A Fox Under My Cloak (22 page)

“Hullo-a-lo!” he said. “I’ve often see you go by. You are a lad! The young blood pinched by the beaks. Crikey, what’s that you’re riding, a new kind of thrashing machine? What’s the make?” He bent down.
“Helena.
Sounds like an
advertisement
for shampoo. What an assembly of oddments! The mag. looks like the Tower Bridge; you could almost fly under it. Don’t you get the rain in? Perhaps it’s meant to be
water-cooled
? Well, at least you’ve got a decent carburettor. The engine is French, square bore and stroke, I suppose. My, what an Old Iron never Rust, Solid Tyres never Bust! Now you want to complete it with a coffee-pot silencer! You
are
a lad!”

Flattered by the older man’s admiring laughter, Phillip
explained
what he wanted. The manager, to whom he had taken an instant liking, said that it could be brazed on.

“You’re the fool of the family, I can see that! I like fools of the family. What d’you do with yourself in the evenings?”

“Oh, I just muck about.”

“Well, let’s go out together one night in the Studebaker, shall we, when my boss is away in London? I have to see a few potential customers, farmers who’re making piles of dough nowadays, so come along with me one evening, and we’ll look for birds. You never know your luck! Well, tata for the time being. Your old thump-thump will be ready at six o’clock. I’ll put a mechanic on it right away. Call me Monty. My name’s Jarvey, my old man invented Jarveyised steel. I know your name already from the local rag, you ‘young blood’! Righty-ho, Phil, Gran’ma Helena will be done by tea-time.”

Immediately after dismissal at four o’clock Phillip went to the garage. An officer was there, standing negligently by a long, Metallurgique open four-seater, into which cans of petrol were being poured. He belonged to another territorial battalion in the brigade. When he had thundered away up the hill, Phillip learned from Monty that he and his brother were rich. Monty was now elegantly dressed in a grey-green suit, with a white silk shirt and low starched collar with pointed peaks; on his black brilliantined hair, at a jaunty angle, was a new straw-boater with the same colours as his tie. The brother of the Metallurgique owner, he went on to say, had a Harley-Davidson, a Yankee ’bus, that could do over seventy miles an hour on the straight.

“The brother’s a mad devil like you,” he said. “He scorches
like hell, and won’t allow anything to pass him on the road, so don’t try and race him on that old rattle-trap of yours.”

“Rattle-trap? It didn’t rattle before it came in here!”

“Well, now you’ve got some sort of a silencer, you may be able to hear its cries of agony.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s right with it? Why, it’s falling to pieces!” He lifted it up by the handlebars. “The head’s loose! Look out for a speed wobble, my lad! The wheels want rebuilding, half the spokes are loose. Listen!” He ran a pencil round them. “Hear that twanging?” He squeezed the horn. “Moo-cow! When d’you milk the old girl?” He laughed with a gurgle in his throat. “You don’t need a speedometer, old boy! At twenty miles an hour the spokes rattle, at thirty your ribs rattle, at forty a red light glows, and at forty-five a gramophone record plays
Down
Among
the
Dead
Men
!
Ha, ha, ha! What you want, my boy, is a nice little light car—like that two-cylinder monobloc Swift over there, going for only sixty quid. I’ll let you have it cheap for sixty-five! Or how about this Sizaire? A spiffing car! The spiffs come out of the radiator when the dam’ thing boils. Then there’s this White’s steam car—roast your kippers and chestnuts while you drive! Only a mere bag o’shell—one hundred and fifty quid, sixty per cent discount for cash!

Phillip was fascinated by the easy way his new friend spoke; all the same he felt a little wary of him. Possibly Monty was a bad companion. He went out, to try
Helena
across the long straight stretch across the heath. At the top by the fountain and horse-trough he stopped to examine the new silencer. It looked quite a neat job, joined to the end of the exhaust pipe by brass wire annealed to the iron by the oxy-acetylene
blowpipe
. He pushed and vaulted into the saddle, opening the throttle. The spout made a pleasant, high-whistling sound when the engine was running, and when he opened up it sounded rather like a cock-pheasant rocketing out of a spinney. As he pushed the lever farther, the hedge rushed by with a blur, and the machine began to wobble. He was holding the bars straight when with a clattering roar it seemed that the engine was breaking up; then he saw a Harley-Davidson passing him, the driver’s head bent low over his handlebars, so that he appeared not to be looking where he was going. Phillip pulled the
valve-lifter
lever, and with a series of muffled pops in the coffee-pot
Helena
slowed up. The Harley-Davidson was now small in the distance. Phew!

