The Gale of the World (44 page)

“Would you do that, sir?”

When there was no reply Mornington said, “I understand from the police that Miss Miranda’s name is posted among the
Missing
.”

He followed, still keeping his distance, until he saw that the Colonel, (“a ramrod type waiting with one knee bent, as though standing at ease during a rehearsal of Trooping the Colour,” as he said later to Mr. Corney) had turned his back on Phillip’s approach.

Phillip went to Molly and said, “Your sweet child is never out of my thoughts.”

Peregrine about-turned and Mornington heard him say, “Did you abduct my daughter from the cricket field?”

“No, sir.”

“That smallholder, Kedd, told me he saw you with her!”

“Oh no,” said Lucy. “Rosamund saw Miranda walking up the cliff path to Lynton, while Phillip went the other way.”

Thank God, Mornington said to himself. He observed that two press-men were approaching. One with a camera said, “Excuse me. Colonel Bucentaur, but I think I’m right when I say your daughter went about with one of your white goats?”

“Well?”

“There’s a white goat hanging in a tree out there, and it’s got a red collar.”

Peregrine shouted, “Do not attempt to take any photographs!”

Frogmen were wading into the water towards the tree. They submerged; to return with the body of a young girl with long black hair.

Later, when Peregrine was asked by the Chief Constable to go with him to the sea verge, Phillip took Molly’s hand, while a voice seemed to be whispering under the azure sky,
Ariel
from
Miranda
hear,
This
message
that
the
sea-waves
bear
—

*

While Peregrine was with the Chief Constable and a doctor, Molly said to Lucy, “What a sad end to your holiday, my dear. You must all come back with us”—thus seeking relief from remote terror growing in her mind. To Melissa she said, “Go to Phillip, my dear, he needs you”, for he was now walking alone towards the Foreland cliffs, at the base of which waves were breaking.

If only I had remained at the cricket field, and given of my
true
self to Miranda, and Peregrine, by behaving as though
nothing
had happened—for nothing
ever
happens if one remains true to oneself—

The waves are the tears of Christ breaking on the stones of the world.

No! Christ was
real
,
I am an escapist—a romantic: untrue to myself.

When Melissa came to him he was sitting with arms held across the front of his crumpled jacket, the sea-wind blowing the silvery hairs of the bowed head … a figure almost of stone, she thought, conscious of life’s beginning in the rocks fused by fire, eroded by water and air—creating the soil for which life had left the sea, to arise and fall in ‘the ceaseless flow of the fountain’.

She sat beside him, he was shivering. “Come with me to
Old-stone
, where I’ll be able to look after you. Lucy and the children have gone home with Molly, and Elizabeth is returning to her Dorset cottage.”

*

There followed an anxious week for Melissa. Pneumonia
developed
in both his lungs. She was with him during most of the nights and days, resting on a couch in the bedroom, seldom leaving him. And as the fever abated he felt himself to be
floating
blessedly in her presence. There were moments of
recrudescence
, when he would cry, the face wrinkled, the voice
self-accusing
.

“Darling, it is wrong for us to be too hard on ourselves—”

“My father clung to his roll of lavatory paper, but they took it away!”

What could it mean? When he was calmer he said, “If only I had remained with that poor, lost creature!”, and told her about the nursing home. She was relieved, having feared that the lightning stroke might have hurt the brain.

That night she lay beside him, facing him as to an anxious small child who may so easily feel lost when the mother’s back is turned upon it. Then as he dropped into sleep quietly she turned over to ease her cramped body, but keeping touch by the palms of her feet held against his legs. And her virtue flowed into him, giving a feeling of peace which he had not known since his first wife Barley had died after the birth of his son Billy.

In the mellow sun of September he sat in the garden at
Old-stone
, once visited by Mornington and Laura; then he was strong enough to go for a walk; but not into Lynmouth, not under The Chains. Melissa took him by bus across the moor, and down to the shallow coast by the estuary of the Two Rivers.

One morning as they walked through the sand-hills wild sweet calls came down from the sky as a gathering of curlews passed overhead to feed at the tide-line—survivors of the storm upon the moor, crying delight at the gleaming sands below.

“The curlews recognise you, Phillip. You kept the crows away from their young.”

“They’re calling to Bodger—”

She took his arm, he felt the little dog was near him as they sat on the shingle by Airy Point, above a white bicker of cross little waves under the sky’s windless blue. “Willie is safe, too,” he said. “The dead are safely over.” He got up and wandered over wet
pebbles, trying in vain to recall the end of Birkin’s book, the one composed in prison during the war. He went back to her.

“Melissa, I used to know the peroration by heart, but now—”

“I remember it.”

“You do?”

She quoted, “‘It is the age of decision in which the long
striving
of the European soul will reach fulfilment, or plunge to final death’.”

“I remember!” he cried, “‘Great it is to live in this moment of Fate, because it means that this generation is summoned to greatness in the service of high purpose’.”

She moved close to him, “‘From the dust we rise to see a vision that came not before’.”

“‘All things are now possible’.” He kissed a scarred cheek lightly.

“‘And all will be achieved by the final order of the European’.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I hope, in a very small way, to
complement
Birkin’s dream by writing my novels. What trials that man has endured for his country. He is a statesman at present without state in the seen world. I must reveal the past of our generation to your generation, indirectly; to reveal truth by a study of the past—the truth, overlaid in nearly all those I have known, yet also invisible and neglected— Will you help me?”

