Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  The woods were at their midsummer best, the bracken shoots mushrooming as high as the skewbald’s ears, the flowering rhododendrons immediately below looking like a fleet of purple galleons anchored in an olive-green bay with their crews asleep or ashore. Beyond the stream, in the hollow east of the mere, Sam Potter’s cottage reminded him of the cottage Tom had seen from Hearthover Fell, in his favourite childhood book, The Water Babies, and as he advanced down the steep slope he caught a glimpse of the ponderous figure of Joannie Potter, wearing red, just like the old lady who had befriended the fugitive sweep. The mere itself, on his right, was very still but as he reached its northernmost tip he could see the tiny V-ripples of voles swimming along the bank towards Smut Potter’s old hideout, and, over by the islet, a moorhen and her chicks making the circuit and again suggesting a fleet, only this time one of rowboats led by a small, brown ketch. The orchestra began as the path flattened out, a low muted hum of innumerable rustlings and warblings and dronings, pitched in the identical key that he heard when he first rode here in the drought of 1902, and he thought, ‘This will almost certainly be the last place to change! Even Sydney’s bulldozers would be defeated by this tangle, thank God!’ and he called to Joannie Potter, twice as heavy as when Sam first brought her here at his instance and she answered in her high-pitched, broad-vowelled voice, ‘Zam’s downalong! Word came Mother Meg wanted un. Do ’ee want un special, Squire?’ and Paul said no, he was just taking the air, and asked after Pauline, his first Valley godchild, now married to a railwayman in Paxtonbury.

  ‘ ’Er’s vine,’ Joannie said, ‘and expectin’ another. That’ll mak’ zix grandchildren, what wi’ Georgie’s last one! Who’d ha’ thought it now?’

  ‘Who indeed?’ said Paul, with a smile, for he had always had a warm corner in his heart for Sam and Joannie, the very first of the second generation round here to raise a family and name one of their children for him, although her sex called for a little cheating and one extra syllable.

  ‘What’s Sam doing downalong?’ he asked and Joannie told him that word had come from the Dell that Meg had had ‘one of her spells’ a week since and Smut had had to take the van and fetch her back from the moor, leaving her horse to find its own way home.

  ‘ ’Er’s over eighty now and ’er reely shoulden keep traapsing about, the way she does,’ Joannie complained.

  ‘You’ll not stop Meg moving around,’ said Paul, ‘not unless you tie her down!’ and he rode on beside the mere, passing the spot where, on the left, he had first romped in the grass with Claire, and on the right was the islet holding his happiest memory of Grace. At the sloping field he turned left, hugging the edge of the woods past the favourite haunt of the Shallowford butterflies for about here, years before he came to the Valley, someone had begun planting an ornamental shrubbery and a few of the imported shrubs had lingered on, notably a buddleia that seemed to hold a special delight for butterflies of all kinds. They were here now, wavering irresolutely over the flowers, a host of Red Admirals, Peacocks, Meadow Browns, Tortoiseshells and Cabbage Whites, two or three hundred of them going about their business whatever it was, and pausing to watch them Paul remembered the neighbours of the old German professor who had been driven from the Valley in 1914, for his hobby had been lepidoptery and he had had cases of butterflies in his study.

  He gave Deepdene a miss and rode instead down the winding path to the Dell to inquire after Mother Meg but she was not there and neither was Sam, the French Canadian Brissot telling him that, against her daughter’s advice, Meg had set out on one of her basket-selling trips early that morning.

  The Dell looked far tidier than it had ever looked under the hands of Old Tamer, his wife, or even Big Jem. There was not a nettle or dock to be seen and green wheat stood shoulder high in what had once been a tangle of briars on the southern slope of the wood.

