Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  That was after they had moved him to a private ward upstairs, a small room where his view was greatly enlarged and he could lie hour upon hour looking across at the great bow of the woods, and the brown, green, drowsing patchwork, between woods and park. By then the tide of pain had receded a very long way, but had been displaced by boredom and acute discomfort, arising from the angle of his leg, slung to the damned gallows at the foot of the bed. Dressings brought pain but also relief from the tedium of lying there alone. If it had not been for the magnificent view he would, he thought, have died of boredom. Yet there were adequate compensations. The leg, they told him, had been saved after all, and although the surgeon warned him that he would almost certainly suffer a permanent disability resulting from partial atrophy of the joint, it would not be much more than stiffness and he would walk with a slight limp, and could certainly ride; in fact, the more exercise he took the better. He had, they said, been extraordinarily lucky, not solely to have escaped amputation above the knee but to be alive at all. His cure, they explained, was due to a third operation performed by one of the most brilliant surgeons in the country, brought here at enormous cost at the insistance of a Mr Franz Zorndorff, some five days after his arrival from South Africa. He noticed that they all spoke of Mr Zorndorff with awe and this puzzled him, for all he recalled was a secretive and rather flashy little Austrian Jew who, during his boyhood and youth, had been in close partnership with his father.

  They let him ponder this for a day or so and then, with every manifestation of sympathy, they broke the news that his father had died the day he had landed in England. He was shocked by the news but not overwhelmed. He had not seen his father in almost three years and, on the last occasion they had met before he embarked for South Africa, their mutual antipathy, so long banked down by mutual distrust, had flared into a shouting match, with Joshua Craddock calling his son every kind of a fool to stick his nose into the Imperial quarrel, and Paul talking a good deal of vainglorious nonsense about his patriotic duty to assist in the chastening of Kruger and Kruger’s Bible-thumping farmers. Since then there had been a letter or two, and an occasional draft of money after his commissioning, but no exchange of affection, no show of warmth on the part of either one of them.

  After they had left him with what they imagined to be his grief Paul found that, for the first time in his life, he could think of his father impersonally, a big, broad-shouldered, taciturn man, with a squarish face, deliberate hands, a large, walrus moustache, a deep voice that disguised a Bermondsey accent, and above all, a baffling inaccessibility due, as Paul now realised, to his obsession with business affairs that never seemed to bring him any real satisfaction for all the time he lavished on them. He had never, for instance, told Paul anything of his mother, who had died when the child was five, or how it came that he, Joshua, had fought his way from the top strata of the artisan class, a plumber with two or three men in his employ, to that of city merchant, or a kind of city merchant, for Paul had no knowledge of how his father earned a living, apart from some connection with scrap metals near the centre of his original endeavours as a plumber. It seemed to him, lying trussed up under this infernal gallows, a very strange thing that he should know so little about his family, particularly as Joshua had been insistent that he should come into the business on leaving the undistinguished little private school, where he had been sent as a boarder when he was eight years old. He had resisted this pressure solely because he had a strong disinclination to work in an office under artificial light, and had dismayed his father by announcing his intention of entering the artillery. He had already made application for entry to Woolwich when the war offered all young men a chance of immediate service overseas. One of the few accomplishments he had learned at the pretentious little school he attended (Joshua, in his ignorance, had always referred to it as ‘a public school’) was how to sit a horse, so that it had been easy, under the impetus of Black Week and its humiliating defeats, to join the Yeomanry. Later, because of the gaps torn in the ranks by the enteric fever epidemic, it had been almost as easy to get a temporary commission, but for all that he had not seen much active service. By the time his training period had expired the war had degenerated into ding-dong encounters between patrols and Boer Commandos and it was in one of these scuffles that he had received his wound. Before that, however, he had changed his mind about a military career. He was unable, he discovered, to take pleasure in harassing the wretched Veldt farmers and their families, and it was not long before doubts obscured his vision of Imperial infallibility. He wondered sometimes, what he would do with his life now that a gammy leg barred him from most outdoor occupations, yet his prospects did not dominate his thoughts during the earliest stage of his convalescence, when he was learning to walk again on sticks and a network of lines rigged along the terrace. What occupied his mind more often was the curious deference shown him, not only by the volunteer nurses but the Countess, the Chief Medical Officer, and the junior physicians. It puzzled him, for instance, that he alone, apart from one or two high-ranking casualties, had a room to himself, and also that any request he made—for a book, a magazine, or a variation of hospital diet—was granted, when in the crowded general wards below other junior officers, especially the non-professionals like himself, were treated like tiresome children and reacted accordingly, cursing the impulse that had involved them in a war for which many serving soldiers now felt a slight disgust, causing them to ask themselves if, after all, the pro-Boer Lloyd George and his following had not been justified in condemning the adventure from the outset.

