Eveleigh said, roughly, ‘For Chris’ sake get something on, girl! This is Mrs Craddock from the Big House,’ and he threw her a flannel dressing gown that had been hanging on the back of the settle. She caught the gown but did not put it on, staring at Claire with far less embarrassment than her lover. Her wide, moist mouth was clamped in a little girl’s sulk and she looked, Claire thought, rather too sure of herself in the circumstances.
‘I bin listening,’ she announced, ‘I heard every thin’ she said, an’ you don’t need to take no notice of ’er! None at all, see? Fact is, she’s got no right ’ere an’ you can order ’er out if you please!’ She turned back to Claire who was shaking with rage. ‘You wouldn’t have no court order, would you? You know, one o’ them notice-to-quit papers, signed by a Magistrate?’
The girl’s insolence was so insufferable that Claire regained the initiative, ignoring her and concentrating on Eveleigh, who was now losing his truculence and was very embarrassed by the scene.
‘I took the trouble to study your lease before I came,’ she said, ‘and I could have you out of here in three months! The Squire let you take over the Codsall lease on a triennial basis but it was never transferred to you. I’m sure Sydney, Martin’s heir, would be very glad to let it revert to the Codsalls. He’s already bought a farm in Nun’s Bay and if he knew the circumstances of your tenure he’d probably apply to me for a re-transfer at once! Now get this slut out of here and reinstate your wife. If you do I’ll ask Rudd to make out a new seven-year lease in your name but if you don’t I’ll write to Sydney Codsall this very day!’
It was a shot in the dark, or at least in the twilight, for Claire’s study of the Four Winds’ lease had been cursory but its effect upon Eveleigh was deadly and she saw this at once. Resentment and obstinacy ebbed from him and for a moment he almost cringed. She saw too that her threat had cut the ground from under the girl, who obviously knew Eveleigh as Paul and Rudd knew him, a man dedicated to these acres, someone whose entire life was bound up in stock and pasture between Sorrel and Teazel. She knew then that she had him, that nothing would be allowed to threaten his hold of the farm and that, in his heart and belly, he valued the least of his Friesian cows above the woman who had found a means of making a bad joke of his years of toil since Codsall’s death.
The girl was a fighter, however, and made a final, desperate appeal, catching Eveleigh by the forearm and hanging there in what struck Claire as a kind of parody of an imploring wife in a Temperance magic-lantern show.
‘Don’ lissen Norman, she can’t touch yer! She can’t, I tell yer! She’s bin put up to this by the old cow, Norman . . . !’ but that was as far as she got for suddenly Eveleigh ceased to look either surly or hesitant but shook himself, like a man coming out of a daze and thrust her aside so violently that she was sent spinning across the room.
‘Don’t you call my missis names you bliddy whore!’ he shouted, ‘I told you before ’bout that and I’ll not tell you again! Do like Mrs Craddock says! Pack yer things and go back to the cottage! Go on, damn you!’ and swinging open the door he spun her round, planted a stockinged foot in her behind and projected her right across the hall to the foot of the stairs.
She fell on her hands and knees and remained crouching there but the terrible indignity of rejection must have sparked off her pride for, after a moment, she rose slowly and not ungracefully and said, in a little above a whisper, ‘You won’t get rid o’ me as easily as this, Norman! I’ll make you pay one way an’ another, you see if I don’t!’, and as Eveleigh took a couple of strides in her direction she ran up the stairs and he came back into the kitchen, closing the door and crossing to the fireplace where he stood with head bowed and hands resting on the mantel as though the effort had exhausted him. It was so quiet that Claire could hear a hen clucking in the yard. She said: ‘You didn’t have to do that, Eveleigh. She didn’t move in without your invitation.’
‘Sometimes I could ha’ killed her,’ he said, ‘lots o’ times I could ha’ killed her and I daresay I would in the end if you hadn’t come!’
He shivered and glanced round the room, so fearfully that Claire’s flesh crept. It was as though she was listening to an echo of a scene enacted in the room during Arabella’s time and described to her by Paul, years after the tragedy and this fancy was underlined by his next words. He said, bitterly: ‘This is an unlucky house, Mrs Craddock. Sometimes I get the notion they’m still yer, the pair of ’em! I never thought o’ that until my boy Gilbert got blown to tatters an’ then my woman turned queer and didn’t seem to take no pleasure in me but I’ve thought of it a lot since and maybe that’s why I took up wi’ that little bitch! She took me mind off me troubles I reckon,’ and he spat in the fire, shaking himself like a big dog scrambling from water.
