The Power of the Dead (9 page)
Read The Power of the Dead Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
“Have I not. He had to flee England for telling the simple truth. Godwin was the man, his father-in-law! Have you read
his
‘Political Justice’?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I will lend it to you. Excuse me a moment.” He hopped out of the glass box. “Yes, madam, we have the finest Danish bacon. Mr. Gray, your best skill with our new hygienic cutter. Thank you.” He hopped back. “Your pardon, sir. The pig in Denmark does not suffer both mental and physical obscurity, as in darkest England. As I was presuming to say, Shelley absorbed much of Godwin’s wisdom, just as Godwin absorbed much of Shelley’s income.”
Phillip felt it was his fault for starting this slightly pretentious talk, and got away after promising soon to settle the account. He must work all night at his writing to make up for lost time.
That afternoon mechanic, carpenter, smith and apprentice were given notice.
The smith grumbled. “Where am I now? What about my son?”
Phillip pointed out that his son had been getting
£
1 a week as an apprentice, and had been learning his trade into the bargain.
“The easy money will upset him for a while only. He should never have received it. Why, the farm labourer gets only just over thirty shillings a week. And most apprentices have to pay a premium, you know that—getting it back in wages of about five bob a week.”
He offered the smith the use of the forge for shoeing; the smith to take one half of the money, the Works the other half for use of tools and all materials, including coal.
“All right,” said the smith, after an unhappy silence. “That seems fair.”
By the end of the week four new summonses had been delivered at the Works, making the total of money owing nearly
£
200. On the
credit side ‘Mister’, according to the cheque-book stubs, owed the Boys
£
145; a parson’s wife owed for a Dynawurkur vacuum cleaner; the buildings of the Works was
£
600, and stock and machinery paid for came to a further
£
180.
“It seems on the surface that we are solvent, Tim, but we must do something to stave off the bailiffs entering to seize goods for a knock-down sale to clear these judgment summons’. Damn, I’ve just remembered something on the farm. D’you mind if I use the telephone? I must know if Johnson’s Iron Horses have returned this morning.”
Lucy replied that she hadn’t seen them. Time was getting on. A fortnight to go to the shoot. He felt impatient with these slow minds.
“Now, Tim, for heaven’s sake get on with your sac machine contract. First, the Works must be tidied up. That will be good for
morale.
The new lavatories are a disgrace. Come with me. Look at them—strewn with newspaper, in a state of total
inefficiency
and neglect. The office must be cleared of rubbish. And there’s another thing. How much longer is the Tamplin cycle-car going to stand sheltering nettles? I’ve seen it here for nearly eighteen months, and it was rusting and rotting away before then.”
“Yes, by Jove, the old Tamp. The fact of the matter is, my dear Phil, that it is of no further use. It has no brakes, the belts and tyres are perishing, the body is decayed.”
“It was left with you to be sold, wasn’t it? Then it should be sold now. The engine’s worth a tenner.”
“It’s not ours to sell,” said Fiennes, coming up.
“Then whose is it?”
“A friend left it with us, to be sold if we could find a buyer,” explained Tim.
“Why haven’t you tried to find a buyer?”
“It really wasn’t much use, it’s out of date,” said Tim. “You see, the cyclecar is now superseded by the light car—Morris, Humber, Trojan, Calthorp——”
“How long have you had it?” Phillip asked Fiennes.
“Oh, about four years.”
“And in that four years it has become out of date?”
“Your attitude is intolerable,” said Fiennes, walking away to the office.
Turning to Tim, Phillip said, “Hardy wrote in one of his last poems, ‘If way to the better there be, it enacts a full look at the
worst’. That’s what I’m trying to bring home to you three. If things are to be better, everyone here will have to alter the
blueprint
of his mind.”
“Yes, I understand what you mean,” replied Tim, earnestly. “But perhaps I ought to explain something.”
Before his young brother-in-law’s mild and gentle gaze Phillip felt that he had spoken too sharply.
“Do explain what’s on your mind, Tim. Let’s talk in the office. Fiennes should hear what I’ve got to say.”
“We appreciate that you’re trying to help us, and believe me, we are grateful. But you see, we don’t regard money from a business sense only. I mean, we offered to try to sell ‘Bongo’s’ Tamp for him when he went to Africa, if we got a chance. But we haven’t had anyone here who wanted to buy it.”
“Now as regards our money,” said Fiennes, “we were only too pleased to be able to help ‘Mister’——”
“I see what you’re driving at. You didn’t like me going after ‘Mister’ for that money he borrowed, while I felt it my duty to get him to sign a promissory note. After all, it is to be kept in the bank, to be claimed from the trustees of his estate when he dies. That way the thing is done properly, and leaves no ill-feeling. Don’t you both agree?”
