Lucifer Before Sunrise (61 page)

There was no place for such men among the victors, the old men who carved up Europe north of the Rhine, land of the conquered. After the signing of the
dictat
at Versailles, did not Marshal Foch point, on the new map, at Danzig on the Baltic and prophesy, “There the next war will begin!”

And there indeed it did begin; and all that was learned on the Western Front, like the virtues of Turgenev, during his lifetime, might never have been.

*

Did he once write a book about a water wanderer, in those remote days of ambition following a war to end all wars? It belonged to that time when a man could say what he thought
without
arrest, when cities were lit by night, houses were painted; when clocks hanging above London streets told the time, and newspapers carried advertisements of firms wanting to sell their goods. Nowadays firms advertised in newspapers, asking the public not to ask for their products.

He determined to bring down his two-ounce split-cane rod, and fish for trout there; but when he got home and opened his
cedarwood
box of artificial flies he saw the mummies of several moths within. There they lay, amidst the wreckage of their victims—Pale Watery, Olive Dun, Alexander, Blue Upright, Pheasant Tail, Greenwell’s Glory, Fiery Forbes, Black Gnat, Red Spinner; but all the silk, cotton, and worsted bodies, together with wings and whisks, were dust.

So Phillip wrote off for one of his special game-cock hackle flies to the little shop near the end of the High Street in Colham, where the taxidermist still tied flies, as his father before him and his
grandmother
before that.

The water in the dykes trembled and shivered as the white glints moved slowly eastward in the height of the sky, one chequered pattern succeeding another seemingly from pole to pole. When the air was clear, only the scattering gossamers of vapour remaining, Phillip heard the song of the willow wren in the River wood.

Walking behind Sheba and Toby as he harrowed the wheat on the ploughed meadow, he felt the heat of the sun being absorbed by the plants of the wheat. The radial heat of the sun was drawing life from the earth. The leaves of the plants had a gleam on them.

As the harrows rattled over the flints laid in an old levelled drain Timid Wat the hare, distant from Phillip by a dozen paces, started from his day-dream behind one of the many tussocks of old turf which lay among the plants. He dashed through the hedge and up over the slope of the Scalt. Phillip knew he would stop on the summit, to watch him with his great eyes held in backward glance, though his head was pointing away from him. He stopped the horses. At once Timid Wat fled, the very spirit of fear. Hares on the adjacent airfield had been shot at by day and by night, and he might have come from there.

A lapwing was rising and tumbling over the irregular patches of the wheat-field. Soon the hen bird would be laying her eggs. He knew that, when he came to harrow the wheat again, it would be difficult to see them: and he must pick them up and set them down when the horses had passed. Yes; he must come down by way of the Scalt, the day before the next harrowing, and mark the
place-
with
a stick. Then Peter, with tractor and roll following the
harrows
, would not crush them. If he marked the site now, the crows might mark it, too, and later get the eggs.

Now that the habit of patience, to follow horses day after day in one field after another had been formed the work gave its own satisfaction. Life for Phillip became simple, with that of the
lapwing
walking around her eggs while he passed on, and her mate stood as though in meditation beside a tussock of half-rotted turf. Then as the joy of spring surged in his being the bird ran with wings uplifted and arose into the sky to fall and wheel and roll and dive to earth while uttering the wildly sweet
see-o-weet,
see-ooo-weet!
of happy release, while his mate, new rootlet or dried grass brought to the slight hollow, quatted to turn it in her beak, thus to restore the rough outline of her nest.

The blue and white days swept by, the four earth-coloured eggs were brooded with passion, tucked between her thighs while heat flowed into the life growing within the shells.

The male bird, ever on guard, dashed at other birds far superior to himself in strength and cunning—carrion crows, gulls, rooks, pies and daws which flew over, searching for an egg
to snatch and take on a branch, there to hold it up in beak, and guzzel. A fury of righteousness possessed the lapwing, giving strength to buffet stronger birds. Up and down the field he flew, crying wildly and sweetly when danger was past; his note changing as another enemy approached, to be dived on from above and harassed from above, greenish-black, white-flashing pinions swishing angrily by corvine head.

It all came back to Phillip, there on Teal meadow:
pew-it
in Gaultshire, cousin Percy Pickering—lapwing in Kent, Desmond Neville, Bloodhound Patrol of Boy Scouts, the
wonder
of life before 1914. Now those days had come back with startling clearness,
he
had
got
back,
O, he must begin his novel series; he must, he must, he must—or perish.

That night he had his second dream in the war.

When Phillip awakened he went at once to the farmhouse and stood trembling by Lucy’s bed, telling her of his dream while tears ran down his face. She invited him to share her warmth, holding him while he told her, in rapid, shaky voice, how his mother, when he was a small boy, had seen her dead mother and sister standing by her bed, and the words,
We
have
come
to
fetch
Hugh.