Suddenly she felt a terrible compassion for him, a far deeper and more urgent pity than she felt for his wife, or his dead son Gilbert, or his daughter Rachel now mourning Keith and involved in pity for him was a little for the girl upstairs, who had tasted power for the first time in her wretched life only to be thrown out in the end like a pan of washing-up water. But he had suffered and was suffering far more than any of them, a man whose lifetime of hard, disciplined toil had led him to this—his wife a neurotic, his children dead or scattered and his self-respect in ruins. She said, gently, ‘Take a drink, Eveleigh. Is there whisky or brandy in the cupboard?’
Without shifting his position in front of the fireplace, he said, quietly, ‘There’s gin and bitters. That was her tipple!’ and Claire crossed to the dresser finding there a bottle of gin and a jug of apple juice. She fetched glasses, washed them, and poured him a stiff measure and a smaller one for herself, carrying it across to him and bending to give the sullen fire a poke.
‘I’ll get Mr Rudd to make out a proper lease,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to worry any more but you’ll be far happier with Marian back to look after you. It’s done her a lot of good working up there with the convalescents. She’s almost over losing Gilbert now and I hear that Harold, your other boy, is doing splendidly in Palestine. He’s commissioned, isn’t he?’ and when he nodded, ‘We’re all going through a bad time but it’ll end, sooner or later. Would you like me to send Marian over to clean this place as soon as the girl moves out?’
She did not know whether her words brought him any comfort. He heaved himself away from the mantel, swallowed his gin and sat heavily in the inglenook, his big, brown hands clasped between his knees.
‘I daresay it’s hard for a lady like you to understand,’ he said at length, ‘but she helped get me through that time I heard about Gil and all that bliddy table-rapping Marian took to. That, and all the work an’ worry and conniving, with everyone on at me to squeeze quarts into pint pots, an’ dam’ near every man and girl in the Valley going off to war or munitions! She was outside it all somehow. Never seemed to touch her, one way or the other. All she wanted was a strong man two-three times a night. It’s hard to explain but . . . ’ Suddenly he got up and walked over to the window, as though confession was embarrassing him more than he could bear. Claire said, ‘You don’t have to apologise to me. I understand better than you think. And I’m not really a lady you know, just a farmer’s daughter, who was lucky to get a good man and stay in love with him. That’s why I’m here, I suppose. The Squire isn’t just a landlord. He thinks of people like you as his friends, not his tenants, and he feels about this place just the way you do. You can say anything to me. It won’t go further than this room!’
He looked at her gratefully and she saw that he was master of himself again and was glad for it excused the impulsive way she had challenged his privacy. He said, slowly, ‘What I was going to say was, her being a young woman made me think a bit of myself, I reckon, took me back to the old days, when I first come here to work for Old Maister an’ Arabella. I’m turned fifty now and it comes hard on a man that age to see most o’ what he’s worked for shredding away, a bit
here, a bit there. The boys went off, then two o’ the girls but me an’ Marian never fell out over aught ’till Rachel took up with that parson’s son, poor little sod an’ then Gil joined an’ got hisself killed. I was wrong both times and I’ll own to that now but I didden know it at the time. You don’t, do you? You just say an’ do first thing as comes into your head and then the damage is done! I’d have come through it all right if Marian had turned to me fer comfort instead o’ they bliddy spirits and suchlike! Then Jill see how things were between us an’ tried her luck so to speak. She come to me in the barn one day after I’d had no sense nor comfort out o’ Marian for three months or more. I was about desperate I suppose, an’ one thing soon led to another. So long as she was there, ready to parade all she got any time I was minded I could muddle along wi’ the work but youm right o’ course, there’s no future to it!’ He stopped suddenly and looked at her under his heavy brows. ‘Do you think Marian’d cry quits an’ come back, same as we used to be?’
‘Yes,’ Claire said, ‘I’m sure she’d be glad to do just that.’
‘Right!’ he said, ‘then I’ll pay that bliddy volcano off an’ have done with her and we’ll pick up where we left off!’
