Mr. American

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Pip then took charge herself, organising a group photograph. She indicated the drayman. 'We'll have you, you great big handsome brute - 'Laughter and cheering as the drayman obligingly flexed his massive biceps ' - and you, too, Algy.' Pip beckoned to the knut, who coloured slightly, but allowed himself to be drawn forward on her right arm while the drayman took the left. Two of the girls flanked them, with the field officer and warrant-officer next, and finally two more of the chorus on the outside. All then linked arms and smiled, the photographers went through professional contortions, and when the picture had been taken the entire company of Pip, Squeak! set themselves to accost young men passing by and invite them into the recruiting office, those who accepted being warmly but decorously kissed for the benefit of the camera.

  Mr Franklin, watching from a distance, found himself confronted by a pretty red-head with a little Union Jack on a pin. 'Won't you enlist?' she cried gaily, catching his lapel, and when he smiled back and shook his head she only pouted for a moment before launching herself at the next young male, who allowed himself to be borne off on her arm. However, the incident started a train of thought in Mr Franklin's mind which led him eventually to the American Embassy, where he sought out one of the senior staff whom he knew and asked him a question.

  'Well, the plain fact of the matter, Mr Franklin, is that for American citizens in England, the war just doesn't make any difference. We're a neutral country - a very friendly neutral country, of course - but neutral, and our citizens here are in exactly the same position they've always been. You've been here five years, you have property here? So - none of that's affected by the fact that Britain's at war with Germany. You have exactly the same rights and protections here that you've always had, both from the United Kingdom and the United States. You can buy, sell, come, go, do what you please - just as you've always done. Nothing's changed. Quite a few people have been in here the last couple of days, just like you, and that's what we tell 'em. Why - did you have any special thoughts in mind?'

  'No, none at all.'

  'I just wondered there for a moment if you were thinking of joining the British Army - one or two fellows have asked about that.'

  'It hadn't occurred to me.'

  'No, well, no reason why it should - and I'm afraid when these chaps asked it took me aback a little.' The embassy man smiled wrily. 'Matter of fact, I didn't know what to tell them. I've an idea there's some prohibition on foreign enlistment of U.S. nationals, but we have nothing in our regulations here, so we've had to ask Washington. On the other hand, one of the older men here had some recollection of certain special provisions where Americans desirous of entering British service are concerned - I believe there's a regiment that used to be called the Royal Americans back in colonial days, and there's some loophole to do with them, he thinks. The King's Royal Rifle Corps they're called nowadays - apparently they figure in "The Last of the Mohicans".' He laughed and declaimed. ' "Forward, gallant Sixtieth!" Anyway, we'll see what Washington says. I advised the young fellows to hold their horses, reminded them they were officially neutrals, and that it might not be quite fitting for an American to get mixed up in the British Army. Know what one of'em said to me? He said: "George Washington and Daniel Boone got mixed up in it, didn't they?" Read me the deuce of a lecture about the retreat from Fort Ticonderoga or somewhere. Well, sir, I told him he was wasting his ardour.' He shook his head, becoming confidential. 'I told him that between ourselves it's highly unlikely that this war will last out the year, and the British Army is going to be in no need of foreign recruits - they'll have more of their own than they can handle.'

  Mr Franklin, recalling the throng at the recruiting office, agreed that this was probably so.

  'In fact, though,' the embassy man went on, 'most of the inquiries I've had have been in the other direction. "Can I go home?" and "Can I take my assets with me?" That's what I've been getting asked - to which the answer is, sure, any time you like. Mind you, if anyone wants to take bullion with him he'd be advised to do it pretty quickly, because a friend in the F.O. tells me that an embargo on gold is inevitable. That's understandable - but as I tell 'em, what difference does it make, when credit transfers will still hold good? I tell 'em not to worry, anyway; it's sure to be a short war, and one thing you can bank on is that whoever loses, it won't be England.'

