They would not have gone as far as to lay hands on the German. He could see that as soon as he flung himself from his horse and rushed round behind the house, where it seemed as though the entire population of the village was dancing round the blazing wreck of the Humber. The house, with all its windows shattered, looked empty but someone said the old professor was inside, hiding under a bed probably. Paul’s informant seemed to assume that the Squire had arrived to share in the fun and was astounded when Paul grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and shouted, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Has everybody gone stark, staring mad? Who started this business? Who began it? Do you realise you could all go to prison for this?’ and he punched his way into the centre of the ring.
His words had immediate effect. For a long time now they had been content to have him do most of their thinking. Tom Williams said, a little shamefacedly, ‘I told ’em they was goin’ a bit far, Squire. Breaking the old devil’s windows would ha’ been enough to frighten the ole bastard out o’ the Valley!’ but he too had a shock when Paul spun round on him, shouting, ‘You bloody idiot, Tom! What harm has the old fellow ever done any of us, and how the hell can he be responsible for the Kaiser’s doings? He’s a fugitive from the Junkers himself! He only came here to get a bit of peace!’ Then, having cleared a ring and seeing people beginning to slip away round to the front of the house, he shouted, ‘The next person to throw a stone or touch anything here will be reported by me to the Whinmouth police, do you hear?’
They heard, those who were not already gone, and within a few moments Paul had the garden to himself, except for some wide-eyed children who should have been in bed. He said, sharply, ‘Get on home. The policeman will be here in a moment!’ and they fled so that he was left to wonder whether, when John Rudd arrived, they should round up the rioters and make them extinguish the blazing car with water taken from the rain butt. He decided not to bother for the motor was all but destroyed and there was no danger of flames spreading to the rear of the house. He stood in the centre of the lawn and called, ‘Herr Scholtzer! Professor! It’s me, Squire Craddock! They’ve gone now, you’ve nothing to fear!’
There was no answer so he fried the back door and finding it open went in. On the first landing, holding a lamp above his head, he saw the old man looking down and seeing the blood on his face, Paul said, ‘I’ll send one of those fools to telephone for the doctor!’ but the German said, briefly, ‘No! Please! It is nothing, Mr Craddock!’ and came down to the hall where glass from the coloured panes in the front door crunched underfoot.
They went into the library, Scholtzer dabbing his head with a towel and in here was the same litter of broken glass and pages of manuscript blown to the floor. The room had always looked scrupulously tidy for the professor was a very methodical man and somehow, to Paul, the disorder emphasised the sheer idiocy of the assault. He said, grimly, ‘You must let me deal with this, professor. I’ll have every one of them in court for this night’s work!’ but the old man lifted his hand and said, ‘No, Mr Craddock, it was goot of you to come quickly but please, you will not make the case of it! That would do no goot for you and I have plans to leave very soon. The police were here with my papers this morning,’ and he began gathering up manuscript from the floor and sorting it into little piles.
‘You don’t have to leave on this account,’ Paul said, ‘they’ll not bother you again. Get a few things together and come back to the house with me. We can clear up in the morning and I can guarantee you plenty of assistance!’
The old man made no immediate reply but having finished collecting his papers he poured two glasses of gin and handed one to Paul. He seemed, Paul thought, very calm and resigned, as though a frenzied assault upon his property and person by people he had regarded as friends brought sadness but neither rancour nor fear. He said, finally, ‘You must not blame them so much, Mr Craddock! It will be happening all over Europe. It is kind that you should ask me to your house but it would not be wise, I think, to go. They would remember it against you as long as the fighting lasts. It would be different if my boy was here but there is nothing they can do to me. It is your glass that has been broken.’
‘And your motor that has been burned,’ growled Paul. ‘Where is Gottfried? I heard he had gone abroad earlier in the summer.’
‘He is in Germany,’ the old man said. ‘He went to Italy for a music examination in June. Then the foolish boy went tramping in the Dolomites and I have since heard that the authorities refused to allow him to leave. Perhaps, by now, he is in uniform. After all, he is German born, with German parents, and your Government would not consider him eligible for exchange. Perhaps his whereabouts are known and that is why your people come here to break windows.’
‘I’m sure that had nothing to do with it,’ Paul said but the fact that the shy young German was possibly serving in the Kaiser’s Army astounded him almost as much as the demonstration on the lawn. Gottfried had grown up in the Valley and seemed to Paul almost as much a part of it as Eveleigh’s children or Sam Potter’s daughter, Pauline. He said, ‘Can they compel him to serve in the Army?’ and the professor replied, with a shrug, ‘It will be a choice between the Army or prison. If I had foreseen such a thing I would have applied for his naturalisation papers when he was a child but one cannot blame oneself for not foreseeing what is happening in the world today.’
‘You say the police were here? Is it likely that you will be sent to an Aliens Camp?’
‘No,’ said the old man, ‘I have been given permission to go to the United States. My publishers and certain Oxford gentlemen were kind enough to vouch for me. It is a pity that Gottfried cannot change places with me, for even the Junkers could not use me as a soldier.’