Claire heard the girl bumping a case down the stairs and Eveleigh went out to her. There was a low rumble of voices, then a pause and finally the front door banged. He came back rather jauntily with a reluctant grin on his face and the tread of a man who has just settled a matter of business to his own satisfaction.
‘I give her fifty pounds,’ he said, ‘that stopped her snivelling! A pair o’ trousers an’ a bit to spend on herself is all she needs to keep her contented. We won’t hear no more of Jill,’ and then, resignedly, ‘it’ll mean tellin’ the Squire, won’t it? If you’re thinking of getting the lease straightened out, I mean?’
‘Only the essentials,’ Claire told him, ‘although I daresay it would cheer him up to learn we had our own kind of troubles over here.’
‘Well, you tell him all you’ve a mind to, Mrs Craddock and send Marian over soon as you like.’ He looked round the disordered kitchen with impatience. ‘This place needs a doin’ over, don’t it? I reckon Marian’ll make the dust fly! Funny thing about most women—present company excepted o’ course—either they can’t have enough of a man one way, or they can’t do enough for him another! Now Marian, backalong, she was different. She kept the place fresh but didden seem to mind how many kids come along!’ He smiled to himself and Claire thought his ability to do that again was the most encouraging thing to emerge from the interview.
III
On the night of March 20th, 1918, Paul took a convoy of lorries carrying ammunition up to a battery about two miles behind the Green Defence Zone, in front of St Quentin. The night was dry, muggy and unusually quiet. Not a single shell whined overhead and only very occasionally did a flare of one sort or another light up the blackness for a few moments. It was difficult to believe that somewhere up ahead were hundreds of thousands of men slopping about in trenches that were only just beginning to dry out after the thaw.
After arranging for the shells to be off-loaded, the major commanding the battery invited Paul into his spacious dug-out for a drink.
He was hardly more than a boy, with a boy’s exuberance and lack of ceremony, and speculated gaily on the date of the long-awaited German offensive, saying that Jerry would probably wait for things to dry out a little more before trying his luck in the quagmire over which the British had tried to advance in the autumn, and when Paul asked if he thought the initial attack would be successful, he said, off-handedly, ‘Oh, they expect Old Fritz to gain some ground but our defences are fluid enough to cope with it. We shall just bring up reserves and counter-attack and in the end everything will be as-you-were I imagine. Well, here’s to a safe trip back and I wish to God I was going with you! Things are devilish dull here lately and I’m overdue for leave.’
Things remained dull until Paul’s lorries were about halfway back to the dump. Then, about 3 a.m., all hell broke loose, first in the areas nearer the base, then in the artillery zone behind him and finally right where the convoy was travelling, a mixture of high-velocity and gas shells straddling the road with terrifying accuracy. It was suicide to push on so Paul ordered the men out of the vehicles and let them disperse in the fields and they were pinned here for more than half-an-hour as the shifting barrage grew more and more intense and the landscape erupted under a continuous rain of shells. Paul was not long in doubt that this was it, the big push they had been promised as soon as Jerry had transferred a sufficient number of troops from the Russian front but what appalled him was the terrible intensity and accuracy of the barrage, as though thousands of guns of all calibres were concentrating on a relatively small area, switching back and forth with a horrid rhythm that prevented anyone making a dash for it. With the first lightening in the eastern sky came fog and Paul spared a thought for the poor devils trapped in the underground front line, saturated with gas, crouching in crumbling trenches and awaiting the first waves of the German infantry to appear through the mist that now lay heavily over the countryside.
About six o’clock, when the barrage seemed to be re-concentrating on the forward areas, he started the convoy moving again but before they had gone far a howitzer shell landed smack on the head of the column and the road was impassable. The pattern of the drumfire now resolved itself into a steady pounding of extreme back and front areas and only occasional shells, mostly gas, fell in the intermediate zone so that there was no alternative but to return to the battery site and await the arrival of trouble-spot engineers to clear the road. The men in the leading lorries had been killed outright so, unencumbered with wounded, they were able to turn and head back the way they had come, driving directly into the sheet of flame on the horizon.
Moving fast they covered the distance in just over twenty minutes but there was no sanctuary at the battery, nor was there much shelter in the gunners’ dug-outs. A direct hit, possibly two or three, had registered on the site and the place was a shambles. Every gun but one had been destroyed and the only living member of the crews seemed to be a bombardier nursing an injured hand. He was able to tell him that, apart from a team over on the right, he was the sole survivor.