  Which was reassuring until, remembering General Flashman's thoughts on national anthems two nights earlier, Mr Franklin wondered if perhaps U.S. embassies in Berlin, Paris, St Petersburg, and Vienna might not be saying much the same thing about Germany, France, Russia, and Austria. And no doubt just as convincingly - one had only to think of the armed might of Germany, of the sheer ponderous strength of her four million fighting men, to ask oneself if such a colossus could conceivably be defeated. On the other hand, he had only to recall the naval review he had seen at Spithead, the sea covered with those huge splendid ships, or the solid marching ranks that he remembered at the Coronation, or the Olympia displays. Germany was taking on the strongest, biggest empire the world had ever seen, richer and more powerful than any nation on earth, because she was many nations. For some reason the association brought to mind a face that he had hardly seen in five years, vividly remembered from Sandringham - the young Churchill with his hands on his hips, head thrust forward, in the billiard-room. 'Money and power - they're what count.' And now Churchill himself was wielding that power, as master of the Royal Navy, with the limitless wealth of Britain to back him up. Mr Franklin wondered if, great as it was, it would be sufficient.

  They travelled down to Castle Lancing on the Friday, from a St Pancras that seemed to contain more Germans, Frenchmen, Belgians, and other assorted continentals than Englishmen. These were the foreign reservists leaving by the trainload to rejoin their national armies, nor did it strike anyone as odd that they should be allowed to do so. War, as far as Europeans were concerned in 1914, was still a word that conjured up pictures of colourful uniforms and massed regiments, of jingling cavalry and infantry in red coats, of trumpets and banners and manoeuvres, Wellington and Napoleon in their cocked hats, bearded Highlanders in kilts, Polish lancers in winged helmets, Frenchmen in blue greatcoats, Guardsmen in bearskins. And the conventions that went with the visions still held good; it would have been an affront to fair play to take advantage of a foreigner's presence in one's country to intern him, enemy though he might be. In a sense it would have been to make a deserter of him; war was still a chivalrous business in the summer of '14.

  So the small, alert Frenchman in his spats courteously made way for the large German in his homburg when they arrived simultaneously at the ticket-window, and the German acknowledged it with a stiff bow and said: 'Danke.' A few months later they might meet again in a special kind of living hell which neither of them could even remotely envisage, where a smiling countryside had been churned into a waste of mud and tangled wire and poisonous stagnant shell-holes and the air was alive with exploding death and the stink of rotten corpses. But for the moment they used each other with formal politeness, pretending not to notice their different nationalities. And together they stood watching a regiment of British troops entraining, the Frenchman with eager interest, the German with deep thought, and when a contingent of English nurses went by in their long blue coats and wimples, they both raised their hats, the German stolidly, the Frenchman with a smile.

  Even so early, the railways were beginning to feel the strain of war. Mr Franklin found himself standing all the way to Cambridge in a first-class corridor that seemed to be full of young officers; only on the Norwich line was he at last able to find a seat. Yet even here, from the train window, he caught an occasional glimpse of a convoy of lorries on the road, or of a khaki-clad regiment marching along in column of fours, with a mounted colonel at its head.

  Castle Lancing was busy, but that at least was with the civilian bustle of the new housing at Lye; of the war there was no sign. They settled in at the Manor, and for the first two or three days Mr Franklin busied
himself with the stud at Oxton Hall. They knew it would be some time before Sir Charles returned, but all seemed to be well and flourishing; the head groom was a steady man, expert in his business, and Mr Franklin felt as he drove away from Oxton on the third day that there was at least one area of his affairs which was in good hands.

  Thereafter he began to behave in a way which caused Samson surprise and not a little concern. Samson was shrewd, and he had some inkling that all was not exactly as it should be where his employer's marital relations were concerned; even so, Mr Franklin worried him. For he had become quiet again, in a way which Samson remembered from the beginning of their association; the butler would occasionally surprise him standing alone in the hall or the study or the garden, lost in thought; and he spent a considerable amount of his time in long walks along the surrounding roads and byways. Once he walked as far as Oxton, and another time to Thetford; he had always, Samson knew, been one for healthy exercise, but that seemed excessive. He wondered what his master was brooding about, and felt that it boded no good.

