The Quick and the Dead

by Gerald Bullet

  ‘A brave one anyhow,’ said Calamy quietly. ‘He’s just gone off to fight the Boers.’

  I stared and gaped.

  ‘Yes,’ said Calamy. ‘I’m not your father, my dear. It’s time you knew the truth. Mr Fleer’s been to see me. A strange man he is. Do you know, Claud, I just can’t bring myself to like him.’

  Tears started into my eyes; my face flamed; the room began swaying about me. Calamy’s voice came from a great distance.

  ‘I had to tell you, my dear. If I hadn’t there’s others that would have done. Mr Fleer was very unpleasant about it.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said doggedly. ‘I don’t believe it. Who is my father if you’re not?’

  He answered that question simply and directly enough. And I saw again that debonair horseman on the Icknam Road. ‘Yesterday he went off to the war. And last Sunday evening your mother met him and said good-bye to him, poor girl. They were seen together—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to hear about him!’ I interrupted angrily, on the verge of tears. ‘You’re the only father I want. Please be my father.’

  It was oddly, yet with a significant difference, a repetition of that scene of seven years earlier. The difference was mainly in me, partly in Calamy. Seven years had taught me much, but it had not taught me how a boy could be the son of two people not married to each other. All children, in my imagination, were conceived (my seniors had been forced to admit that much) but unbegotten.

  ‘Then mother—who’s my mother? … Was I changed at birth or something? Am I going to be a lord when I grow up?’ I smiled wanly, half believing I had made a good joke.

  Calamy got out of his chair. ‘Expect we’d better talk of this another time, my boy.’ He put a hand on my head. ‘It’ll make no difference to you and me.’ The relief of this assurance set me sobbing in earnest. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t cry. There’s nothing to cry about, nothing at all. We’ll all be happy together just as we’ve always been … Come along now, it’s dinner-time. Mother’ll wonder where we’ve got to. Not a word of this to her, eh?’

  I gulped back my tears and fumbled for a handkerchief. We moved towards our dinner.

  ‘He’s not a good man, isn’t Mr Fleer,’ remarked Calamy reflectively. ‘And not a sensible man. I had to read a piece of the Bible to him.’ Calamy chuckled. ‘He didn’t like that at all.’ His sadness had lifted at the memory of Mr Fleer’s discomfiture. That he had put to confusion a minister of the gospel, and by reading a passage from his own precious Book to him, evidently struck Calamy as a little comical. ‘D’you remember, Claud, how it says that Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground? I’ve often wondered what it was he wrote.’

  Before I could answer him—and I was scarcely capable yet of answering him articulately—my mother was upon us, loud with humorous reproaches.

  ‘You pair of ruffians—what are you gossiping about, and my nice dinner getting cold on the plates!’ Suddenly she espied my condition. ‘Why, what’s the matter, darling?’

  ‘Had a fly in his eye,’ said Calamy quickly. ‘But it’s out now, isn’t it, Claud?’

  It was the first and only lie that I ever knew him to tell. Was it, I wonder, eagerly recorded against him by Mr Fleer’s Celestial Ledger Clerk?