  ‘You seem to be keeping hard at it about here,’ he said to Brissot, a man he respected, although he could never understand why he had carried the Cockney Bellchamber on his back all these years. ‘Do you ever feel homesick for Quebec?’ and the Frenchman said politely that he had never regretted settling in England because the winters were so mild, particularly down here, and even as a child he had hated snow. Violet, Jumbo Bellchamber’s wife, came out with her washing while they stood talking and smiled a welcome. Like Joannie Potter she had put on a great deal of weight and it was difficult to picture her as a slim, fleet-footed girl, who had once set Valley tongues clacking and driven the young sparks wild. ‘They all seem to have settled for a quiet life at last,’ he told himself, ‘although I would never have bet a shilling on it happening!’ and he took the track that led over the western shoulder of the Bluff and was soon clattering down Coombe Bay High Street.

  Not much of the original village was left and what little there was seemed populated with strangers, loafing about the church green in holiday garb. Almost everyone about here, he reflected, catered for summer visitors and in a month or two, when the school holidays began, this street would teem with Cockneys and Midlanders in shorts and coloured shirts, with children scrambling about in the harbour with shrimping nets and toy boats. He was in such a relaxed mood, however, that the thought of Coombe Bay as a holiday resort did not bother him this morning. It was probably good for trade and who the devil was he to deny city families a fortnight by the sea, or begrudge people like Smut Potter and that French wife of his selling their confections? As he drew level with the Vicarage he saw Parson Horsey, a bent, shrunken old man now, with a halo of silvery hair circling his brown, polished skull. The old man was still very active, however, for here he was hoeing his flower-beds and stooping every now and again to pluck a weed and toss it in a seed-box close by.

  ‘I had to get out in the sun this morning,’ Horsey confessed, after Paul had hailed him and Paul said, ‘Me too!’ and reined in, asking after Abe Tozer, the smith, who had taken to his bed a week or so before.

  ‘He’ll not last the summer,’ Horsey said, ‘but he hasn’t any regrets. After all, he was swinging a hammer up to last week and his wife tells me he’s well over eighty. I suppose the forge will close when he dies. There’s more call here for a good garage than a smithy. Your good lady is well, I trust?’ and Paul said she was and told him the news from Periwinkle. Horsey said with a smile, ‘Well, it doesn’t surprise me, Squire. That girl of yours is a lovable lass and as for that lad of Hazel Potter’s, one should never be surprised at how a Potter turns out! I’ve just seen Pansy taking her third husband for an airing. He’s a powerful swimmer, you know, and she marches him down to the beach every morning of the week about this time between May and October. There’s some very good stuff in that woman somewhere. They say she’s made that poor chap a very happy man. It isn’t everyone who would take him on.’

  It was a judgment, Paul thought, that old Parson Bull would never have passed and not for the first time he congratulated himself in installing this little gnome of a man as rector all those years ago when Parson Bull, last of the sporting parsons, had ridden himself into the ground chasing foxes.

  ‘Do you ever hear from Rachel these days?’ he asked and Horsey said he did, now and again, and that the last time she wrote she said she had just been adopted as Socialist candidate for a Glasgow constituency and seemed to have a chance of being elected if Baldwin went to the country in the autumn. He waited to see if Paul would respond with news of a letter from Simon but when he did not, added, ‘Your boy is her agent. I expect you’ll be hearing!’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Paul. ‘They’re generally too absorbed in politics to waste propaganda time writing to an old Diehard like me! What do you really make of them? Honestly now?’

  Horsey said, with a smile, ‘I think maybe they have the right idea—broadly speaking that is! Things are badly shared, no one can deny that, so perhaps it’s right that the younger generation should chivvy those in authority. Frankly I find their outlook a bit cold-blooded and I
daresay you do as well, but if they can goad the Establishment into knocking down a few slums, raising the general standard of living, and stopping another war, then all power to their elbow! Our lot were a bit too complacent, don’t you think?’

  ‘You weren’t,’ Paul said, remembering Claire’s tale of the sermon he had preached to wounded soldiers, ‘but probably I was and still am! I’ve always known my limitations and they don’t extend beyond the Teazel and the Bluff, yonder!’

