The Power of the Dead Read online

  Phillip had replied that surely suffering was not necessary if people would see clear and plain. The idea of this had come from Willie.

  Back came the answer: We can learn only through suffering, which brings clarity.

  There the argument had stopped, Phillip thinking that Anders thought like that because he had not been through the battlefields. Back to Pa and Ernest.

  Both considered him to be interfering, and, no doubt, said among themselves that he was a bore. They wanted to be left alone to live in their own way. They did not want their lives to be ordered by someone else. Yet when they got into a muddle they had to be got out of it—at the nervous expense of someone else. Grannie Chychester knew it: she had suffered from it: that was why he always felt easy and clear with her. She understood. Pa and the Boys, and their blood-loyal sister Lucy, did not understand.

  He longed for them to understand. So good—so kind—if only Lucy was understanding, what a happy, happy time they would have together. But as it was, he had to live more or less in a vacuum. And he was trying to pour her into the vacuum of his personal memory, or experience. He was trying all the time to alter her.

  Lucy probably accepted that he was not what she had hoped for; and so her whole being was given to Billy and Peter. And his moodiness had affected Billy, who no longer went to him with happy cries of “Dada-dada.” Ah well, like his own father, he must make the best of a bad job. He must devote his life to writing. He would ask Hilary to end the contract, and go away by himself, find a cottage somewhere, and live alone.

  “Tea’s ready,” Lucy called out, from the table in the shade of the mulberry tree. “Come if you like, but I don’t want to disturb you, of course.”

  That was the trouble: she left him alone, she didn’t really care. And yet, how could she? How much did he really care for her? Only so much as she was convenient to him. Appalling thought!

  He sat down at the weather-warped table, next to baby Peter in the high chair.

  “Where’s Billy?”

  “Oh, somewhere about,” replied Lucy, happily.

  The klaxon of the new motor-car sounded. Err-err, err-err. Phillip went to the gate. There was Billy sitting at the wheel, twisting it. He made to lift him out. Billy resisted.

  “Uncle he said yes.”

  “Well, Daddy he say no. It will spoil the steering if you try to turn the wheel while the car is standing still. Come on in, you’re going for a ride after tea.”

  “Peter comin’, too?”

  “I think we’re all going.”

  The boy sat still. Phillip gave up and went back into the garden. Err-err, err-err, went the klaxon. Lucy went out and said, “Such a nice tea for you, darling, then we’ll all go for a ride with Uncle, shall we?”

  “Will Daddy come in Uncle’s car-car, Mummy?”

  “I expect he will.”

  Lucy held out her arms, and he yielded. She knew how deeply he loved Phillip, from his first conscious moments, the nurses at the Malandine Cottage Hospital had told her.

  *

  Phillip rode with them to the top of the downs, while feeling that he could not breathe inside that dark prison while the sun was shining outside. On the crest he asked Ernest, who had hardly spoken during tea or afterwards, to stop and put him down. He wanted to walk up to Whitesheet Hill.

  Here, on top of the world, with the extended hump of the Chase rising along the southern sky, and the vale to the west, its human hopes enclosed within hundreds of dark hedges and taller hedge-timber—each family life bounded by a few meadows and pastures, ruled by them indeed—he saw his previous conceptions to be petty, and due to his own frustrated feelings scape-goated upon Pa and Ernest. Why be dissatisfied, when he had been given the chance to live the life he had always longed to have? He had felt that he did not belong to Wakenham; or belong anywhere, indeed; now he belonged to this country, he was no longer rootless. There in the church were the proofs of what he had always longed to have; the Maddison chapel with its effigies and memorials, eroded and defaced by Time; and it meant nothing to him. Indeed, in some way he could not determine, it was a petrifiction upon life—upon Hilary’s as well as his own.

  And yet, what was the alternative? He couldn’t let down Hilary after all his kindness. He worried Hilary, he knew; even as Ernest, and that unsold Tamplin cycle car, now entirely hidden in nettles, worried him.

  A string of small white clouds was stationary in the sky beyond the Chase. Below them, in his mind, he saw the blue waters of the Channel, and the summer wavelets on the sands of Malandine. Barley now seemed infinitely remote from his life; and yet, O God, she was ever-present.

  He lay on the sward, with its scent of thyme, but no tears came. He was what he was; he must accept it; he had to live his secret life apart from the ordinary world. But that world had its claims; and he must not avoid them. Indeed, the secret world must sustain the ordinary world. In the application of that faith was freedom. O God, he prayed, help me to do the right thing.

