A Fox Under My Cloak (23 page)

He watched with fascination the toe of the shoe opposite revolving on the ankle, just as his own foot turned at times, working off energy. He began to laugh to himself, the indrawn breath laugh, imagining Desmond beside him at the Hippo, when Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds had jumped high off the elastic billiard table, turning somersaults, and then, while one rested in an armchair reading a newspaper the other somehow lighting the methylated spirit on his boot-cap, lifted his foot and set fire to the newspaper. It would be terribly funny if “
Strawballs
” suddenly saw his paper on fire from the bottom upwards! Act of a “mad devil”! Feeling that the joke would set everyone roaring with laughter he took a box from his pocket, struck a match, and creeping to the other chair put the flame at the
bottom of the page in the centre. The flame started small, but ran up quickly, and a harsh throaty voice behind the paper exclaimed, “What the devil?” before the paper was crunched up, and through smoke and pounding hands Phillip saw the open-mouthed face of “Strawballs”. “Oh, it’s Mr. Maddison!” said the colonel’s voice, changing its tone to one of mingled exasperation and resignation. Before he could say any more, Phillip left the ante-room, and hurried up the stone steps, with their curving iron rail, to his attic, not quite certain what had happened to his frightfully funny joke; but after all, the colonel had said, Let the fun be fast and furious.

*

He decided to go to bed, having a feeling that he was going to spew. In pyjamas, he went into what Baldersby called The Throne. This ancient lavatory outside his door consisted of a mahogany box enclosing an old-fashioned pan patterned with purple ferns. He waited; tried to accelerate matters with a finger; went back and got into camel-hair sleeping sack, flap turned down by batman all ready on green canvas camp-bed, and left the candle burning just in case. His forethought was justified; and ten minutes later he crept back again, cold and shivering, vowing that never again would he drink champagne or port.

He was aware of Chick coming in; then the candle going out; then a dancing light by the door, voices, and someone saying quietly, “Chick, a telegram has come for you, and you’re wanted downstairs to sign for it,” then Chick’s drowsy grumbling voice saying, “Why can’t the damned thing be brought up?” It was urgent, said the voice, and the special messenger was waiting. Chick got up, rubbing his eyes, and putting on slippers and British Warm went away down the stone steps, leaving the door wide open.

Phillip raised himself on an elbow, listening. The telegram was a ruse to get Chick away. Was he going to be arrested? He lay down again. He saw his life in ruins, as so often in the past. “Strawballs”’ paper on fire, the Backfield grass on fire, also for a spree, then lying under his bed, saying to Mother,
Ought
I
to
kill
my
self
,
in terror of the police, as the whole field crackled and rose in yellow-brown smoke behind the wooden garden fences. His jokes had never really gone well. As Mother always said, he was his own worst enemy. He had always known
that they were idiotic, before he acted; it was always as though someone inside him prompted him. Why was he such a fool, why, why, why?

He pulled the soft fawn flap of the sleeping sack tight round his neck when he heard a remote shuffling of feet coming from far below the stone steps: the shuffling of many feet came nearer, then light and shadow waggled in the open door-space and peering through eyelashes he saw someone with a tent
candle-lantern
and forms behind entering to move Chick’s bed and valise against the wall. Then after more shufflings and
whisperings
, Baldersby’s voice said, “One at a time, go steady, and don’t miss the cad,” and he saw they carried the black-painted leather fire-buckets which hung on the wall of the hall with their red coat-armour and then
swish
!
all over him, water and carbolic acid.
Swish
!
again, and again, continuing while more subalterns came through the door now carrying green canvas buckets. Colder and colder the sluicings became, as they penetrated all the sleeping sack, and his pillow, under which lay the gold locket containing the coloured miniature of Helena. Water gushed upon him, as he lay unmoving; and when the light was gone, and footfalls had clattered down the stone staircase, he drew out the locket, and felt that it was ruined.

In silence, after a few minutes lying still, he began to cry. He stopped when the undulating notes of Baldersby’s hunting horn floated up, thinking of the last time he had heard such notes, when General Fitzclarence was leading the charge of the Guards brigade against the Prussian Guard in Nonne Bosschen, the Nuns’ Wood. Then, laughing to himself (hollowly, he said to an imagined Desmond in Freddy’s bar) he pulled and writhed himself out of the sopping, weighted sack, and stood up, shivering in pyjamas clinging to his skin. All the same, the locket must be ruined, the carbolic acid was very strong, it burned his eyes and lips, and stank horribly.

He looked for matches in his tunic, but it was sopped through, so was the box. Footfalls came up the stairs, with light; he waited, wondering if more was coming; but it was O’Connor with his Orlix electric lamp, bringing his own British warm, and a laundered pair of pyjamas.

“Here, my boy, put on these,” he said. “Then come
downstairs
with me, and sleep in my room. I have managed to get a spare camp-bed for you.” Seeing his face, and shudders,
O’Connor said, “The thing for you is a hot bath, but the
bathroom
is in the colonel’s suite, so come down in the coat and I’ll give you a rub down with a stiff Turkish towel.”

