‘But they always seemed contented enough,’ Paul argued. ‘Why should they want to go off and get shot at?’
‘You did it yourself once, didn’t you?’ John reminded him, ‘but this time it’s more than high spirits and boredom, I fancy. For a century or more we’ve been telling everyone we’re top nation and now we look like having to prove it.’
Paul said, ‘Come, John, you heard what Grenfell said; there’s no chance of us being involved, except as mediators. Do you honestly believe there’s a likelihood of us siding with France and Russia?’
‘Yes I do,’ John replied and Paul noticed that there was an edge to his voice. ‘Politicians like Jimmy Grenfell think they know better than most people but the fact is it must be difficult to see the wood for the trees in Westminster. I’ve been watching this damned naval race for a long time and I’ve thought about it too, more often than I cared to. If it doesn’t come now it’ll come next year or the year after, so maybe it’s as well to get it over and done with while we still have the pretence of naval superiority. At all events that’s what the Navy thinks!’
As John said this Paul had a vision of Roddy Rudd, the fresh-faced, motor-mad boy who had been dazzled by Grace and had once incurred his jealousy. ‘Where is Roddy now?’ he asked, and John said somewhere in the South Atlantic, serving as gunnery officer on the cruiser Good Hope. ‘And damned well out of it, I hope, at least for the time being,’ he added, ‘for don’t run away with the notion that the German Navy won’t fight or that, ship for ship, it isn’t a damned sight more up-to-date than ours!’
‘Good God, you can’t mean that, John,’ Paul said, for having grown up in the belief that one British-manned ship was worth ten of any other nation’s he found his agent’s disparagement unpalatable.
‘I do mean it and I have it on excellent authority,’ John said, ‘although it isn’t the kind of thing one should noise abroad. They’ve got better range-finders and thicker armour-plating and many of them can show a better turn of speed! And now, to more practical issues: Will you do anything to give Elinor Codsall a harvest hand at Periwinkle?’
‘Certainly I will, providing Will doesn’t come back looking sheepish the day after tomorrow. I’ll tell you what, John, I’ll lay you two to one in half-crowns that he will!’
‘You’re on,’ said John, ‘for if we’re to have everything turned upside down for the rest of our lives I don’t see why I should miss a chance of making five shillings out of it!’
Paul knew that he had lost his bet some time before the crowds began to gather outside the County Press offices in Paxtonbury awaiting the appearance of the latest posters, and before packets of newspapers screaming ‘War!’ were flung among excited newsagents’ boys when the Cornish Riviera made its three-minute stop at the cathedral town. He knew it even before the sombre Foreign Secretary, Grey, had made his prolix but unequivocal speech to the House on that tense Monday afternoon, for his telephone, still one of three in the Valley, linked him with a man whose sources of information were just as good as those of Grenfell’s and whose interpretation was more expert.
At about 2 a.m., on the night that Paul deflated the Valley jingoes in the bar of The Raven, he awoke to hear his telephone-bell shrilling in the hall, where it stood in an alcove under the stair well out of sight of Mrs Handcock who still regarded the instrument as a direct link with the Devil. And in a way, on that close August night, it was. When Paul went downstairs to answer it the voice at the end of the wire had the fruitiness of Satan who had just succeeded, against all probabilities, in winning over half Christendom.
Paul said, a little breathlessly, ‘Who is it? What’s happened?’ and through a soft chuckle Uncle Franz replied, ‘Now who would it be my dear boy? Who else, among your bucolic friends, would be awake and abroad at this hour?’
‘What the devil is the point of ringing me at this time of night?’ Paul demanded, although he felt relieved. ‘Is it about Grace?’
‘Not specially,’ the old man replied, enjoying his advantage, ‘although I do have news of Grace. The Glorious Cause has come to terms with their Tormentors. I understand Holloway is to be emptied of the dear old ladies on condition they wave Union Jacks in a day or so!’
‘Oh, get to the point, Uncle Franz,’ Paul growled, ‘I’m standing here practically naked and it’s gone two o’clock! It’s a miracle I heard the bell at all.’
‘Well,’ said Franz, slowly, ‘there isn’t a point, not really, particularly as you are not a man of affairs looking for a profit motive. I just thought you might like to know that I’ve leased the scrapyard for almost exactly the sum that you inherited from your father back in 1902! Leased it mark you, not sold it! It reverts to us again after five years!’
