A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  “An awful good idea,” said Major Howes. “Awful good,” he repeated. Phillip had heard the colonel use this expression: it seemed to be rather the fashion among those officers who were “’Vars’ty m’n”. Another expression was “awful bore”, the opposite of anything “awful good”.

  “Chick” had been to the “Vars’ty”, though, Phillip understood, not as an actual member. He had been at Fitzwilliam Hall, a sort of extra college, which didn’t quite count. Some of the real colleges had strange nicknames, like Pemmy or Pemmer, Pothouse, and Keys.

  “Anyone like to say anything?” asked the captain with the Rover motor-bike.

  No-one spoke for a moment; then Phillip said, “Sir! Were we supposed to be going into trenches tonight?”

  “Well, not exactly into our own trenches, but advancing on a position where the Germans would be entrenched. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, sir, it isn’t done like that out there.”

  “Oh, really.” After a pause the senior captain said, “Perhaps you will tell us how it is done, then?”

  “Well, sir, if it was at night, the German lines would be lit by flares, making a compass unnecessary. Anyway, the luminous paint would not be visible in the bright lights.”

  “But supposing the Germans were not sending up flares?”

  “Well, sir, the Germans do send them up, all night.”

  “At present, yes. But present conditions of stalemate will not hold when the time comes for open warfare. It has already begun, at Neuve Chapelle and elsewhere. Any more questions? No-one else has anything to say?” He turned and saluted Major Howes, who said, “Thank you, Captain Rhodes. I think that is all, gentlemen. Will you make your own way back?”

  Phillip, on returning to Godolphin House, went upstairs to get his pipe; and on coming downstairs was about to enter the ante-room, when he paused by the half-open door, hearing the somewhat thick voice of Baldersby, the senior subaltern, saying something which at once he thought must refer to himself.

  “Damned cheek! Bloody rude, contradicting Rhodes! ‘It isn’t done like that out there!’ Just because he’s been out for a week or two as a Tommy! Abominable manners! Blasted little Cockney! Look how he helped himself to half the trout mayonnaise the other day at luncheon! By God, we’ll take him down a peg or two—show him what isn’t done here, what?”

  Phillip was about to creep away from this unpleasant revelation of his effect upon others, when he saw that the mess-sergeant, bearing a tray of drinks, had come silently on his rubber-soled shoes. “By your leave, sir,” said the sergeant, gravely, with a slight inclination of his head. Before the war he had been junior butler to one of the noble members of the Pigskin Club, Phillip had been told by “Chick”.

  Phillip waited to hear no more; he felt shame about the incident mentioned by Baldersby. It had occurred three days before, when eight of them, including Baldersby, had had an early luncheon, at noon, as they were going out with an advance party on brigade manœuvres. The mess-sergeant had brought in a large silver two-handled tray, of salad and pink fish, said to be trout presented to the mess by Colonel Baldersby, father of the senior subaltern, who was often referred to, among the junior subalterns, as “Bertram Baldersby, of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire”. Phillip had been the second officer at table to be offered the dish, over his left shoulder; he had been helping himself liberally, while saying to the mess-sergeant, “I like this, Sergeant,” when the ex-butler said, slowly and gravely, “Yes, sir; but there are other gentlemen present.”

  Hastily Phillip put most of it back on the dish, amidst a silence that had ended only when the sergeant had gone away; then O’Connor, also an attached officer, and an Irish barrister, had remarked, “I have not yet visited the Pigskin Club, after the colonel’s awful warnings to us about minding our pees and queues in the matter of not sitting down in the favourite armchair of any of the venerable and noble members of that historic gaming house. Has anyone?”

  “Of course I have, my uncle is one of the stewards,” replied Baldersby, shortly.

  *

  Phillip put on belt and cap, and wheeling out Helena, pushed and ran and vaulted and sped away up the street with loud drum-beats of the open exhaust to the large and famous red-brick Belvoir Hotel. The entrance was under an arch, through which in the old days coaches had driven. He had been through the arch twice before, the first time to the bar, where the barmaid was the girl he had seen several times on the flapper-bracket of a Douglas motor-cycle belonging to a dark, pale-faced A.S.C. subaltern; on the second occasion, to listen outside a small room, lit by a pink-shaded electric light, through the open door of which had come the gramophone strains of They’d Never Believe Me, which “Hercules” sometimes played and sang with others in the ante-room, around the piano. It came from the George Grossmith musical comedy, Tonight’s the Night, according to the sheet-music.