  He said good-bye and walked the skewbald down to the harbour where he saw the blind Alf Willis, supple and well-muscled for a handicapped man of over forty, emerge from the water and watched Pansy hand him his towel and help him on with his sweater. It was just another facet of the morning’s ride that pleased him and he turned the horse into the sandhills, meaning to follow the coastline as far as Crabpot Willie’s goyle before riding the last mile home in time for lunch.

  It was much cooler here by the sea and the flies, which had bothered the skewbald in the woods, dropped away so that he put her into a steady trot. In five minutes he had reached the gully and turned inland, heading through the scattered pines above the shanty but halfway up the incline he reined in, his eye catching a sparkle of metal on the summit of the opposite hillock. There was a trap over there, stationary in a cleared patch about a hundred yards west of the goyle, and when he looked more closely he could see someone sitting motionless on the box, slumped against the iron backrest. He rose in his stirrups and called ‘Hi, there!’ but the figure did not move and the pony, after raising its head, went on cropping the sparse grass. He thought, ‘That’s odd, it looks like Old Meg’s trap,’ and he crossed the goyle at its shallow head, circling round to the clearing and coming alongside the shabby little equipage. It was Meg’s trap and Meg was in it. The reins had slipped from her hands and she sat with her eyes wide open, looking out over the tops of the lower pines to the bay. He did not need to dismount to discover that she was dead.

  The sight of her sitting here, staring out across the Channel, was impressive and a little awesome. She looked rooted and statuesque, her knees spread and her hands resting lightly in her lap. She might have been part of the background, something that belonged there, like one of the fully-grown pines or the outcrop of sandstone against which the trap-wheel had come to rest in the pony’s search for grass. He dismounted, hitched the mare’s reins to the rear step and, after feeling her pulse, knelt on the footboard and eased her into the trap-well, which was half-full of rush mats and besom brooms. She was very heavy and the effort required all his strength but he managed it and gently, for he had a great affection for this hulk of a woman, who had always gone her own way with dignity, earning her own bread and keeping herself, and often her indolent family, with coppers coaxed from the twin trades of hawking and fortune-telling. It was strange, he thought, that she should die the morning he had news for her of another grandchild, one among so many, yet he did not find her death shocking or startling. It must have come upon her very stealthily, while she was returning home across the dunes and perhaps, hearing its rustle, she had reined in to take a last look at the sun baking the sandbanks a mile or so out to sea. It was, after all, a pleasant way to die and one might envy her some day, death in the open and the fresh air, after a long lifetime of breathing fresh air; a good deal better than John Rudd’s death in a stuffy little room and a far more natural one than poor Claire’s. He thought of Old Tamer’s death in the breakers off the Cove, hardly a mile east of this spot, and wondered if man and wife would now meet again after all this time and if so what would they have to say to one another. It seemed unlikely. If Heaven and Hell were Old Testament realities, then Tamer would still be working out his time in Purgatory, whereas Old Meg, who had never stolen so much as a clothes-peg, would surely get her reward if rewards were going.

  He lifted the reins and clicked his tongue at the pony, turning the trap in a half-circle and setting off across the fields in the direction of the ford.

  V

  Uncle Franz Zorndorff paid his last visit to Shallowford that September, his last visit anywhere as it happened, for a few months later he died at the age of ninety-three. His final meeting with Paul was almost accidental.