‘Good God!’ Paul exclaimed, ‘who is the tenant? The Tsar of Russia?’
‘Only indirectly,’ Franz said, ‘but I won’t bother you with details now. I rang because papers will arrive for you to sign in a day or so, and you won’t be under an obligation to read them! You have my word for it that they are . . . well . . . advantageous, shall we say?’
‘Did you ring to tell me that or for some other reason?’ Paul asked, suddenly seeing a chink of daylight through the old Croat’s smokescreen and Franz replied, blandly, ‘I suppose I really rang to stop you ringing me when the documents arrive for I won’t be available; I shall be on the move as soon as the balloon goes up!’
Paul said breathlessly, ‘You really think it will?’ and there was a pause before the old man replied, as though he was choosing his words very carefully. Finally, he went on, in a slightly more serious voice: ‘I don’t imagine it will affect you much one way but if you do have emergency measures in mind take them now! Don’t even wait for the morning papers. Germany, France and Austria have mobilised and Austria is over the frontier into Serbia. Germany will declare war on France tomorrow, if she hasn’t already done so. As for us, we shall be in by Tuesday at the latest!’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Paul demanded. ‘Grenfell rang two days ago and said it depended upon half-a-dozen unknown factors, any one of which might result in us standing aside.’
Franz said, ‘My dear boy, the politicians are the clowns who provide the curtain raiser, an entirely different cast act the play! If I thought you would follow my advice I could put you in the way of making another fortune between now and next Sunday but you have always had your nose too deep in the dirt to do that and, in a way, I admire you for it! At least you know yourself, don’t have self-doubts about your destiny, and have hit on the secret of real success, which is living one’s life the way one wants to live it! Judged that way you’re a very spectacular success indeed! Good night my boy! Sleep well . . . ’ but Paul cried,’ Wait, Uncle Franz! You’ve hauled me from bed to say this much so you can tell me a little more! What’ll be the outcome of this madness on everybody’s part?’
‘A very long war,’ Franz said, ‘so don’t be taken in by the Kaiser’s promise of Home-before-the-Leaves-Fall! Most of the poor devils won’t come home at all and those who do will never be the same again. Kitchener’s view is three years, although everybody is laughing at him right now. Personally I think he’s an optimist!’
‘Three years!’ Paul exclaimed, ‘but Great God, that would bankrupt everybody wouldn’t it?’
‘It will bankrupt a good many,’ Franz said, fruitiness reentering his voice, ‘but I am reasonably confident that neither you nor I will be among that number. I’ll give you one piece of advice that you may be inclined to take. Put every acre you’ve got under plough while you still have the chawbacons to do it! Who knows? You may come out of it better than I!’ and he rang off, leaving Paul holding the receiver and conscious, despite his half-nakedness, of sweat pouring from under his arms and striking cold in the draught from the big door. He reached beyond the telephone and slipped on an old hunting coat, too agitated to go back to bed and disinclined to wake Claire who had
not heard the bell. He went through the library and out on to the terrace where the heat of the day still lingered and the cloying, old-world scent of wallflowers hung on the air like the perfume of meandering ghosts. There was a waning moon low in the sky over the Home Farm meadows and the night was so still that the whisper of the avenue chestnuts reached him across the paddock. He thought, grimly, ‘All over Europe men are shuffling along in the dark with their packs and weapons, and I daresay, by now, every. main road in Germany is noisy with the rattle of wagons. Almost everyone here and there thinks of war as I thought of it, during the voyage to Table Bay fifteen years ago, but it didn’t take me long to discover that war is a boring, bloody muddle, punctuated by moments of fear and disgust!’ And suddenly his memory turned on a peepshow that he would have thought forgotten, of smoke rising from a burned-out Boer farm, of sun-bonneted women and snivelling children standing behind the wire of a waterless concentration camp, of a private of the King’s Royal Rifles with a Mauser bullet in his belly calling on his mates to put another through his head. ‘It was bad enough then,’ he said half-aloud, ‘but that was a piffling affair by today’s standards! I don’t suppose a hundred thousand ever met on one field and now there are millions, and fighting will occur in densely-populated areas! Who the hell is to blame for misery on that scale? The Kaiser? The Tsar? Those tricky French politicians or the starchy British ones, like Asquith, Grey and that Jack-in-a-Box Lloyd George?’ He moved along the terrace to Grace’s sunken garden and when the perfume of roses she had planted, reached him he thought of her again, and how pitiful The Glorious Cause looked measured against a European war. What, precisely, had that cynical old rascal Franz meant when he implied there were men behind the politicians and generals pulling strings? Did he mean merchants like himself, who made a profit on war as his father had done years before? Or rabble-rousers, high and low, obsessed by the cult of nationalism who used their influence to convert happy-go-lucky chaps like Smut Potter and Horace Handcock into blood-thirsty patriots? And how did he himself view the prospect of war against the Kaiser’s Germany? He had never considered it a serious possibility, not really, in spite of all the years of newspaper talk and even now found it difficult to whip up rage or resentment against the Germans. The only two personally known to him, the professor and his son Gottfried, were amiable, intelligent chaps. What he did feel, however, pressing like a girdle about his ribs, was a sadness at the finality of the occasion, and the sensation reminded him of the time he had lost Grace and fled from the sleazy lodging of the prostitute near the Turkish baths. It was a profound certainty that the way of life that was his he was about to lose and with it the promise the future had offered, for if Grenfell’s predictions proved right it would be a savage, bloody business, no matter how long or short it proved, and if it did drag on, as Franz seemed to think, then nothing could ever be the same again for any of them. He wondered, objectively, if he would involve himself in it; if, before it was over, he would find himself alongside men like Will Codsall and some of the others who seemed eager to show their mettle but decided against, remembering that he was now thirty-five, with a wife and family to consider and that war was a young man’s business.
The perfume of the roses from the sunken garden seemed to drench this end of the terrace so that when he heard a step on the flagstones and a voice calling him, he thought once more of Grace, whom he always associated with this garden. Then he saw a blur of white in the doorway and called, ‘I’m out here, Claire!’ and she came along the terrace towards him, her hair tumbling over the pink shawl he had given her last Christmas. She said, anxiously, ‘I wondered where on earth you were! What’s happened? Is it anything serious?’
‘Serious enough,’ he told her and repeated the gist of Franz’s conversation over the telephone. He was amazed to note that she seemed relieved rather than startled, as though the clash of armies had nothing to do with themselves or the people of the Valley. She said, ‘Well, all I can say is I’m glad you’re too old and the children are too young!’ and he thought the remark very typical of her and envied her ability to view catastrophe in such a personal light. He said, however, ‘It will make nonsense of all we’ve been trying to do down here, Claire. You realise that I suppose?’
‘I don’t see why it should,’ she argued, ‘James told you it couldn’t possibly last more than a month or so, didn’t he?’
‘I’d sooner take Uncle Franz’s word than Grenfell’s on an issue like this,’ he said. ‘If there are people around prepared to pay that much money for a five-year lease on a scrapyard they must have a good idea what’s likely to happen! Those kind of people, Uncle Franz’s kind, don’t make mistakes that cost money, not their money!’
‘Oh well,’ she said, cheerfully, ‘there’s nothing we can do about it is there? I suppose they must fight it out and then go home and pick up where they left off!’
He smiled, putting his arm around her and kissing the top of her head. It would be a shame, he thought, to try and explain to her what a conflict on this scale could do even to a place as remote as this, or to a woman with a civilian husband and children in rompers. She would soon find out if Uncle Franz’s gloomy prophecy came true. Then he thought how differently Grace would have reacted to the news and remembered that it was here, on this spot, that he proposed marriage on the night of the Coronation soirée. It was disturbing but also significant, he reflected, that Grace should seem so close tonight and the sharpness of his memories seemed almost an affront to Claire standing with her head on his shoulder inhaling the sweetness of the night air so he said shortly, ‘Come on, there’s no sense standing here, let’s go back to bed!’ and they went in and up the broad, shallow stairs. She curled up and was asleep almost at once and again he envied her narrow world. ‘There’s Ikey,’ he thought. ‘He’ll have to go but she never bothered much with Ikey. He always seemed to belong to the era of Grace and anyway, he’s a professional and might even welcome war as offering prospects of promotion.’ Then, as it began to grow light, he borrowed something of Claire’s complacency, thinking, ‘Dammit, maybe she’s right! There’s no sense in losing sleep over something that can’t be helped or altered! I’ll do my worrying when I have to!’ and was sorry then that she had gone to sleep for the scent of the roses seemed to linger about her, and it occurred to him that casual access to the woman beside him was a more exciting prospect than storming every citadel in Europe.