  He arose, feeling clear.

  Now for a view upon the ordinary world. If the wander book sold well, as Anders said it would, it might solve his problem, as well as Hilary’s. There was not much future in farming, and land prices were dropping steadily. Those farmers who had bought their farms just after the war were finding it hard to make ends meet. Why live against the grain? Time was passing; he was already in his fourth decade. He must write, or perish. And literary success would mean that he could keep the land going. The problem was soluble.

  Striding over the close grey turf, he found freedom in impersonal ideas arising as though on the breeze which shook the carline thistles, and lifted the wings of linnets flitting before the wind. Wheatears ran ahead of him, pausing to watch before flying on with low measured flight, to drop again as though they had tired suddenly, or abruptly changed their minds. His life was like that: often broken across, impulse after impulse. As soon as the final Donkin novel was finished he had intended to begin his suburban trilogy, the central character his father, sympathetically presented in every aspect of that unhappy, irritable, dreaming man. But now he had virtually promised never to write about any of his relations—not even with love, and its hovering spirit, compassion.

  London was to have been the villain of Soot, not his father. And yet, with the full focus upon truth, how could ‘London’ really be the villain? London was living soil which had been harmed, debased, made sour; its river polluted by the spirit of unenlightened commerce: but even as he decided upon that, were material, otherwise unspiritual, minds really to blame for what they did not know? Had the Luddites been right to smash the machines, which made the Satanic mills of William Blake? All life was impelled by trial and error; there was no absolute good or absolute evil. The steam-engine brought the wheat of the destroyed prairies, as Jefferies had written; and English wheatfields went down to docks and thistles; labourers starved while the finches rejoiced. The cheap food cry was one of genuine benevolence for those working in the mills, and the factories; whence the slums, the rookeries of the feared East End, and that shocking story once told by Father about Gran’pa Turney, and an out-of-work cab-runner at Liverpool Street station carrying his bag to London Bridge and being rewarded with a cigar stump. Fear of desperate, out-of-work men had been behind that act. For, at heart, Gran’pa Turney had been a kind, even generous man. ‘Must a Christ perish in torment in every generation because people have no imagination?’ Nuncle’s opinion of nearly two million unemployed, most of them ex-soldiers: Those fellows could get work if they wanted to, only they don’t want to was matched by Pa’s complacent, I’ve no use for the fellow, meaning Dick Sheppard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, who was ill with asthma, Martin Beausire had told him. Asthma was the disease of the sensitive, frustrated by what Arnold Bennett called le bloc.

  Where then, could a regenerating point be found? In revolution, as in Russia? When I hear Beethoven being played, I want to stroke people’s heads Lenin had said, until I remember that today heads
must be split open. Jesus had refused direct action at the Passover, and had gone to his death. So had Father Aloysius, on the Somme, shot while moving among the wounded. He could hear his voice now, against the distant hammer of machine-guns and exploding shells. The Virgin and Child is a symbol of what is … Love is in the world always, waiting for all men.

  What guts, to push the entire bloody war away in thought, and proclaim the spirit of love while tens of thousands lay dying in Noman’s Land. Such were the lights of humanity.

  He strode on, joyfully. He saw human life clearly. Man was the dreamer; his seed drove him to dream. Woman was practical, the home-maker. The dream in man’s seed was for her; he dreamed first of her beauty, which could never be, should never be, totally possessed. Even with Barley he had felt at times lonely: perhaps all dream, the life of the spirit, must be in secret. And yet, when with her, he did not dream: or rather, living was dream itself: one was through to the other side of life, as it were, beyond the barbed-wire and the barrage, into open country, the war between heaven and hell was over.

  Was the part of Barley which had fulfilled his nature, completed his life, the companionate male part of her in a female body? She understood, she was a friend first, a female afterwards.

  Why was he growing towards Lucy like Father to Mother? Lucy was always willing to help, to listen, to go for a walk, to do this or that—when she was free of the nursery—but he had to do all the talking. With Barley there was no need for words. She knew.

  With Lucy it was always the same: he had to be the leader, the explainer. She followed out of kindness, generous for his sake. Like Mother to Father. So Father had always felt that Mother was a burden; and his irritability was due to loss of nervous energy. Had he not shouted out once, during a row, years ago, You force me to play the rôle of the bully.

  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 Lu
cy 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.