He decided to go to Cambridge, a town he had not visited before, for the ride. He did not remain there long; having bought a new pipe at a shop in one of the narrow streets, he returned, arriving at Godolphin House in time to wash and change into slacks, as it was Guest Night.

O
N
the occasion of this weekly ceremony all officers were
expected
to dine in. This was a courtesy to the guests. Phillip had already observed that guests, whether dinner or day-time callers, left two visiting cards which were put under one of the criss-cross green tapes on the baize board in the ante-room. One card would be inscribed to the Officer Commanding, the other to the Mess President and Officers. He had observed this; without any comprehension of the spirit that had directed the convention.

The guests sat at the top end of the long mess table, which “Strawballs” referred to as High Table, in line with the senior officers, including Baldersby; the rest of the subalterns sat at the lower tables, below the seniors. It was like a large family party, Phillip thought, as a champagne cork popped on his right side and the mess-sergeant poured from the napkin-covered bottle into the shallow glass, one to each officer all along the snow-white tablecloth. Brown belts shone; brass buttons gleamed; a dozen half-a-crown-a-week batmen had seen to that. Black, brown, and yellow heads were smooth with brilliantine.
Cheer-ho
, he said, to black-haired O’Connor on his right, and
curly-yellow
“Chick” on his left. They were sharing the bottle of bubbly, or fizz, as some of them called it. The name on the label was Veuve Cliquot, 1906.

He had already sipped his soup and swallowed three glasses of sherry at table, following three dry martinis in the ante-room. He felt himself to be a lad, a mad devil.

“By God,” he said to O’Connor, “I am enjoying this
base-wallah’s
life.”

“Not so loud, my boy.”

“Was I speaking loudly?”

“You were, and you are, my boy.”

The fish was more pink trout from the paternal estate of Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire, sent by train in ice. Second-lieutenant Brendon, almost an elderly subaltern, since he wore the Boer War ribbons, had remarked in Phillip’s hearing recently that Baldersby’s father was in effect a fishmonger, trying to buy his son a third pip. Baldersby, Phillip realised, was generally regarded as a fool, a joke, without any brains whatever; and that was why he had not been promoted although he had been commissioned since 1910.

Phillip thought the fish was the best he had ever tasted; much nicer than plaice. It was served luke-warm and eaten with thin cucumber slices. “Strawballs”, he noticed, did not use his
fish-knife
, but a fork only. So he did the same. The colonel’s guests were “Crasher” the brigadier, and “Little Willie”, his brigade major, the latter so-called owing to a facial resemblance to the German Crown Prince. He had thin straight fair hair, a longish nose, and pale greenish eyes rather close together. The brigadier, alleged veteran of the famous charge, sat on the colonel’s right, wearing a tunic with small round brass buttons which went up to his neck enclosed in a turn-down collar on which were red gorget patches and gold oak-leaves. His trousers were pulled down tight under Wellington boots by elastic bands under the arch, and swan-neck spurs jingled on his heels when he walked. He had a face deeply tanned and lined, his white hair was grizzled into tight curls upon the corners of a large round head. Seeing the stare of his round pale-blue eyes as he drank his soup with loud noises, sucking it down through thick mulberry lips while holding up the spoon-handle, Phillip imagined him to be a pretty fierce character.

The colonel had explained to
the junior officers in the
ante-room
that morning that the brigadier after drinking a toast always dashed his glass upon the floor, so that no other toasts could be drunk from it. It was an ancient custom, said “
Strawballs
”, but—ah—with a glance in the direction of Phillip—no junior subalterns were required to emulate the brigadier’s customs.

