A Fox Under My Cloak (27 page)

Handing over the fat white horse to the groom, Phillip walked back feeling that the landscape had changed since he had left Godolphin House an hour before. His stiffness soon wore off, and he was jubilant again as he went down the High Street, wondering as he passed Tom Hill's if he would have a pair of grey canvas leggings made, like the adjutant's. Later on, perhaps. The immediate thing was to get the green Humber car. What luck, it was in. A mechanic swung the brass handle, the engine started, Phillip occupied the driver's seat, was told what the gears were, how many times to pump oil into the glass container on the dashboard to feed the engine, which pedals were for what; and drove out of the garage, and down the slope to Godolphin House. Leaving the motor outside, he went into the ante-room, glanced at a newspaper, dropped it, and went out again, hoping that he would be noticed. He was: Baldersby's face, teeth holding cigar stump, regarded him from the open mess window.

“Hullo, Baldersby. Nice weather, isn't it?”

“Hr-r-r,” growled Baldersby, with a scowl. Phillip thought he was really harmless; he was a joke to the others—“Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire”. His bark was worse than his Berkshire!

In high good humour—he would take out a horse again, until he could ride properly—Phillip swung the handle, and got in. He started off full of confidence, and changing gear with only two clashes, was going up the High Street at about 25 m.p.h. when he saw the three other horses coming down on what he
thought was the wrong side—they were on his left-hand side—and putting on the brakes, sat helplessly while the motor-car swung to the right, then to the left, before revolving completely on its own tracks and stopping, facing backwards. The polished steel-studded rear-tyres had skidded on the tarred surface.

He sat there while the horses went by, giving a little salute to each; then getting out, restarted the motor, and reversing without incident, went on and arrived at the Green House, to be welcomed by three sisters for tea—and supper, with songs, Chopin, and gramophone records while a nightingale sang in the garden.

*

The notes of other nightingales could be heard in the silence of the High Street after the ten o'clock closing of pubs, when the touts, who spied through big black binoculars, stop-watches in hand, from the beech-clumps of the Severals upon race-horses by day, and the stable boys, who might be any age between fourteen and eighty years, had gone to out-house, loft,
harness-room
, and stable. A peaceful country town, in the fullness of May; and nobody enjoyed the ups of life there more than Phillip despite the downs, from which he arose again with the buoyancy of ignorance, unaware of the reasons of his being disliked, a herdless youth having little or no percipience of the feelings of those older men who were to him merely faces whose critical gaze was to be evaded or disregarded.

Laughing to himself as he thought of the terrific spree in the Belvoir Arms, he walked back to Godolphin House in the moonlight, and stopped to listen to a nightingale. It was a calm and beautiful late evening in the third week of May. The old feeling for birds and woods and spring was overlaid by the excitements and adventures of his new life. He chuckled, imagining Desmond beside him, enjoying his account of the adventure; and continued on his way, now and then deviating a little from his course, which added to his sense of the evening's fun. His head was wet, so were the shoulders of his tunic, his tie, and his collar. What a rag it had been! In this mood he went in by the side door of the mess, and pulled himself up by the rail beside the stone steps to his attic room, where his camp-bed stood by itself.

*

Lying within his sleeping-sack, he reviewed the evening's details. When he had gone under the brick arch into the
courtyard
,
the gramophone was playing
They'd
Never
Believe
Me.
He was standing by the open door, listening, when an R.N.A.S. man said to him, “I say, would you mind not using our mess? This is the C.P.O.s' mess, you know.” Phillip said, “Oh, I didn't know,” and going away, walked out of the courtyard and up to the clock-tower at the cross-roads at the top of the town. Then hoping his former self would not be recognised, he went into the bar of the Belvoir Arms and sat on one of the stools. He ordered a pint of bitter beer, and drank it in two draughts, out of bravado; then he asked for another in the same tankard. The barmaid was the rather plump girl who rode on the flapper-bracket of the A.S.C. officer's Douglas.

