The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  He said briefly, ‘Come with me, Pansy. Smut and I will think of something, but there’s no time to go asking for volunteers, no time at all,’ and together they hurried through the rain to the quayside opposite the jetty where Smut was still standing like a sentinel, his back to the village. In a few words he explained the situation and for once, having no constructive ideas and still not fully convinced by her story, he was content to leave it to a man who had been in and out of trouble the whole of his life.

  Smut said, sucking his lips, ‘She’s right. She must be right. Alf is mazed about that switchboard and he’s out there all right if he baint backalong and he baint or I’d have seen him. Well then, there’s two ways o’ goin’ at it, Squire, and tiz for you to decide. Do us go out an’ fend off that bliddy Easter egg by catchin’ hold o’ the cable, or do us bank everything on bridging that gap and fishing Alf ashore bevore ’er strikes? Tiz one or the other, baint it?’

  ‘No, it’s both,’ Paul said for Smut’s clear presentation of alternatives had aired his mind so that he began to form the basis of a plan. It wasn’t much of a plan and he didn’t think he had time to elaborate it. The mine was now appreciably closer to the end of the jetty, rolling gently in the rising tide, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Noah and Jaffsie on the point of launching their skiff some seventy yards west of where they stood. He called, at the top of his voice, ‘Not there! Bring her this side!’ and when Noah straightened himself and looked bewildered, he cupped his hands and roared, ‘Over here, man! Pick it up and carry it!’ and his urgency must have conveyed itself to them for they bent and raised the light skiff as he turned to Smut and said, ‘If Noah and me can get to the block-house could you give us a few extra minutes by catching that trailing cable-end and stopping the drift? It’s asking a lot I know, but there’s no other way.’

  Pansy spoke up and Paul noticed that resignation had taken the place of panic in her voice. ‘If he won’t, I will,’ but Smut said sourly. ‘Dornee talk so bliddy daft. You’d sink the skiff wi’ your weight.’ Then, with a half-grin, ‘I’ll do it but I doan reckon I could on me lonesome. It’ll need two and it’ll have to be Jaffsie. Anyways, I’d sooner him than his father.’

  ‘Suppose they refuse?’

  ‘You leave the persuading to me, Squire. They’ll back down on a gentleman.’

  By the time he had said this Noah and his son were within thirty yards, both bent under the weight of the skiff and oars. Smut hurried over and intercepted them and they lowered their burden to the ground. Pansy said, ‘What can I do then? I got to do something.’

  ‘You can tell the constable what’s happening and ask for volunteers if there are any able-bodied men in that crowd back there. Where are the nearest ladders, long ladders?’

  ‘Back o’ the pub, the boss keeps a twenty-rung in the yard in case o’ fire. There’s rope too if you need it, in the bran tub. Shall I show ’ee?’

  ‘I’ll find them. Go up and tell Voysey and see if you can get someone to help, but I can’t wait for them. We’ll have to do the best we can right now.’

  She scuttled off into the High Street as the three men approached, Noah looking more thoughtful than Paul had ever seen him look although his boy Jaffsie was wearing the same slack grin.

  ‘You knows what youm at, Squire,’ Noah said flatly, and Paul snapped, ‘Have you got a better plan? If you have, speak up. Every second counts.’

  ‘There baint a better plan,’ Noah said slowly. ‘Us’ve no choice, neither one of us. All the same—’ and here he glowered at Smut, ‘there was no bliddy call for him to threaten me. You doan reckon I would have left Alf to get blowed to tatters, do ’ee? I’d ha’ done something. I’d ha’ tried!’

  The man’s unaccustomed dignity shamed them both and Paul’s memory, rippling back across the years, saw him not as Noah, the village layabout with the half-idiot son, but as all the dead Williamses who had plied their trade from this spot and lay in a string of two-tier graves in the churchyard, all but Tom and Dan, whose bones were coral now in the hull of a drowned battleship.