The brothers remained silent. “If you won’t face facts for yourselves, I must for you. The truth is that you have several pressing claims, and I’m trying to stave off a knock-down sale by the bailiffs. The writ is still only being held off by daily payments. If they lapse, all this machinery will go at a knock-down sale with no reserve.”
“Personally, I don’t give a damn if it does, I’m sick of the whole thing,” said Fiennes, going out of the office. “It’s a low spring tide, and I want some prawns.”
When he had gone, Ernest, with a mutter, edged his way out, leaving Tim and Phillip alone.
“As Fiennes tried to explain,” said Tim, “the Coplestons have never exactly looked on money as something which is to be put before living. You yourself once told me that money for money’s sake is a bad thing, in that it alters human nature, making people grim and hard. We really are grateful for all you are doing, and we certainly intend to pay you back one day, but I think Fiennes feels a personal note of criticism in your tone of voice. Please forgive me saying all this, but you said the truth was wanted.”
“I, too, believe that people should be happy, but I’ve known a fair amount of people who borrow money, and friendship is usually spoiled by it.”
Someone knocked at the door. The postman wanted a signature for a registered letter. While Tim signed, Phillip opened the envelope, and then showed him a demand that the sum outstanding for advertising in
The
Model
Engineer,
£
36, be settled at once, otherwise a writ would be applied for.
“Dash it all, it quite escaped my mind. Our standing
advertisement
has been running on for four months, curse it. We forgot all about it, to be quite candid.”
“I must go home and do some work, Tim. See you tomorrow.”
A year drifts by, and it is the summer of 1917, the wettest summer in Flanders for many years. I am standing on a duck-board by the flooded and foul Steenbeke listening in the flare-pallid darkness to the cries of thousands of wounded men lost in the morasses of Third Ypres. To seek them is to drown with them … the living are still toiling on, homeless and without horizon, doing dreadful things under heaven that none want to do, through the long wet days and the longer nights, the weeks, the months of a bare, sodden winter out of doors.
The survivors are worn out; some of them, tested beyond the limits of human dereliction, put the muzzles of their rifles in their mouths, in the darkness of the terrible nights of the Poelcappelle morasses, and pull the trigger.
Those at home, sitting in arm-chairs and talking proudly of
Patriotism
and Heroism, will never realise the contempt and scorn which the soldiers have for these and other abstractions; the soldiers feel they have been betrayed by the high-sounding phrases that heralded the war, for they know that the enemy soldiers are the same men as themselves, suffering and disillusioned in exactly the same way.
And in the stupendous roar and light-blast of the final barrage which broke the Siegfried Stellung I see only one thing, as recorded by
Field-Marshal
Hindenburg, an incident which grows radiant before my eyes until it fills all my world: the sight of a Saxon boy half-crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter—Mutter—Mutter’, out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg and sitting nearby, hears the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says: ‘All right, son, it’s all right. Mother’s here with you.’
The next morning the Clerk to the Court told Phillip that another
£
4 for the Dynawurkur judgment summons must be paid in by six o’clock, otherwise he would have to distrain. That meant the bailiffs. Phillip went to his office and paid the
£
4
with his own
cheque, then telegraphed to his literary agent in London. That would give them another twenty-four hours’ grace. The sale price had been
£
15. 17. 6; the sum due, with fees for stays of execution, was now
£
49.0.0.
In the afternoon he gave his cheque for a further
£
14, being extra costs for the stay-of-execution of the writ, which was for
£
40, plus
£
8
accrued expenses. Then totting up the items in his
cheque-book
stubs he found that he was already
£
22 overdrawn. He paid
£
45 to the Court, bringing his overdraft to
£
67.0.0.
“I am afraid that, unless a further four pounds is forthcoming by noon tomorrow, I must distrain,” said the Clerk.
“But can’t some of this be used for that?”
“I’m afraid I’ve already made out the receipt.”
When Phillip told Tim that they must find
£
4
somehow, Tim replied “Oo ah,” and disappeared.
Nobody had made any attempt to clean up the Works, so he set about cleaning and tidying. Afterwards he thought to go down to the river and fish in the pool below the oak wood, and think what to do.
He took with him a long bamboo pole, a reel of stout thread, a float made of a swan’s quill, and a length of 3-X silkworm gut; and having baited the hook with a bread-pill, lay on an elbow and watched the float. It was the first time he had fished since the summer of 1914; it brought back many memories and regrets, upon which mounted present thoughts about the neglected state of the Works; so he hid the rod and returned up the path through the trees.