III
In the first week of November a persistent north-easterly, showering Channel spray and needles of sleet across the Valley, drove the yellow-eyed gulls from their fishing grounds on the sandbanks and launched them on one of their periodical circuits across the shoulder of the Bluff, west to the upper reaches of the Sorrel then back across the shorn fields of Four Winds.
The gulls knew the features of the Valley better than any earthbound creature and as they hovered over the woods and streams, peering down for unconsidered trifles, they must have been aware of some of the changes that had taken place there in the last few weeks. They no longer had to contend with the wild cries of Eveleigh’s crow-starver, or the ill-aimed pellets of Henry Pitts, because, at these two points of flight, they maintained height and swooped upon easier pickings behind the field kitchens of the vast tented camp that covered the moor between Periwinkle Farm and the Paxtonbury road. There was always food to be found here and nobody minded when they helped themselves from the bins ranged along the hedge that bordered the camp to the north. Thousands of men were living there but were either clumping about in cohorts, encouraged by bellowing figures out on the flanks, or cowering in their sopping tents, sheltering from wind and rain. So the gulls dived on the offal and hunks of bread scattered all around and flew off gorged to Coombe Bay, where the more observant might have noted other changes in and about the village, the absence of Tom Williams and his fishing team for instance, or the stillness of the house and garden where the old German professor had lived above the dunes, a man who h
ad always welcomed them and encouraged them to take bread and bacon rinds he saved for them. This house, a favourite port of call for storm-driven gulls, was unoccupied now, its windows open to the rain and there were slivers of shattered glass lying on the lawns back and front, reflecting the pale gleam of the sun on the rare occasions it penetrated the low cloud. This, perhaps, was the most significant change of all, for there had been territorial camps on Blackberry Moor in years gone by but never a scene like the one enacted outside the old German’s house one wann evening in late August.
It began with an advance up the hill of a knot of Coombe Bay men, including Eph Morgan, the Welsh builder, Walt Pascoe, Tom Williams shortly before he joined the Naval Reserve and others, women and children as well as men. If the local posse could have been said to have had leadership it was vested in Horace Handcock, the Shallowford gardener. He it was who had preached the crusade in the bar of The Raven but he was too old and too drunk to take his place at their head when they stormed up the hill to register their disapproval of the Kaiser’s rape of Belgium.
The professor was at his desk when the clamour reached him and he got up to look out of his window. The first stone, flung by Walt Pascoe, smashed the glass and grazed his head, causing blood to flow. A moment later stones or clods had shattered every window at the front of the house. The professor remained downstairs long enough to bundle up his manuscripts but while he was doing this a fragment of glass struck his chin, inflicting another small wound. He went upstairs and locked himself in Gottfried’s bedroom overlooking the garden but soon this window was shattered and he saw that people had made their way round the house and were cavorting about his flower beds, pulling up plants and shrubs and howling like dervishes. Then Eph Morgan remembered, the German had a motor and at once linked it in his mind to the Squire’s derelict Belsize, still embedded in Sorrel mud. It seemed to Morgan a good idea that there should be two derelict cars in the district so, with the help of many willing hands, he trundled it out of the coach-house and on to a rose bed where, with the tools taken from the shed, it was soon reduced to a wreck. More people continued to arrive from the village and as it was nearly dusk someone suggested a bonfire so Pascoe punctured the petrol tank with a garden fork and soon there was a very good bonfire indeed, one that could be seen a great way off. Paul saw it as he crossed the ford and set off at a gallop for the village, making the journey in the record time of eleven minutes, for he was riding a mettlesome four-year-old that Rose had sold him just before the outbreak of war. He had been warned of the riot by Pansy Pascoe who had the forethought to use The Raven’s telephone and she urged him to come quickly before murder was done. Pansy was probably the only person in the village who disapproved of the riot. She had been employed by the professor as a daily help and he had treated her with kindness and generosity. She realised, however, that it was useless to argue with her husband Walt in his present mood, for he was full of beer, having enlisted that very day at Whinmouth and was due to depart the following morning. She said, on the telephone, ‘Do ’ee come quick, Squire! They’re murderin’ the poor old toad!’ and Paul had set off at once shouting to Chivers to send John Rudd after him and during his wild ride along the river bank he thought savagely of the strange madness that had seized people since newspapers had begun calling Germans ‘Huns’ and printing stories of crucified Belgian babies that no man in his sense could believe.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 83
