A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  The mess-sergeant was his usual gravely deferential, unsmiling self.

  Phillip racked his brains what to talk about.

  “Are you interested in motorcars—er—may I call you Dimmock?”

  “Of course. No, not particularly. Why d’you ask?”

  “I wondered, that’s all. Well, cheer ho!”

  “Here’s luck!”

  “Have you been in the Pigskin Club yet?”

  “The Pigskin Club, I think, it is a place to avoid, really, unless one is really interested in bloodstock, and all that sort of thing, don’t you know.”

  “Are you—er—Dimmock?”

  “Oh yes, rather. It’s in our midst all our lives, so to speak, friends, cousins, relations, you know, the horse is part of the life of the land.”

  After ten more minutes of this bleak conversation—Dimmock was not interested in birds, fishing, electricity, or chemistry—Phillip said he thought he would go to bed. Yet Dimmock seemed to want his company.

  “Oh, must you, so early?”

  Phillip wondered what was coming next. He found out the reason for Dimmock keeping him when he went into his bedroom. Somehow or other somebody had obtained another set of bedroom china-ware and chest-of-drawers; while his camp bed, although a bit twisted, stood with sleeping-sack laid upon it as before. What happened to Baldersby’s things he did not think; the idea did not occur to him until after the war that he should have made a gesture, at least, towards replacing them, and by that time Baldersby was dead, having been killed on the morning of his first day in action.

  Dimmock’s kindness gave Phillip hope again, he did not put in the application to be sent to the front. He was, of course, unaware that his other application had already gone through.

  *

  Now, in the late spring of 1915, the ivory hawthorn buds were dropping, blushet pink in death; nightingales sung out; nearly all the talk in the town bars was of the coming July Races. The marching companies with their yellow Japanese rifles passed strings of bloodstock, and saw the flying thin-legged centaurs on the turf. Songs rose above the dusty hedgerows—It’s a long, long trail a-winding, Into the land of my dreams——

  Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

  How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

  And many sighs are drained.

  Happy the lad whose mind was never trained;

  His days are worth forgetting more than not.

  He sings along the march

  Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

  The long, forlorn, relentless trend

  From larger day to huger night.

  During the May Week inter-college boat races, held as usual for a fortnight in June, ladies appeared in Godolphin House for luncheon and tea, at the top table with the senior officers and their own particular friends in the regiment. The colonel had, before their appearance, addressed the junior officers on the matter of decorum. Among the visitors was a beautiful girl wearing a big picture hat, who was said to be going to marry Lieutenant Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, etc. She arrived with Mamma and Papa in a Rolls-Royce and they stayed at the Belvoir Arms Hôtel. How had Baldersby got such a peach of a girl, it was asked. The junior subalterns, warned to take no notice of the visitors, beyond the usual courtesies shown to guests of the regiment, took surreptitious glances and wondered among themselves in the ante-room afterwards.

  The summery peace-time aspect of their lives received a jolt one day—when the names of four were posted on the ante-room board for Overseas. Rumour said Gallipoli, a place where all was not well. One of them was an attached officer, who was in Phillip’s regiment.

  By this time Phillip had learned more or less how to get from place to place on a horse, but it was still an embarrassment for him when it trotted, despite that he had learned to rise and fall in time, if not in harmony, with the rising of the various feet of the quadruped. He went over once or twice on horseback to the Green House, where he was now an old friend. A patch of oil was ever-fresh where Helena stood, against an out-house.

  For some reason or other, he thought, Fairy fancied she was passionately in love with him. When he went over, as often as not her sisters left them alone, with the piano. Apparently she wanted to kiss him passionately sometimes on the lips, a procedure which embarrassed him. Hadn’t he ever kissed a girl? she asked. No, he said. Had he ever wanted to kiss a girl? Not really, he replied. Had he ever kissed anyone? Only his mother; but it was so long ago he could not remember.

  “Well, aren’t you the strangest man! A heart of stone! I believe you hate me!”

  “I like you. I say, do play that Chopin piece again, Fairy.”

