A chant of “Oh No! Oh No! Oh No!” came from the boys, who had overheard what Peregrine had said to his son.
The Crier, climbing on to the platform, had got so far as, “Pray silence for the Right Honourable the Earl—” when shouts arose, and turning round, he saw a large horned apparition galloping straight for him. For it was true what Peregrine had told his son: the old goat was used to quiet and gentle voices (as indeed was Roger). Raucous human noises disturbed a social balance acquired on the broad acres of the Abbey park over which he had ruled, and where his sense of propriety had been formed.
The amused spectators saw King Billy leap upon the platform: the imported Town Crier of Brighton jumping off, to lose a buckled shoe as he landed below. The goat’s mood changed when he saw the shoe; many times in the past King Billy had played Hunt the Slipper with the Bucentaur children. Picking up the gaudy object he made off in the direction of Castle Rock, pursued by the band of small boys led by the shooter of peas.
Meanwhile the Town Clerk of Lynton was hurrying forward to instruct the Crier to proceed. “We’ll get your shoe back, don’t you worry. It was they dalled boys who let that bisley animal go, I shouldn’t wonder, the young limmers!”
The Crier, uncomfortable in ill-fitting hired finery, attempted to hide a hole in his sock with the remaining shoe, while yelling in a loud voice, “My lords, ladies, and gentlemen! Pray silence for Lieutenant-Colonel Pegerin Boo-Center, Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Companion of the Distinguished Service Order!”
The anxious Mayor muttered to the Town Clerk, “He’s got it in the wrong order!”
Peregrine got on the platform and said, “I now give, with whole-hearted satisfaction, every damned goat I possess to the Devon County Council, and may God have mercy on their vegetation!” Then he jumped down.
Nobody quite knew how to take this brief speech. Was it a prayer for the safe-keeping of the goats, or for the local farmers’ crops, asked Jack o’ Lanthorn in the afore-mentioned issue of The Lynton Lantern.
Meanwhile the Crier had clambered back on the platform, to announce the Lord Lieutenant of the County. He scrambled down again, a Z-shaped figure worried about the hole in his sock, as the nobleman—hair clipped short and moustache trimmed by Van Tromp of Curzon Street, as befitted a Lancer who had commanded the Cavalry School at Camberley—said crisply, “I won’t detain you long on this fine summer afternoon—” glancing up at the sky, where the two gliders were now circling at five thousand feet—“to declare both my pleasure and my duty to announce to you that Devon has been offered a most generous gift from one of our very good neighbours in Somerset—Colonel Bucentaur. The gift is both remarkable and unique. During four centuries the herd of White Goats of Brockholes St. Boniface Abbey has been famous. The herd has had its existence since before the reign of Henry the Eighth—and may I say, in passing, that it still appears to possess the bold, not to say dashing, characteristics of the Elizabethan age!” (Laughter) “I now have very great pleasure in accepting the gift—a pleasure anticipated, I may say, somewhat in advance by the leader of the herd, King Billy—” (clapping and loud laughter)—“who has already betaken himself into pastures new with, I am able reliably to inform you, one of the buckled shoes of the Town Crier of the great watering-place of Brighthelmstow—now known as Brighton—” (Loudest laughter and cheers). “Mr. Mayor and Councillors of Lynton, I now have the pleasant duty to accept, on behalf of all Devonians, Colonel Bucentaur’s most generous gift of the immemorial Herd of Brockholes St. Boniface Goats, and long may they remain to grace, Sirs—” he turned to the group of Devon worthies— “your beautiful Valley of Rocks!”
Thirty released goats made for the figure of King Billy, now silhouetted on a crag among other grey upstanding rocks. One goat remained, Capella, to trot into the crowd of strollers, seeking her friend and comforter, while uttering now and then little bleats of distress at not finding her.
*
Rows of deck-chairs were set out before the pavilion, with tables for the scorers. By this time the two gliders, familiar sight to holiday-makers, were rising smaller and smaller in a thermal lifting off the lichened rocks amidst bracken and furze which bestrewed the wide valley. Both had sealed barographs; both pilots were after height records.