  Part Two

  The Judgement of Little Bethel

  Chapter IV

  I have said that the fields surrounding Adam Lane were at this period speckled with building plots. But it is time to be more particular. Speaking at a venture, I suppose that I must have been now in my thirteenth year. To me the preliminaries of building were anything but unwelcome. I had no thought for the future, for the time when four parallel rows of red villas should slope down at right angles to the Links Road (as we called it), and a vast green playground be thereby destroyed; nor did I regret the more rural past. It was sufficient for me that, from the very beginning of these operations, stacks of bricks and piles of new white planks began to appear in the nearer fields: appeared and remained, week after week, unattended and apparently forgotten. The delicious smell of those planks returns to me now: delicious not in itself but for its associations. During the best part of a year, from midsummer to late autumn, one such pile of planks served my happy purpose. We called it ‘the craft’; I was skipper, with Bertie Wiccombe as crew; and together we sailed enchanted seas. Accustomed to the society of my contemporaries at school, on most occasions I couldn’t help looking on Bertie Wiccombe, who was two years my junior, as the merest stop-gap. I saw a lot of him, for he lived next door; we could shout to each other over the garden fence. But he was only a kid, I felt; there was no real fun in going about with him; he lacked initiative. He was a fresh-complexioned, fair-haired child, the idol and victim of a doting, hysterical mother. He promised to be like her: already he had her high cheekbones, her abnormally wide bright eyes. He was both fond and mortally afraid of her: a paradox I could by no means understand. Mrs Wiccombe’s mother-love took unfortunate forms. When she wasn’t smothering the child with endearments and caresses she would beat him savagely, on the slightest pretext. Savagely? But no, that is more than I can vouch for. I only know that on days when he was late home from playing in the fields, or had torn his clothes, or dared to display a touch of temper, we in our cottage would hear nightmare noises from next door. Feet running to and fro; a bumping and banging; shrill voices; and, finally, the house filling with screams. In the sudden silence that followed, Calamy and my mother would exchange an uneasy glance. And sometimes Calamy would start up out of his chair, as though to interfere. But he always, with a puzzled unhappy look, sat down again. To me it was purely horrible and fantastic. I had never in my life received, by way of corporal punishment, more than an impulsive smack or two. They had no special theories about the matter, Calamy and my mother; no one had told them that solemn punitive beating was inhuman nonsense; they were wise without instruction and almost without thought. When I was troublesome my mother would sometimes quarrel with me, in her childish ingenuous fashion; or Calamy, in support of her, would mildly remonstrate. And that was the end of the matter. The very quarrelling presupposed a friendship, a fundamental equality, not at all impaired by the relationship of mother and son; and as for Calamy’s protests, they derived force from his very mildness and their own infrequency. Good behaviour was taken for granted in our household; and breaches of it, at their worst, were in effect breaches of friendship, condemned because they made for temporary discomfort. My naughtinesses, though possibly numerous, were not sensational; but I cannot doubt that they were at least as grave as Bertie Wiccombe’s. Thinking his case over,. I soon came to the conclusion that if Mrs Wiccombe had been my mother I should have run away. Herself I dismissed, briefly, as a madwoman: possibly I was not far wrong. But there is another possibility—which is that Bertie was cunning or craven enough to cry before he was hurt, and that the running and screaming was the beginning and end of the affair. Yet the fear, at least, was in some measure real; and the strange glitter in the woman’s eyes was not to be argued away. Some shame or delicacy forbade me to question Bertie himself, and I fancy that the same hesitancy attended Calamy’s endeavour to broach the subject to the boy’s father. Wiccombe senior was a stout, slow-thinking, quiet fellow, whose features and feelings were hidden away under a black beard. During the day he worked at a sawmill five miles from our village; at night he returned to the bosom of his excitable family. Excitable—it was his own word. He confided to Calamy that poor Susan was an excitable woman: ‘She’ll make herself ill one day, Mr Calamy, with those tempers of her.’ Meanwhile, miraculously, she failed to make her husband ill: he went stolidly about his business. And Bertie, the apple of her glittering eye, played with me in the garden, respected my seniority, and helped me navigate my craft.

