The Innocent Moon by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online

without her ; the barrenness of my work alone, deprived of her care; the emptiness of life before she came, the silent battlefield when she had gone away. Neither I, nor any other man or woman, can live without love. I thought of the unhappy parson in her father’s house, washing away his sins instinctively to absolve himself of the effects of obvious childish torment in his mind; andrecognising in Spica a sympathetic quality, so that he calls her, in the idiom of courtesy of a thousand years of inherited aristocracy towards the women who nourish the seed of continuity of that aristocracy, “Lady Tibby”—her real name is Tabitha.
   O Tabitha, the very purity and beauty of your being makes me sad—for what am I but a hollow emptiness, a pretension to goodness?
Notes.
   Spica’s mother has a sort of wild look, redeemed by sudden generosity and balance. I think she must have a bit of a struggle to make ends meet, with that not very intelligent husband of hers. And yet—she is limited, too, in understanding, as we all are in our various ways. But to facts:
   She read The Hounds of Heaven, and said that she “saw nothing in it”. From this she went on to say—this on the last evening, that my influence on her daughter was bad: she had always been dreamy and impracticable, and these “vices” were more apparent since she had known me. She wanted her daughter to be happy, and she knew that to be introspective and moody was a state to force oneself away from, otherwise it led to misery and unhappiness, not only for the person concerned, but also for those who cared for that person. Her little daughter (she kissed her lovingly and tenderly) she loved, and was it not a mother’s greatest wish to see her children happy?
    On the first day of his holiday in the West Country, Phillip called at the house of his Uncle John at Rookhurst. He was invited to stay the night; but the atmosphere of the place, some of the rooms shut up, with white sheets over the furniture, made him feel almost imprisoned; his mind was set on arrival at his destination—Cousin Willie’s cottage on the coast of North Devon. Feeling that he could not very well refuse, he stayed; and later was glad, a feeling of new life having come from a rump steak eaten with watercress and washed down by a bottle of burgundy. Under its influence he talked about his literary ambition, to be told that it ran in the family; both his Grandfather and his Aunt Theodora had shown talent in that direction, as amateurs of course.
    “I think Willie, too, Uncle John. His letters from France are very vivid, don’t you think?”
    “Oh, he never writes to me, Phillip.”
    In the morning he went south to the coast, meaning to follow the lanes as far as Land’s End, and so up to North Devon. He bathed from the Chesil Bank, and in the late afternoon went on; up and down hills, first turning away from the sea then windingback again, until the declining sun made him think of a room for the night. By now he had passed through Exeter, and was following the road to the coast, seeing the blue tors of Dartmoor on his right turning purple as the sun went down behind them. His wrists ached with the bumpy, twisting road; at long last he came to a town built down a hill, with a narrow High Street leading to what he thought was the sea, but arriving at a quay, saw it was mud-flats. There would be flat fish there when the tide came in, he thought, and wild duck flighting in winter. After talking to a sailor beside a moored sailing boat he went on up another hill, and through more twisty lanes until suddenly before him and below lay a wide valley of pasture land. He stopped, arrested by the sudden strange appearance and change in the countryside. The grey road descended before him, to rise, after a curve at the bottom, up the reverse slope. But what had startled him was the sight of the dark mass of a church on the horizon, with a shortened spire on its western end. It was as