A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  “Can you give any particular instances?”

  “Well, there is the incident of setting fire to the colonel’s newspaper on guest night.”

  O’Connor rose; and being motioned to speak, said,

  “I suggest to the court that the defendant has already purged his contempt for that gaucherie committed in extenuating circumstances. In addition, he has apologised to the colonel.”

  “What does the prosecution say?”

  “Damned bad form,” growled Baldersby. “No idea of good form.”

  “Do you agree that the gaucherie has been purged?”

  “He’s a little tick, all the same He cut guest night last week.”

  Dimmock turned to Phillip. “What do you say to that?”

  “Sir, I forgot all about it.”

  Baldersby went on, “He lets down the regiment! Look at that bounder from the garage he goes about with! That feller who has the infernal impudence to wear Parthenopian colours on his boater and on his tie—a chap in a shop!”

  O’Connor said, “I submit that my client is not responsible for an acquaintance who adds the feather of a paycock to the plumage of a crow.”

  There were ironical cheers from the chairs and sofas.

  “Who is the man who wears Parthenopian colours? Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is he teaching you to drive a motorcar?” asked O’Connor.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you pay for the hire of the motorcars you use?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How much?” interjected Baldersby.

  “Ten shillings an afternoon.”

  Dimmock said, “Any further complaints? We have established one thing so far—cutting guest night. What other charges does the prosecution prefer?”

  “I don’t prefer any of ’em, I dislike everything about the feller,” maintained Baldersby, stoutly. “Then there’s another thing. He goes into the R.N.A.S. chief petty officers’ mess-room in the Belvoir Arms without being invited, and ignores all hints to keep out. He isn’t fit to hold the King’s commission, and gives the regiment a dam’ bad name by his presence anywhere.”

  “Do you agree about the R.N.A.S. mess accusation?”

  “I didn’t know, sir!”

  “Haven’t you heard that ignorance is no excuse?”

  “How was I to know?” said Phillip, desperately. He thought that he was being court-martialled seriously. “I thought it was all part of the hotel!”

  “One doesn’t sound the ‘h’ in that word,” growled Baldersby. “I saw and heard Maddison soliciting in the bar, having the dam’ bad manners to ask an A.S.C. officer, who is friendly with one of the barmaids there, if the girl was ‘all right’. The feller turned his back on him, I saw him, I was with three brother officers of the regiment in the smoke room at the time. So I cooled him down.”

  O’Connor said, “How did you do that?”

  “In the usual way of dealing with a cad. I emptied my glass in his face.”

  “In the bar of the Belvoir Arms?”

  “Yes. And I’d do it again.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He poured the water-jug over me, gave me a shove which caught me off balance, and caused a table belonging to the hotel to be broken.”

  The whole room broke into laughter, except the faces of Phillip, Dimmock, Baldersby, and O’Connor.

  “Order,” said Dimmock.

  “I would like to ask a question,” said O’Connor in a mild voice, as he looked steadily at the ceiling. “Was the defendant in angry mood when he retaliated in kind? Was there a scowl on his face? Did he show his teeth? Did he reveal any desire for revenge? Or did he have upon his visage a familiar unsophisticated inane grin, partly, perhaps, of embarrassment, partly, perhaps, of bewilderment? Did he, a newcomer to the life of an officer’s mess in England, did he regard it all as a spree, similar to the fun we have in the ante-room during some nights, when natural high spirits and gaiety prevail over the sombre prospects of war? If it be claimed that it was an error in the most gross taste to confuse private behaviour in a regimental ante-room with lack of decorum—and I am not going to suggest that it be an error in the most gross taste, for that might involve a question beyond the scope of this, shall we say, unofficial court-martial, then——” The speaker paused, studiously avoiding the senior subaltern’s face.

  “Mr. President,” went on O’Connor, in his clear voice, enhanced by his Irish accent, “speaking only as the counsel for the defendant, and not for a moment as a guest of the regiment, I suggest that my client, in giving tit-for-tat, in responding in the classic manner of Tit versus Tat, in returning a measure of water within a jug for a measure of Scots whisky and an additional measure of soda-water within a siphon, was only conforming to a precedent set by a distinguished member of His Majesty’s Forces!”

