The Balliols (48 page)

The men kept up a murmur of talk that was like the chorus of a play.

“What about peace to-night, kid?”

“At any price.”

“At any bloody price.”

“Crowds just coming out of the Hippodrome in London.”

“Think of Leicester Square to-night, all of ‘em laughing and jolly, and running to the tubes.”

“We could do with a tube to-night.”

“It's funny to think all that's going on just the same as it used to.”

“Well, kid, probably last time you was at the Brixton Panto, there was some poor blokes out ‘ere waiting for a damned relief to turn up.”

A runner from Brigade emerged out of the night, singing.

“Is this the way to the Ritz?” he asked.

“Straight on, sonny, that's the way. Got your gal with yer?”

“Not ‘arf … in this ‘ere sandbag.”

“You'll want a wash and brush up first.”

“I'm smelling of sweet mud, not violets.”

He passed on, singing.

“Cheery cove.”

“And ‘e ain't singing for bloody joy, either.”

It was after twelve before the relief arrived. It was one before the positions had been handed over, the guns dismounted, the limbers ready for the long trudge back to billets with foreheads frozen by the rain, eyes red and heavy with hours of watching, puttees and trousers heavy with clinging mud, feet moving mechanically over the rough track, the limbers sticking in the mud and having to be pulled out. Once one of the mules floundered in a shell hole and guns, packs and ammunition had to be unloaded before it could be freed. The grey landscape of lopped trees, roofless houses, broken garden walls, stretching on every side of them, in its vast expanse not one sign of homeliness or comfort; nothing but abandonment and waste, was an appropriate backcloth for the small party of men, struggling on, suffering like the fields and hedgeways, mutely, without understanding why.

It was on the afternoon of such a night that Rickman asked Tallent's advice on the sonnet sequence that was to form the centre piece of
The Poetry Magazine's
“On Active Service” number. There came into Tallent's face such a look of moral, righteous vituperative indignation that Hugh thought that the outburst was at last to come. For about a minute he looked at Rickman as though he were a scientist surveying some uncatalogued species. Then with surprising quietness, he held out his hand.

“Have you got the proofs there? Good. I'll have a look at them. I suppose it's not too late to alter anything? That's splendid. We must make them as good as we ever can. I don't suppose there is anything I can suggest but there might be an alternative rhythm, another way of breaking up the metre.”

Rickman was surprised and flattered at Tallent's interest.

“That's very kind of you.”

“Not at all, not at all. This is an important occasion.
The Poetry Magazine's
‘On Active Service' number.… We mustn't let down your standard.”

He took them over to his cubicle. While Hugh spent the entire afternoon in sleep, Tallent spent a full two hours over Rickman's proofs. At tea-time he returned them.

“Just a suggestion or two,” he said.

Hugh caught a glimpse of the proofs as Rickman took them. They were practically rewritten from the first line to the last.
Rickman kept his temper. He glanced at sheet after sheet, the colour mounting in his cheeks. “That's very kind of you,” he said. His voice was even-toned. But there was a look in his eyes that not even the most delinquent sergeant had ever seen in the orderly room.

The look frightened Hugh.

“There's no power on earth, that can keep those two from a real stand-up row.”

On a February morning of grey skies and drizzled rain, Ruth's child was born: a son. The last sight to fade from pain-dazed eyes as the mist of chloroform laid its peace about her was the broad leafless avenue of chestnuts. As the calming fumes released her the proud line of trees was the first object to grow clear to her.

On the following Friday there was a mellow expression on Lord Huntercoombe's face as he took his place as chairman of Peel & Hardy's board that resignations and deaths had reduced to the barest quorum of three members. Before he asked the secretary to read the minutes of the last meeting, he looked from one to the other of his colleagues.

“When I consider that each one of us has at this moment a son serving at the front; when I reflect on the kind of world that we have given to our sons to live in, I suppose it's foolish to be enthusiastic over the birth of a male child; but I must say that I feel very proud and happy to be a grandfather.”

He paused; then in his customary voice: “Will the secretary please read the minutes to us?”

There was not a great deal on the agenda paper. There rarely was nowadays. The firm was doing better business than it had ever done. The staff was busier than it had ever been. But the problems that arose were of a routine nature and did not need to be referred to the directorate. Smollett's perky substitute was proving himself not only popular but efficient. The board meetings rarely lasted for more than half-an-hour. The moment the actual business was over the chairman took his leave.