When that person came in, dark eyes sunken, the blue-dark of his jowl combining with many craters of chicken-pox to give his face an uneven appearance, Phillip asked him to have a drink, hoping to talk about the comparative merits of single and twin-cylinder engines. He swallowed his pot of beer, and ordered two more.

“How does your Douglas behave up-hill with a pillion
passenger
?”

“Depends on the hill, and the passenger.”

“Well, say the barmaid here. Would it go in top up to the Heath?”

The other eyed him. “Why do you ask?”

“I only wondered. Mine's a single-cylinder, of course. I say, if I asked the barmaid to come for a ride on it, d'you think she'd say yes?”

“I don't understand you!”

“Well, I saw her on your bus, and I wondered if she'd care to come for a ride on mine. D'you think she'd be offended if I asked her?”

“What exactly do you mean?”

Phillip saw that he was angry, but had no idea why. “I mean, she's game, isn't she?”

The A.S.C. officer turned his back. The barmaid, who was polishing a glass behind the counter, gave Phillip a cold stare. The A.S.C. officer said something, and she poured him a glass of gin, to which he added soda-water from the siphon on the counter.

The tankard of beer was still there when at nine o'clock the green-aproned cellarman came in, and the barmaid left. A
minute or two later the A.S.C. man left; and going out, Phillip saw him taking his Douglas off the stand, and the barmaid getting on the cushion. Then the machine purred away in the direction of Six Mile Bottom.

Could the barmaid be the A.S.C. chap's bird? Had he thought he was trying to get her away from him? How funny, when he had a girl of his own—there it was,
Helena,
on the silver-grey tank of his own motor-bike!

Having nothing to do, Phillip returned to the bar and picked up
The
Daily
Trident.
There he read, under headlines of big dark type, “The Tragedy of the Shells. Lord Kitchener's Grave Error.”

It was what he had always known, what everyone in France had known, there in print. Shrapnel, instead of high explosive, useless for cutting wire … “responsible for our Armies failing to gain their objectives, and the consequent appalling casualties.”

“Dirty yellow rag that, sir. Been publicly burned in the Stock Exchange today, according to the evening paper. Several trade unions have condemned it, too, sir. Attacking Kitchener like that!”

“I think Kitchener deserved it.”

“Really, sir?”

“I don't think that anyone at home has the slightest idea of what has been happening out there.”

At this moment the senior subaltern came in, a half-smoked cigar between his teeth, followed by the adjutant, the second-in-command, and a strange lieutenant, wearing the same badges, whom Phillip had not seen before. All were smoking cigars.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Phillip genially, as they made for the far end of the room. They did not appear to hear. He swallowed his beer quickly, thinking that he ought to switch to whiskey, since the adjutant at the other end of the bar had ordered four large White Horses for his party.

When he returned to the others sitting on the settle,
upholstered
in woven horsehair, which ran round three sides of the room, Phillip ordered a large White Horse.

The next to enter the bar was an old-faced man with a coarse voice, obviously a bookmaker. Phillip, perched on his stool, heard him say to the cellar-man, while pointing at
The
Daily
Trident
,
“Castleton, who owns that yellow rag, is an ally of the Huns.”

“Oh, no,” said Phillip, swinging round on the stool. “
Castleton
's quite right. He's a decent chap. I met him when I was a boy.”

Thereupon he declaimed his opinion of what was wrong in France, how Kitchener's mind, having been formed on problems of the East, was incapable of grasping the problem of the present war in France.

“The Germans have eight or ten howitzers to our one, all firing high explosive. Their shrapnel is a farce. So is ours. The people in this country do not know the truth. Do you know, f'instance, that the Germans believe absolutely in the
righteousness
of their cause? I've talked to many, so I know. They all said the same thing on the truce of Christmas Day. They can't lose the war, since it is a righteous war, and God is with them. No, no, don't go away—just listen a moment ——”

“What are you, a Hun?” asked the bookie.