  After playing, she looked at him as he knelt by her side to turn over the sheet music, and said, “You are the strangest person. You don’t even seem to love your own self, let alone anyone else!”

  “I hate myself.”

  Her hand moved to touch his head; but anticipating the move, he had already cried, “Good lord, I forgot to turn off my tap, and can smell the petrol dripping!” and hurried outside.

  *

  The July Races—during which the junior officers were warned by the colonel to keep clear of the Pigskin Club—arrived, and the town was filled with Rolls-Royces, Daimlers, and other majestic black landaus and landaulettes, many driven by chauffeurs in khaki; and one yellow Rolls, cheered by the stable lads when it passed down the High Street, the bewhiskered and genial figure of the Earl of Lonsdale sitting with his countess in the back.

  After the races, Baldersby went away to be married. In the evening, redolent of ripening corn on the breeze, the captains and the subalterns saw him off from the station. Bertram St George Baldersby, Esquire, in new barathea cross-woven uniform, sword and pistol attached to Sam Brown belt (he had been persuaded by Jonah the Whale that these were indispensable for any military wedding) and new flat hat which sat down low and square on his forehead—making his eyes look almost fierce under the peak—and new mustard-coloured puttees, was borne to the station in the T-model Ford of Captain Wyman, said to be the proprietor of two Electric Palaces, who wore the ends of his moustaches waxed to rolled points. Where this captain had come from Phillip did not know; he had appeared one day, his kit in the Ford standing outside Godolphin House.

  It was after mess-dinner: the sun yet glistened in the sky, looking as though the day would never end, so timeless the feeling, so far away the war. Captain Wyman’s Ford held fourteen men on its way to the station; eleven more followed in a two-seater Singer belonging to someone else. Phillip rode on the iron running-board of the Ford, holding on to Baldersby’s shoulder, while someone held to his belt strap, and someone else to his collar.

  “Oh, it’s you again!” cried Baldersby, petulantly. Everyone had been drinking champagne, toasting the lucky man. “Let go, damn you!”

  “I can’t, I’ll fall off if I do.”

  “Then fall off!” Baldersby puffed violently. Someone was standing on his lap. The swaying load bumped on its flattened springs.

  “I can’t! Someone’s holding me, too!”

  “Bah!” cried Baldersby, struggling in vain.

  By this time Baldersby was the major joke of the mess; Phillip the minor. The feeling of the send-off was part affectionate, part scoffing. Baldersby looked to be a man who had lived much in armour, with his strutting movements; his body, when seen in the private swimming bath of Tonge Park, where subalterns had a standing invitation to tea from the châtelaine, had appeared to be the same width from top of chest almost to his knees. Yet he was not fat; he was neither round nor rectangular; he was Baldersby the man of ancestral armour, slightly scowling as through a visor, long yellow moustaches turning down, long hair of the same colour; his eyes, teeth, and big-toe nails, as he stood for a dive on the edge of the bath—a belly-flop in the end—all were noticeably yellow. The absence of all hair on the insides of his thighs showed where it had been worn away by friction against the ribs of horses.

  Baldersby in
the swimming bath of Tonge Park had swum slowly, on a breast stroke, puffing after Phillip to duck him in the traditional manner, in a horse pond. He succeeded, holding down the loathéd neck by a hand; but swallowing too much water himself, he was forced to let go. Phillip, all gasping over, bore Baldersby not the slightest ill-will. It was but another inexplicable act in the spree that was life.

  The train came in. Baldersby stood there, flat hat, yellow boots, yellow puttees, sword scabbard scrubbed yellow and polished, not with saddle-soap (remarkable for a hunting man) but with light tan boot polish. There was no-one else in the train. Baldersby had it to himself.

  The engine-driver waited, so did the guard. Watches, each as large as half a cricket ball, were consulted. Minutes sped by. At last the engine driver gave a little toot on his whistle.

  “All right, all right,” cried Baldersby, fluttering a hand. “Well so long, you fellers.”

  At this he was lifted up bodily to an open first-class carriage door, and flung in. Cheers as he got up, closed the door, leaned out, puffing his cigar.