  Phillip, walking under the arch, heard the gramophone playing; and as before, stopped by the open door to listen. Several Royal Naval Air Service fellows were sitting in the room. Phillip knew that the Belvoir Hotel was the headquarters of the anti-Zeppelin gun-crews who drove the Rolls-Royce tenders, one with searchlight, the other with a pom-pom gun, about the countryside at night, whenever one of the German gas-bags was supposed to be over; but he had no idea that this little room was the Petty Officers’ mess.

  “Jolly good little gramophone,” said Phillip, after a while entering the room, and sitting down.

  “Yes,” said one of the petty officers. He had rather a cultured voice Phillip thought. “We find it sufficient for our limited circle.”

  “Had any air-raid warnings recently?” asked Phillip, his voice assuming the tone of the older man’s voice.

  “I am really not in a position to say,” replied the other, going out of the room.

  Phillip took up a Tatler and looked at it. When the record of They’d never Believe Me ended, one of the R.N.A.S. took it off and closed the Decca gramophone, making of it a black cube. Then he, too, went out.

  Phillip thought he would go into the adjoining bar for a glass of beer. The R.N.A.S. men were there, but feeling that they did not want him to speak with them, he sat by himself. If the barmaid rode on the flapper-bracket of a Douglas, perhaps she might care for a ride on his ’bus? But she went off duty before he could ask her, and a cellar-man in a green baize apron took her place.

  When he went outside a policeman with notebook and a long piece of iron wire was standing by Helena. He said it was his duty to report Phillip for offences contravening the law. He put the wire up the exhaust pipe, and said: “Have you any baffle plates in the pipe, sir?”

  “If I had, they are all blown out by now, Officer.”

  “Then would you agree that you have no silencer?”

  “Yes, of course. This is an open exhaust.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the policeman, shutting his book.

  “Your perfect witness, officer.”

  *

  Phillip liked O’Connor, the barrister from Trinity College, Dublin; and when he was summoned to appear before the Magistrates’ Court on two counts—(a) for exceeding the speed limit of 10 miles per hour through the High Street, and (b) riding a machine powered by an internal-combustion engine fitted with an insufficient silencer or alternatively the said machine not being fitted with a sufficient silencing box in accordance with the Motor Car Act of 1896 and subsequent Acts, he sought his advice. O’Connor advised him upon the wording of the letter pleading guilty to both charges and “unreservedly placing himself in the hands of the Bench”.

  “We might dispute the legality of the ten miles an hour speed limit, which was imposed by local bodies, as it happens, without authority from the County Council, the duly elected and legally constituted body which alone can make such a speed limit enforceable by law; but that would be unwise under the circumstances, my boy. This is a town famous for bloodstock, and trainers have an established right to lead their strings through the High Street,
and the burgesses to insist on protection for the valuable animals on whom the prosperity of the district largely depends—you follow me?”

  “Yes,” said Phillip, “I’ll plead guilty as you say, and place myself in their hands.”

  “And get a silencer fitted to that exhaust pipe, my boy, or they’ll get you again.”

  The letter as advised by O’Connor was written and sent; with apologies that urgent military duties prevented the writer from being present in court to pay his respects and offer his regrets to the Bench in person. He was fined £1, and there were six inches of single column in the local weekly newspaper headed WARNING TO YOUNG BLOODS IN ARMY RUSHING ABOUT ON MOTOR-CYCLES.

  Alone in the ante-room just before half-past twelve, Phillip cut the report out of the paper, pinned it upon the green-baize board, and sat in a chair with The Times. Officers came in to read it, before going into the mess. When, a few minutes later, he followed in, the Mess President, Major Fridkin, sitting at the top table, said out loud to the senior subaltern beside him,

  “Who stuck it up there? ‘Young bloods in the Army’, what? I see the report says the ‘young blood’ was a member of this regiment, Baldersby. A bit inaccurate that bit, don’t you know.”

  “It ought to have said ‘Young ticks attached’,” snorted Baldersby, his small deep-set eyes glaring. “Damn it all, a hoss might get foot-fever, or swelled pasterns, bangin’ ’em on those cobbles! Damn beastly things, motor-cycles. Bikes, little ticks call ’em! Young ticks on what they call ‘bikes’. Faugh!”

