Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  When the trap began to descend to the river, however, he cheered up, reflecting that he had left Smut something to think about and to hope for and then he glanced curiously at the boy sitting on the box beside him, thinking, ‘Well, Grace and the avant-garde can sneer as much as they like but there is some point in my being here! Would the Lovells have given Smut Potter a second thought? And would this boy Ikey be getting a sporting chance? She might have originated the idea but she didn’t stay and see it through!’ and he went on to ponder the Eveleighs at Four Winds and Will and Elinor’s success at Periwinkle and then smiled at himself for seeking personal reassurance in a balance-sheet of good works. ‘Are you scared of going to a real school?’ he asked, suddenly, and to his surprise and slight embarrassment the boy gathered up the reins and brought the colt to a sudden halt. He turned and met Paul’s enquiring gaze steadily and Paul realised, for the first time, how greatly he had matured in the last two or three years. His skin, once fish-belly pale, was brown and healthy, his eyes were clear and his hair neatly cut, so that there was about him an air of confidence altogether different from the perkiness of the scrapyard urchin.

  ‘Yes, Mr Craddock, sir,’ he said, ‘I’m scared all right but you don’t have to worry, I won’t let you down, sir! The tutor told me all the new boys got ragged and that I’m not to mind because it’s an old English custom!’

  He had lost, Paul noted, all traces of his thin Cockney accent and it came as rather a shock to realise that he had almost forgotten the poor little devil during his own troubles. The boy, he thought, could hold his own anywhere, for the toughness and resilience of the street Arab was still there under the looks and manners of a conventional lad on the point of exchanging prep school for public school. He said, as though to excuse his recent neglect, ‘Well, I’ve had troubles of my own lately as you’ve probably heard and that’s the reason why I appeared to lose interest in what you were doing over at the crammer’s. You remember it was Mrs Craddock’s idea that you went in the first place?’

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said, ‘I’m not likely to forget that, sir,’ and then more hesitantly, ‘Will she ever be coming back, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ikey, probably not,’ he said gruffly, and Ikey taking the hint, shook out the reins and they moved down from the moor to the swollen Sorrel in a rather embarrassed silence.

  Wild daffodils and yellow iris showed on the margins of the half-flooded meadows and the blackbirds were noisy in the Hermitage thickets. The sun, which seemed to have been away visiting another solar system since autumn, had returned to play a spring game with the darting current, and a bay hunter, out to grass on the Four Winds side of the stream, whinnied a casual greeting to the cob, before throwing up her heels and galloping madly across the levels. Paul said, ‘Tell me, Ikey, are you ever homesick for London now?’ and the boy replied, ‘No, sir, never! I don’t think I should ever want to go there again. This is my home now, sir.’

  ‘Me too,’ Paul said and the kinship that had been born during their first ride down this road during the coronation summer, suddenly reasserted itself as he thought, ‘I must write to Uncle Franz and find out more about the boy. If there’s a likelihood of Grace coming back, I’m damned if I won’t think about adopting him officially for he is the only soul about here who shares my feeling for the Valley and that makes him a kind of heir!’ They said no more until they were passing under the long park wall for each was absorbed in the familiarity of the scene, the swift river and stretch of meadows to the right, the sweep of Priory Wood to the left. Then Paul said, ‘There’s something else, Ikey, I don’t know whether your tutor mentioned it but at a school like High Wood they will expect you to have some kind of domestic background. Did he ever talk to you about that?’

  ‘He did mention it, sir, but said it was a matter for you and Mrs Craddock.’

  Paul considered. He was confident that Ikey would pass muster in all outward respects but he recalled his own limitations as an officer in the Yeomanry, reflecting that there was no accounting for the graduations of the English caste system and the snobberies it spawned but there it was and one either accepted it or withdrew from the game altogether.

  ‘Do you ever write to your own parents, Ikey? Do you keep in touch with them?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t,’ said the boy, unsentimentally.