  He found the key to all this within a few minutes of receiving his first visit from Franz Zorndorff.

  The little man strode on to the terrace unannounced about a week after Paul had been allowed downstairs. He was not wearing his city clothes today but had got himself up in what he imagined to be correct country-house attire, a pepper-and-salt Norfolk suit, a wide grey cravat with a diamond pin, and a billycock hat sporting a pheasant’s feather. The staff made way for him as though he had been the Emperor of Japan or, at the very least, a racegoing friend of the new king, Edward. He seated himself in a creaking basket chair and opened his pigskin attaché case, producing a sheaf of papers tied with pink tape.

  ‘Delighted to see you’re making such excellent progress, my boy!’ he began, gaily. ‘We’ve a little signing to do first of all. I trust you read all the letters the solicitors sent on?’

  ‘No,’ Paul admitted, a little irritated by Zorndorff’s brashness and the fact that he made no mention at all of his partner’s death. ‘I began to read them but I found it difficult to concentrate. You wrote promising you would come over soon, so I decided I’d ask you to summarise them. They looked damned dull to a man who has read nothing heavier than the Strand Magazine for three years.’

  He saw to his amusement that he had succeeded in disconcerting the Jew, who now looked somewhat startled and then, recovering himself, uttered a short, neighing laugh.

  ‘Then you won’t know? Unless, of course, the whisper has gone round, as I rather thought it might!’

  Paul asked him to explain, adding that visitors were only allowed a bare half-hour before the bell rang and the terrace had to be cleared.

  ‘Oh, don’t concern yourself over that!’ Zorndorff said, contemptuously, ‘I’ve tamed everybody in this charnel-house, including that fraud of a matron! They won’t shoo me out, I can assure you!’ And then, placing his shapely hands on his knees and looking directly at Paul, he added, ‘You’ll probably be surprised at the extent of your patrimony. I was myself, somewhat, although I realised of course that Josh spent very little over the years. That was his trouble, I think; he could never cease to think in sixpences, or free himself from the notion that he was still waiting on a plumber’s harvest—a hard frost that is!’

  ‘You haven’t told me how my father died,’ Paul said, not altogether liking the half-veiled patronage of the man yet understanding now why h
e had been treated as a favoured patient.

  The Jew lost a little of his ebullience. He said, seriously, ‘I suppose I owe it to you to admit that Josh Craddock died fulfilling what he imagined an obligation to me. As to the facts, he killed himself heaving a two hundredweight water-cistern from a cart!’ He hissed through his teeth, one of the few Continental habits he had retained after forty years in England. ‘Imagine that! Josh Craddock, with cash and assets totalling something like forty-thousand pounds, killing himself to help a lazy oaf of a carter empty a cart!’

  The figure stunned him, and Zorndorff, enjoying the confusion his casual announcement caused, smiled as he waited for Craddock to recover a little. The Jew had a well-stocked wardrobe of smiles; this was an occasion for his thin one. He said, finally, ‘Well, and how much did you think he was worth?’

  Never having given any thought to the matter, Paul guessed, reckoning the ugly house in Croydon, at £750 and his father’s share of the business at about £3,000. ‘Certainly not more than five,’ he said, ‘and hardly any of it in cash! You wouldn’t be having a little quiet fun at my expense, Mr Zorndorff?’

