farming College for thirty pupils paying nine thousand pounds annually was impracticable, and that the month’s trial had become void owing to indecision, Penelope remained silent.

  When she did not speak, Phillip said, “I’ve been wondering if Desmond is the partner I should have on the farm. If I may speak frankly before him, he seems to have a realistic view on the situation here. He has farmed his own land in Essex and South Africa. He tells me he failed in the general slump of nineteen twenty-three. Thousands of farmers went broke then, ruined by the repeal of the Corn Act. What do you think, Penelope?”

  “I find it somewhat hard to make up my mind just at the moment,” she replied in a voice as impersonal as crushed ice. “Would you like some tea, or a drink?”

  “Not at the moment, thank you.”

  “If I came here,” said Desmond, in his slow, depressed voice, his eyes fixed on the hearthrug before him, “I should first have the soil of every field analysed to find exactly what it was deficient in, and therefore what it would and would not grow. I should convert the cowhouse for milk, and build up a herd, beginning with tuberculin-tested stock. Now is the time to buy. Later in the war prices will rise enormously. Phil is well-placed, really, although he feels he has made only a failure here; and no wonder, with those two footling away aimlessly. Actually, he is well equipped. He bought on the ground floor, and now that everything is rising, his capita
l is appreciating. I would lay out the farm to be self-sufficient for a first-class pedigree dairy-herd, and four good men. Those meadows are ideal for ducks and geese, too. Poultry would be a profitable side-line.”

  Penelope said in her most serene tones, “I find this recent suggestion, or rather development, a little confusing, Mr. Neville. Especially as I have heard it all before. Mrs. Treasure!” she called, and almost at once the housekeeper came into the room, bearing tray with decanter, syphon, and glasses.

  “Oh, Mrs. Treasure, might we have some tea, please? Mr. Neville, would you mind helping yourself to a peg? And will you let the dogs out for me for their run in the garden, Mrs. Treasure? I shall not be long. Thank you, Mrs. Treasure.”

  The dogs got obediently off the end of the sofa and followed the housekeeper out of the room and down the stairs. Soon muffled barking told that they were running around on the lawns below.

  Desmond poured himself a drink and said, “To the new farm,” before swallowing. Phillip sipped his tea, wondering why Desmond was so insensitive to atmosphere.

  “Have you seen this new bird book?” said Penelope to Phillip. “I thought that the photographs were rather fine.”

  The dogs came in, and pushing past his legs collapsed before the fire in their established places.