Ulverton (27 page)

The Major turned; the Squire turned. Up to that point the Squire had not noticed Percy Cullurne. Now all eyes were turned on Percy Cullurne. Percy Cullurne stood upright and saw us watching him. He scanned our eyes and shook his hands free of water, as he had done on that very spot thousands of times before, I am sure. He sniffed. He spat, though not in anger: it was a practical, working-man’s expectoration. He sniffed again and passed a hand across his mouth. Every action of his had become entrancing. One almost expected him to start dancing and singing, as in the music-hall, or produce a rabbit from his cloth-cap (needless to say, Percy Cullurne was not in his Sunday best). But then he fell still, and merely stared us back. It was our turn to move.

‘Ah!’ came from the Major. The Major thought that enough, evidently.

The Squire had no choice. Anyway, his Furies were at him. His moment of personal glory was crumbling before his very eyes. He cleared his throat. He could, with a great effort of will, have turned his back, and said nothing. ‘The greatest events,’ as Fielding puts it, ‘are produced by a nice train of little circumstances.’ How different things might have been then!

‘Ah!’ came from the Squire.

Percy Cullurne cocked his head slightly, like a faithful dog who has just received an unfamiliar command.

‘Cullurne,’ said the Squire. He lifted his chin up, and placed his small hands behind his back, and rocked to and fro on his heels. His hair-oil gleamed in a decent imitation of St Michael’s helmet.

‘There’s a place at the end, Cullurne. Make it thirty-three.’

The crowd murmured its approval, along with one or two shouts from smocks, to the effect that Percy could stop a regiment with two fingers, if he could find them – which from the laughter that followed was clearly not meant to be complimentary; but its probable vulgar import, hidden in the multiple folds of village irony, was wholly lost on me. Percy Cullurne rested an elbow against the pump and continued to stare at us with nothing but puzzlement showing across his features. The frumpy old lady to my right leaned across in front of me to the cantankerous gent on my left and whispered, ‘Village idiot!’ To my shame, I did not flick her hat off, but merely wrinkled my nose at the stench of naphthalene, and emphatically cleared my throat.

Small beads of perspiration began to run down the Squire’s nose. He compressed his lips and puckered them in and out, like a child about to cry (‘bivering’ – as the local dialect rather charmingly has it). He looked anxiously about him for what I could only imagine was an escape route. Fury was grappling with a sense of absolute funk. This was extraordinary. His fingers locked themselves behind his back, then writhed. I believe to this day that he knew he was defeated. Percy Cullurne had probably terrified him for years, though he was twice Cullurne’s age, and of course immeasurably superior in social position. I know men of impeccable breeding who live in abject fear of a particular domestic servant (often the butler). It is, I think, a need, a profound desire, acting within them. Percy Cullurne has never grappled with himself. He is, in one way, as insentient to his own soul as a plant or a tree because he has never felt a need to query that inner self. His soul is commensurate with desire: his desire is his soul, and the soul remains content merely to be.

‘Come on man,’ said the Squire, ‘come on.’

Cullurne passed a big hand across his big face, which appeared to wipe away the puzzlement, pushed himself off from the pump and began to walk towards us. It was a space of only some thirty yards, but his slow, shambling gait, the ease of his great limbs, the
utter
silence that surrounded the strike of his iron-shod heels against the hard ground, the sudden shattering of a big dry whorl of horse-dung by an oblivious boot, his long shadow dancing over the stony earth – all this made his progress as slow as a Titan’s, as if a figure from some Homeric bronze-hammered past had loomed, had risen again into our midst. I can’t honestly say now whether I knew what he was about to do: perhaps all of us thought he would shuffle onto the end of the line, to a cheer no doubt, and the meeting would have been accounted a great success. Whatever Cullurne was or was not to do, we knew we would never forget that slow, methodical advance towards us, transfixing time itself; bespeaking slow, hard hours in the field, or in the dusty barn, or in the great lavish garden of the Manor; and arresting, for a long minute, our madness.

