"Pull out!" she gasped. "You mean… let them win?"
"Dammit, woman, they are winning!"
"But only temporarily. I mean, they're bound to be beaten in the end, aren't they?"
"Yes, they are," he said, "but we won't emerge with any credit. They've already given us the hiding of our lives and demonstrated that the only possible way to beat them is to wear 'em down, burn their farms, and slaughter or capture every able-bodied male between fourteen and seventy. By God, if I met a Boer now I wouldn't have the gall to look the chap in the face. We're behaving more like Prussians than Englishmen."
She gave it up after that. Clearly he had got some bee in his bonnet about the Boers and was deaf to the opinions of everyone around him. She only hoped he would keep his mouth shut in the presence of any of her friends she invited in over the Christmas holiday.
There was to be the usual family party, with a coming and going of the whole tribe of children and grandchildren, and she wanted to make a special impression this year. Hugo would be bringing his aristocratic wife on Boxing Day, the first time she had been offered an opportunity of getting to know the exalted creature, for the brief introductory visit before the wedding didn't count and at the ceremony itself she caught no more than a glimpse of the bride among all those fashionably dressed guests.
* * *
As it happened, however, Hugo and his wife appeared long before Boxing Day, bowling up to the forecourt in a very elegant equipage just as she was emerging from the kitchen in a grubby apron, after helping one of the girls to unstop the clogged runaway of the well-trough. She found it hard to believe that even Hugo could be so dense as to spring the girl upon her without a warning and would have blushed scarlet if she had not had her mind switched by the vision of Hugo in a well-tailored uniform of dark blue, with a broad yellow stripe running down his trouser-leg. Daughter-in-law Sybil escorted him up the steps and presented him like an impresario introducing his star-turn.
"There now!" she cooed. "Doesn't he look perfectly splendid? Aren't you proud of him, Mrs. Swann? My word, but that tailor did a wonderful job once I put a flea in his ear! 'Swamped with orders, ma'am,' he said, if you ever heard such nonsense. As if Hugo didn't take precedence over a queue of stockbrokers and pen-pushers! Kiss your mother, Hugo, I'm sure she expects it."
Henrietta wasn't at all sure what she expected, apart from the floor to open and engulf her after being confronted by the daughter of the Earl of Uskdale in a flowered apron and a sewing dress, two years old. She was seized in Hugo's bearlike embrace and lifted clear of the floor, but Sybil did not seem to pay the least attention to her embarrassment. She had no eyes for anyone but Hugo. Henrietta had time to note the soft shine in her ice-blue eyes as she patted and prodded her exhibit, straightening non-existent tunic creases and flicking imaginary specks of dust from the frogging. And then, to make bad worse, Adam had to come downstairs, pause on reaching hall level and exclaim, "Lord God Almighty! What's he joined, a German band?" and she could have cracked him over the head with the sewing-room door-stop. Luckily his daughter-in-law was not only blind to everyone, but Hugo but deaf to opinions that he looked anything but every inch a soldier. Then Adam moved all the way round him in a cautious circle and said, "That's a City of London badge, isn't it?" Lady Sybil said that it was, and that Hugo was now a member of the Inns of Court Volunteer Company.
"But how does that come about?" he protested, giving Henrietta a chance to doff her apron and stuff it behind a row of leather fire buckets that stood alongside the stair cupboard. "He's not reading law, is he?"
"Oh, I managed that easily enough," Lady Sybil said, implying that she could, if she wished, secure Hugo a seat in Kruger's war cabinet. "All it needed was a word here and a push there, and here he is, come to say his good-byes before joining General Gatacre's staff as a supernumerary. We're both sailing on the Empress of India the day after tomorrow."
"You're going too?" Henrietta gasped.
"The entire nursing unit is going," confirmed Sybil. "Eighty-six of us, not counting the surgeons. Daddy telephoned me before it was released to the newspapers."
"But Hugo has had no training for staff work, has he?" asked Adam, whose face still expressed incredulity. "He's only fooled about in the Yeomanry."
"Does one need training for a post of that kind?"
"Well, military men are in two minds as to that, my dear," said Adam, his features relaxing somewhat.
Lady Sybil said, "I daresay they'll see you get trained in the field, Hugo. And now…" she turned her best hospital-fete smile on the cringing Henrietta, "I really would like a cup of that nice China tea you gave us when Hugo first brought me here, and we've at least an hour for a gossip, because we aren't due at the Overseas Comforts concert until ten o'clock, and that will give us plenty of time to change. It's a nuisance really but I did promise to appear."
It was not Henrietta's idea of a gossip. She hardly contributed a word and Hugo said very little, but sat there beaming at his wife as she described in detail how she had set the stage for Hugo's debut as a national hero. When they were leaving, and Hugo embraced her again, Henrietta shed a tear or two, for the bovine Hugo had always seemed the most helpless of her sons. But then she reflected that he was in extremely capable hands and Lady Sybil's manipulations would almost certainly ensure that he climbed the military ladder at twice the speed of his brother Alex.