  Cheers greeted this speech, followed by the roared chorus of “Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire!”

  Baldersby retrieved his cigar, and striking one of the monster Bryant and May’s matches in a giant box upon the marble mantelpiece tried to set fire to the charred end. Then puffing furiously he took it from beneath his teeth and waved it in the air.

  “That’s all very well, but what has it got to do with the fact that by his very presence here in the mess of the Cantuvellaunians he is an eyesore and we don’t want him here! Let ’m get back to where he came from! That disgusting motor-bicycle he rides about on, with a coffee pot stuck on the end of the rusty pipe! That isn’t funny, it’s utter bloody awful bad form! It makes the townee cads laugh. No doubt, it might be funny in a circus, dammit, but not when done among officers and gentlemen!”

  Baldersby pressed the bell violently: almost instantly the mess-sergeant glided in, a deferential, enquiring expression upon his smooth face as he went to Baldersby, who said, “Six large ‘Old Scotties’,” and with a slight bow the mess-sergeant glided away.

  “I’ll tell you what!” roared Baldersby, waving cigar with one hand and tugging left section of tow-like moustache with the other. “I would like to see the outsider in the middle of twenty couple o’ dog hounds now, here, at this very moment!” and pulling the horn from between his buttons he drew a deep breath, pressed the mouthpiece to one corner of his mouth, hardened every muscle of head (including eyes), neck, and abdomen, and produced the series of piercing high notes known in the hunting field as the rattle or mort-blast.

  “Whoo Whoop! Whoo Whoop! Whoo Whoop!”

  Then from the side of his mouth came equally piercing yells, as the imagined lemon, black, white and tan foxhounds tore the hated figment of Maddison’s face to bloody gobs of flesh and cracked bone.

  Phillip ran for the door in his pyjamas, as “Hercules” launched himself in a flying tackle across the table—and missed his grab. Phillip opened the door and was gone before anyone could stop him. The effect of the whisky was still upon him; his mood was of wild self-annihilation. He would apply in the morning to go back to France. Near to hysteria, he ran out of Godolphin House and up the hill towards Freshwell’s Garage, meaning to get his motor-cycle and ride as far towards London as he could on what petrol remained in the tank.

  The mood did not last more than a few moments in the fresh air. He stopped, and looked back. In the moonlit street he saw figures. He waited until they had gone back into the mess, then crossed the road swiftly on bare feet and went along in the shadow-fringe of house-roofs on the opposite pavement, thus passing unseen the house on the corner.

  Near the theatre he crossed over again, and waited by a shop window displaying saddles, boots, curry combs, bits, saddle soap, and spurs. He was going on tip-toe past the Pigskin Club, when two figures came out and walked slowly together, with clinking swan-neck spurs, the same way as himself. He kept behind them, distant about ten yards. They stopped when the notes of the horn came again. So did he.

  The notes were muffled, seeming to come from the upper rooms of Godolphin House.
Then they came clearly, with the noise of a window being opened up above. It was his bedroom. Immediately afterwards a glint appeared by the attic window, a dim object sailed downwards, and crashed upon the roadway below. Other major crashes followed at intervals, then a minor one. That’s my soap-dish, thought Phillip.

  “Damme, Willie,” he heard the rusty voice of “Crasher”, the Crimean veteran, say, “I thought for a moment that the Russkies were carronadin’ ‘Old Strawballs’ little lot, don’t y’know.”

  At that moment a succession of wooden drawers, their contents flying, descended from the window above.

  “An original way to move furniture, I must say, General.”

  “Damme, Willie, d’you suppose any more’s to follow? They’re not celebratin’ me, d’you suppose, Willie?”

  “Probably raggin’ some unfortunate young cub, General.”

  “Do ’im world o’ good, Willie.”

  A camp bed hissed through the air, and clattered upon the iron railings.

  “Damme Willie, that looks like one of those new-fangled campaign beds we saw at the Stores t’other day! Damme Willie, I’m in half a mind to get me trumpet and sound the alarm, and rout ’em out again, Willie. What d’ye say?”