“My grandmother was German, but I'm English. No, really, honestly—what I'm saying is the gospel truth. What the Germans say is that they are an increasing nation with practically no colonies ——”

“And those won't be theirs much longer!”

“Just a moment. They are a growing nation ——”

“Were, you mean!”

“All right.” Phillip gulped down his whisky. “Anyway, they have to depend on increasing trade, selling all sorts of things abroad, even toys, to keep going. They're shut in, you see. So they built battleships to protect their shipping, just as we have done, only we started earlier.” Having rid himself of all his ideas on the subject, Phillip asked the other to have a drink. His offer was refused; and unperturbed, he ordered another for himself.

The cellar-man, his cropped hair ending in a water-flattened curl pressed low on his forehead, said, immediately the large beef-faced man had left the bar, “Lord Kitchener is very highly regarded in this town by the racing fraternity, sir.”

“I like him, too; but he has let us down over shells. Our chaps, before an attack, are forced to try and cut enemy wire with machine-gun bullets. What a hope! There's no hope! Everyone anywhere near the front line knows it.” The
cellarman
polished a glass. “Including those who have found out by personal experience,” muttered Phillip, to himself.

Then he began to whistle the tune of a song which Cranmer had sung during one of the peaceful bacon-frying mornings behind the Brown Wood Line, which ought to have been called the Bill Brown Line since the bunkers and rifle-pits in it had been dug by the Grenadiers. He sang to himself the words of the last verse.

Raising his glass, Phillip, now in a state of semi-exaltation with his own thoughts, drank to Cranmer, to Baldwin and to Elliot, to Peter and David and Nimmo Wallace, to the Earl of Findhorn and the Iron Colonel, to the wounded and the dying in No Man's Land, to faces seen in the pallor of flares and the glow of charcoal braziers, ration parties making a crude
xylophone
sound on the frozen corduroy path with their boots, fearful of the tearing scream and crack of shrapnel, to Tommy Atkins whose ghost must have come to help him out of the T-trench, to the
prächtige
Kerls
,
in field-grey on Christmas Day, and to that which, by God, cried inside him, Come back to us, come back—and with this feeling he hurled the empty glass upon the floor.

The cellar-man was used to that sort of thing; but only when toasts were drunk, on special occasions, such as banquets, in the private dining-room. However, he said nothing; but lifting the flap in the counter, came through with brush and pan, and quietly swept up the fragments of what had been a large wine-glass, and returned to his original place.

“That will be another sixpence, sir,” he said, across the counter.

Phillip gave him half-a-crown, telling him to keep the change.

“Thank you very much, sir. You have been in France, I take it?”

“Yes, I was with the London Highlanders, as a ranker, and fought through the first battle of Ypres.”

“Yes, sir?” He leaned over the counter. “But there are
others, sir, if you will pardon my saying so, who have not had the same experiences as yourself, sir.”

“Quite! Quite!” and Phillip offered his hand to be shaken by the cellar-man.

Baldersby appeared, shoving past a circular three-legged table to the bar. He was going to order more drinks.

“I say, Baldersby,” said Phillip, feeling extremely genial towards the entire world, “would you care to have a drink with me. Two large whiskies, please,” to the cellar-man.

“I won't drink with you,” replied Baldersby, almost violently.

“I don't really
mean
to chuck my weight about, Baldersby.”

“Weight!” retorted Baldersby. “What weight have
you
got?”

“Ten stone four pounds, actually. But seriously——”

Baldersby turned his back on Phillip. His eye caught the heading of
The
Daily
Trident.
He picked it up, cried out “Pah!” and ripped it in pieces. This had also recently happened in the Pigskin Club, where Baldersby and the others had dined. The
Trident
had been carried by one of the members there to the
fireplace
, between polished steel tongs, and put in the fire.