  In this seafaring of mine, Bertie was the ideal companion. Our voyages were infrequent; I consorted mostly with boys nearer my own age, and these knew nothing of this adventuring; and so, by happy chance, aided perhaps by an i
nstinct in ourselves, the game was never staled for us. Nor indeed had we, in those days, ‘the black art to dispense’ a several satiety to every sense: our impulses were unforced, our pleasures untroubled by thought, and we did nothing too much. It is a cool dusky evening that I find most vivid in memory. We sit on the deck of our craft, with night slowly gathering round us. Above our heads stretch the branches of a giant elm; below is a sea of tossed and waving grass. It is a sea in the convention of our game, and soon, in the fading light, its actual appearance will lend colour to the pretence. We stare out upon a rain-swept sky, and our eyes follow the greying contours of the links. The Links Road, as usual, is deserted: at best it is but a green track, first trodden, they say, by the feet of Ancient Britons. There is rain still in the air; it comes and goes, fitfully. The wind is rising; its cry, lonely and wandering, is like the voice of an ancient, half-remembered grief. We have been rained upon, Bertie and I; if we gave any thought to the question we should perhaps feel wet and cold. And we are both, I fancy, in some degree sensitive to the mood of the scene, the mystery and melancholy of the hour. If so, we savour it without thought or question: it adds zest to our pretending, enriches the music of our fancy. We enter the Sargasso Sea, which we conceive to be a kind of vegetable soup; and thence, in a rising wind, proceed to the Spanish Main. Our gallant craft moves like a swan over the heaving hills of water. Her sails fill; she gathers speed; she flies; she is a bird flying. Whence came such notions and similes into our boyish minds is more than I can pretend to know: all I recall now is the vividness and detail of my fancy—the sound of creaking wood and straining tackle, the noise of waters, the occasional sudden slap of the sail. Bertie, loyally seconding my fictions, was an apt partner in any emergency. ‘Pirates on the starboard bow, captain? Right. I’ll load the gun. Now the gun’s loaded. Bang, bang.’ The pirates sank. Cheerful and efficient was Bertie: he initiated little or nothing, but he was quick to act on a hint, and in his infant fashion he was a good and industrious embellisher. If I decided to invent an island of palms, I could safely look to Bertie for the fixtures and fittings—cannibals, wigwams, missionaries, skeletons, buried treasure, and the like. He had read little; he was not, as I was, the seasoned companion of men of thirteen and fourteen whose mothers, some of them, committed suicide, and whose fathers knew men who had telephones installed in their houses. His school, poor child, was an inglorious establishment at Hadley Rise: a mere score of boys collected for tuition in a private house. But of such books of adventure as he had read, of such glimpses of the larger world as had been given to him, Bertie made the best possible use. Perhaps I enjoyed his company more than I knew. It was he, I remember, who discovered a mutiny aboard; and he who knocked down the chief mutineer with a belaying-pin. ‘I wonder what a belay-ing-pin is like?’ he said to me, as it were aside. The victim of his valour had just been taken below and put in irons: the mutiny was already over. ‘Something like a rolling-pin, but bigger, and made of iron,’ I answered, at a venture. ‘And what’s it for? … I suppose,’ said Bertie thoughtfully, ‘it’s just for knocking people down with?’ I supposed so too: I did not connect the phrase with an admonition so often on my lips during these cruises. ‘Belay there!’ ‘Ay, ay, sir!’—this was a recurring refrain in our nautical dialogues. That mutiny at sea represented one of Bertie’s highest flights; and for his smart handling of the situation I made him a gracious speech, in the pauses of which he whispered anxiously: ‘Have I got to say anything, Claud, when I get the medal?’ In a conspiratorial undertone I hastily instructed him in his part. Then unction reinflated my voice; Bertie went down on one knee; and I, suddenly changing my character (‘I’m Queen Victoria now—don’t forget!’ I hissed), pinned the medal to his breast. ‘God bless your Majesty,’ said the honest seaman. ‘I only done my duty.’ We once had a fire on board; we were often shipwrecked; and all such disasters were announced, or predicted, in a ritual speech. ‘Captain, the craft’s in jeopardy!’ Bertie would inform me; and at that proud word jeopardy, which possessed for us a unique and potent charm, the hour would blossom for us in exotic glory, the adventure begin. We were not, I think, abnormally imaginative children; nor were we daydreamers. We were honest actors living intensely in the play but making no confusion between the world of pretence and the world of perception. Already, within the limits of our capacity, we were realists, with a wholesome appetite for knowledge and experience of the actual, in its myriad forms. It is your realist, not your sentimental dupe, that can appreciate the true savour of romance: those other palates are too gross.