‘We’d only fired a few rounds,’ he said, ‘they had us taped to an inch! I was over by the dump which didn’t go up, thank Christ. I bin out two years but never seen anything like this, not even on the Somme. It’s a different kind of straffing, sir, a proper your-turn-next carpet pattern. Jerry ’as all the bloody luck, don’t ’ee? Look at the fog out there!’
Paul’s sergeant put a field-dressing on the man and sent him over to the remains of the officers’ dug-out. It was useless to send him back to the dressing station for the fog belt in the west was masking a leaping sheet of orange indicating the barrage had switched yet again and was now firing at extreme range.
The gun on the right was still in action but its detonations sounded like apologetic coughs against the roar of the overall barrage. The ground quivered and heaved and the din penetrated the deepest recesses of the brain, slamming the door on every impulse not directly concerned with self-preservation. Paul staggered across to the battery HQ post and on his way recognised the remains of the boyish major who had entertained him three hours before, identifying him from among several blood-stained bundles by his military moustache and the crown on the lapel of his tunic. There was nothing he could do but get his surviving fourteen men under what cover was still available and there they remained until, through the tormented fog-belt, came the first of the beaten infantry.
They arrived in twos and threes, stumbling, blear-eyed men, some without rifles and about half of them walking wounded trying forlornly to find their way to a dressing station. Only one, a hard-bitten sergeant of a Midland regiment, was coherent and told Paul of chaos and carnage up the line where break-throughs had occurred right and left of the sectors his company
had been holding.
‘Couldn’t do a damned thing to stop ’em!’ the man said, with a curse. ‘The saturation strafe they sent over at first light wiped out two-thirds of us. All the trenches up there are shallow and under-manned and then down comes this bloody fog to cap all! We held ’em off for a time with two machine-guns but they by-passed us and went round the flanks. It’s a real bloody cave-in if you ask me and it’ll take days to harden up, even if we’ve got plenty o’ reserves back there!’ He glanced bitterly at the fog which lay low on the ground all about them. ‘By God!’ he muttered, ‘if we’d had fog like this at Third Wipers we could have gone all the way to Berlin!’
Then a wounded captain arrived and with him an astonishingly composed Engineer, a tall, angular Scotsman with iron-grey hair who had been in the support line all night installing a pump. Paul never forgot him, a polite, methodical man of well over forty who took command of the half-demoralised mob of wounded and stragglers now milling about the littered gun-site. The Scotsman said they would have to organise a road-block and rallying point until reserves came up and a counter-attack could be mounted and his quiet confidence spread to Paul and some of the unwounded NCOs, who at once set to work, driving the three remaining lorries broadside on across the road, digging in each side and hauling timber and wire from the shattered gunpits and dug-outs to make some kind of entanglement to protect front and flanks. Men and more men trickled in until there were about two or three hundred to man the strongpoint, and as soon as the barrage lifted Paul sent off two despatch-riders to the rear with scribbled messages reporting their strength and position. The Scotsman told him that they were on the furthest edge of the Green Zone that had been designed for defence in depth but that the German attack had been launched before the new trenches were much more than surface scratches. There were plenty of tools available, and the men dug furiously after they realised they were out of range of all but long-range artillery and that the very speed of the German advance would mean a long interval must elapse before field batteries could be moved forward to give their infantry support. The bombardment had slackened appreciably and what there was of it seemed to be concentrated on areas further back, probably in the hope of checking the flow of reserves in the Green Zone. They had dug and wired a semi-circular strongpoint by nine o’clock and sited their three light machine-guns and two Lewis-guns by the time the first parties of German infantry appeared through the thinning fog at a range of perhaps four hundred yards. By then the gun on the right, that had been firing over open sites, was silent, having run out of ammunition and the Scotsman, walking along the curving trench, did not give the order to fire until the scattered groups on the edge of the mist were within close range. They went to ground at once and during the lull that followed some of Paul’s men brought up rations and a small jar of rum salvaged from the battery command post. Paul tried to contact the rear by telephone but the wire must have been cut to pieces by the bombardment, so the Scotsman despatched several of the walking wounded with orders to fan out both sides of the road and take their chance getting through with first-hand reports on the situation.
Post of Honour Page 34