There seemed nothing more to say and Paul felt trapped in a mesh of circumstances almost as frustrating and bizarre as those encompassing the German and his son. It was as though the entire structure of the estate and its way of life was crumbling and all one could do was to stand around wringing one’s hands and making fatuous comments on each new development. Will Codsall had disappeared, then Gottfried, now the old professor, whom he had always thought of as popular in the Valley, and others would be going soon, among them some of those who had created this mess on the floor. He supposed that he would get used to what was happening in time but the rhythm of the Valley had been so smooth and settled, and the process of readjustment was not easy, for he was unable to subscribe to the strident patriotism that had been surging down the Valley ever since Bank Holiday; so much of it seemed as shrill and childish as the recent behaviour of sober men like Tom Williams and Ephraim Morgan.
He said, as a valediction, ‘You were happy here, Professor, you won’t forget us easily?’
The old man smiled, drawing a mottled hand across his great walrus moustache. ‘No, Mr Craddock, I shall remember Shallowford with gratitude. I found what I sought here, the chance to live and work among kindly people and a single night’s stone-throwing cannot erase the memory of more than ten years’ peace!’
They shook hands and Paul left him, letting himself out of the shattered front door and crossing the road to the spot where his bay was tethered. The street was empty, so empty that Paul wondered if everyone had gone into hiding, but outside The Raven Pansy Pascoe came out of the shadows, calling softly, ‘Is ’un all right? Did they ’arm the poor ole toad?’ and Paul told her that the professor had escaped with a few cuts but that the police would be making enquiries in the morning.
‘Well,’ she said, philosophically, ‘I daresay that’ll put the fear o’ God into some o’ the gurt fools but it won’t bother Walt! He’s off first light an’ dam’ good riddance to ’un! Us ’aven’t ’ad a word o’ zense out of ’un zince it started!’
He wondered how she would manage on the meagre separation allowance and a house full of half-grown children but then he remembered that she was a Potter and that the Potters always managed somehow. He t
hanked her for telephoning and rode off up the empty street. Glancing over his shoulder he could still see the orange glow of the burning motor on the hillside; it looked, he thought, like a beacon warning the coast of invasion from the sea.
IV
There were changes that the sharp-eyed gulls did not see as they made their circuits waiting for the wind to change and enable them to return to their fishing grounds on the banks. By early November the Dell was beginning to assume its once familiar look of neglect and near-squalor, with tools and faggots scattered around, and rubbish accumulating behind the sheds and byres. Jem, the Bideford Goliath, who had reigned here ever since he quit his job at the fair and imposed his genial discipline upon the two Potter girls, had followed Will Codsall into the Army soon after the Miracle of the Marne, and although he was over thirty his giant frame had ensured acceptance by the fast-talking recruiting sergeant at the Paxtonbury Territorial centre. Jem had been followed, almost at once, by Smut, who had abandoned his greenhouses to the younger Eveleigh boy and gone gladly enough, as though, in soldiering, he saw an opportunity to recapture the excitement of a poacher’s life. John Rudd warned him that his prison record might result in rejection but John was wrong for when Smut admitted that he had served a term of imprisonment for belting a gamekeeper over the head with a gun butt the recruiting sergeant was delighted, saying this was precisely the type of recruit needed. Smut’s musketry instructor was equally impressed. At the initial five-round shoot-off Smut scored four bulls and an inner and that with a type of rifle he had never before fired. On the strength of this plus a pint or two of beer, the instructor withdrew him from the awkward squad and sent him on a sharpshooters’ course. It was astonishing how rapidly Smut reverted to type, how quickly and completely he forgot his patiently acquired horticultural skills and became, in effect, a poacher again. He found that he could still move across country quickly and noiselessly at night and interpret and locate the sounds made by blundering adversaries opposed to him in training exercises and with the rediscovery of his skills he sloughed off the new personality he had acquired after his release from gaol, progressing rapidly in his new profession. After Will Codsall he was the first of the Valley men to cross to France and move into the soggy ditches that already reached from Switzerland to the sea, and here he adapted himself far more easily than did most of the men of his battalion. Alone among them, save for a tramp or two lured into the recruiting office by the promise of beer and the leonine glare of Kitchener, Smut could spend successive nights lying out in the open in all weathers and he did not find a five-day spell of front-line duty very different from life as a boy in the Dell in Tamer’s time, or as a young man subsisting on what he could trap and kill between the Sorrel and the Whin. He had no personal quarrel with the Germans but he was more fatal to them than many of those who regarded all Germans as unspeakable swine. To Smut they were simply the equivalent of the hares, bucks and pheasants he had stalked in the past, and the techniques he employed against them were much the same. He would lie behind the parados for hours disguised as a roll of wet sacking on a pile of rubble, as still and patient as a famished cat at a mousehole. Whenever he caught a fleeting glimpse of a moving cap or a hunched shoulder in the trenches opposite, he would wheeze with satisfaction and gently squeeze the trigger of his specially-sighted rifle. Sometimes, if the weather was good, he would take a chance after