She took his hand. “‘Whithersoever thou goest—’” She felt his tears on her forehead as he stammered, “I – I saw my past life while I was l – lying there, on The Chains— I felt I was being led back out of Hades— Never leave me,” he whispered, hiding his face against her breast.

“I never have, Phillip.”

“With you I shall be able to begin my chronicle! Do you know, I’m glad I didn’t write the novels before. They would probably have been angry and satirical if written in the ’thirties. Now I think I can understand every kind of man and woman.
Particularly
my father. Yes!” he cried, getting up and walking about on the sand. “I shall start my chronicle in the mid-nineties, on a spring night, with that reserved, shy young man walking up the hill at Wakenham. He was carrying his dark lantern, eager to see what moths were on his ‘strips’, as he called them—pieces of old flannel steeped in a mixture of rum and treacle pinned to the bark of one of the elms. And one night in the beam of the lantern, he saw a rare Camberwell Beauty! My father must have felt it was an omen, for the girl he loved was born in Camberwell, then
a village. She became my mother. She was dark and intuitive, like Miranda—”

“Weep no more, old soldier,” she whispered, but her tears, too, were flowing. Then they were smiling and walking hand in hand down the shore.

“You remember Blake’s lines—‘When the stars threw down their spears/Watering Heaven with their tears—’ I know now what that old poet meant. And you have brought love to me, and to my sister—love which dissolves arrogance and hatred—love by which one can see all things as the sun sees them; without shadows.” He held up his arms, crying, “O my friends! My friends in ancient sunlight!”

1964–1968

Devon.

Edward Garnett, literary advisor to Galsworthy and Conrad, friend of many writers including Hardy, Hudson, and D. H. Lawrence—a critic of classic sensibility and wide range of
scholarship
—said to the author one summer day in 1928 on the shore of the estuary of the Two Rivers in North Devon what was seldom to be forgotten.

“A written page may be life; but the test must be, Is it art? A writer may transcribe an actual happening with what is called ‘realism', yet his work remain comparatively unconvincing.
Whereas
what is transmuted by the Imagination will convey the spirit of reality, and read as life itself.”

Forty years have passed since those words were spoken by the White House, the marshman's cottage on the sea-wall where Garnett was staying for a holiday. He held in his hand a set of galley proofs of a novel called
The
Pathway
which had taken nearly four years to begin, continue, and complete.

“‘True but imaginary', in Conrad's words,” he went on,
waving
the long strips of printed paper. “You have brought it off, my dear fellow!”

*

The final sentence of
The
Gale
of
the
World
was written at 4.20 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, 11 February 1968, in a cottage near the harbour of Ilfracombe in North Devon. The whole novel, from the opening sentence on The Chains of Exmoor to the final scene on the bouldered, wreck-strewn shore of Lynmouth after the great storm which swept some of the characters to their deaths, had been imagined. As with
The
Pathway
(the story of Phillip's cousin Willie)
The
Gale
had slowly formed itself, with all the characters imagined upon the paper before one, during long days shut away from summer suns, and short dull days comforted before the open hearth of a hilltop hut; and, at times of concern, in the silence of sleepless nights.

William Blake wrote, ‘What is now achieved was once only imagined'. All things of the visible world are by their material forms archaic; whereas the Imagination is the spirit of evolution to higher forms. All men and women of good will who hold to their being by this spirit know the greater love which streams from ‘the fostering hand of the Creator'.

At 4.20 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon in February 1968 I got
up from my writing table overcome by emotion, crying out words of grief and amazement while walking aimlessly about the rooms of the cottage empty except for myself, disturbed by feelings of a lost freedom which also had been a tyranny during the two decades now closed behind one. For
A
Chronicle
of
Ancient
Sunlight,
of which
The
Gale
is the ultimate and climactical volume, was ended. During those years one had been visited by fear of failure at all levels, together with exaltation which at times arose to a point of feeling oneself to be in glow, to be in levitation—a necromancer raising from the ashes of consumed Time remembered friendships and places—a sunlit lane in Kent, the spokes of my bicycle humming—a dawn sky above the Wiltshire downs—a trout stream on Exmoor, where the dipper flew from rock to rock—a battlefield under Messines Hill in 1914; the more terrible desolations of Picardy and Artois in later years —the comradeship of young volunteers like myself marching through the white-dusty lanes of Surrey and Sussex in that sweltering August when war suddenly obliterated the old feelings (it seemed, then) for ever.

Backwards in Time to revisit the first Christmas tree in the new house in Wakenham, while the polyphone played
Over
the
Waves,
and the face of a mother was happy as she lit the little candles: the same face, thin with pain, dying of cancer in a nursing home.

A thousand scenes from Time regained! Innumerable joys and sorrows, the best and the worst of oneself: in that moment of 11 February 1968 all were swept away as
débris
of the Imagination.

Bitterness, dear Francis Thompson? Ah no! Behind the tears were love and gratitude that one had been born in England, that one had been privileged to experience hardship that had burned away the selfish dross of oneself, and thereby, perhaps, made one worthy of an attempt to speak for those who had not come back from the Western Front.

*

The flame of the taper falters. We have come to wax end, our chronicle with it.