“My father scoffed at her belief that her brother Hugh, in a nursing home, was dead. Later that day my grandfather, who lived next door, had a telegram from the nursing home….” He cried out, “Billy is dead. I know it! I know it!”

“Don’t worry, Pip,” said Lucy, taking his head upon her breast. “I expect Billy is all right, the war is nearly over, you know.” He poured out his spirit before her, trusting himself to her.

*

The brilliant azure of the open sky illumined the mossy white blossoms of the pear-tree just outside Phillip’s bedroom window. He saw the same walls of cream distemper, blue Wilton carpet, couch, chest-of-drawers, open journal before him on the same three-legged table at which he had sat during the years behind the black-out curtains. Downstairs was still a store for seeds, tubs for pickling bacon, tools, spare wheels, balls of binder-twine, rubber boots, and tins of paint. Upstairs in his lighthouse room, the floorboards around the carpet were scrubbed by Mrs. Valiant like the deck of a wooden ship of olden time. Here he had found refuge when he should have been helping Billy, leading Billy, when he should have shouldered the main burden of the farm himself.

He thought of a friend, a painter of the East Anglian landscape, who had come to visit him during the summer. Humphrey Mariner was on leave from the front, he had been staying with a fellow-artist who was a soldier in Italy. Mariner had told Phillip that when he had suggested to his friend that he might find
relaxation
from a supreme military responsibility by taking an odd hour
off occasionally to paint, the Field-Marshal’s reply had been, ‘My men in the line cannot paint, so I do not paint.’

That was the way to lead men, to inspire others—by personal example. And however much he might feel otherwise, in moments of self-indulgence, or weakness, the inner man insisted that he look at himself without pretence.

*

“Any post, Mrs. Valiant?”

“Nothing since this morning, sir.”

Both were waiting for a telegram: Mrs. Valiant, with hope to hear that her son James was safe in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp: Phillip, with the same concealed anguish, but no hope.

At night he saw the stars in their westward sweep across the
hemisphere
as he lay on his couch against the wall. Searchlights no longer pierced the skies. No flares burned above the airfield beyond the wooded horizon of the Home Hills. No engines were heard in the upper air, by night or by day.

During the past six years he had almost forgotten the stars. Night had been an occasion for pulling the black curtains across the window, and shutting himself away from the reality of living. Now the sky was clear, the stars began to have meaning, as in his youth.

And as though Nature, outraged and occluded for so long, wished to make the eternal truths unmistakably clear to man,
suddenly
he found himself marvelling at the colours of the late April day as he sat by the open window.

Why was the blossom of the pear-tree, its branches almost
touching
the pantiles of the roof of the woodshed below his window-sill, so white and so thick? And the colours of the bullfinch on a twig amidst the blossoms—black of head, breast of burnt red earth, grey of back—why were they so startlingly sharp, as though new?

Was it similar to the mental relief a patient felt as, the crisis past, suddenly he saw with exceptional clarity the primary virtues and colours of the world as in the rising of the sun?

As Lucy passed the casement window of the farmhouse parlour, on her return from taking rose-hip syrup to those cottages which had small children, she saw Phillip standing by the radio in the alcove of the north wall, where dusty latticed windows were before he took them out and set them to widen the southern window, afterwards bricking up the spaces in the wall adjoining the road.

Quietly she opened the parlour door, lest she disturb him; for music, which she recognised, and did not much care for, was coming from the radio. She recognised it from Act III of
Tristan
und
Isolde,
for Phillip had gramophone records of pre-war recordings made at the Bayreuth Festival. Quietly she opened her boudoir door, where the children, home for the holidays, were sitting. Lucy was pale. She told herself she must keep calm. She was afraid of what Phillip might do to himself, and perhaps to the family. He had, more than once in the past, threatened what he might do. If only Tim were nearer.

The children’s eyes were red with weeping. That morning a letter had arrived from the R.A.F. station in Lincolnshire with the news of Billy’s death while returning from an operation over East Germany.

*

Phillip had not moved since going to stand by the wireless set nearly half an hour earlier. For days, weeks, months, ever since the failure of the Ardennes offensive in the snow and fog of Christmas—when, Billy had told him, the half-trained pilots of the Luftwaffe of sixteen and seventeen years of age flew over the Allied airfields in straight flight, while the experienced pilots of the R.A.F. shouted from doorways of mess and cubicle, ‘Weave, you bloody fools, weave!’ as one Focke-Wulf after another ran into Chicago pianos or multiple pom-pom fire—he had known that one day he would
hear the music of the
Death-Devoted
heart,
Love-Devoted
Head
theme of Wagner’s
Tristan.
And that would be followed by the music of the finale of
Götterdämmerung
—Valhalla of the gods wrecked and in flames, the world of men drowning in the rising waters of the Rhine.