  Other pastimes I had, and other companions. Jackman, a lanky dark-haired boy who condescended to me much as I condescended to Bertie Wiccombe, was the only one of my schoolfellows who lived within a reasonable distance of Adam Lane. With him I played county cricket, each of us having eleven innings and answering proudly to illustrious names. The pitch was far from smooth, and the bat had no ‘spring’; but we managed very well. Now and again Bertie Wiccombe begged the favour of keeping wicket for us; and once, to our enormous gratification and embarrassment, Jackman’s father strolled into the field to watch us. And watch us he did, in grave silence and rather shyly, as if anxious not to intrude. A match was in progress; I fancy that it was Gentlemen versus Players, and that I was busy being eleven gentlemen. I was for stopping the game, and whispered as much to Jackman the moment I had a chance. ‘It’s all right,’ murmured Jackman, a blush belying his casual tone. ‘It’s only my pater.’ Covertly I glanced again at the fascinating stranger. And I thought I had never seen anyone so tall, so noble, so quietly impressive: he might have been a king in mufti, or a great statesman, or an explorer (in sober fact he was a coal merchant). Jackman’s pater was clearly Jackman’s affair, not mine; but I was uneasy, feeling that we ought to invite him to join the game. He himself cut the knot of my indecision by immediately walking away; but the next time we played cricket together Jackman produced an elaborate scoring-book which his father had bought for him. ‘For the county matches,’ explained Jackman. I gazed rapturously at the pages upon which such glorious fictions were soon to be written— ‘caught Hirst, bowled Richardson,’ and the rest of it. ‘Decent of the old top, wasn’t it!’ said Jackman airily. His coolness astounded and shocked me. Was it possible that Jackman did not worship this prodigious father of his, as I was prepared to do?

  For cricket and seafaring, and for various soldiering games inspired by the Boer War (in a world remote from ours, that campaign dragged slowly on), for these delights I resorted to the green undulating acres that lay on the south side of the Links Road. On the north side stretched the links themselves, where gentlemen in red coats were sometimes to be observed stalwarting from tee to tee, followed by their caddies. The place of origin of these personages was unknown to us, and we were—oddly, as I now think—quite incurious about it. Their scarlet figures were symbols of another and a grander world than ours: vaguely, in my fancy, I grouped them with Lord Mayor’s Day and Windsor Castle and (with slightly more reason) our Fox-hunting English aristocracy. Across the links ran a footpath, a public right-of-way leading in the direction of Suthergate. In earlier times, when these fields were farmed, there had been a hedge running parallel with the path, and even now, in spite of the gentlemanly influence of golf, there was a ditch that in places could be called a brook. It was with a delicious though unjustified sense of trespassing that Jackman and I, sometimes (not often) accompanied by Bertie Wiccombe, frequented the links footpath, paddled in the brook, and sailed our home-made boats—boats made of corks, with a match-stick for mast and a triangle of paper for sail. At first I was jealously unwilling to share Jackman with Bertie, or Bertie with Jackman. Bertie, being my junior, admired me: my strength, my knowledge, my tree-climbing prowess. And though my pleasure in his admiration was largely unconscious, I became, in Jackman’s presence, dimly aware of the danger of losing it, the possibility of being outshone by Jackman. The crisis came one Saturday afternoon. It must have been late in the year: I re
member the day’s lantern glow and delicate aroma. Autumn spices were in the air, and the very sunlight had a russet flavour. Rusty leaves from the elm above were sprinkled on the deck of my pretended ship, where I sat waiting for Bertie Wiccombe, who, on our way to the fields, had turned back home to do some suddenly remembered behest of his mother’s. Not for some weeks had I visited this pile of planks; and vaguely, without defining the sensation in thought, I felt a strangeness in the idea of its having continued in my absence to be there, mute, insentient, unregarded. Something in the nature of things perplexed me, but even to frame a question about it was beyond my powers. So I sat, lost rather in feeling than in thought; and was surprised when someone who was not Bertie Wiccombe came striding towards me across the field.

  ‘Hullo, Jack. Aren’t you at footer?’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Jackman. ‘I’m here, you ass. Can’t you see me?’

  That was the end of that. The greetings being achieved, we fell into a comfortable silence.

  ‘I called for you,’ remarked Jackman presently.

  ‘Did you?’ said I. But I was a little flattered. The mature Jackman had never before called at the house for me. In the past it had always fallen to me to take the initiative.

  ‘Yes. You’re mother said you were out.’

  ‘She was right there,’ I answered. An un-cordial answer. But, you see, I ‘owed him one’ (as we said) for that little sarcasm of his. ‘How did you know where to find me, then?’ I asked, after a moment’s pause.

  ‘Young Wiccombe came up while we were talking.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was visited by a premonition of disaster.

  Jackman grinned. ‘He said I’d find you on the craft.’