Prentice's eyes followed him as he walked slowly, with bent shoulders, towards the door.

“He's looking very old,” he said, when the secretary had gone and they were alone. “How old is he, seventy? I don't suppose he'll last a great deal longer.”

And then, thought Balliol, his grandson would be the heir. Hugh had said that it would be strange to be the uncle of a peer. But it seemed to him far stranger to be the grandfather of one.

To a man of his generation living in the country the gap between the aristocracy and the gentry had been far greater than it had been for a man of Hugh's generation living in London. Distinctions of class were less marked, or less discernible, in a great city, where peers and commoners were meeting frequently on equal terms; particularly since Edward VII had admitted Jews and Americans and industrialists into society, and Lloyd George's budget had lowered the prestige and power of the Upper Chamber.

It had been different in his day. Living in the country he had been conscious of as much difference between his father and the peer who owned the greater part of the neighbourhood, as there was between himself and the local doctor. He would have no more expected his sister to marry an aristocrat than the son of a local tradesman. Country life had been communal and friendly. Everyone had been on speaking terms with everybody else. But the feudal distinctions had been rigidly maintained. There was the aristocracy, then the gentry, which might or might not include the rector; there were the big farmers, the doctor, the lawyer; then in a descending scale according to the dimensions of their activities, the local tradesmen, the small-holders, the peasants. Each had his own pigeon-hole.

Hugh never had known that world. By the time he was old enough to recognize the social framework, it had gone, never to return; its going symbolized by the inability of a family such as his to maintain its standard of living out of the land it had inherited; so that it had either to expand or to contract. The gentry class, as Victorian England had known it, had disappeared. It had been the framework of the feudal system, maintaining the balance between the peasantry and the aristocracy. With its disappearance the feudal system had gone too. So that to a man like Hugh that whole world would have the interest of a museum piece. To himself who had been nurtured in that world, the old distinctions still had significance. It did seem to him fantastic that his grandson should be the next heir to Tavenham.

He wondered in what light Huntercoombe saw the change. The different position of his own class had clearly so innoculated him that he was able to accept any further change with equanimity. When the question of recommending Smollett for a commission had arisen, it was Prentice, not Huntercoombe, who had expressed surprise. Huntercoombe had seen in the raising of a man like Smollett to the officer class a fusion of upper-middle, with middle-middle class, which exactly paralleled the fusion in his own world of the gentry and the aristocracy. Victor Tavenham and Hugh were brothers, and Hugh and Smollett were brother officers. And just as the differences between Hugh and Tavenham were so minute that a foreigner would not have been
aware of them, so Balliol was forced to wonder, when Smollett paid his first visit after he had been gazetted, what difference a foreigner would see, apart from physique and health, between him and Hugh. Smollett looked very well in khaki. Military training had brought a healthy glow to his cheeks; he had squared his shoulders, set back his head. He looked a real officer, not a tailor's dummy. That was the thing about uniform. Men who had never known how to dress, who had always looked wrong somewhere, suddenly became all right. “It's hard to know where one is nowadays,” he thought.

It was on the occasion of one of Smollett's visits, on a midsummer afternoon, that the door of Balliol's office was noisily flung open, with no preliminary knock, and a tall, khaki-clad figure was striding into the room, with a “Hullo, father!”

“My dear boy!”

Hugh looked so well, so unchanged that it was difficult to believe that it was six months since that bleak winter morning, when they had set out to Victoria in the dark. For those six months while he himself had been following the ordinary routine of the city day, his son had been in hourly danger of his life, had known cold, exposure, hunger. But his manner was of one returning for a week-end leave. There was the same absence of ceremony; an atmosphere so casual that Smollett's appearance as an officer seemed more of an occasion than Hugh's return from France.

“Here's someone you did not expect to see,” said Balliol.

The last time that they had met, Smollett had been Smollett to Hugh, Hugh had been Mr. Hugh to Smollett. Now they were brother officers. The adjustment in their positions was underlined by the technical nature of Smollett's greeting. He talked military shop. He asked questions; he compared notes; he made great use of his permission to address Hugh as Balliol. He made it abundantly clear that two equals were meeting on equal terms. When he had at last gone with a, “Cheerio, Balliol. I'll be coming across soon to join you,” Hugh turned to his father with an amused smile.

“I wonder how people like that will feel when it's all over and they've got to go back to where they were.”

At an ordinary time Balliol would have accepted such a remark as the cue for an impersonal, unbiassed, lightly-phrased monologue. But on his son's face was an eager, self-absorbed look that did not suggest a potential audience.