  ‘I don’t joke about money!’ the Austrian said, sharply. ‘As to the estate, I based Joshua’s share of the business on half our last offer to sell, a little over fifteen thousand; the rest is in hard cash, or readily saleable assets, and you are the sole beneficiary. That was something I insisted on when I witnessed the will.’

  He began to forage in his case but Craddock checked him, saying, ‘Never mind the documents, Mr Zorndorff! I should much prefer you to explain, and as simply as you can! Am I to understand that the whole of this sum, including a half-share in the business, comes to me and that I can do as I wish with it?’

  ‘By no means,’ Zorndorff said. ‘Your father remained an artisan all his life but he was no fool. We talked it over and agreed that you should inherit a third share of the business and the whole of the capital sum, but you won’t receive more than five thousand until you are twenty-eight. That last provision was no suggestion of mine!’

  Because Paul still appeared bemused the Jew became a little impatient. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘even you must realise that the coarse metal trade prospers in wartime. We were doing well enough on sub-contracts before the war, but three years ago, when army contracts were put about, we forged ahead in relation to the blunders the generals made over there! I was optimistic from the start but I must confess that even I hardly expected a three-year war. The point is, we seem to be set fair indefinitely for the Kaiser has obliged the trade by entering the naval race. If you applied yourself I daresay you could soon convert your thirty thousand working capital into two hundred thousand.’

  Paul, who had heard nothing but the last few words, said slowly, ‘What the devil do I know of the scrap metal business? Or any business?’

  ‘I would be prepared to teach you,’ the Jew said, earnestly now, and without a trace of patronage. ‘Joshua was the only friend I ever had and I have every intention of paying my debt to him, whether you like it or not, my friend!’

  ‘Then you must find some other way of paying it,’ Paul said, ‘I may be half a cripple, but I’m damned if I intend to devote my life to scrap metal, Mr Zorndorff!’

  The Jew did not seem surprised or disappointed. He looked thoughtful for a moment, drawing his brows together and contemplating his beautifully manicured hands. ‘With that capital you could do almost anything you liked,’ he said, at length. ‘Have you any preferences? Or is it something you would prefer to think about during the time you remain here?’

  Paul said, briefly, ‘First I intend to learn to walk, Mr Zorndorff; properly, without sticks; like any other person, you understand? I think they have exaggerated my disability. In the meantime, would you care to buy me out at any figure you considered fair?’

  The naïveté of the offer stirred Zorndorff. His head shot up and his eyes sparkled as he said, crisply, ‘Be satisfied with your loose change and oblige me by allowing me to fulfil my obligations any way I choose!’ and he stood up so suddenly that Paul made sure he was deeply offended but he was not, for his smile betrayed him and somehow, because of it, Paul was convinced of the man’s fundamental honesty, and of the genuineness of the obligation he felt for the son of the man who had once stood between him and ruin. He said, half apologetically, ‘I know you have my interests at heart, Mr Zorndorff, you have proved that already. I daresay I should have croaked in the general ward without first-class attention but the truth is I never expected this kind of opportunity and it alters everything. I had some idea of farming, in a small way, in one of the Dominions perhaps, but it’s something I need to think about very deeply. I don’t imagine I shall be out of here for a month or more. May I come to you then? Or write, if I form any decision?’

  ‘By all means, by all means,’ Zorndorff said, expansive and avuncular again, and without any gesture of farewell except a vague pat on the shoulder he picked up his case, strolled along the terrace and went down the steps to the carriage park behind the forecourt.

  Paul watched him go, thinking ‘Whatever he does is part of a charade. What could he and a dull dog like my father have had in common? Were they the complement of one another? And was my mother somehow involved in the improbable association?’ His involvement with the dapper, enigmatic Austrian was to endure for another forty years but this was something he never discovered.