The two captains approached for the spinning of a coin, while the umpire, a tall elderly man with a drooping moustache and wearing a long white coat with a bandless yellow panama hat dating from 1902, stood by to pick up a silver crown-piece with the face of the young Queen Victoria almost worn away with the Royal coat-armour on the obverse side.
“Head,” cried Peregrine, and won the toss. He decided to put in the opposing team. Let the Savages sweat it out in the hottest part of the day!
The articled clerk, a Saxon-headed man of about forty, went in to bat with a crony of the evening bar at the Club. Both were blue-capped. Their captain’s directive was to break the esteem of the Bloody Redcapped Goats by stonewalling. Then, like Monty at Alamein, “Knock them for six!”
So the match dragged at first. Lucy sat with her small daughter between Melissa and Elizabeth, enjoying the feeling of having nothing to do. Very soon Mrs. Osgood Nilsson joined them.
“I thought perhaps I’d find you with Miranda and Molly Bucentaur. You are cousins, aren’t you?”
“Oh,” said Lucy, liking her cheery face. “They’re in the pavilion seeing to the tea-things, I think.”
“I always find cricket so boring, don’t you? I mean the game itself—”
Lucy didn’t know what to say to that; and soon the inquisitor departed for more amusing company.
The stonewalling persisted. Each ball was meticulously blocked. No runs were attempted.
For the third over, Peregrine put on another bowler. Six leaping, bounding hops; six times a yorker hurtling down the shortest distance between two points: plop, six times it was blocked, to come to rest a few yards down the pitch. And likewise, every ball of three more overs was either blocked or chopped.
“What, are these heathens on strike?” Peregrine asked the umpire, who shrugged the jersey partly tied round his neck and replied, a laconic “Oo-ah.”
A party of onlookers along the road started a slow hand-clap. Peregrine stared furiously at them and gave the equivalent of Churchill’s V-sign. Ironical cheers came back.
The first bowler was put on again. At his second ball, a yorker, the articled clerk sent it soaring up in a parabola, to drop over the boundary. Six! Clapping from Saxon Savages in a row grinning almost as wide as the peaks of their blue caps. And an odious, vulgar chortle reached Perry’s ears— Stuff to give’m! Village cads, he thought; and decided to teach them a lesson.
Peregrine was an exceptionally cunning bowler. He knew how to knock down stone walls, which do not cricket make. When, before the war, he had played for his county, a chord of yellow horn-like skin had extended along the third finger of his right hand. The yellow corn had been built up by constant spinnings of a ball tossed vertically and curvaceously during many hours of practice. The ball could be made to swing and cut both ways, to break either to off or near stump on striking the turf. In his youth, while at Oxford he had been coached by Sidney Barnes, a great bowler who learned his art in Lancashire, home of great cricketers.
Observing who was now going to bowl, the grinning row of blue caps became as solemn as puffins.
The articled clerk, determined to do or die, stepped forward and sent Peregrine’s first deceptive ball—a slow limer—skying over the pavilion. It fell in the rough. Seeing a familiar red object, King Billy came down from his rock to find out what was going on.
Peregrine did not discern what they were laughing at. He thought they were laughing at him. Another ball was tossed to him. He rubbed it on the grass before beginning an easy amble as though for another slow limer: two easy ambling steps: then a succession of springy strides: a long arm swinging vertically over and past a face set with karata intentness: flick of fingers and wrist wh
ich once could neatly chop in half a 9-inch Bridgewater brick by a concentration of will and spite—sustained and calculated hostility. The articled clerk dithered, playing off his foremost foot with a straight bat.
Anxiously he awaited the next ball, determined not to be confused by tricks. There followed a third off-breaking ball—was it hissing? —and then a fast leg-break—another, which also broke to leg: and thus softened up, speechless-thoughtless, the victim awaited the sixth ball, a hissing wobbler that swerved from leg-stump to off-stump, richochetting back to the leg.
Clean-bowled, mute and feeling witless, the tyro lawyer walked, puffin-nosed, to the pavilion.
During the interval, before the next batsman went out, Lucy saw the green Aston-Martin arriving with Phillip sitting beside Piers.