Wagner had seen it all, with the clairvoyance of genius: Siegfried, the pure hero, had, through arrogance, betrayed himself, and all about him.

*

Edward Roderick Dietze, speaking from Kiel, the last resort. His voice said that as a small boy, with a German father and English mother, he had lived in London. In August 1914 his father left to return to Germany, while mother and son remained in England. Soon Edward Roderick Dietze’s small English friend was no longer allowed to talk to the boy whose father was a German. For two decades after the war he had thought and worked so that there might be friendship between Germany and England, where before there had been hostility. “Goodbye, my English friends.”

*

Silence, and the hissing of space.

Another voice, harsher, as though from a self-compressed body.

“Stand by for an important announcement!”

*

England must be about the only place where a man might listen to a broadcast from the other side and not be thrown to death by typhus into a concentration camp. Those camps—each one held enough political prisoners from the Eastern camps to fill it a dozen times over. And, supreme in the air, the victors’ aircraft had
destroyed
all sewerage and water systems, all transport by road and by rail, so that for weeks hundreds of thousands of men and women had been starving, and without medical supplies.

*

“Stand by for an important announcement.”

*

Russia was over the Elbe, and was it henceforward to be not so-much the Decline of the West as the Renaissance of the East,, according to the prophesy of Oswald Spengler in his book written in 1911?

*

“Stand by for an important announcement.”

*

The barrier against the East is down. Of the European-cousin nations locked in a death-struggle for so long, one is dead, the other
bled pallid. The hopes that have animated, or agitated my living during the past thirty years and four months are dead. Yet the artist in me must, with his last breath, strive for equipoise.

*

“Stand by for an important announcement.”

*

Truth is relative. The horror of innumerable civilians burning in coke ovens called crematoria is the horror of hundreds of thousands of civilians burning in Hamburg, Breslau and other German towns set on fire by the phosphorus bombs of the Royal Air Force, following a policy inspired by Churchill’s ‘grey eminence’, that while a factory could be rebuilt in eighteen months after destruction, it would take eighteen years to replace a factory worker.

La
balance,
la
balance,
toujours
la
balance!
My poor Philippe Pétain. It was your mistake not to have remained on the battlefield of Verdun.

*

“Stand by for an important announcement.”

*

The horror of Japanese soldiers bayoneting helpless prisoners-of-war kneeling with their arms bound is the horror of Japanese soldiers being roasted alive by U.S.A. flame-throwers directed into their foxholes.

Men are killed deliberately by cold-water douches, and deliberately by the breaking of reservoir dams. The old world of partisanship is no good. Had ‘the last Christian died on the Cross’?

*

“Stand by for an important announcement.”

*

Still no words followed. Instead, a record of
Siegfried’s
Funeral
March.

Silence.

Whisperings.

“Here is Grand-Admiral Karl Doenitz to say a few words!”

Doenitz announces that the Führer is fallen.

And at once the thought in Phillip—
This
lets
me
out.

“Germany will fight on!”

What eke can he say? He is a dead man speaking for a dying nation.

The loud-speaker hissing, the broadcast from Kiel finished.

Silence, and the faint scratches of space.

*

The yellow panel of the radio still glowed. A turn of the switch and the alcove was in shadow.

Behind the shut door of the adjoining room Phillip heard the subdued voices of children. Lucy was with them. He recalled her saying once, ‘The children are all my life.’ What constant thought, care, and labour for her family that dove-like woman had borne during the years, what work she had done for the village, which respected and loved her. That was her world.

And since my world for so long has existed only within the turbulence of an idea, how could there be harmony between turtle dove and a vehicle of phantasy called by the Greeks,
phoinix
:
a vehicle now locked in stone?

*

He knocked on the door. There was silence. He knocked again. Lucy’s voice said “Come in, my dear. I was just going to lay the table for tea.”

He went to Lucy and kissed her gently. Then he kissed the children.

“I’m just going into the Studio.”

“I’ll bring your tea there, Phillip.”

He saw fear in her eyes. “I’ll just write some notes in my journal, then may I join you for tea with my chookies?”

“Please do, Dad,” said David. “We all want you, really we do.”

Alone in her bedroom, Lucy was crying—for the third time in her life. The first time was when her mother had died, in 1917
when she was still at school. She had left for home at once, to comfort Pa and Tim who were alone in the house.

She cried the second time when, deeply in love with Phillip, she thought she had let him down, by forgetting to say ‘How do you do?’ to the cottage woman who was looking after his meals, when she had first gone with him to the cottage.

Now she cried for the third time, because she knew she must leave Phillip, because she would not be able to help him any longer; and he must have his freedom. But she kept this
determination
to herself for the moment.