“How about another bottle of Veuve Cliquot? It’s my turn,” he said, after the fish. He raised a finger, and a waiter came forward.

“No, no, my boy, hold your horses,” said O’Connor. “One bottle’s enough. Your pay will not run to such extravagance.”

“I jolly well like that! Why, you paid for the other bottle, so now it’s my turn. Another bottle, waiter.”

“You should not have done this, my boy,” said O’Connor, raising his glass. “Here’s to us all.”

Before the capon, as the
menu
called it, was finished, Phillip’s bottle was empty. “Chick” offered to stand another one; but O’Connor said no, they had had enough. The mess-room was now merry with voices and laughter. Looking round, Phillip thought what a wonderful thing it was he was there; less than three months ago he had been in the Diehard T-trench. He wanted more to drink, to keep the fun going. Who cared for the morrow? Eat, drink, and be merry, and to hell with everything else.

“I’m damned thirsty, O’Connor.”

“The very thing,” said O’Connor, pouring him a glass of water, then one for himself. “The normal healthy human liver objects to more than two, at the most three, fluid ounces of alcohol. The Widow Cliquot laces her wine with liqueur cognac. Hock is the best drink for food with company, in my opinion, or a dry wine from the Moselle. For that, we must wait till we get to Berlin.”

The dinner went on timelessly. No table-cloth was ever so white or silver in gleam with candle and glass and leather; the table seemed to float in laughter and happiness.

*

The waiters, having served caramel, and then cheese, cleared the table. A decanter of port wine was placed in front of the colonel. He removed the stopper, and put the crystal jug by the left hand of the brigadier, who poured himself a glass and passed on the decanter until it had gone all round the table and come back to the colonel, who thereupon filled a glass for himself; and after a pause the Mess president, Major Fridkin, rose to his feet and said to the subaltern who was orderly dog for the day, sitting at the far end of the table, “Mr. Vice, the King!” Whereupon a new second-lieutenant got up and called out in a voice firm and much rehearsed mentally, “
Gentlemen
, the King!” And they all stood up saying, “The King!”, followed by a diminishing muttering chorus of “God bless him”, then drinking the toast, while from the brigadier known as “Crasher” came a belated deep grumble of “God bless ’er”.
He always drank the toast to Queen Victoria. There followed a brittle crash as the brigadier turned and flung his glass into the marble fireplace.

Then they sat down, and the colonel said, “Gentlemen, you may smoke.”

Phillip was interested in what O’Connor told him about the brigadier. His nickname had come from the Galway Blazers, in which country all the stone walls had to be flown as though they were fences.

“Why is that?” asked Phillip.

“
Y
ou
wouldn’t know!” said Baldersby shortly.

“He was a wild man in a country of many wild men in an age of wildness. In the hunting field, I have heard my father say, he was a top-sawyer all the time, stone, bank, or
blackthorn
bull-fence. They still tell stories about him in the
Shelbourne
in Dublin. Have you done any huntin’, my boy?”

“A little.”

“In whose country?” enquired Baldersby.

“Oh, ours.”

Baldersby, pulling a yellow moustache, leaned across the table. “May I enquire where
your
country is?”

Phillip thought he might be going to say something about him being part-German. “I—I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Do you have the button of any particular hunt?”

Not knowing what this meant, he replied, “Well, not exactly.”

In a spreading silence Baldersby went on, “When you said just now, ‘
Our
country’, what country did you mean?”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Well, then, whose pack did you follow?”

“With what pack did you hunt, he means, my boy,” said O’Connor, as the port decanter reached him on its second coasting. Refilling his glass slowly, while feeling hot and entangled, Phillip tried to recall some of the fox hunts in
The
Field,
but all he could think of was Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds in the novel by Surtees.

He must say something. Then having passed on the decanter he raised his glass to the glowering Baldersby across the table, and said:

“Here’s to all sportsmen, including Mr. Facey Romford, the immortal Jorrocks and ‘them stinking violets’, coupled with
the name of Crasher, the broth av a bhoy among the Galway Blazers!” and drained his glass as if it were beer.

“Steady on, my boy, or you’ll find you have the drink taken,” said O’Connor. “What you need is black coffee.”