*
Leaving Beth resting in the hotel, Piers had driven up to the common where, following wheel-tracks, he came to Shep Cot. Phillip was round the corner by the corrugated iron lean-to, kneeling at the back of the jacked-up Silver Eagle, apparently examining a back wheel with a large-handled magnifying glass of the kind seen in libraries. A meshed chain lay across the worn tyre. The box body was loaded high with brushwood corded above six-foot lengths of oak poles extending beyond the rear. A small dog stood by, looking at him.
“Bodger, this is Piers,” said Phillip; at which the small dog gave a single wag of its tail-stump.
“Moving house, Phil?”
“No, Piers. I haven’t renewed the road-fund licence, or the insurance, so I’m going to use the old ’bus only on the moor, for collecting turf. I thought if I cut some now while it is dry, I can stack it in this shed. I’ll need chains on the back-wheels to get up there,” as he pointed to the southern skyline.
Piers helped to adjust the chain round the tyre of one rear wheel, thinking the while that his old friend seemed to fumble a lot at the fastening.
“Let me do it. I expect you’ve been working too long and too hard. Sit down and rest, Phil.”
Having bolted on one wheel, the other was jacked-up, removed, chained, and replaced. “Shall I help you unload, Phil?”
“Thank you for the suggestion, but I think I can manage to take this load to the summit.”
Piers was puzzled, but asked no questions. He picked up the magnifying glass. “I don’t suppose you get many small flints in the tyres. Surely there aren’t any on the moor? I thought the geological layers were shale and ironstone, or is it old red sandstone?”
“At times my sight isn’t too good, so I use that glass.”
“Overstrain, I expect. I don’t know how you stick it here in winter. How’s the magazine going?”
“I’ve had to close it down. Most of the old subscribers, when Christie had it, didn’t renew their subscriptions; and the railway bookstalls took two thousand copies on sale or return. The first number sold about sixty. They refused to take any of the last number.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I had a letter from ‘The British Board of Traders’ Protection’, demanding an explanation of a paragraph I wrote in my editorial, that the free export of British capital, largely in the hands of cosmopolitan financiers before the war, should be legally forbidden. Would I define ‘cosmopolitan’? Did I not mean Semitic?”
“You do tend to ram Birkin’s ideas about ‘international financiers’ down people’s throats, you know. Well, at least your loyalty can never be in question.”
“I’m a failure.”
“You’ve been too much alone. Can’t I persuade you to leave off work for a spell, and come down and watch the cricket. You and me, and Melissa and Beth? I’d be like you without Beth. Every moment is alive for me nowadays.” He hesitated. “I hope I’m not being selfish, but the weather’s too good to be by yourself. In fact, almost too good. There’s thunder about, I fancy. Look at the gulls, almost out of sight. I’m told they fly inland before a storm.”
*
Over the hills and far away, above a sea cerulean and fused with sky along earth’s horizon, other birds were flying, some too high to be seen by human eye alone. In lower airs the gulls were turning and changing direction as though without aim—stalling, flapping this way and then that as they criss-crossed the sky.
For this was the Day of the Ants. From miles around the Valley of Rocks, from every grass-grown ant-hump made of innumerable vegetarian and arboreal fragments compiled and tunnelled, chambered in food-storage caves and nurseries where young worker ants, white and sunless, lay within cocoons ready to break and release each its imago for a life of total work at highest speed—the chosen few, born with wings, were crawling to the light of day, to perform their brief, orgiastic fates.
What secret call made the winged females, future matriarchs of new colonies, to rise and shine together on their temporary wings? Only the spermed and ovaried ants alone received the impulse, to be borne into rising air. Those females returning shed their wings, each to seek a new habitation, bearing the sperm of a dead Icarus which should in due course launch a thousand ships for love of some dim, remote Helen of their perception.
The red-headed woodpeckers sloped from the oak-woods, each uttering yallery-greenery cries to announce claim to territory. And in due course each bird would leave its extraordinary little all-white cylinders, each one perfectly shaped, soon to dry in the sun. Those broken by inquisitive human fingers would reveal a faecal composition of black ant skeletons bound together in pure lime.