  ‘There’s a long ladder in The Raven yard,’ began Paul, ‘you and me could …’ but Noah, still glowering, made a sudden, emphatic gesture and growled, ‘Bugger the ladder! You an’ Smut can zee to that end of it. Me’n Jaffsie’ll come in from the Bluff zide and zee if us can ketch that cable-end and hold un off for a spell, but fer Christ’s sake doan hang about, Maister. The scour’s getting stronger every minute an’ us’ll have our work cut out as it is. Come on, Jaffsie, us’ll launch un from the far zide o’ the breakwater.’

  He and the youth picked up the skiff and marched off without another word and Smut, looking as chastened as Paul had ever seen him, drew his hand across his mouth without comment. They stood there long enough to see father and son crash down the shingle bank beyond the breakwater and then, turning their backs on the sea, they ran together through the open gates of The Raven yard.

  II

  The ladder was there, leaning against the roof of the old coach-house but Paul saw at a glance that it would be as much as they could do to carry it. They dragged it out and were emerging on to the quay when Voysey bustled up and behind him Fred Olver and Pansy. Behind Pansy was a tall Negro wearing the fatigue dress of the U.S. Army and Paul never did discover how he came to be there at that particular time but was grateful for his strength on his end of the ladder. In a staggering little group they ran diagonally across the quay to the short stretch of runway that sloped down to the jetty and it was only when they had begun to pick their way through the rubble that Paul remembered the boat. The rain was falling steadily now and visibility was shortening but the skiff was well in view, making its wide approach sweep to the west in choppy water. Without the glasses Paul could see Jaffsie at the oars and the thickset figure of Noah at the tiller. The mine was perhaps a hundred yards offshore, approximately equidistant between the boat and the blockhouse.

  Voysey, notwithstanding his uniform, was awaiting a lead and it was Smut who gave it.

  ‘If they catch and hold the bugger we can take our time. If they don’t we’ll never make it,’ he said.

  ‘They’ll catch it,’ Paul said and suddenly he had a vivid recollection of Noah’s expression the moment before he bent to lift the stern of the boat. For the first time since Pansy had accosted him he felt confident of extricating Willis without the sacrifice of lives.

  The ladder, long and cumbersome as it was, was too short to bridge the gap blown in piers and planking by the mine. The best they could do—and this was Voysey’s suggestion—was to lower one end into the debris and rest the other on the last section of crossbeams where the jetty had been sliced as by a knife. The ladder then lay at an angle of about forty-five degrees and the approach beyond, across a tangled mass of beams and iron supports, was negotiable to an active man.

  Voysey said, with a briskness that failed to conceal an exasperated dismay, ‘Do we all go over? And if he’s there how do we get him down? He’s not only blind, he’s almost certainly unconscious or badly injured.’

  ‘We got to find him first,’ Smut said, but then the Negro private spoke up and Paul was surprised by the ordinariness of his voice, as though he had half-expected him to speak like a coloured character in Huckleberry Finn.

  ‘I’ll go across and poke around some,’ he said quietly. ‘Then I’ll call for help, maybe.’

  They all looked at him with varying degrees of astonishment but he did not await their sanction or encouragement. Without even crouching he descended the angled ladder and picked his way over the rubble to the canting wall of the blockhouse. In a few seconds he had passed out of view behind the structure and Paul at once forgot him, turning to peer through the enclosing trailers of mist at the skiff.

  It was no more than forty to fifty yards east of them now and being held almost stationary by an occasional flick of the oars. Noah was lying face down and full le
ngth in the stern, his gumbooted feet braced against the thwart on which Jaffsie sat, his arms, spread like an advancing wrestler’s, projecting over the rudder-bar, almost as though he intended playing catch-as-catch-can with the black, spiralling object that bobbed and lifted about ten yards nearer the jetty. Smut, Voysey and the other man, Fred Olver, stared down at the scene as they might have gazed at some fantastic feat being performed for their entertainment in a circus tent. Nobody said anything. Everyone’s concentration was riveted to the strange, crablike posture of the blubbery man in the skiff. They did not even shift their gaze to the mine. Their eyes were on Noah Williams and his half-crooked embrace of nothing.

  They were brought out of this semi-trance by the Negro, hailing them against the wind from a projecting beam at the extreme right of the blockhouse. He was standing there silhouetted against the grey sky, holding Willis in his arms and his posture, Paul thought, was wildly improbable and grotesquely divorced from workaday life. It belonged in the coloured illustration of an adventure book he had read as a boy, something by Henty or Fenimore Cooper.