making a kill and wait for a second victim but more often he would be inside his trench within seconds of his quarry hitting the ground. Then, after carefully notching his rifle, he would meander along to another sector, pick a fresh vantage point and begin another vigil. He would fire at almost anything that stirred but the mark that excited him most was a sun-reflecting Pickelhaube, for this meant the passage of an officer and therefore a slightly longer notch on his scoreboard. He was held in high esteem by his officers not because of his sniping but because he was now a fully-licensed poacher and an enormous asset to men short of almost everything that made life bearable under conditions of constant danger and appalling discomfort. He never hurried and never acted impulsively. Before making a swoop he would study the routes of ration parties, just as he had marked out the rabbit-runs in Heronslea coverts and sometimes, when his platoon was desperately short of firewood, duckboards, sandbags, wiring stakes, plum and apple jam, bully beef and even the almost unobtainable navy rum, Smut would be permitted to lay aside his rifle and drift back towards brigade headquarters on some spurious errand. Here he would make a careful reconnaissance, and after selecting three or four of the more robust of his mates, return after dark to the areas he had memorised. Sometimes one or two of his carriers would be caught and mercilessly punished but Smut was never among this minority, for he never carried anything himself and could always melt into the darkness and try again the following night. They soon made him a corporal and he could have risen higher but he was content with two stripes, explaining that a third would cramp his style. The night he appeared at the entrance of his officer’s dugout with a case of Scotch whisky his Company commander swore that he would recommend Potter for the D.C.M., declaring that men had been decorated for far less but Smut talked him out of it. One of the very earliest lessons he had learned as a poacher was to remain inconspicuous and after some discussion he settled for ten shillings which he sent home to Meg, telling her that more would be coming for he was now doing a brisk trade in the sale of souvenirs.
Smut was not the only member of the Potter clan to find release in war. All three of his elder sisters had their burdens appreciably lightened when their men marched out of the Valley whistling ‘Tipperary’. Pansy let her cottage at an advantageous rent to a major at the camp on Blackberry Moor and moved herself and family into the farmhouse at the Dell and here, restored at last to the congenial company of the recently liberated Cissie and Violet, she began her war work.
The Potter girls were the first women in the Valley to make war show a credit balance. Although past their prime (Cissie and Pansy were on the wrong side of thirty and Violet was twenty-eight), they were still strong, vigorous, handsome, healthy women and the Lancashire Fusiliers, occupying the tented camp on the moor, were a jolly set of boys, all far from home and unfastidious. Often, of a winter evening, the Dell farmhouse erupted with song and laughter and even a man as formidable as the Bideford Goliath would have found it impossible to defend the fort as he had defended it against the raids of the Timberlake boys. The girls still thought of Jem affectionately and sometimes sent him parcels and money to eke out his rations and pay in the dismal Welsh camp, where he was learning to disembowel Germans with bayonet and Mills bomb but they did not wish him back, telling one another that war had opened their eyes to the pitiful state of servitude into which they had lapsed. Such work as was done on the farm was now performed by volunteers and paid for in kind, and whereas Jem laid the mark of his despotism on the fat posteriors of his handmaidens if they so much as winked at another man they now had a battalion of men at their disposal, with no question of any one man, or even two, claiming proprietorial rights over them. Meg, as usual, kept to herself and Hazel rarely appeared in the Dell. One way and another the Potter girls were set fair to enjoy the war, for when the Lancashire Fusiliers moved out the Shropshires moved in and the pleasant rhythm of life in the Dell hardly faltered.
In the last week of November there was a flare-up in the kitchen of Four Winds, where domestic scenes had once been commonplace but had been unknown since the Eveleighs had replaced the Codsalls. The cause of the only serious dispute that had ever broken out between the black moustached Norman Eveleigh and his wife Marian was Gilbert, their eldest boy, who had been whipper-in to the Sorrel Vale Farmers’ Hunt ever since Squire Craddock had reorganised it, in 1911. Gilbert was now nearly eighteen, a slim, serious-minded boy, whose appearance favoured his mother but whose character was more like his father’s. He was withdrawn and sparing with words but known in the Valley as a conscientious boy and the best rider to hounds for miles around. Squire
Craddock liked and trusted him and the hounds, each of whom he could identify at a glance, adored him. The demands of the Government Remount Department, however, cost Gilbert his job. By early October there was hardly a horse left in the Valley, apart from those reserved for the plough and all prospects of hunting ended. Without consulting anyone Gilbert walked into Paxtonbury, added a year to his age and joined up, and this folly on his part disrupted a very united family for Mrs Eveleigh, who prized her eldest boy above all the rest of the brood, said she would disclose Gilbert’s correct age and get him discharged at once. To her dismay Eveleigh told her to hold her silly tongue, saying that he, for his part, was proud of the boy. Periwinkle Farm had contributed a man to Kitchener’s Army and the contemptible Dell had sent two; if Gilbert wanted to rescue the honour of Four Winds who were they to deny him?
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 84