  ‘All right,’ said Paul, ‘then we shall have to do a bit of bluffing. Sooner or later the subject of your family is bound to crop up. Did you have any story in mind?’

  The boy grinned, suddenly an urchin again, and said, ‘Well, yes, sir! I was going to say my guv’nor was dead, and my mother was still living abroad. Could I say that you were … well … a kind of cousin, looking after me over here?’

  ‘You can do better than that,’ Paul said, laughing, ‘you can tell them I’m your stepbrother and official British guardian. The word “guardian” always seems to impress the snobs somehow. Would you like to do that?’

  ‘I would, and thank you, sir.’

  ‘Well, then that’s settled. When you leave on Tuesday do you want me to take you to school, and see you settled in?’

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, no, sir,’ Ikey said unexpectedly. ‘I’d sooner take the plunge on my own, sir.’

  Paul glanced at him, noting the set of the jaw and his mind returned to the child’s gallantry and initiative on the night Codsall had hanged himself. ‘By God,’ he thought, ‘that snob school is lucky to get him, even though he might be the product of a drunken docker and a Hungarian emigrant!’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘that’s something for you to decide but I’ll drive you as far as Paxtonbury in the brougham. We must have the brougham for an occasion like that!’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Ikey said, ‘I should like that, in case any of the High Wood chaps are going by the same train.’

  ‘Any of the High Wood chaps,’ thought Paul, grinning. ‘Damn it, he’s half-way home already!’ and they turned in at the gates and set the cob at the steep drive.

  IV

  As it turned out it was Chivers, the groom, who drove Ikey to Paxtonbury in the brougham that warm spring day for Paul was already on his way to London. Celia’s telegram arrived the night before, delivered by a perspiring telegraph boy who had cycled all the way from Whinmouth, but it told Paul very little. ‘Essential you are in London early morning of the third,’ it said. ‘Will meet 10.40 a.m. from Paxtonbury, Love Celia.’ That was all and Paul had to make what he could of it, reshuffling his programme, saying good-bye to Ikey and catching the main-line train at Sorrel Halt. Celia had a carriage waiting for him at Waterloo and he was in her town house in Devonshire Square by late afternoon finding that he was expected to stay the night, for Celia had arranged his meeting with Grace at seven-fifteen the following morning.

  ‘Where and why so early?’ he demanded but the Frenchman Daladier was present and he did not press the enquiry after Celia’s warning glance. They ate dinner together, making polite conversation and afterwards the Frenchman, who seemed to live on the premises, wandered off into the billiard-room. As soon as they were alone she said, urgently, ‘Pierre knows nothing about the real reason for you coming and I don’t want him involved, you understand? He’s practising here now, and any kind of scandal would injure him. I won’t have that happen, Paul!’

  It was not, he reflected, the Celia who had received him at Coombe Bay in January, but a taut, nervous woman, manifestly irritated by the situation. He said, seeking to reassure her, ‘There’s no reason why either of you should be involved. Just tell me what kind of arrangement you’ve made with Grace.’

  ‘I haven’t made any arrangement with her,’ she said, sharply. ‘I haven’t set eyes on the little fool since I paid her fine at the police court, a day or so before I saw you in Devon! The fact is … she’s in Holloway Prison at this moment!’

  ‘Holloway Prison? For suffragist offences? Good God, Celia,
what the devil has she been up to now?’

  Celia looked as if she was about to cry. ‘I’ve had the greatest trouble keeping it from him,’ she wailed, ‘he’s a very perceptive man and I daresay he’s guessed the truth but he’s very tactful and hasn’t brought it into the open.’ She looked at Paul defiantly and he noticed that she was vulnerable and beginning to look her age. There were wrinkles under her eyes that he had never noticed before and the skin of her neck was slack. Suddenly he felt sorry for her, sorry but at the same time grateful, for it was obvious that a decision to get him to London had involved her in risks she did not care to take and that her fear of involving her lover by public scandal was real. He said, ‘Look here, Mrs Lovell, don’t think I’m unappreciative of what you’ve done. Just give me the facts and then let me go to a hotel. I’ll see you aren’t involved in any way. After all, this is my responsibility, not yours. How long has Grace been in gaol? And what did she go there for this time?’

