The Power of the Dead (51 page)

Phillip held the small pink objects, more like paper flowers than lanterns of paper and bamboo, and stood by quietly while his uncle continued speaking.

“The New Year festivities started with the full of the First Moon, and went on for several days until the New Year, Lucy. Everyone paid their debts, shops were shut, fire-crackers were set off, strangers in the streets bowed to one another, saying, ‘The New Year has come'.”

“How wonderful. Everyone makes a fresh start in the release of the social spirit!” exclaimed Phillip.

Hilary ignored this remark and said, “How do you feel about it, Irene? It's a warm night, would you like to see the lights on the Long Pond? Good heavens,” he said, half relenting towards Phillip, “it must be all of forty years since I brought these back from Peking, intending, with my brothers and sisters, in the presence of our parents, to float them off under the hunter's moon.”

Coats were put on. ‘Billy's haystack friend', as Phillip called Mrs. Rigg's child, was allowed to go with them. The Riggs followed at a distance.

By the shallows of the Longpond the yellow stubs of tapers were lit by Hilary. There was no wind; the faintest of airs in motion carried the floating papers away from the shore. Standing alone, a little apart, Phillip thought of friends now faceless under the dissolving rains of Flanders and Somme. The Chinese Feast of the Homeless Ghosts was inspired by love; Hilary had been inspired to see again his parents, and the faces of his young brothers and sisters with the hopes of nearly half a century before …

The lotus was the flower of immortality; the tapers were symbols of light offered in darkness—the homeless spirits helped away from haunting the minds of the living …

He felt upwelling love for Hilary.

Lucy felt the harmony come upon all as the glims of light moved away into the track of the watered moon. She heard Hilary speaking to Irene in a low voice—it seemed impossible that
anyone
could speak otherwise on such a still night. She moved away with Billy to leave the two together, whispering to the boys that they could see the little boats from another place, where they would be out of the path of the moon.

Hilary was saying, “We could take a couple of years off to visit the places we both knew out there, Irene. I've had a hard life. I've done my best here, but it's been no good, you know. Phillip will never settle down to what we older ones have hoped for him. I've tried, times without number, to bring him to a level-headed view of things. He's in the clouds all the time, I can see that. Well, as you know, the War Department want to acquire this land. I've fought against the idea of chucking my hand in, time and time again. Now I've come to the point where I can't stand any more. Please help me, Irene, I love you, I need you——” His voice had a guttural sound, he was crying.

*

When they went in, Phillip thought that his accumulator would have picked up a bit, so that he could hear part at least of Act Three, where the chalice bearing the blood of Christ gleamed in the forest—symbol as alive as any work of the spirit, truly a celestial manifestation revealed through the imagination of Wagner to those with ears to hear. All life, save of the spirit, was weariness: this was the Kristos of Willie, the music was Truth.

“Phillip, I'd like a word with you.”

“Uncle Hilary, do you mind if I go up to hear part of the last act of
Parsifal
? It won't take long.”

“It doesn't do you, or anyone else, any good to brood on that kind of thing, Phillip.”

“Man does not live by bread alone, Uncle Hilary.”

“Now look here, Phillip. I've been in India, I've been in China, I've seen tens of thousands dying of starvation, and their religious fancies didn't save them. Only hard, organised work can do that.”

“Yes, I realise that, Uncle Hilary. I'll be back in a minute.”

He went to the kitchen where the two women were making coffee.

“Irene, there's just a chance to hear a bit of Act Three. The accumulator may be good for five minutes. We'll hear the part where the chalice glows in the wood. Can you keep back the coffee, Lucy?”

“Yes, of course go up and hear it, you two. Where's Felicity?”

“I don't think she came back with us,” said Irene.

Hilary sat at ease before the parlour fire, deeply relieved, entranced. He saw Irene and Phillip going up the stairs, and felt contentment that he was no longer alone in the world.

Phillip and Irene sat side by side on the couch, the small tin trumpet between them. Reception was now better, the music flowed with the pilgrims through the dark forest. Soon the vision would be revealed.

Left alone in the parlour, Hilary stared into the flames. After a while, hearing no sounds from above, he went upstairs to see how they were getting on. Just in case, he tapped on the door and opened it at the same time. Their faces looked at him a moment before Phillip got up and said, “The accumulator is giving out at the very moment we wanted to hear.”

Remaining by the half-open door Hilary said, “If you'd asked me, I'd have switched on my set for you. Why not come down and hear it? I'll go, and tune into the wave-length.”

When he was gone Phillip said, “I think I understand him now. He was thinking of his mother and father, and of the breakup of the family, while launching those lotus-lights.” He got up and walked to the casement. “I, too, have been thinking, all these years, that my ‘homeless ghosts' were in my care, and that I must do for them what they didn't survive to do. But they were in God's hands all the time. Yes, I can see now that I've been wrong. My double life has hurt Lucy; it has made me impatient and irritable like my father with my mother. My father has always lived in the past, in dreams of this very country.”

He paced up and down the small room, to stop at the place where he had been standing in the light of the moon, to hold up a finger as though in warning to himself.

“I see clearly my duty to the estate from now onwards. After all, it is the land which remains. Not even our bones do that.” He was shaken by thoughts of cousin Willie. “What is a mere writer, when he sheds his conceit—and in the course of time his dream dies with him? A scatter of black compost in the chalk.” His voice quavered. “I'll go and tell my uncle that I'll never write another word that is not entirely practical——”

“Dearest Phillip, I think you should know something. Promise you will say nothing until Hilary tells you? He has made up his mind to sell to the War Department.”

He stood with a feeling of being riven before going downstairs to face what was to come.

“
Parsifal
appears to be ended, Phillip. It was on the
Rhinelandsender
.”

“Thank you for trying to get it for me, Uncle Hilary.”

“Now look here, old man. You've had some success as a writer, haven't you? In fact I'm told you've done quite well. And having fully considered the matter, I've come to the conclusion that your writing is what you are most fitted to do.”

“Yes, I understand, Uncle Hilary. Thank you for telling me.”

He left the house and started walking towards the moon,
thinking
of the same moon shining in the sky while he and Barley were walking from Queensbridge to the cottage in Malandine on the white night of their marriage. With deep emotion he
repeated
aloud the lines which he had quoted to her then:

Felicity, standing by the Longpond, heard the words. They sat together on the wooden pier. He told her the news. She saw a tear glistening on his cheek, she took him in her arms, she held his head against her breast while giving small nervous kisses on the greying hair of his head.

Christmas
1961
—
Midsummer
1963.
De
von.

Henry Williamson (1895–1977) was a prolific writer best known for
Tarka the Otter
, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including
The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream
tetralogy and the fifteen-volume
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds.

His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, ‘He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.’