Adam, it seemed, had more sombre thoughts as they watched the brougham sweep round the curve that ran between the leafless limes to the gate. "I don't know, I never did credit Hugo with much grey matter, but I would have thought he had sense enough to stay clear of that shambles. That woman's a menace. And to think I urged the boy to marry her!"
"She's obviously very much in love with him," Henrietta said.
But he replied, glumly, "Is she? Is that love? I don't think it is. Not our kind of love, at all events. She's using him as a kind of reflector, something to catch the public's eye and bend it in her direction," and he withdrew to his study without another word.
3
He could talk to Giles, had always been able to talk to him ever since he was a boy, with his nose stuck in all those heavy tomes in the library and his flow of questions about the meaning of existence.
Giles and Romayne were among the Christmas visitors, and Romayne was far gone with child and seemingly happily settled in that Welsh valley where Giles had at last found anchorage. He used this as an opening gambit when they took a walk together on the last afternoon of the old century, climbing the spur behind the house and crossing the bracken-clad slope towards the river that fed Adam's lily ponds. He said, "That wife of yours, boy, she seems to have found contentment that eluded her all this time. I must say I never realised she was genuinely interested in social reform. To be honest, I always saw it as a bit of a fad."
"I don't think she's more than marginally involved in politics," his son told him, "or not in the way Debbie is. You're right about her adjusting, however. Our relationship has changed in Wales. I'm not saying we were unhappy before but… well… she always seemed to me to be looking for something."
"Want to tell me?"
"If I can."
They walked on down the gentle slope to the river where it split into two streams to form the islet that Henrietta always thought of as Shallott, a grey-haired man, born in George IV's reign, and his serious-faced son of thirty-four, who always seemed detached from everybody around him.
"She's identified with me now," Giles said, "in a way that's almost miraculous. Or so it appears from my standpoint. It was she who brought it about, you see, something she did without prompting from anyone, and it's made a place for her that didn't exist before. Given her a clearly defined purpose, I suppose, that was missing all the years she was growing up surrounded by lackeys and neglected by that old devil of a father. I've got to win that seat, if only for her."
"How do you rate your chances?"
"Fair to middling. Better now that I've taken L.G.'s line on the wa
r."
"How can that be? It's a very unpopular line, isn't it?"
"Not among my people. They've been an oppressed minority for generations and some of them see Kruger as a South African Llewellyn, fighting for freedom. L.G., and all the other pro-Boer Liberals, have had a very rough ride these last few months, but I haven't. I've had some rousing meetings and our party machinery improves all the time. If I don't win the next election, I'll win the one after that, once reaction sets in and people begin to see that L.G.'s line was the right one. This jingo mood isn't a natural one for the British. By and large they're a fair-minded lot when they're sober. Right now, of course, most of them are blind drunk."
It was a good enough analogy, Adam thought, approving his son's clearheadedness. He said, pausing for breath and looking between the willows at the winter flood swirling round the butt end of the islet on its way to the sea, "By God, I've seen a thing or two in my time, since I was a boy growing up in the fells. Railways lacing the country. Trade figures multiplying fifty times over. The nation swelling itself up like the frog in the fable and edging everyone else out of the sun. It took Rome five centuries to do what the British have done since Waterloo, yet how long is it in terms of the calendar? Eighty-five years. Just over a single life-span. Would you believe I once saw a poor devil hanged in Carlisle for setting fire to a barn? When I fought my first skirmish in India, Germany, as we know it today, didn't exist, and most of America was a desert. It's the pace that makes one dizzy. The entire cast of society has been broken and remade since those days. Everyone's expectations are upgraded, even those of your miners, although you probably wouldn't get them to admit there had been much change in their standard of living. There has, tho', and I don't know where it began, exactly. Was it with steam-power and greater mobility? Or with the emergence of trade unions? Or with Gladstone's compulsory education acts? Or a social conscience among an elite minority, with leisure and time to digest the philosophy of Tom Paine and company? Damned if I could pinpoint it, or predict its future course. It's like that river there, made up of a hundred streams welling out of the hills until it's strong enough to carry everything along. Can you make a guess where we're heading, lad?"
"I try every time I make a speech or finish a canvass," Giles said, smiling, "but I come up with different answers once a week. I suppose it depends on the calibre of the men on top, and what kind of course they've set themselves."
"What course are you setting after midnight? The end of a century is a good time for stocktaking, isn't it? Not at my time of life, mind, but certainly at yours."
"To adapt the new technologies to the needs of the average man, woman, and child, I'd say. That's the heart of the problem. All those innovations you've been spouting at me aren't worth a damn if all they do is to help make rich men richer, and are used to browbeat sixty thousand Boer farmers into changing their way of life to please diamond diggers and gold prospectors. You can only work, argue, and fight within the law. The law's very far from perfect and still bears down on the majority, but less than it did. And, anyway, it's a lot better than a street full of people throwing bricks at one another."
They took the short way home across the bridge and through the five-acre ornamental landscape Adam had conjured out of the two paddocks, a few coppices, and some rough pasture. He was silent as they climbed the rise, but as they emerged in the forecourt he said, thoughtfully, "We'll be lifting our glasses tonight, when the village bells ring the old year out and the twentieth-century in. I don't know what the others will be drinking to, but I'll raise my glass to you, boy. At least two of us speak the same language, and that's a comfort for a man with a family as big as mine."
