The Power of the Dead (11 page)

Everything he had said to them, everything he had proposed, or tried to do, had been, to them, meaningless. Look at the
condition
of the Works—the untidiness—everything higgledy-piggledy—the wash-basins black-rimmed with oil—towels, as grimy as the basins, flung on the floor. The lavatory pans were pits of horror. He stood still, momentarily lost, all personality dissolved as a bleak, strained feeling possessed him like a petrifaction.

After a while he moved away to the store-room, where stood a half-opened case of one gross tins of grease-solvent soap, sold to a compliant Tim by some commercial traveller telling a hard-luck story. He opened one, and started to clean the basins. There was no water in the tank. He went outside, found two pails by the kitchen door, emptied their rotting garbage on the ash-heap, and walked up the lane to draw water from the well. He borrowed a clean pitcher to dip in the water, and returned with full pails.

Muttering to himself, he began to clean the lavatories. It took several pails of water to free the passages after removing wads of newsprint and scraping with a wire brush. Then the scouring with abrasive, while he kept all feeling under control, breathing steadily against a mounting sense of horror at the indifference, the neglect, the unawareness due to what seemed to be a total lack of sensibility—butterflies without antennae. It only wanted
shellfire
to complete in miniature the appearance of the Somme
battlefield
where all the underlying purpose of life—the created order and beauty of the species—had been denied; life working
back
wards
to chaos, far beyond the simple, the natural order of death succeeding life.

He could no longer control his feelings, he began to shout at himself. Taking a broom, he swept the floor of the machine room. The inner self collapsed; with a wild scream he went to the Office. Here was no relief; here everything was in chaos. A feeling of despair rushed out of him, leaving a sense of appalling lifelessness within. He stood still, knowing his real self to be destroyed beneath the personality he had assumed during the war, covering the
distraught
inner core of his earliest years. In a frenzy he struck the back of his right hand on the bench again and again until blood came from the base of the fingernails. In the flaring moment he saw the truth of his life which, despite all he did, could never change its pattern. He was done for. A man’s life, right through to its end, was as his beginning. He never had done what he wanted to do; it was always prostitution for others, who
did
not
want
his
interference.
Therein lay the truth; he was like Father, trying to change others, because he was weak and unable to change himself. He had always
pretended
with Lucy. What would become of him? Was he doomed to the same sort of misery all his life, always more or less at odds with those about him, always trying to explain, to make things clearer—Doris, Mother, Father, Cousin Arthur, the Coplestons—Uncle Hilary and his damning of the miners’ leaders—damning strikes which were only a mass demand for a decent life—damning the General Strike in the spring. A European generation had died upon the battlefields in vain.

No, that was not true. He saw Hilary’s point of view. It was realistic, as he, and the Boys, were unrealistic. They had tried to make a boyhood dream come true. So had he; so had Hilary.

Again, he had accused Lucy, in manner if not with words, of being insensitive to the point of stupidity in not remembering the legacy left to Ernest. He was becoming unfair, intolerant. Good intentions paved the way to hell. He must be only a writer, in detachment from life. A writer
must,
with his last breath, strive for clarity; he must never damn anyone, but see all human, all natural events, ‘as a child, or an idiot, sees them’. Conrad
knew.

He sat down, telling himself that the fault lay in himself because his intelligence had been clouded by feeling: he had been
dictatorial
, withholding himself from the Boys: he had camouflaged his
fear
of them, and of Pa. Lucy was balanced: had she not said, in
her mild way, ‘Bother the Boys, why can’t they look after
themselves
,’ which really meant, ‘Why can’t
you
allow them to look after themselves?’

His entire attitude towards the Boys had been wrong. They were easy-going, and natural: he drove himself, and was unnatural. Feeling clearer, he resumed the sweeping of the workshop floor, and recovered himself in steady progression. He would not touch the office; if they liked to file their papers in the basket and upon the floor, let them. If Fiennes wanted to leave off the telephone receiver, let him. While Ernest solemnly read, with inner glee,
Cohen
on
the
Telephone.

*

Miss Calmady, the optimistic cook, had heard the shouting from the kitchen and came out, dirty apron and untidy hair, wondering what he was about. This queen of the greasy pot and bubbling garbage pails spent most of her evenings down the lane with the Collies, small-holders whose secret ambition it was to own Down Close and its garden, three parts wasted, when ‘Colonel
Coperston
’ died. The hamlet always referred to him as ‘Colonel
Coperston
’ ever since, as a man of forty years, courting Miss Margaret Chychester at Tarrant, he had taken part in amateur theatricals at the Gaiety Theatre in
The
Y
eoman
of
the
Guard.

“I thought I ’eard a noise,” she said.

“Yes, I was rehearsing my part of the idiot in a play, Miss Calmady. Now I must pick up Mr. Smith at Ruddle Stones and take him to the pictures.”

*

The Gaiety Theatre had been built on the site of the Assembly Rooms, which had been burnt down during the reign of Edward the Seventh. Now the theatre was a picture palace.