Whatever we were thinking, two Important Persons were in no doubt of his intentions: the Vicar, his head on one side, his palms together, was ready to grant his blessing; the Major had come down from the podium and was standing with an equally ready hand extended from a crisp cuff; the Squire, however, was rigid from head to toe. The Sacrificial Lambs watched Cullurne from the corner of their eyes, until Cullurne came to a stop two paces from them, and from the Squire. The crowd were eerily quiet. The whole square appeared suspended in a great silence, into which Cullurne’s voice broke – I was tempted to say like the blows of a blacksmith’s hammer, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was not violent, it was not thrust from him: it seemed to branch as naturally from him, in those soft syllables, as a tree from the earth. I cannot put it into words. Suffice to say that he spoke quietly, as if only to the Squire – but there was not a man or woman in that wide square who did not hear him.

‘I’d rather,’ he said, ‘bide at home.’

The Squire swallowed. His fingers writhed.

‘Stay at home, man?’

The man nodded slowly. There were a few titters in the crowd, and a smock snorted. The cantankerous gent on my left tut-tutted violently.

The Squire lifted his chin still higher.

‘Duty, Cullurne. I would be proud for one of my servants to answer the call of the hour. His country in need. And so on. Duty, Cullurne. Duty.’

The Major’s hand drooped, but did not fall. The Vicar’s mouth puckered into a mew of distaste. My heart, I have to say, was hammering wildly. There was a curious taste of metal in my mouth. The church rang the quarter, thudding its fleet hooves across our temporal defiance. As the echoes washed away, the under-gardener spoke again.

‘I’d rather bide at home, sir. That’s all.’

The crowd’s titters grew into chuckles. The young men in the line shifted from foot to foot, grinning.

‘I see,’ said the Squire. He looked about him, as if for aid. People averted their eyes – myself included. He began to glower. He was grappling with himself; it was painful to watch. It was, in some profound way, embarrassing.

‘Yes. I see. He would rather stay at home. Yes. I see. What? Well, if a man would rather stay at home, then who are we to stop him, what? What? Thank you, Cullurne.’

Bare reportage cannot convey the deep hatred sometimes evinced between men through the simplest address. The words of the Squire were more spat out than spoken. The crowd murmured. Cullurne turned and walked away, and every eye followed his long strides, every heart beat to his steady rhythm – until each step became no more than a faint echo, dwindling to silence through the empty lanes.

Activity broke out again in the square: the crowd began to disperse into small knots, the young men gave their names to a dapper clerk who had suddenly appeared from the side of the crowd, the hoops rattled and a green-liveried automobile roared to a stop outside the Post Office and diverted everyone’s attention. It was the Major’s. When I looked above it, at the eaves, I saw nothing. The house-martin had gone.

It was not I who chose Ulverton as the ‘happy spot’ for my final innings; it was the skein of family connections that pulled me to this place. My wife’s second cousin, Mrs Mary Holland, had lived in the village for almost all her married life; although her husband was long dead by the time I settled here, she was so enamoured of the place in which she had brought up her family, that she had vowed to stay on and not retire, as was the wont then, to a widow’s decline in Weymouth. Our friendship began through tragedy: having lost her darling son, Daniel, to influenza in his first term at
Eton
in the same year as my own brother was appointed housemaster there, in 1886, relationships were established more closely than would otherwise have been the case, for the stricken mother needed all the support we could give her; mine being of the post-marked variety, until my leave gave us the opportunity to visit her in 1893. I well remember the carriage mounting that last hill north of Ulverton, cresting the bare, nibbled flanks of Frum Down, and giving us all of a sudden that enchanted view of the verdant river, the clustering trees, the black thatch of ancient roofs and the simple grey stone of the church, that bespoke all our exiled dreams, and seemed to embody all our fairest fancies! Apart from the odd straggling copse, and the neat lushness of Ulverton House, all about was naked and desolate, even repellent (how ignorant I was then of the springy exhilaration of our bare downland!) – but this only served to heighten the charms of this remote village. We were stricken by love, and vowed to make this ‘our’ England on the final return from India. Alas, our plans were only half-realised, as it were: dashed by dysentery and death – and sometimes I find the association dreadful in my solitude; Mrs Holland too now lying beside her husband and her son near the Saxon yew of our secluded churchyard, their tombstone recording their allotted spans only a little less mutely than the grassy mounds of the labouring generations, whose stones are as bereft of art as their lives.