He went in, reminding himself that it was less than just for a father to acknowledge a family favourite, but how could one avoid a preference, with five sons and four daughters of such diversity? He had a flash of insight then, concerning this particular son, his wife, and that child in her belly, and all three acquired special significance in relation to this mellow corner of England that he had shaped and made his own, in a way that the network was not and never would be a durable monument to him. Alex had his career and George the business. Hugo had that extraordinary wife dancing attendance on him, and the girls had their husbands and families. Something told him it was Giles and his successors who would live here some day when he was dust, and maybe some of them would come to think of it as he was beginning to think of it, the only worthwhile legacy one generation could pass to another. Land, and what grew on it; contours, cunningly adapted to the eternal round of seasonal colours that nothing could change or distort, no matter how many cleverdicks came forward with their inventions. It comforted him somehow, a conviction that continuity was attainable, providing a man had patience to keep striving for it.
Four
Sacrifice to Dagon
It was deemed a signal honour to ride on reconnaissance with Montmorency. The Empire, woefully short of heroes of late, had plugged holes in the Pantheon Wall with a hotchpotch of newcomers. Small fry, by yesterday's standards. Captains, sergeants, pipers, and even bugler boys, but welcome none the less under the present humiliating circumstances.
Captain the Hon. R. H. L. J. de Montmorency was at the apex of this improvised pyramid, having, so to speak, secured a year's start over his competitors by winning the V.C. serving with the 21st Lancers, in Kitchener's Sudan campaign in '98, and since added other dashing exploits to his credit, so that his name was familiar to the readers of every penny journal in London. It followed that anyone who rode with him was shortlisted for reflected glory.
Glory, after such a laggardly start, was rallying out here along the farflung battlefront. Times were already on the mend when Hugo landed at East London and trekked northwest through Queenstown, to the sector where General Gatacre was doing his best to wipe out the shame of earlier defeats on the central front. He was having some success, too, or so it was rumoured along the route. The Boer generals, De la Rey and Schoeman, were already giving ground and falling back to the north, the price paid for their inexplicable failure to exploit the rout of the British in this area when the tide of invasion lapped into Cape Colony.
The enemy moved slowly, however, far too slowly for Gatacre, who was now deploying his cavalry to chivvy them as the main offensive developed on the right flank. When Hugo received orders to ride ahead with Montmorency's column, he was delighted, not so much because Montmorency was a popular leader, but because he had a suspicion that the long and purposeful arm of Lady Sybil would soon reach out from her field hospital at Queenstown and keep him out of Mauser range of the Boers while he was, as she herself had put it, "easing himself in," a phrase that suggested a cushy billet well behind the lines.
He was not to know that his selection for a forward post was the direct result of a message Gatacre's chief of staff had received from the daughter of the Earl of Uskdale, informing him that the famous athlete she had married, and shipped out here along with her nursing unit, had no aptitude for paperwork and would need careful coaching. It was an unfortunate admission, so far as Lady Sybil was concerned. A staff officer, mounting a massive advance against an alert enemy, was not likely to fancy the job of coach to civilians in uniform, and merely did what seemed to him the next best thing for a serving officer sponsored by the daughter of an earl. He attached Hugo to a proven hero, reasoning that this was the shortest route to newspaper acclaim and likely to please the lady concerned. Only that day he had received news that the Boers were pulling out at Bloemfontein. A token rearguard resistance was the worst Montmorency's column were likely to meet while feeling their way across the Kissieberg hills to Stormberg Junction.
Like so many others in the great arc of Imperialists between the Orange River and the Tugela that winter, Gatacre's reckoning was seriously at fault. The Boers were moving back certainly, and faster than his intelligence had deduced, but they were determined to make the British pay for any gains they made. Montmorency's column rode headlong into a well-laid
ambush that emptied fifty saddles at the first volley, and the survivors, milling about in the wildest confusion, could not see so much as a hat to aim at after they had galloped for cover.
Hugo had been enjoying the ride up to that moment. Half-dozing in the saddle, he jogged along, dreaming of conquests past and yet to come, seeing his presence here as little more than an exciting interlude in a lifetime of pot-hunting. He did not share the general view that an athlete approaching his thirtieth year was past his prime and should be casting about for the means of acquiring other laurels. After all, he was neither a sprinter nor a leaper, and long-distance runners often continued to compete well into middle age. An Italian, over forty, had just won the marathon at an international meeting.
Then, in a sustained crackle of rifle fire that reached him like the flare up of dry sticks on a fire, he was jerked back into the present, with wounded and riderless horses cavorting past him in all directions, dismounted troopers looming out of the flurry of dust, and Mauser bullets going over him like a swarm of bees.
He did what seemed the only thing to do, wheeling and dashing for the nearest cover, a scatter of low rocks at the foot of a broken hill on his immediate right, and when he got there, flinging himself to the ground and making a grab at his horse's bridle, he was astonished at the scene of chaos that presented itself, not only along the track ahead, but right here, in the shelter of the rocks.
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