While Phillip stood beside ‘Mister’ just inside the door, waiting for Pa and the Boys, children began to file past, ushered by school teachers to the front rows. The local committee of the Junior Imperial League had arranged for the audience of children; while in the centre of the hall old soldiers of the British Legion, some with artificial legs, eyes, and arms, were already seated.

There was a gallery above the entrance; here on the front rows of tiered seats sat local dignitaries with superior, long-established tradesmen of the town who considered themselves to be ‘just below the professions and the county,’ said ‘Mister’.

“My dear Phil and ‘Mister’, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you both!” exclaimed Tim, his face showing pleasure. Pa said, “Ha. You missed an excellent dinner.” Then seeing ‘Mister’, “Hullo. You here too?”

The film began well, with shots of the dumps, new roads, etc., and the preliminary bombardment taken by official photographers in the early summer of 1916. There the marching columns were, waving, smiling, and cheering as exhorted by the camera-men of those sweltering June days. There were the howitzers in their chalk pits, firing in recoil; the field-gunners; piles of plum-pudding mortar bombs; strings of mules being watered in long lines at canvas troughs; the Leaning Virgin of the basilica of Albert above the horse and lorry traffic of the Ancre valley. The night-marching scenes of the boys going up the line were fine and true against the light-play, like continuous summer lightning, of horizon
gun-flashes
. But the attack at 7.30 a.m. on Z morning was nothing like it; and spoiled by the incessant shrill cheering of children. There was a moving roll-call scene, when, in pauses of silence while the platoon sergeant looked around, one saw the unanswering names hanging on barbed wire, or lying sprawled upon the pitted downland sward.

Then the film took an ugly turn. The Germans were portrayed as fat and cowardly creatures; some of them almost Billy Bunters of the ha’penny poor-boys’ ‘libraries’ of before the war, always
running
away. The misery of deep mud and hopeless cold of winter rain was made light of by the antics of a comic cockney actor floundering about before the camera in a new tunic with sharply creased trousers—straight out of the Ordnance Stores at Pimlico.

Phillip felt that he could not remain beside a passive Lucy as the shrill cries of the children changed to a terrible booing of everything German; the feeling became anguish, equal to that felt during the first hours of the opening battle when his platoon had been cut down by machine guns and he had lain in a
shell-hole
unable to help with two bullets through his left leg, when the children cheered in crescendo as a young German soldier, going through the British barrage to get water for a wounded comrade, was killed by a bursting shell. But he sat through it to the end and God Save Our Gracious King, while thinking of Willie, dead these three years, who had prophesied that unless a change of thought came to Europe, and particularly to Britain, the war would come again.

He must delay his book no longer. When he had taken ‘Mister’ back to Ruddle Stones he returned to the farmhouse, and putting a pile of logs on one side of the little open hearth of his study, and drawing a pint of beer from the 4½-gallon ‘pin’ from the one-man brewery in Shakesbury on the other side, sat down to finish the introduction to his war book.

Lucy had told Mrs. Rigg, who came in during the day to help with the work, that they would not be home again until lunch time the next day; but there was a light on in the master’s room. As she told Lucy next day—“Whinivver I poked me ’ade up out of the badeclothes, I zeed the light still on, and I zaid to me ’usband, ‘’Arry,’ I says, ‘whathivver be’m about, a proper ould oyl he be, ’a zaith, workin’ by day and by night. Whathivver be’m up to, ’a zaith, ’tes this yurr writin’ that he be ut, ’a zaith.’”

Mrs. Rigg went on to say that she went over early, and cooked
the master some eggs and bacon, he looked very happy, and not a bit like a weary man, she declared.

“’A was smilin’ like someone had gived he a present, ma’m.”

“We’ll have to leave the ploughing of the Big Field until after the shoot,” said Mr. Hibbs, the manager of Fawley Estate Farms, Ltd. “I’ve left you alone, as there was little I could do, while you were carrying on with the seasonal jobs. But looking round with Haylock I see you’ve had Johnson’s Iron Horses to do the ploughing for you. He went a bit deep, didn’t he? I doubt if anything will grow in that rank soil. When we ploughed deep for beet-sugar during the war we found that an extra inch was all that was practicable, and every fourth year afterwards we could bring up, with safety, another inch. That gives the rank soil a chance to weather, and be assimilated. I fancy you’ll have to reverse the process, and put back the meat-soil on your ninety odd acres, Captain Maddison.”

“Oh. It was pretty awful before, you know.”

“Yes, it was sucked out all right. Haylock is pleased, there are several coveys on the furrows. He plans to bring them down from the top fields and line his guns behind the hedge across the road from the southern boundary of the Big Field. There will be stops out, of course, and a gun on either flank, to prevent the birds from breaking back and veering off. I suppose you’ll be one of the flanking guns, sir?”

“I don’t shoot, Mr. Hibbs.”

“A man with a walking stick will be enough to keep them from veering. Sir Hilary, I understand, wants to shoot over our other farms the first day, and get the birds on to your land for the final battue. Haylock reckons there are between three and four hundred brace o’ partridges; we’d’ve had more, except for that storm at the end of May which killed a lot of chicks just as they were hatching.”