Tim reappeared soon after six o’clock. He got out of the Trojan with what a writer for the Conglomerated Press would describe as a mysterious smile on his face. Taking Phillip aside he said, “I have managed to get the four pounds.”
“How did you manage that, Tim?”
“I went to Exeter and pawned the Dynawurkur vacuum cleaner, getting four pounds for it.”
“But why did you do that?”
“I thought it would help us.”
“But it doesn’t help if everyone acts anyhow on his own.”
“Now please don’t get upset, I only did what I could to help.”
“But it isn’t helping, Tim, to cut across someone else’s
command
. Incidentally, why didn’t you send it back when the first summons came in? Now the cost of the damned thing is over
fifty pounds! And it’s never been used! And
you
make about a hundred mile journey by car virtually to sell it for four pounds!”
“I only thought I was helping,” said Tim, with an air of hurt dignity.
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to get it out of pawn. I don’t exactly know the legal position, but we may be pawning something that isn’t ours.”
“I can easily go and get it back in the morning. Have you had any tea? Miss Calmady says you didn’t have any lunch, either. Speaking for myself, I’m dashed hungry.”
“I must get back now.”
On the way home he called on Mrs. Chychester. She said he looked tired, and ordered tea.
“Do tell me, dear Phil, what is worrying you,” as she leaned forward in her chair with sympathy. “I suppose it is Adrian’s boys? I have heard a little about what is happening, from Ennis. I was afraid it would come to that.” She sat still, her face a gentle ruin. “Adrian is hopeless.”
“It is difficult to know where to begin——” he said; then seeing that she was looking frail, he declared that it would be all right in the end; they owed only a little money, and their assets were greater than their liabilities. He would stop all further leaking away of capital. The old lady thanked him, saying she was so glad to think that someone was there to help her grandchildren.
“I am sure that things will come right.”
She pressed his hand, saying, “But you must not wear yourself out over it, you know. You look so tired and thin, if you will forgive an old woman being personal. And after all, your first duty is to your Lucy and dear little Billy. I am always so glad to hear about him from his ‘new mother’. Do give them both my love, won’t you?” Then she smiled and said that he must give Billy an extra kiss for ‘Grannie’.
*
He went on his way to Rookhurst feeling happier, determined to act so that Lucy’s grandmother should be justified in her faith in him. If need be, he would sell the Norton. Should he telegraph to cousin Arthur, for the twenty pounds owed to him? But Arthur was—crooked. How about some of the Copleston relations? He had learnt that if a Bill of Sale were raised on the new machinery of the Works, the machinery would not come under the hammer at a knock-down bailiff’s auction: if he could raise
£
100 it would
dispose of the imminent major threats of writ and
judgment-summonses
.
A money-order by telegram awaited him from Anders Norse, as an advance against the otter book, of
£
30. Where could he get another
£
70—plus the
£
4 per diem wastage?
The next morning, as a last hope, he urged Ernest against his silent, reluctant will, to accompany him on a visit to his relations, declaring that he could not very well go alone to beg from people to whom he was almost a stranger.
Ernest got into the sidecar and during the journey into Somerset to see Aunt Euphoria, his godmother, he remained unspeaking. When Phillip stopped at a pub to get some beer, Ernest remained in the sidecar. He was a teetotaller, drinking only sherry and port, which he did not consider to be alcoholic.
Determined not to speak until Ernest spoke first, Phillip brought out a glass of port and gave it to Ernest. Ernest drank it, and broke the silence with an “Ah”, to which Phillip replied “Ah! ha!”
Mrs. Champernowne of Champernowne lived in a house on the side of an oakwood belonging to the family of her husband, the eldest of a family of fourteen. It was part of a five-thousand-acre estate, Lucy had told Phillip, in reply to his questions before the journey. Major Champernowne of Champernowne was a heavy, thickset man who in youth had emigrated to Canada, returning to serve with the yeomanry in the South African War, where he had been hit in the leg, so that it became shorter than the other. When he inherited he spent his life planting trees, shooting, fishing, and running the home farm. He was a gruff, bulky man, wearing tweed clothes of wool spun from his own sheep. He left the visitors with his wife, who said at once, “But why do you come here? What is it to do with us?”
Phillip, putting aside embarrassment, told her of the urgency of the situation.
£
100 would ensure the possession of
£
500 worth of new machinery. Mrs. Champernowne, somewhat fluttery, said that she was sorry, but did not see what she could do. Uncle Champernowne came back, and said that the peal were running—he pointed to the stream at the bottom of the valley—and if Phillip cared to throw a fly he was welcome to do so.