  “Rather soon after last week, don’t you think, General?”

  “Mebbe you’re right, Willie. Well, so long as they clear up this mess before the ’osses walk by in the mornin’, Willie.” The general paused. “Raggin’, Willie, did ye say? That reminds me of the letter in The Times yesterday, d’ye recall it, Willie? That foreigner fellow the Prince o’ Wales dubbed—what’s’s name, one of those Kimberley mushroom knights.”

  “Otto Beit, General?”

  “’Ats’r feller, Willie! Son was a cornet, shot himself in the Cavalry Barracks at York, didn’t know the form, so the others bully-ragged ’im. Chivalrous letter, I thought, Willie, well put together. Pleaded for consideration towards new types of officers in the Militia. I’m in favour of reasonable kindness, Willie—I served under that blackguard Raglan at Crimea, and b’God, Willie, when the ‘Thunderer’ got the news by electric telegraph, and m’lady mother thought I’d been snuffed out, she had the pair o’ greys dyed black—did I ever tell ’ee that, Willie?”

  “Yes, indeed, General.”

  “Well, the carronadin’ seems over, so Bedfordshire, Willie, Bedfordshire!”

  Followed the sound of a prodigious yawn, after which the two figures went jingling slowly up the hill towards brigade headquarters.

  Phillip had heard only snatches of what was said; he recognised the brigadier and his brigade major, and kept well back in shadow until they had gone. By now he thought it was all rather funny; and thinking to add to the fun, he turned to the left before Godolphin House, which was on the corner across the road, and going some way up the street, crossed over and so came to the back entrance in moon shadow all the way.

  The interior doors were open. Listening, he heard laughter and the clink of glasses; and distantly, the nightingale singing. In a few moments he was up the stone steps, two and three at a time, silent on naked feet; and listening outside Baldersby’s door. No sound within. He turned the handle, entered. It was a quick matter to open the window, and then to place white ewer, basin, soap-dish and chamber pot under the window, ready for a salvo. Then he went to the iron rail outside, listening. Reassured, he crept back, and stripped Baldersby’s camp bed of rugs and sleeping sack.

  These, with the pillows, went out of the window when he had dropped the drawers full of shirts, socks, breeches, trousers, and other things, and heard them spike themselves on the railings below. Then, one after another, hurled sideways to burst into the middle of the road, went the china bedroom-ware, each splaying out with a satisfactory ringing crash upon the void.

  Soon there were voices below. Faces looked up. There were shouts. Phillip’s heart began to thump. Should he await them, or dash down to the next floor, and through O’Connor’s bedroom to the main staircase?

  While he hesitated, he heard footfalls clambering up the stone steps. Could he get out of the window and so on to the roof, and hide among the chimney pots? He dared not; he would fall So he awaited his pursuers in his attic room.

  He was grabbed, lugged downstairs for what Baldersby called the kill. The sentence was in two parts: to run the gauntlet of wet-knotted towels, between two rows of junior officers across the ante-room floor, who lambasted him on head, shoulders, and back while cries of high delight came (from them, while Baldersby sounded the mort-blast, and Jonah the Whale beside Hairy Harry Fridkin stood by the open door, much amused. It was Hairy Harry, Phillip learned later, who had, on both occasions, suggested to Baldersby the idea of the subalterns’ court-martial. Phillip was glad that the towels were very wet, for they hid the marks of tears: tears not of pain, for the towels did not really hurt, but of loneliness.

  The second part of the sentence was the more humiliating. He was ordered to stand naked upon the ante-room table, china pot in hand, and dance a jig. This he refused to do, so he was lifted up, while hands tore at the flannelette pyjama suit his mother had made for him, as he strained and pushed against them. Baldersby tried to crown him with the pot. Somebody—it was O’Connor, a spectator, holding towel in hand since, considering himself a guest of the battalion, he must make a token conformation with the ruling—shouted out “Steady!” Too late: the mind of the phrensied youth, as though torn across in response to the tear in the jacket his mother had sewn for him, momentarily passed into a lower stratum, where fear or death-thought ruled, akin to that which had screamed as a child under the cane of the father, to that which screamed out of men physically dislocated, mortally stricken upon the battle-field.