  III

  As the weeks passed and the sun continued to beat on the baking façade of the great house, there were many things he discovered about himself and not the least important of them was the durability of the bright crystals of thought left in the recesses of his brain by the long, exhausting fever duel between the static army on the ceiling and the serenity of the view of the park and downland, seen through the windows of the two wards he had occupied. Somehow the latter came to represent his future, and all that was pleasant and rewarding in life, and he saw it not simply as a pleasing vista of fields, woods and browsing cattle, but as a vision of the England he had remembered and yearned for out there on the scorching veldt. And this, in itself, was strange, for he was city born and bred, and although he had never shared the Cockney’s pride in the capital neither had he been conscious, as a boy, of a closer affinity with the woods and hedgerows of the farmland on the Kent-Surrey border, where he had spent his childhood and boyhood. Yet the pull existed now, and it was a very strong pull, as though he owed his life to nectar sucked from the flowers growing wild out there across the dreaming fields near the rim of the woods, and with this half-certainty came another—that it was in a setting like this that he must let the years rescued for him unwind, yielding some kind of fulfilment or purpose. He had never had thoughts like this before and it occurred to him that pain, and a prolonged flirtation with death, had matured him in a way that had been leap-frogged by the other convalescents, many of whom had had more shattering experiences in the field. Some the war had left cynical and a few, among them the permanently maimed, bitter, but all the regular officers seemed to have emerged from the war with their prejudices intact and talked of little else but sport, women, and the military lessons learned from the campaigns. They continued, Paul thought, to regard England as a jumping-off ground for an eternal summer holiday in the sun among lesser breeds, looking to them and the Empire for protection and economic stability, but had little or no sense of kinship with the sun-drenched fields beyond the terrace, or the chawbacons seen toiling there, taking advantage of the Coronation weather to cut and stack the long grass. He began to keep very much to himself, reading and browsing through the long afternoons on the terrace, and it was here, about a fortnight after Zorndorff’s visit, that he came across the two-page advertisement in the Illustrated London News that gave him at least a glimmering of an idea concerning his future.

  It was a detailed announcement of the forthcoming sale by auction of a thirteen hundred acre Westcountry estate, owned by a family called
Lovell, that seemed to have been very hard-hit by Boer marksmanship, for the heir, Hubert Lovell, had been killed at Modder River after winning a Victoria Cross, and his brother, Ralph, in a skirmish outside Pretoria. Their father, Sir George Lovell, had been a considerable landowner, with other and larger estates in Cumberland and Scotland, and the Devon manor-house, the home farm and five tenant farms, together with areas of surrounding woodland and common, were destined to come under the hammer at the end of the month unless disposed of, either as whole or in parcels, by private treaties.

  It was an impressive and, he would judge, an expensive advertisement, for there were pictures of the house and the three dead Lovells, and a potted history of the family. The house looked impressive but neglected, a sprawling, porticoed building, built on the shallow ledge of a long slope crowned by woods, and seemed to Paul to be mainly Tudor, with Carolean or Georgian extensions east and west. It was approached by a sharply curving tree-lined drive and had clusters of spiralling chimneys that he associated with Elizabethan buildings. It looked squat, comfortable, weatherbeaten and commodious but it was not, in the first instance, the house that attracted his attention, so much as descriptions of the outlying farms, each of between four hundred and two hundred acres. The agents handling the sale announced that they would be open to separate sales of these properties, each of which had its own farmhouse and farm-buildings, and their names read like an Arcadian rent-roll—Four Winds, The Hermitage, Deepdene, High Coombe and Low Coombe.

  The oval portraits of the three Lovells interested him. The old man, Sir George, was a bearded, heavy-featured man, with bulging eyes and, Paul would judge, a sensual, bullying mouth. He looked more like an evangelist than a country squire. His elder son, Hubert, was handsome in an unremarkable and slightly effeminate way, with a smooth face and rather vacuous expression, whereas Ralph, the younger boy, was an almost comic caricature of a Regency rake, with his sulky mouth, mop of dark, unruly hair, and an expression that suggested wilfulness and a certain amount of dash.