When I am depressed in spirits I play Chopin. I am famous for this: my cottage being on the main street, facing the high flint wall of the churchyard, the open windows of summer mean that any passing souls are vexed by my missed notes, or stirred by my harmonies. On that day, that August day fourteen years ago, as the thirty-two young men of Ulverton clambered aboard the bus and waved their proud farewells, and were trotted out of sight, to some distant and unimaginable vista, each dressed as if for a church outing, or a visit to town with their beloveds, I played my heart out. Mrs Holland sat by the window and listened, tears welling in her eyes through the B Minor Sonata, as the cries of the young men sounded in the street, their younger siblings shrieked and whistled, their mothers and fathers waved and kissed and blew their noses, and the bus momentarily darkened the room as it passed.

‘It will only be a small affair,’ said Mrs Holland. ‘My dear husband used to play this.’

I said nothing and played on.

Ulverton had more volunteers than any other village on the downs. The rhetorical flourish with the sabre had played its part, for everyone said how ‘the Squire hev done us proud, then.’ I continued to work shoulder to shoulder with the men he had forbidden to attend the meeting. At least, that is how I interpreted their absence. In the way of things here, no one questioned this privilege, because no one saw it as such; believe it or not, those lucky few with their noses to the chalk were seen as exhibiting extreme unselfishness. They were making their sacrifice for the sake of knowledge and discovery. The talk of treasure-hunts dwindled in the tap-rooms of Ulverton. That healthy air of ruefulness which I had so valued in the English countryman and countrywoman evaporated in those early months of the war: loins were girded, and spines stiffened, and the deadlier face of patriotism shown, in a way I found thoroughly alarming.

There was only one pariah, one Untouchable, in our pastoral haven – and that was Percy Cullurne. ‘Craven’ was the least insulting, and the most printable, of the many qualifications made upon his good name that summer and autumn. He, in his turn, lapsed into near silence, seeming not to feel the sting of the verbal sticks and stones, and the odd scrawled contribution to fellow-feeling upon his cottage door, and the various small missiles aimed at him by the dwarf regiments, goaded on by their zealous parents. It might have turned out otherwise: a hundred years earlier, he would no doubt have been the hero of the hour, carried shoulder-high around a burning rick. But the vans of Socialism, odious though they were, had only trundled ineffectually through our village by 1914: perhaps owing to the memories of the older folk, still vivid, of the terrible results of rebellion, and a general relieving of hardship and poverty, there was little connection made between the ranting from the vans and the famous last words of John Oadam [alias ‘Captain Bedwine’ of the ballads – see
The Book of Downland Songs
, 1923]; little attempt to relate the tenets of the placarded strangers with the fenced-off woods and the touched cap, that deference as ingrained as the soil in the furrows of their hands.

Not that the members of the ‘team’ were happy with this arrangement – I mean, their enforced sacrifice. I don’t want to give the impression that they were burning to be off into foreign
parts,
and slaughter the Hun: no, it was far more owing to an uncomfortable sense of exclusiveness; a coat that carries well in Pall Mall, but not amongst the labouring brethren of rural England. Exclusiveness, or difference, without material satisfaction – that is too close to the outsider complex. Every aside in the Half Moon, or the Malt Shovel, or the Green Man, or the New Inn; every little silence at their leaving; every knowing smile or wink in the lane; each military or patriotic reference in the Harvest Home songs of that summer’s end; every slow, laborious reading-out of the newspaper before the assembled family or the tap-room company became a jab, a prod, not just to the conscience but to that feeling of belonging so essential to the otherwise lonely human animal. Our village was more full of eccentrics then than now, but even the most awry of minds was inextricably woven into the common fabric, just as the trees in the wood grow more individual the more familiar one becomes with the mass. Matters have changed: our great roads are thronged with motor-cars and lorries, the wireless tinkles, the telephone connects us with far-away towns. Ulverton is slowly losing its sense of remoteness; each day brings the world nearer, darkening my room with its passing, pruning us of our odder growths, blowing away the strong rich scents that come of stagnation. The nearest high scarp is no longer the edge of the world, and heads barely turn when the toot of a motor-car sounds at Church Corner. Is this to be regretted? Time, dear reader, shall arbitrate upon that question – not I.