  Mr Franklin, in fact, was saying good-bye. He was not saying it to anyone, but he was saying it to places that he had grown to know and love. He was saying it to the shades of the Babes in the Wood and their wicked uncle in the cool solitude of Wayland, and to the pleasant, dusty Thetford road, along which another English American named Tom Paine had set out a hundred and fifty years earlier; he was saying it to the bridge where Mr Lancaster had sat puffing morosely at his cigar while a beautiful woman with green eyes laughed as she searched the map for West Walsham, and to the narrow lane where a fox had invaded his luncheon basket and his heart had stopped at the sight of an angel face beneath a black bowler hat; he was saying it to the musty, dim interior of the Apple Tree, where he stood again and bought pints for the garrulous, bright-eyed Jake and the burly Jack Prior, and rejoiced with them over the fine new cottage into which Jack and his family would be settling on the Lye model estate before the year-end; he was saying it to the bridle path by Oxton where he had talked with Sir Charles and ridden with Peggy, and to the chestnuts and beeches which shaded his home; and he was saying it to that home itself, to the panelled hall where he had stretched out on the bare boards on that first night in his rough blanket and said: `We're back,' to the comfortable furniture with which he had filled the study and diningroom and drawing-room (and felt such quiet pride), to the graceful curved staircase where it had been such a pleasure to walk, with the ice-smooth polished banister beneath his hand, where on that terrible night he had sprawled, blasting shots at Curry for his very life, where his enemy's blood had run on the boards and the shots had ripped into panel and plaster. And to the old stables and the apples and the ivy-covered walls and the broad gravel drive and the flower-beds which old Jake had laboured to keep free - well, fairly free - of intruding weeds.

  But most of all he was saying it in the old churchyard of Castle Lancing, to the great yew trees and the square tower and the lichened stones warm in the afternoon sun as they had been or, that first evening five years ago, when he had sat drowsy with October beer and muttered snatches from Grey's Elegy and the Harfleur speech. To the thick green grass among the tombs, and to the tombs themselves, from the fine new one of timeless polished granite which he had caused to be set up, bearing the words

  ELIZABETH

  FRANKLIN

  REEVE

  (so that everyone should know it was a Franklin born who lay there), to the ancient weathered stone propped against the church wall with its thin, spidery inscription: `Johannes Fran . . in. ., obit 1599.' And to those imagined people on the road away, so very long ago, who had travelled so far and so well, so that he might travel back, and in the way of things, set out again. For he was going, and he could not really tell why; it was not that he was restless, or drawn like his ancestors by the horizon, or tired of his surroundings, or longing for the places of childhood - this was the place of childhood, far more than the Nebraska farm he could hardly remember, this was the place where the 'free-born landholder, not of noble blood' had begun it in the unknown past, and where the generations of yeomen had tilled their land and planted their seed and courted their wives and watched their children grow, and in their time taken the terrible seven-foot staves cut from the hearts of these black twisted trees and gone out to the vineyards of Bordeaux and the passes of Spain in their country's quarrel, and perhaps to Shrewsbury and Barnet and Bannockburn and Halidon Hill, and certainly to Edgehill and Naseby and Marston Moor - and to the long road of the pilgrims, across the western sea to the place which in their homesick longing they had called New England. His people, and in a dim, half-understood way he had felt he was realising some great hope by coming home again, and now it was over, with the hope unfulfilled, and he could not tell why. He wanted to stay, God knew but he wanted to stay, and yet there seemed to be nothing now to stay for.