  ‘He’s alive and out cold,’ the Negro called, and forgetting Noah as readily as he had forgotten the American a moment before Paul followed Smut and Voysey down the ladder, leaving Fred Olver at the apex to steady it in readiness for the ascent. Just as he passed below the level of the debris Paul saw Noah’s left hand flutter as he laid hold of the shredded length of cable. The boat was then no more than a few yards from the mine and the mine less than three boat lengths away from the jetty.

  III

  They did not relieve the Negro of his burden. He seemed to be a man of unusual strength endowed with an acrobat’s sense of balance. With Voysey and Smut alongside him he picked his way over the rubble like a cat, needing no more than a touch or two on the elbow when his feet found the lower rungs of the ladder. Because of this Paul had leisure to glance through the shattered framework on his left and watch Jaffsie brace himself against the oars, so that the skiff swung slowly round in an arc and began heading out to sea.

  It moved, Paul thought, with a terrible dragging slowness, so that he roused himself and shouted to the recumbent Noah, ‘Let her go and get ashore, man!’ but Noah, if he heard, paid no attention to this advice but continued to sprawl with his face almost in the water and the splayed cable clutched in both hands. The mine, checked in its spiralling drift towards the end of the wrecked jetty, followed unwillingly, clearing the last beam by no more than a few yards. Then, ascending the ladder as one of a bunched group, Paul had no opportunity to follow its progress. Other people, Pansy among them, had joined Olver at the top of the ladder and Willis was lifted clear, Voysey venting his relief in a roar of disapproval as he realised the shore end of the jetty was now lined with figures, women and children among them. They all scuttled away with Voysey herding them like sheep, and the big Negro must have gone with them for suddenly Paul was alone with Smut watching the last scene in the drama as Noah, fifty yards seaward of the jetty, lowered the cable-end back into the water and rolled round facing his son who at once set a slanting course for the breakwater.

  Smut, watching intently, voiced a thought that was in Paul’s mind.

  ‘He’s got zense as well as nerve,’ he said grudgingly. ‘He’s leaving her where the tide’ll carry her’ way along the beach. Er’ll blow off this zide o’ the landslip and do no harm to nobody, except the gulls mebbe.’ But then, sensing perhaps that this was a wholly inadequate acknowledgment of what the Williamses had just achieved, he added, ‘Youm so bliddy wrong about people, Squire. I knowed Noah zince he was a tacker, and I woulden ha’ bet a farden on him tackling a job like that, never mind doing it so quietlike. Buggered if I won’t stand him a pint tonight if he shows up.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Paul said, ‘I’ll do any standing that’s to be done, and it’ll be a quart if he can take it,’ but at this Smut’s grin returned to him for the first time that afternoon.

  ‘You don’t want to worry on that score,’ he said. ‘Noah baint a bible-puncher, like the rest of his kin. Noah Williams could drink the bliddy Raven dry if you give him the chance.’

  Huddling into their damp clothes they crossed the quay, their feet scrunching on shattered glass.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Outpost Incident

  I

  Rumble’s fears that the Valley might suffer further air attacks on account of its nearness to Normandy proved unfounded. By now the Luftwaffe was a spent force and although V-bombs, and later rockets, continued to keep Londoners on the jump, the provinces seemed to be groping their way back to a peacetime routine in that final winter of the war.

  The Royal Marine camp was still in being but its complement had shrunk to a mere hundred or so. Many of those who had stamped and shouted on the square were now in Holland or the Far East, and not a few lay in graves beside the Scheldt, or along the approaches to Caen. Hit-and-run raiders were never seen now, only Polish-manned aircraft skimming over the coast like little silver hornets. Simon wrote saying he had an admin. job at Eindhoven. Rumble, travelling by slow stages, was on his way home across the Indian Ocean. Andy and his friend Ken Shawcrosse were still based in the tall Victorian houses at Coombe Bay but more often than not were away, leaving Margaret and the baby Vanessa to their own devices.