  She said, only slightly reassured, ‘There is a very militant section of this suffragist movement led by that dreadful woman Pankhurst and her daughters. It seems that Grace is one of the most irresponsible of them, she and a woman from the North, called Kenny. You must have read about them in the papers?’

  Paul said, shortly, ‘The last I read about them they were organising a petition to the Opposition leaders, to Campbell-Bannerman­, I believe, but Grenfell tells me they’ll get even less change from him than from Balfour!’

  ‘That’s so,’ she said, ‘but they have begun to picket the big Liberal meetings in the provinces. Up in Manchester, a month or so ago, Grace and some others climbed into a loft over the platform of a hall when Churchill was speaking. They had banners that they let down when the meeting started and were thrown out neck and crop, as you would expect them to be.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Most of them went meekly enough but Grace didn’t. She hit a policeman with an umbrella and was later charged with resisting arrest. She was put on probation but would you believe it she did the same thing two days later down here and this time they sentenced her to a month without the option! She comes out early tomorrow. That’s why I sent for you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you send for me straightaway?’

  ‘What good would that have done? She had legal representation in court and he couldn’t stop her going to prison!’

  ‘I can’t understand how I didn’t hear about it,’ he said, ‘it must have been in all the papers.’

  ‘She was charged under a different name. She didn’t use yours or her father’s. She used her mother’s name, “Philimore” and I don’t know what her grandfather, the canon, would have said about it if he had been living!’

  ‘You’ve written to her?’

  ‘Yes, I have but she didn’t even answer. I told her that I’d seen you and that you were anxious to talk things over, and asked if I should get in touch with you. Listen, Paul …’ she spoke with a kind of desperation, ‘if you like, you … you can bring her back here! I’ll get Pierre to take me to the races and if you could keep her out of the way until midday, you are welcome to do that! All I ask is for time to get Pierre away before she arrives. The French can be even more censorious about this kind of thing than the English, and I just won’t face the risk of losing him, you understand? I’ve got a right to my happiness. God knows, I earned it, with Bruce Lovell!’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ he said, thinking of John Rudd’s comment about the Lovell streak and the misery it introduced into the lives of everyone associated with them, ‘but I won’t risk bringing her here. I’ll take her straight home. It was very good of you to go to so much trouble and I’m not sure that either of us deserve it!’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ Celia said, ‘but I don’t know why you should blame yourself! Millions of women would consider themselves lucky to have had her chance and I can’t forgive myself for bullying you into marrying her.’

  He smiled at that. ‘Nobody had to bully me into marrying Grace Lovell,’ he said, ‘I made up my mind to marry her the first time I saw her. As to blame, I must have gone wrong somewhere or other or perhaps there wasn’t a chance from the beginning. I’ve got Simon, and he’s part of her, and in spite of what you think I’ve got some pleasant memories.’

  He kissed her for the first time as a friend and not a relative and it amused him to see the effect, for at once she shrugged off her despondency and said, ‘Let’s join Pierre in a drink. If he asks after Grace say something pleasantly noncommittal,’ and they went into the billiard-room where the big Frenchman was potting with what appeared to Paul to be the expertise of a professional. He was a heavy-jowled, phlegmatic man, more like a middle-class Englishman than a Frenchman and it was difficult to see what an elegant, fastidious woman like Celia found so engaging about him. Then it was obvious, for the surgeon put up his cue, took her hand and raised it deliberately to his lips and Celia smiled over his head and for a moment looked almost girlish. She said, ‘My son-in-law has to be away very early. Would you like a drink before he goes up, Pierre?’ The surgeon looked at him very carefully, as though assessing his chances of surviving a tricky operation and Paul thought, ‘He knows quite well why I’m here but he’s probably got hundreds of more important secrets in his head!’ They drank brandy and soda together and Paul left them listening to a scratchy Mendelssohn recording on Celia’s latest extravagance, an Edison Bell phonograph. The tinny (and to Paul, wholly unmusical) sounds penetrated as far as the first landing. It was not solely his instinctive recoil from mechanical contrivances that made him aware of the mockery of the song.