  He had written in May saying that he was going to Austria for a holiday and Paul was very surprised, not so much that a man of his advanced years should feel a sudden urge to travel, but because Franz’s wish to see his homeland again after so many years indicated an unsuspected streak of sentiment in the old man. By Paul’s calculations Franz had fled the Continent seventy years ago, when the Emperor Franz Joseph had ruled over his hotch-potch of a dozen quarrelsome races of which Franz’s people, the Croats, were then a persecuted minority. Paul had never heard the Croat speak of Austria-Hungary with affection. It was the home, he would say of Schlamperei—which he translated as a policy of deliberate drift, a tolerance for romantic nonsense, and to a man with a lifelong dedication to money-making Schlamperei was an unforgiveable sin. It was therefore with some astonishment that Paul had read into the old man’s letter a kind of confession, for Franz had written, ‘ . . . I’ve had a very long run, my boy, and can’t expect more than another year or so. Before I go I should dearly love to see what they have made of it over there, since the old Empire broke up and everybody chose their own road to perdition. You might find it difficult to believe but I have always had a filial affection for the Old Man’ (he meant, presumably, Franz Joseph, who had ruled from 1848 until 1916) ‘and before I die I have a ridiculous desire to ride in a carriage along the Prater, and take a final sniff of the air of Transylvania. I daresay the journey will kill me but if it does then I shall have no complaints. Whilst the City of London is undeniably the only place where a man can put on weight whilst making a fortune, it is not, I think, a place where one would wish to leave one’s bones! Last week I made a shorter sentimental journey to your father’s grave, in Nunhead Cemetery. It was, perhaps, the sight of those grey acres that suggested this grandiose display of sentiment!’

  Franz did not leave his old bones in Transylvania. Judging by the series of luridly-coloured picture postcards received by the twins, by Claire and others, his return to Vienna, after a lapse of almost three-quarters of a century, invigorated him and in mid-September that year Paul was again surprised to hear Franz’s precise voice on the telephone and to learn that he had that day landed in Plymouth.

  ‘What the devil are you doing in Plymouth, you restless old rascal?’ Paul demanded, and Franz said that he had made the outward journey by trans-Continental express but had returned home by sea from Trieste and would be passing through Paxtonbury in an hour or so. If Paul cared to meet him there he was welcome; there was a later train on to town and they could spend an afternoon together.

  ‘I’ll meet you, of course I’ll meet you,’ he said, beginning to wonder if the old chap was senile, ‘but why on earth don’t you stop off and stay with us for a week or two? There isn’t all that hurry to get back to London at your age, is there?’

  ‘As a matter of fact there is,’ Franz replied, unexpectedly. ‘To my way of thinking even minutes count but don’t expect me to explain that from a public telephone-box! My train gets in at one-fifteen and if you intend to meet me be there, because I shan’t get out unless you are, do you understand?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Paul said, resignedly, and replaced the receiver with a suspicion that Uncle Franz’s apparent hurry might have something to do with the twins who had been left in charge of the patron’s various enterprises during his absence. He mentioned as much to Claire but all Claire said was, ‘You’re a born worrier, Paul! Why on earth should you suppose anything like that? Those boys are perfectly capable of looking after his interests. They’ve been more or less running his business for years!’

  ‘Nobody runs Uncle Franz’s business!’ Paul said, ‘and I shall get to the bottom of this! It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if those two hadn’t been monkeying on the Sto
ck Exchange while he was away!’ and he drove off across the moor, his disquiet causing him to arrive far too early and spend an impatient three-quarters of an hour stamping up and down the platform, awaiting the boat train.

  He saw Franz leaning from the window before the train came to a halt and was relieved by his obvious chirpiness. The old fellow was as spruce as ever, his face sunburned the colour of an old walnut and his Van Dyck beard curled Continental fashion, so that he looked like the most elderly character in Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’, one of Paul’s favourite pictures.

  He went along to the compartment and supervised the unloading of Franz’s cases, more than enough to load a barrow, and with the note of tolerant impatience he reserved for the Croat, said, ‘You don’t have to bother with all this clutter. I’m taking you along home whether you like it or not. Put all this stuff in the left-luggage office and we’ll have lunch at The Mitre and get back to Shallowford for tea. Claire’s expecting you.’

  ‘Then I shall have to disappoint her,’ Franz said, flatly. ‘I’m catching the late-afternoon train and only my duty to you disposed me to break my journey to this desert staging-post. If I survive I may well join you for Christmas but in the meantime there’s salvaging to be done, I assure you.’

  ‘So those boys of mine let you down after all?’ Paul said and the old Croat’s Father Christmas eyebrows shot up an inch as he looked at Paul with humorous concern.