*
In a time-space of one hour, including the changing of leg-pads, the North Devon Savages were all out for eighty-seven runs; and the Crimson Ramblers went in to bat. By four o’clock they had lost two wickets, two balls, and had scored sixty-one runs; and the pitch was deserted for tea. Miranda, Rosamund, and other young girls attendant on their mothers carried round trays of tea and cakes first to the Savages, then to the Ramblers. Overhead every rook and jackdaw from the cliffs above the coast from Bull Point to the Quantocks was airborne, glutting itself on flying ants under a sky no longer of enamelled azurine, but flecked, at immense height, by little streamers of high cirrus. Over Dartmoor to the south ‘Buster’ saw cumulus forming. Thither flew Falcon One and Falcon Two; to return high in clear air to the Valley of Rocks. There they saw a storm brewing up over the sea.
*
Play was resumed, the Ramblers returning to bat. The air in the Valley of Rocks had become cooler. With the drop in temperature came the dropping down of ants. The first ball spread-eagled stumps. An ant had alighted on the moustache of the batsman at the moment the ball was released: it started to crawl up and was about to enter a nostril. No use to protest! Out came another batsman, who promptly cut the ball and was caught by slip.
While the next man was going out, flights of swallows appeared twittering over the field, flying close to the grass. Ants were dropping everywhere. Hundreds of starlings alighted, to run about the pitch. The game was stopped, until the birds were chivvied away; then a fifth wicket was wrecked by the same bowler. Perry went in to stop the rot. He hit the next ball over the road. Six. The bowler was about to begin his run-down when the umpire held up a hand. All over his ancient panama hat ants were crawling and shedding wings. He cursed and swept them off. Play on! The third ball went up into the sky, to fall over the boundary. More cheers from the Ramblers.
*
Miranda saw Phillip, while the fielding team was changing over, get up from where he had been sitting cross-legged and walk slowly past the pavilion to rising ground choked by furze and thorn which led to steep slopes to the sea below. She must speak to him. Lucy was beautiful, perhaps he still loved her; she could help him by telling him that she had not, as her father had told her, been ‘running after him, tongue hanging out’. This was the holiday she had so looked forward to; and everything had turned out the wrong way. She must speak to Phillip. While she hesitated she saw that a man carrying a rolled umbrella had caught up with him and they had stopped together. What were they talking about? She waited until they had finished, too far
away to hear what was being said.
*
“You are Captain Maddison?”
“Yes.”
“I am from the paper of the times, in London. You’ve been a journalist, too, I know. So will you help me to get some facts right. By the way, I have a considerable admiration for the character of Sir Hereward Birkin. Have you see him lately?”
“No.”
“And you are also a friend of Lord Cloudesley?”
“An acquaintance.”
“Have you read the article in the New York Herald-Tribune’s Sunday magazine, by Osgood Nilsson?”
“No.”
“Mr. Nilsson has disclosed an idea to bring about the release of Rudolf Hess now serving a life sentence in Spandau prison. Do you know anything about it?”
When Phillip didn’t reply, he withdrew a folded magazine from a pocket. “You know Mr. Osgood Nilsson, I think? I marked the passage where he suggests that the attempt to rescue Hess is to be made by gliders. Can you tell me if any, or all members of the Crimson Ramblers, visiting here today, served either as Commandos, or with the Parachute Corps at Arnhem?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“But you must have heard of the project? Between you and me, as one old soldier to another, I’ve reached the conclusion that it never pays to allow vengeance to run its course. Churchill loathed the idea of the Nuremberg hangings, didn’t he?”
“‘The grass grows green upon the battlefield, but upon the scaffold never.’”
“Did Hitler say that when you were his guest at the Parteitag at Nuremberg in nineteen thirty five?”
“My dear chap, it was said by Churchill in his prime of inspiration, that is, when a young man! Well, that’s all I know, except that I, too, used to work on The Times. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll be on my way.”
*
Miranda watched the man with the rolled umbrella hurrying back to the cricket ground; and making her way into the pavilion she went through the main room to the door at the back of the ladies’ lavatory. Then through another door, and she was among brambles and thorns, to tread a way through and up until, suddenly, she saw Capella. With a series of bounds her pet was beside her. She knelt to put her arms round the goat while rubbing her cheek on the coarse hair of its neck. “Darling, darling Cappy!”
The Gale of the World Page 37