O’Connor could see that Phillip was attracting more than immediate attention. The room was not a large one, Godolphin House being of moderate size, similar to a score facing the High Street.

“Some more black coffee for Mr. Maddison,” whispered O’Connor to his servant, who with other batmen was waiting at table.

When the Colonel rose they all stood up. In decorous silence the senior officers followed the jingling rowels of “Crasher” into the ante-room. Then the subalterns trooped in. They had been warned to behave quietly in the presence of the brigadier, as a mark of respect to both his rank and his great age; he would not, the adjutant said, stay very long.

Phillip found himself near the brigadier and his brigade major, “Little Willie”. He wondered where he had seen the
brigadier’s
face before. Then he remembered: in old pages of
Punch,
and cartoons of Bismarck. “Crasher” looked just like Bismarck. He heard him say to Major Fridkin, polite and smiling by his side, “In my day we had a crackin’ good spree after guest night, the faster the better. Damme, time flies like a duck-hawk.”

“Yes, indeed, General,” said Major Fridkin, raising his
eyebrows
, as he puffed at a long, fat cigar between his fat lips.

When the brigadier and “Little Willie” had departed, the fun began. There was a competition to see who could pick a coin off the carpet, bending down while the heels of your feet placed closed together against the wainscoting did not shift. Phillip fell over. Then couples were matched to stand with arms stretched sideways, to press with chest and flat hands in an attempt to shift the other backwards. This was Baldersby’s special trick: he was short, Saxon and stocky, and tall, Celtic Phillip could not force him back. On the contrary, Baldersby pushed Phillip into an armchair and bent him over until Phillip felt his back about to break, so he yelled, “Let go, oh, you’re hurting!” Then Baldersby, stooping, got him round the knees and tossed him feet over head into the chair; and jerking out Phillip’s tie, pulled the ends tight.

“Steady there,” exclaimed O’Connor, seeing that the other could not breathe. He worked the tie free, and Phillip sat down to recover.

While he was in the armchair, the others started cock-fighting: a couple sat on the floor, broomstick behind knees held by elbows, hands clasping knees, the idea being to tip an opponent off balance with toes. Meanwhile, at the far end of the
ante-room
a small group had gathered around the piano, singing
They
’
d
Never
Believe
Me.

When the colonel returned with Captain Whale, the adjutant, there was a sudden break in the noise, and all officers got to their feet, except Phillip, who was struggling against a swirling feeling, through which he heard the colonel saying, “Continue as before, gentlemen, let the fun be fast and furious. I do hope you are going to give us your awful good ‘Stonecracker’ song, Jonah?” at which there were cries from the far-away piano of “Yes, come on, Jonah! Give us
The
Orderly
Room
Song,
sir!”

Thus encouraged, Jonah the Whale stood by the piano, ready to let his rich baritone voice fill him and others with sentiment.

The colonel picked up
The
Times,
which he read usually after mess-dinner in his room, and sat down in a wicker upholstered armchair, paper across knees, spectacles pushed up over bushy brows while he relaxed.

Phillip, when the swirling feeling had partly subsided, began to giggle, as he visualised the adjutant in the orderly room,
cracking nuts, and eating them, for ninepence a day. Then he became aware of the colonel’s brown shoe on a knee-slung leg revolving at the ankle. This turning movement continued
clockwise
until the end of
The
Stonecracker
; and was resumed
anticlockwise
, to his distress, when Father O’Flynn rolled out like very neat brown rich cigars from the corner by the piano, gleaming cigar-shapes of sound.

“Awful good song, Jonah, awful good,” said the colonel, and opening
The
Times,
covered all of himself from view except part of his fingers, trouser’d thighs and knees, sock’d and shoe’d feet.

Hoping to dispel the swirl about him, Phillip sat up in the armchair opposite the figure reading the spread newspaper. Thank God the swirling was now entirely gone. When Captain Whale sang again, a new and very beautiful song, he got up and started to go to the piano; but he felt safer in the armchair, and sat down again, quietly, to avoid any creaking of wickerwork, and attention to himself.