  “So long, you fellers.”

  “So long!” cried Phillip, with the others, cheering. Abruptly Baldersby left the window. Nor did he look out again. He was reading the newspaper he had brought with him for the journey—The Pink ’Un.

  *

  Phillip never saw him again. After his month’s marriage leave, Baldersby went to the third battalion, then being formed under the command of Major Fridkin, soon to be promoted lieutenant-colonel. There Baldersby got his company, his longed-for third pip, and his own charger. On it he led his two hundred odd, men on route marches; then another two hundred men; then another, and another; for it was a training battalion, feeding the two battalions at the front. At last, after the great battles of Somme, and the opening and middle stages of third Ypres, in the time of what was called the man-power shortage, Baldersby was sent out himself, and was killed almost immediately at the battle for Poelcapelle, one of scores of local battles, involving the British in 600,000 casualties, for the Passchendaele ridge overlooking the plain of the Scheldt, between the end of July and the beginning of December 1917. This was a little more than two years after Baldersby’s marriage at the age of twenty-six; to Phillip in the summer of 1915, Baldersby seemed quite old.

  Lieutenant-colonel Fridkin, five years older than Baldersby, saw out the war in England. For his services in training troops at home during the four years of the war he was awarded the Order of the British Empire, together with a foreign decoration: the Chinese Excellent Crop, 2nd Class, with Grand Cordon.

  Chapter 16

  ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

  MEANWHILE it was August 1915. Phillip was still haunted by the thought of having to return to the front. Cousin Willie, now commissioned, was in Gallipoli, of which many stories were told, of failure and disaster. Turkish snipers, their faces dyed green and their heads covered with grasses and twigs, were said to have been roasted after capture by the Australians; a division of second-line Lancashire territorials had broken at the recent Suvla landing, and stabbed the water-pipe from the off-shore barge, to fill their water-bottles: and the water had run into the sand. There was some talk, too, of a big push in France; two more subalterns in the mess had orders to proceed overseas, to join the first battalion. Soon the second battalion, it was said, was to fire its courses at the range near Southend, and then, with luck, go out as a unit.

  He avoided the thought of far-off terrors by gadding about—never sitting still—always on the move lest something be missed in life that had no other horizon than death. He had no idea that he was escaping from his secret self, living in one dimension, from one moment to another moment, avoiding the thought of the length of his days.

  Like a star, the thought of Desmond, his great friend, was fixed in his actual living, as the thought of Helena was fixed in his secret living, above his fears and uncertainties.

  The gaiety of his friendship with Monty had gone after a Saturday night and Sunday morning spent together at Southend-on-Sea, where they went, Monty on a Douglas motor-cycle, Phillip on his. They stayed in a cheap little house marked Bed & Breakfast, and on Sunday morning, as they packed their haversacks, Monty suggested that they creep out and leave without paying. At first Phillip thought this might be fun: then, thinking of the landlady’s grey hair and thin face, rather like his mother’s, he demurred. So the bill was asked for, and paid. Monty insisted that there would have been no risk; second loots like Phillip were two-a-penny, and who was to know where they had come from? Phillip felt rather inferior in Monty’s eyes after that, coupled with the way Monty had sworn at him outside Ely; and the gay expeditions together seemed to be over.

  Then there was a little trouble with the police, after a motor-cycle accident on the straight road across the Heath. The hell-for-leather Harley-Davidson owner, with whom Phillip had struck up a roadside acquaintance, was a subaltern in the Bucks, named Waterpark. He knew some people who lived in the red brick house among trees and stables lying off the Cambridge road. Waterpark, whose elder brother owned the racing Métallurgique, asked Phillip early one evening, when they stopped on the Heath for a chat astride their machines, if he would care to come to dinner with him at the House.

  “The cove I was taking has just had his orders for overseas, and Mrs. Sweeting asked me to bring another cove. It’s a pleasant little place, two jolly girls, still in the schoolroom of course, and they give you a good dinner. Old Sweeting trains the Royal String.”