  Phillip feeling Major Fridkin’s sleepy-lidded gaze on him, kept his eyes on his plate. He had never meant to agitate the race-horses as Baldersby seemed to think.

  He saw the very thing for a silencer after parade the next morning, on one of the market-day stalls in the cobbled gutters beside the broad main street. It was lying amidst odds and ends of old junk on a shallow. A coffee pot, the very thing! The percolator would muffle most of the gasses, and he might even fit a whistle on the spout, as a cut-out! It seemed to him to be frightfully funny, a coffee pot on the end of the pipe, on his bike displaying in large white letters O.H.M.S. There was a garage half up the hill leading to the Heath, and thither Phillip went, pushing his machine, coffee-pot tied to handlebars. A dark young man with a handsome face, sharp of profile, wearing a bright red and blue striped tie, came out of the little glassed-in office.

  “Hullo-a-lo!” he said. “I’ve often see you go by. You are a lad! The young blood pinched by the beaks. Crikey, what’s that you’re riding, a new kind of thrashing machine? What’s the make?” He bent down. “Helena. Sounds like an advertisement for shampoo. What an assembly of oddments! The mag. looks like the Tower Bridge; you could almost fly under it. Don’t you get the rain in? Perhaps it’s meant to be water-cooled? Well, at least you’ve got a decent carburettor. The engine is French, square bore and stroke, I suppose. My, what an Old Iron never Rust, Solid Tyres never Bust! Now you want to complete it with a coffee-pot silencer! You are a lad!”

  Flattered by the older man’s admiring laughter, Phillip explained what he wanted. The manager, to whom he had taken an instant liking, said that it could be brazed on.

  “You’re the fool of the family, I can see that! I like fools of the family. What d’you do with yourself in the evenings?”

  “Oh, I just muck about.”

  “Well, let’s go out together one night in the Studebaker, shall we, when my boss is away in London? I have to see a few potential customers, farmers who’re making piles of dough nowadays, so come along with me one evening, and we’ll look for birds. You never know your luck! Well, tata for the time being. Your old thump-thump will be ready at six o’clock. I’ll put a mechanic on it right away. Call me Monty. My name’s Jarvey, my old man invented Jarveyised steel. I know your name already from the local rag, you ‘young blood’! Righty-ho, Phil, Gran’ma Helena will be done by tea-time.”

  Immediately after dismissal at four o’clock Phillip went to the garage. An officer was there, standing negligently by a long, Metallurgique open four-seater, into which cans of petrol were being poured. He belonged to another territorial battalion in the brigade. When he had thundered away up the hill, Phillip learned from Monty that he and his brother were rich. Monty was now elegantly dressed in a grey-green suit, with a white silk shirt and low starched collar with pointed peaks; on his black brilliantined hair, at a jaunty angle, was a new straw-boater with the same colours as his tie. The brother of the Metallurgique owner, he went on to say, had a Harley-Davidson, a Yankee ’bus, that could do over seventy miles an hour on the straight.

  “The brother’s a mad devil like you,” he said. “He scorches like hell, and won’t allow anything to pass him on the road, so don’t try and race him on that old rattle-trap of yours.”

  “Rattle-trap? It didn’t rattle before it came in here!”

  “Well, now you’ve got some sort of a silencer, you may be able to hear its cries of agony.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s right with it? Why, it’s falling to pieces!” He lifted it up by the handlebars. “The head’s loose! Look out for a speed wobble, my lad! The wheels want rebuilding, half the spokes are loose. Listen!” He ran a pencil round them. “Hear that twanging?” He squeezed the horn. “Moo-cow! When d’you milk the old girl?” He laughed with a gurgle in his throat. “You don’t need a speedometer, old boy! At twenty miles an hour the spokes rattle, at thirty your ribs rattle, at forty a red light glows, and at forty-five a gramophone record plays Down Among the Dead Men! Ha, ha, ha! What you want, my boy, is a nice little light car—like that two-cylinder monobloc Swift over there, going for only sixty quid. I’ll let you have it cheap for sixty-five! Or how about this Sizaire? A spiffing car! The spiffs come out of the radiator when the dam’ thing boils. Then there’s this White’s steam car—roast your kippers and chestnuts while you drive! Only a mere bag o’shell—one hundred and fifty quid, sixty per cent discount for cash!