  Claire, supposing her to be lonely, invited her to come and join Mary and the other children at the Big House, but she declined. It would be a nuisance, she said, to keep returning whenever Andy came home after one of his mysterious forays up and down the country. His Development Company was already in business and a little of his pre-war zest had returned to him. Margaret and the family generally welcomed this, but none of them cared much for his crony, Shawcrosse. They employed a blonde secretary, a hearty girl with a warm, built-in smile and Margaret hinted to Claire that they probably shared her as mistress as well as stenographer. Anticipating Claire’s protest she said, ‘Now wait. Who the hell am I to complain of that? Besides, if it sweetens his temper I’ll tuck them up in bed if they ask me nicely.’

  Claire said nothing. More than ever she was beginning to wonder if her brief essay in mending and making-do had not been a failure after all.

  II

  The valley did witness one further skirmish but it was between allies and took place one frosty morning in the Home Farm hayloft, whither Prudence Honeyman (née Pitts) had retired to settle for her PX goodies. It was a brisk, scandalous engagement, reminiscent of a much earlier era in the Valley when people made a rare fuss about this kind of thing, but although it did not involve a member of the Craddock family its repercussions were instrumental in breaking the long Honeyman tradition at Home Farm and causing Paul to redraw farm boundaries that had remained static for a generation.

  One of the few Americans left in the Valley after the pre-D-Day exodus was Ed Morrisey, the barrel-chested sergeant in charge of the sub-depot in the goyle, about half-way between the landslip and Coombe Bay. He was on familiar terms with the Honeymans, for theirs was the nearest farm and when, one morning in February, he received instructions to pack up and rejoin his unit, he decided to make a final attempt to collect dues skilfully withheld by Prudence for over a year.

  What he did not know, it seemed, was that Prudence’s husband Nelson had been keeping a close watch upon his regular and so far frustrated attempts to exact payment from the beneficiary, for Nelson had been married to Prudence for twelve humdrum years and knew her rather better than Eddy or anyone else in the Valley.

  It had not been a successful marriage, although its failure was a secret from all but Paul, who knew most things of importance concerning his tenants, enough, in fact, to cause Claire to wonder why he was so unfamiliar with the domestic ebb and flow of his own family. The answer to this was that Paul had never taken his sons and daughters very seriously, whereas he automatically accepted responsibility for his tenants, and had done ever since buying the estate.

  In t
he late nineteen-twenties, when she was growing up at Hermitage under the tolerant eye of Henry and her mother Gloria, Prudence Pitts had been the most sought-after girl in the Valley and at thirty-four she still had a good figure, bold, snapping eyes, and a mop of red-gold hair. Gloria had often despaired of getting her safely off her hands but then, to everyone’s surprise, she had suddenly decided to marry Nelson, only son of old Honeyman, and one of the most conscientious younger men in the Valley. Nelson, slight, earnest and unoriginal, had been no more than a servitor at the court of Prudence but he was shrewd and it did not take him long to discover that the source of his luck was a false alarm on her part. Like the Potter girls before her Prudence had sampled most of the young men between the Whin and the Bluff before she settled on one in particular.

  She was not, however, possessed of the Potter temperament, regarding men as swains and providers and not the means of passing a pleasant hour under the stars. To that extent she learned her lesson early in life and never made the same mistake again. She remained a flirt and many a man who had business at Home Farm in the last ten years had been encouraged to try his luck but, as in the case of Ed Morrisey, the prize eluded them. A kiss, a hasty fumble, a subdued giggle, was all they got in exchange for time and capital invested, and Sergeant Morrisey had been a steady investor since the first occasion Prudence had snapped her eyes at him and told him how she yearned for what she called ‘sweets’ and he called ‘candy’.

  He brought her candy. Boxes and boxes of candy, together with ‘K’ rations and towels and sheets representing scores of clothing coupons. He brought her tinned turkey at Christmas time and, when these yielded no more than a kiss or two in the barn, he produced several pairs of nylon stockings, now accepted in the Valley as a kind of down-payment on defloration. It remained, however, a strictly one-way trade. The missionary continued to distribute his beads but the native remained relatively hostile.