“What are your plans?” he asked.

“Father, I've no idea.”

He was seated on the table; swinging his putteed legs, tapping his cane against the heavy, nail-shod soles. He looked up, laughing. The pictured memory of that parting came back to Balliol. His son's sudden impatient fretfulness, the girl bareheaded, in her fur coat, hurrying down the platform, the determined walk towards the bookstall. So that was how the land lay, was it? It had been real, then: not simply the mood and moment coinciding. Hugh had his plans, all right. If not an exact plan, still, a kind of plan.

“You won't be dining at home to-night, then?”

“No, not to-night.”

“We'll have your room made up?”

Hugh hesitated.

“Yes … yes, do that. But leave the key under the door. I can't tell when it'll be, not yet. …” He paused, then looked up quickly. “I'm sorry, father. I'm longing to see you all, to tell you everything. But it's all a fog. I don't know where I am. I shan't know till this evening's over.”

But you do know, Balliol thought. You know very well what it is you're planning. Only you don't want to talk too soon. You won't, in the vernacular of the proverb, count unhatched chickens. But you know what you'll be saying to her to-night. You know the answer you're expecting. You're already picturing the scene at Ilex to-morrow morning when you walk down to breakfast with the announcement, “Father, get that silk hat out. You'll be needing it to-morrow.”

Balliol could read into his son's mind; but he asked no questions. The less one asked the more one learnt. People preferred to tell things in their own way, in their own time. Besides, there was not much that his son could tell him. He could guess at his son's thoughts as he listened to the heavily-nailed soles clattering down the stairs.

And indeed in the actual diagnosis of Hugh's state of mind he was accurate enough. Hugh's thoughts, Hugh's plans, were as his father guessed at them. But the emotions that lay behind those thoughts and plans, the emotions that coloured them, gave them their particular quality and meaning, was a closed door to Balliol. As Hugh ran out into the sunlit street, he was lifted by an emotion peculiar to his day and race; to be understood only by those who actually have experienced it, who have seen suddenly with new eyes a prospect familiar to them since childhood in the contrasted light of the desolate world that they have left.

It was an emotion far more complex, far deeper than the excitement of any ordinary homecoming after no matter how long a separation. It was far more than the feeling, “Here I am back once again where I belong. It hasn't altered. It never will alter. It is eternal in the scheme of things. However far I travel, I shall find this waiting.” It was in part that feeling. But it was far more than that. Not only was there the contrast between the loneliness and the squalor that had been left and the friendly familiar beauty that had been recovered, but there was the explanation and the justification of that contrast. It was a feeling that was illogical, unreasoned; that the cool brain of an examining counsel could ridicule in fifteen questions; but it was a feeling that encompassing reason, silenced it.

At the corner of Bury Street and Piccadilly, Hugh paused, watching the stream of London's traffic clatter past. It was after five. The heat of the day had lessened. The pale cobalt of the sky had deepened. The sun had lost its metallic quality. It quivered in luminous, caressing folds on the crowded pavements; the slate roofs; the patterned awnings; on the taxis snorting and grunting with changes of gear and screech of brakes; on the large low-bodied cars soundlessly increasing and diminishing their speed; on the buses, with their top decks crowded. It was an ordinary London scene, such as Hugh had absorbed without noticing it a hundred times. But to-day, seen after six months' separation, he saw it suddenly as in itself it was; saw it transfigured, so that for one moment this ordinary London scene became the symbol of London's life, its variety, its greatness. This eager stir of life, the hurrying crowds, the officers and soldiers, the brisk martial stride; the salutes given and returned; the old men in their stiff hats slowly sauntering towards their clubs; the languid ladies pausing before shop windows; the eager, bright-eyed girls laughing up into the faces of the men beside whom they trotted, from whose khaki arms they hung; the nondescript shabby men, walking slowly as though there was no object in their walk; seeing all that and realizing how each different type formed the sum of the city's greatness, realizing that he, too, was part of it, that he drew his life and strength from it, that without it he was nothing, since he had been born and bred here, as much as any tree planted in kindly soil; that here in this city was all of life that really mattered to him; that should the life of this city perish, there would remain no life for him that would be worth the living; seeing all that, because of that sight, knowing how, whatever happened, the city's life blood must flow unchecked, he knew that if the price of that flowing were the
desolation that he had left, the desolation he was to return to, the price was not too high.