  This fear, of one who had not learned to submit, charged nerves with power and muscles with strength, so that he writhed from the clutches of the laughing-weak, who received violent heel-blows upon chests and chins, catapult-like thrusts of legs straightening abruptly from bends, skull-butts in midriffs; and thus escaping from the worry, Phillip whizzed the pot sideways into the marble mantelpiece, where it shattered to many pieces.

  He was lugged and tugged to the floor; so were many laughing subalterns, while Baldersby advanced, cigar between teeth, to add his weight to the mêlée. Phillip saw his light yellow shoes and managed to thump first one then the other on the toes with his clenched fist, making the senior subaltern howl and hop away, to the great amusement of Jonah the Whale and Hairy Harry Fridkin standing in the doorway. Major Fridkin saw Baldersby’s discomfiture with a certain satisfaction: for if Phillip was an outsider, cause of anger and exasperation to Major Fridkin, he considered St. George Baldersby to be the fool of the regiment, and an over-bred nonentity: an attitude of interior scorn which may have had its origin in envy that Baldersby was the only member of the regiment, except Major the Hon. Arthur Wayland, whose particulars of family tree and pedigree, covering several centuries, appeared in Burke’s Peerage, a copy of which, living on the colonel’s desk, was frequently consulted by Major Fridkin, who longed to be armigerous.

  He chuckled, cigar in mouth. “That will teach him not to chuck his weight about.”

  The adjutant agreed; while thinking that the outsider was putting up a dam’ good fight.

  Gasping and twisting, thrusting and sobbing, the culprit broke from the worry, and with one hand holding pyjama trousers, fled up the stone steps to the attic room. He would put in an application, in the morning, to return to the front: and this time he would take it to the orderly room. O’Connor followed him to the attic, and telling him not to take the ragging to heart, for it was all over, advised him to wash in cold water at the bathroom tap, put on his uniform, and come down to the ante-room.

  “You acquitted yourself well, my boy. And we all have to go through a tempering at some time or other in our lives, to break the cast of our own conceit.”

  “Well, thank you, O’Connor, for what you did for me.”

  “Oh, ’tis very little, I’m thinking. But if y
ou will take a tip, my boy, don’t talk about the war, or the enemy. I know there is some truth in what you have been saying—after all, it is in The Times today, which hints that Sir John French himself has broken the news about the shell-shortage—but timing is important, indeed it is everything in life. A joke at a funeral will be in bad taste; the same joke at a coming-of-age party may cause a man to be considered the very soul of wit. Now to the bathroom, and don’t forget a clean shirt, and hair brushed—it’s wonderful how a change of linen can effect a change of mind.”

  Phillip, holding to the idea of going back to the front, felt strangely other than himself sitting next to Dimmock, who wore the magical two cloth pips sewn on his shoulder straps, and sipping a whiskey-soda that Dimmock had invited him to have. Most of the others had gone; unknown to Phillip, they were cleaning up the litter in the High Street outside.

  Lieutenant Dimmock, who had come back sick from the B.E.F., after five weeks with the first battalion in a quiet sector around Arméntières, did his best to make the ranker officer see what was wrong with himself, as they sat somewhat uneasily side by side.

  “Well, I don’t want to preach, but when I heard that you had not been to school, I mean the kind of school most of us go to, with fags and prefects and particular codes—at Harrow if you turn up your trouser-ends in Lower School you get beaten, elsewhere if you don’t turn them up you do, sort of thing—what was I saying?—Good luck!—Well, the best thing is always, when one is new in a job or school or ’varsity or regiment, to lie low, to conform like blazes, and certainly not to utter the first thought that comes into one’s head, don’t you know.”

  “I see.”

  “Where were you in France, by the way?”

  “We went to Messines first, and then to Ypres.”

  “We were south of you, in the more industrial area, coal mines and all that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, I see. I say—er—well—I hope you won’t mind my asking, but will you have a drink with me?”

  “That’s awful nice of you. There’s just time before the hatch goes down. Just a small one this time, please.”