  Greatly daring, for he suspected a trap, on the lines of Downfall among Bad Companions in the tableaux in Madame Tussaud’s, Phillip said, “Thanks”. What was a Royal String? Was it anything to do with a Royal Flush, like poker? A gambling house? What an experience to tell Mrs. Neville!

  “I’ll go back to the mess, and have a wash and brush up.”

  “Right. We’ll meet here at seven.”

  As usual, Waterpark raced away on his twin Harley-Davidson, head down, eating up the road, as Monty said. Phillip dare not open his throttle wide, as the engine always began to vibrate, and cause a speed-wobble, at about forty-five. The Harley, with its high-compression pistons, could do over seventy.

  He signed out for mess dinner, then went upstairs to change. He left his money, except two shillings (possibly needed for a tip) in a drawer, just in case poker was the idea. He must be wary not to sign an IOU, which was legal tender, the new fellow in his room, drinking gin and water out of tooth-mug as he lay on his bed reading, told him in his dull voice.

  This new fellow, called Flynn, was a curious fellow, Phillip thought. He was an undergraduate in his second year, and had recently been commissioned. Whenever Flynn could get a lift back to the university town, he went into the Blue Boar, and drank beer steadily. Flynn had a putty-coloured face, and long hair parted in the middle which often flopped over his eyes, which were dull grey. His hands were cold and damp. On his first night in the attic-room he had turned in his camp bed, while resting on an elbow, and muttered to Phillip in his thick voice that Phillip could do something to him if he liked, and then he’d do it to Phillip. Phillip pretended to have heard the word as “beggar”, and replied with assumed innocence, “No thanks, I don’t play cards for money.”

  “Who the hell’s asking you to?” Flynn had growled, and Phillip saw that his putty face was sweating.

  “Beggar my neighbour is a card game, isn’t it?” said Phillip; whereupon Flynn repeated his offer, to which Phillip replied unconcernedly, “No thanks,” and thought no more of it. Nor had Flynn mentioned it since. What Phillip did notice, however, was that Flynn was always wetting his bed.

  Phillip told him that he was going out to dinner with strangers. Flynn grunted. “This town’s full of four-flushers and three-card coves, so don’t go getting into any fix-up. You really need me to look after you, you know.”

  “Oh, I’m only taking two bob. Well, cheer-ho.”

  He met Waterpark as arranged, and they went down the gravel drive to the house c
overed with Virginia creeper. The people inside seemed very quiet and nice. There were coloured pictures and engravings of race-horses, and many signed photographs in silver frames. He recognised Edward the Seventh, the Kaiser, George the Fifth, Queen Mary and others.

  There was duck for dinner, and green peas that looked so very green that he wondered if they were doped. But more pressing was the problem, Which way up ought the fork to be held? Supposing he made a mistake? The thought was so painful that he decided not to take any peas.

  “Oh, but they are just at their prime, the tomtits are beginning to peck the shucks! Won’t you change your mind?”

  “No thanks, really.”

  “Don’t you like peas? And with duckling, Mr. Maddison?”

  “Well, you see, the last lot I ate made me sick.”

  “Oh dear!”

  The two girls, in white, long-haired with bows, were jolly sorts, he thought. By this time he realised that his fears about being lured to a gaming house were foolish, for these people obviously moved in very high society. Trying to make up for his awkwardness at table, sitting on his hands and hunching up his shoulders, he volunteered to sing songs at the piano in the drawing-room. Alas, he made a bigger fool of himself, choosing the Indian Love Lyrics, which he had heard sung only, but never sung himself; the result was rather like riding the white horse for the first time. To make it worse, he changed from tenor to bass, and blared out notes muffled in throat,

  Less than the dust, beneath thy chariot wheels!

  Less than the rust which never stained thy sword!!

  Less than the trust thou hast in me, my Lord!!!

  Even less am I, even less am I!!!!

  They all clapped together, with smiling faces: perhaps it had not sounded too bad: so with elation he decided to give an encore of a different kind, his favourite poem To a Skylark by James Hogg, first heard when Uncle Hugh had recited it by his cot when he was nearly three, when the feeling in Uncle’s voice had made his tears run in sympathy.