  Perhaps he had been fooling himself from the start, with some sentimental dream which, after all, was no substitute for life itself A dream was not a purpose, and a purpose was what he had lacked all along. Happy marriage to Peggy, the raising of a family - these would have supplied it. Even the protection of Bessie Reeve had been a purpose, in its little way, while it had lasted. But for the rest, it had been without a future or a goal - maybe it was his evil luck that he had looked for West Walsham that day, and been deluded by the glimpse he had had of the artificial, useless world which surrounded the King, and which seemed important only because it gave itself importance. He had despised it for the shallow, vicious facade that it was, without values, without honesty, without worth - and yet it had shaped his acceptance of the way of life which he had drifted into with Peggy. He had been as helpless as any fish out of water, knowing nothing in this new old world, and he had been content to drift, and not see that he was drifting; no code or experience from the wild past of Hole-in-the-Wall or Tonopah could have helped him, in an atmosphere as different as that of another planet. In fact, he had been looking for the impossible; it was not his world, and he knew it. He had been a misfit, a pretender, and a fool. He did not belong. .. and yet, as he looked at the old stones in the churchyard, and across the green meadows and hedges and woodland in the evening haze, he knew that he belonged in a sense that went deeper than mere living and walking and sleeping on the surface of the land. If this was not home, the birthplace and the native soil, then there was no home anywhere.

  It was difficult enough to bid good-bye even to the inanimate things, it was impossible where people were concerned. Five years in England might have added an ease to Mr Franklin's conversation and a polish to his manner, but it had also awakened in him emotions which he had not suspected, and it had not eroded his natural reserve and taciturnity. He could no more have walked into Mrs Laker's shop to bid his adieus, or into the Apple Tree to say farewell to Jake and Jack Prior, than he could have struck the Queen; his soul shuddered at the thought. He would, once he was away, write brief letters of thanks for friendship and service, but that was another matter; that he owed to his sense of simple courtesy as much as to anything. But say good-bye in the flesh to anyone in Castle Lancing he could not.

  The one exception was Thornhill. Perhaps because he had been the first with whom he had conversed on level, easy terms, perhaps because he was the first who had truly welcomed him to the village and made him feel that it was home, perhaps simply because he was Thornhill, the unfailingly kind, eccentric, helpful friend with whom no ceremony had ever been necessary, or would be now, Mr Franklin felt that he was different. With Thornhill there would be no embarrassment, no fuss, no stilted phrases of regret; it would more likely be `Close the door after you, old fellow, and - hold on, pop that letter into Mrs Laker's for me as you go, will you?' It was, as it turned out, something like that.

  'You're leaving?' Thornhill turned in surprise from among his welter of books, knocked one over, and upset a cup of forgotten cocoa on his papers. 'God damn and blast, what was that doing there? Well,' he looked at Mr Franklin
over his spectacles, 'that was a short stay, wasn't it?'

  'It's been five years, almost to the day.'

  'And what's five years?' Thornhill was looking for a cloth, couldn't find one, used the front of his jersey in a desultory way, and gave up. 'In three centuries, my dear chap, it's absolutely damn all. Well, I'm sorry - going anywhere special?'

  'States, maybe - or Canada. I'm not sure yet.'

  'Coming back?'

  'I doubt it.'

  'Well, there it is,' said Thornhill. 'It'll seem odd without you. Mind you, the damned place has changed so much lately, I don't know whether I'm coming or going myself. Do you know I saw a beastly mechanic the other day, actually filling up the front of his motor lorry with water from the horse-trough? "Has it come to this, Thornhill?" I asked myself. "Yes, by God, it has; the Philistines are upon thee," I added. Disgusting brute. Anyway, I thought the bloody things ran on petrol, or oil, or some filthy chemicals or other. And they call it progress!'

  'I feel rather responsible for that,' said Mr Franklin. 'If I hadn't sold Lye Cottage to Lacy it would never have happened.'

  'If it hadn't been for you,' said Thornhill, 'it would have happened sooner than it did. You saved us for a couple of years from the helots and "the march of the mind". Good old Thomas Love Peacock. Let's drink to him -I've got some beer in the sink.' And when he had filled two glasses and soaked the front of his trousers and cursed, he said: 'To dear old T.L.P., and to your departure, or safe arrival elsewhere, or something. Anyway, although I hate to admit it, the model cottage thing may not turn out at all badly - I thought, Lacy being the swine and bounder that he is, that he'd raze the whole village to the ground and turn it into a factory for producing mechanical dung. In fact, they'll probably be jolly good homes, instead of the hovels some of the poor souls are living in now. And it'll mean more work, I daresay.'