  Phillip was fascinated by the easy way his new friend spoke; all the same he felt a little wary of him. Possibly Monty was a bad companion. He went out, to try Helena across the long straight stretch across the heath. At the top by the fountain and horse-trough he stopped to examine the new silencer. It looked quite a neat job, joined to the end of the exhaust pipe by brass wire annealed to the iron by the oxy-acetylene blowpipe. He pushed and vaulted into the saddle, opening the throttle. The spout made a pleasant, high-whistling sound when the engine was running, and when he opened up it sounded rather like a cock-pheasant rocketing out of a spinney. As he pushed the lever farther, the hedge rushed by with a blur, and the machine began to wobble. He was holding the bars straight when with a clattering roar it seemed that the engine was breaking up; then he saw a Harley-Davidson passing him, the driver’s head bent low over his handlebars, so that he appeared not to be looking where he was going. Phillip pulled the valve-lifter lever, and with a series of muffled pops in the coffee-pot Helena slowed up. The Harley-Davidson was now small in the distance. Phew!

  He decided to go to Cambridge, a town he had not visited before, for the ride. He did not remain there long; having bought a new pipe at a shop in one of the narrow streets, he returned, arriving at Godolphin House in time to wash and change into slacks, as it was Guest Night.

  Chapter 12

  LIFE IS A SPREE

  ON the occasion of this weekly ceremony all officers were expected to dine in. This was a courtesy to the guests. Phillip had already observed that guests, whether dinner or day-time callers, left two visiting cards which were put under one of the criss-cross green tapes on the baize board in the ante-room. One card would be inscribed to the Officer Commanding, the other to the Mess President and Officers. He had observed this; without any comprehension of the spirit that had directed the convention.

  The guests sat at the top end of the long mess table, which “Strawballs” referred to as High Table, in line with the senior officers, including Baldersby; the
rest of the subalterns sat at the lower tables, below the seniors. It was like a large family party, Phillip thought, as a champagne cork popped on his right side and the mess-sergeant poured from the napkin-covered bottle into the shallow glass, one to each officer all along the snow-white tablecloth. Brown belts shone; brass buttons gleamed; a dozen half-a-crown-a-week batmen had seen to that. Black, brown, and yellow heads were smooth with brilliantine. Cheer-ho, he said, to black-haired O’Connor on his right, and curly-yellow “Chick” on his left. They were sharing the bottle of bubbly, or fizz, as some of them called it. The name on the label was Veuve Cliquot, 1906.

  He had already sipped his soup and swallowed three glasses of sherry at table, following three dry martinis in the ante-room. He felt himself to be a lad, a mad devil.

  “By God,” he said to O’Connor, “I am enjoying this base-wallah’s life.”

  “Not so loud, my boy.”

  “Was I speaking loudly?”

  “You were, and you are, my boy.”

  The fish was more pink trout from the paternal estate of Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire, sent by train in ice. Second-lieutenant Brendon, almost an elderly subaltern, since he wore the Boer War ribbons, had remarked in Phillip’s hearing recently that Baldersby’s father was in effect a fishmonger, trying to buy his son a third pip. Baldersby, Phillip realised, was generally regarded as a fool, a joke, without any brains whatever; and that was why he had not been promoted although he had been commissioned since 1910.

  Phillip thought the fish was the best he had ever tasted; much nicer than plaice. It was served luke-warm and eaten with thin cucumber slices. “Strawballs”, he noticed, did not use his fish-knife, but a fork only. So he did the same. The colonel’s guests were “Crasher” the brigadier, and “Little Willie”, his brigade major, the latter so-called owing to a facial resemblance to the German Crown Prince. He had thin straight fair hair, a longish nose, and pale greenish eyes rather close together. The brigadier, alleged veteran of the famous charge, sat on the colonel’s right, wearing a tunic with small round brass buttons which went up to his neck enclosed in a turn-down collar on which were red gorget patches and gold oak-leaves. His trousers were pulled down tight under Wellington boots by elastic bands under the arch, and swan-neck spurs jingled on his heels when he walked. He had a face deeply tanned and lined, his white hair was grizzled into tight curls upon the corners of a large round head. Seeing the stare of his round pale-blue eyes as he drank his soup with loud noises, sucking it down through thick mulberry lips while holding up the spoon-handle, Phillip imagined him to be a pretty fierce character.