  She came out of a little wicket-door that might have been the twin of the one by which Paul had entered Paxtonbury Gaol and it was of Smut Potter’s shrunken frame and mountebank garb that he thought as he saw her stand uncertainly under the great stone gate, a pitiful little figure against a blank and grotesque background. Then, with a sob, he dodged between carts and cabs and ran across the shining wet surface of the road towards her, expecting to see her stiffen with surprise but she did not seem in any way agog at his presence but merely smiled, politely rather than joyfully, and said, with her customary containment, ‘I thought it would be you, Paul. Celia isn’t very good at concealing things, is she? Have you got a cab?’

  He told her a cab was waiting across the road and asked if she had had breakfast.

  ‘A sort of breakfast,’ she said, casually. ‘Smut Potter might have kept it down but I couldn’t!’ and a sensation of pity and desolation engulfed him, so that for a moment he felt sick and dizzy and must have showed it, for she took his hand and piloted him across the road to the side-street where the cab waited. It was an old victoria and the interior smelt like a neglected tack-room. He called to the cabby, ‘Anywhere! Back to the West End,’ and they moved off at a trot, sitting isolated from one another, like a young couple having a tiff and waiting for each other to capitulate. After a few moments he had mastered himself sufficiently to look at her, deciding with relief that she did not seem to have changed much in the months that had passed since they had parted. If twenty-eight days in Holloway had marked her in any way there was no outward sign of it. Her skin had the same wax-like transparency, her hair was neatly if plainly dressed, and her eyes, reflecting the glint of morning sun after the dawn showers, were still hard and clear and blue.

  He said at length, ‘I only heard you were there last night. I came up here expecting Celia to give me an address,’ and when she made no reply, ‘She promised to arrange a meeting between us as long ago as last January; I’ve been waiting to hear ever since.’

  She turned suddenly, swinging her small, compact body at right angles to him and looking at him with a kind of desperate resignation.

  ‘I’m not coming back, Paul! You might as well know that at once! It was good of you to come, and I’m glad to see you, but I’m not coming back, for your sake as much as mine!’

  It came as no re
al surprise but it had plenty of power to wound. ‘We can at least discuss it, can’t we?’ he muttered, fighting to keep the note of pleading from his voice.

  ‘We can talk like civilised human beings, I suppose, but only until ten. After that I’ve got to report to H.Q.’

  ‘Report?’ he said savagely. ‘What the devil do you mean, “report”? Are you a private in some kind of army? Whoever you have to “report” to can wait! We’re still husband and wife and I’ve neither seen you nor heard of you in almost a year.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said quietly, ‘but I still have to report. And we are an army, fighting impossible odds. That’s why every individual counts.’

  He could not trust himself to reply at once and they bowled along in silence for three or four minutes. Then he said, sourly, ‘I don’t begin to understand you, Grace! Anyone can be absorbed in an abstract idea but not to the extent of throwing everything life has to offer on to the rubbish heap! You’ve got a home and a child, even if I count for nothing, and you’ll never persuade me that you weren’t happy down there most of the time! I’ll concede the right of women to vote, I’ve never seriously challenged it but it can’t be this important! Nothing can!’

  ‘What about your own “abstract idea”, Paul?’

  ‘Shallowford? That’s entirely different! It doesn’t hurt anyone and it doesn’t make nonsense of other people’s lives!’

  ‘No, perhaps not,’ she said, as though debating the substance of a breakfast-table remark, ‘but it obsesses you just as much as mine obsesses me.’

  ‘You knew about Shallowford when you married me, Grace. It’s true that I also knew you were interested in women’s suffrage but whereas I made it perfectly clear what I had in mind, you didn’t! You didn’t see fit to warn me that you wanted to spend your life between committee rooms and Holloway!’