Phillip stuttered his thanks, and putting his new Loewe pipe in his mouth, he followed O’Connor down to a larger room on the second floor, which O’Connor shared with Brendon, the elderly subaltern, who had been a volunteer in the South African War. Brendon often referred to two things in the mess: that his wife, a cousin of the colonel’s wife, had not been able to join him owing to the lowness of a second-lieutenant’s pay,
seven-and-six
a day; and that he could not afford a whiskey-and-soda. He was rather stout, with ginger hair, a large moustache; he walked with a bit of a swagger.

Brendon came into the room while O’Connor was vigorously towelling Phillip, who now felt better. Conscious of his military superiority, Brendon began to hold forth with his usual
condescending
air of amusement when regarding Phillip.

“A soldier is not a soldier, as Napoleon might have remarked in parenthesis, until he has learned to regard himself as the lowest thing on God’s earth, something that crawls on its belly. Until then, he will merely be something that is chucking its weight about. Before he can advance, he must first learn that his centre of gravity has to be lowered, like that of water, to the lowest level.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a cold tub,” said Phillip with assumed nonchalance. “One way to keep fit!”

“In other words,” went on Brendon, ignoring the interruption, “the tyro who chucks his weight about by speaking out of turn has to be taken down a considerable number of pegs. Or to change the metaphor: while remaining the newest entry, he must not assume for himself the prerogatives of a stallion hound,
if
you
can follow my meaning. Until then,” continued Brendon, fixing Phillip with his eyes, “Until then, a mere puppy in the pack, in the old phrase of the classical side, he simply remains, as a soldier, simply
non
est
.”

“May I offer you two gentlemen a drink?” said Phillip. He had seen that the locket was not spoiled.

“No, thank you,” said Brendon.

Pyjamas on, Phillip felt more cheerful. He flicked the water from his new pipe, and, offered O’Connor’s big glazed jar, filled his pipe, and was about to put it in his mouth when
Silas B. Ramshott, another elderly subaltern, looked in from his room next door. Ramshott was a short, rather puffy pale-faced American actor, always talking about the plays of Pinero, Winchell Smith, Somerset Maugham, and others in which his Broadway successes had been made. Now he cried out:

“Well, I’m darned, if you’re not gum-sucking my noo pipe! Jeese, that’s my Loewe you’ve got, I bought it King’s Parade, Cambridge, last weekend. I missed it three days ago!”

“I bought this one in Cambridge, too, really I did!”

“The hell you did! That’s my pipe! I left it on the
ante-room
table, by the noos-papers.”

“Well, I bought this pipe in Cambridge.”

“What was the name of the shop?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Where was it?”

“In the High Street.”

“There isn’t a High Street in Cambridge!”

“Anyway, I bought it there. However, if you think it’s yours, by all means have it,” and Phillip held out the pipe.

“D’you think I want the darned thing now, after you’ve been gum-sucking it?” cried the other, his putty-coloured face showing disgust.

“Well, then, what’s all the fuss about?”

“You wouldn’t know,” said the voice of Baldersby, as the yellow moustache came round the door. “The sooner you clear out of our regiment, the better everyone will be pleased. You’re nothing but a damned outsider!”

“Come, now,” said O’Connor. “Maddison, as an anomaly in our midst, may be out of place for the time being, but there is a possibility of misunderstanding in this matter of the pipe. Maddison said he bought the pipe in the High Street of
Cambridge
. Admittedly he does not know the town, and quite possibly the tobacconist where he says he bought it has sold others of that make and pattern. As for tonight, he has the drink taken, and I suggest that an apology to the colonel in the morning is due for his act of misplaced humour. Now, as we have an early parade, I for one have a wish for m’ bed.”

When the others had gone, O’Connor said that he would suggest to Phillip that he wrote out an apology immediately after breakfast, and took it to the colonel personally. He
appealed tactfully to Brendon, who was getting undressed, revealing a bulky body almost covered in long woollen
combinations
. “What do you say, Brendon?”

“Well, since you ask my opinion, I should say that my cousin, being a good sportsman, will appreciate that it will take some effort on Maddison’s part to ask to see him, after his attempt to cremate him in his own ante-room.”

“I am sure that is very good advice, Brendon; and courage is always its own reward. But go aisy in future, my boy, or you may find yourself in the wars again.”

“Yes, I will, certainly. And thank you for your kindness, O’Connor. And also for your good advice, Brendon.”

Brendon turned in his bed and looked at Phillip. He said nothing; for O’Connor was kneeling by his bed, head bowed, touching the beads of his rosary.

*

In the morning when Phillip went down to breakfast, he stopped at the letter-rack in the ante-room. There was a foolscap envelope addressed to him, without a stamp, obviously just put there, for the gum on the label still felt slightly damp. He took it to the lavatory to open it.

Phillip ran his eye down the list, headed by Bertram E. St. George Baldersby, and followed by a score of names. He did not examine them; but tearing the round-robin into little pieces, went out and dropped them in a trickle across the
ante-room
floor, as though for a miniature paper-chase. After this gesture of defiance he went into the mess, where a dozen officers, including Major Fridkin, were sitting, eating fried bacon, kidneys, mushrooms, and scrambled eggs.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Phillip: to which there was no reply. Helping himself to a plateful from the silver dishes over the spirit flames on the sideboard, he ate his breakfast,
with feigned unconcern that he had obviously been sent to Coventry.

He scrumpled this up, and began again,

This joined the first draft in the waste-paper basket.