A Fox Under My Cloak (24 page)

After this momentary submission to the idea of resurrection through death, Phillip put the letter under the blotting pad, meaning not to send it. He would think it over. It was time to go on parade.

The mess-sergeant found it later, and put it in a plain envelope, and took it to the mess president, Major Fridkin; who gave it to Jonah, the adjutant; who showed it to
the colonel. “Strawballs” read it, gold spectacles on nose; and later signed a chit, typed in the orderly room, recommending the application. Thence to brigade; and to Eastern Command, held by the
white-haired
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who had been
relieved
of his command in France; and so to the War Office in London.

“So I went in and apologised in person, Mrs. Neville. Well, the colonel, I won’t tell you his nickname, looked at me over his glasses, and all he said after what seemed a long time was, “Very well, I shall accept your apology, Mr. Maddison,” so I saluted and went out. My luck was in, in more ways than one, for that very afternoon after parade I bought an almost-new O.K. Junior motor-bike in a local garage for seventeen pounds ten, and sold it straight away to someone in the mess for twenty-two pounds ten. With the profit I bought a new set of tyres for my own bike, and here I am, on weekend leave!”

“I can see all as you describe it, Phillip; you ought to write a book, you know, you make it all so vivid. What times we’re living in!” A sudden shriek punctured Mrs. Neville’s words. “Have you heard about Mavis’ officer on the staff? Oh, oh, that major on the staff!” She quivered helplessly. “Haven’t you heard?” Another puncture, followed by subsidence into her chair; helpless flipping of hand; turning away, wiping eyes, gasping, “Oh dear! Oh dear!” Another shriek, “We haven’t any money, but we do see life!”

When she was calmer Mrs. Neville became solemn. “Not a word of all this, Phillip! Your mother would never forgive me if she knew I had told you! Your Father must not know, you see, dear,” she went on in a sweet, clear voice, as her mind took command of her feelings. “If you promise, Phillip, never to say a word about it, I will tell you—although I feel mean in saying anything at all.”

“I promise, Mrs. Neville.”

“Well, Phillip, how can I begin? First, let me say, there has been nothing wrong, you know what I mean, concerning Mavis! Oh no, all above board! She met him in the train, and he took her to the Hippo. Nothing more! I would never breathe a word of scandal, you know that, dear, don’t you?”

“What happened, Mrs. Neville?”

“He was a fraud! He ordered a Review of Troops on
Blackheath
!” shrieked Mrs. Neville, flipping a hand at him. “On a horse! That he had hired from Soal the coalman, down here in Randiswell! What a nerve! You know, Phillip, I can’t help admiring the fellow. Inspecting a whole battalion! All dressed up in staff major’s uniform! And the horse found its own way back to Soal afterwards!” She quivered away once more into gasps, little groans, and watery eyes. She went on to tell him
details, while Phillip began to feel it was very funny. What a cheek, for a civilian to dress up as a major and inspect a battalion, after writing to the C.O. on War Office paper!

“He did it very well, too, Phillip. Oh yes, nothing paltry about Mavis’ major! He arrived on a horse, oh yes, very
magnificent
was Mavis’ major from the War Office! Mavis and her mother were watching, and Gran’pa and Aunt Marian! There were thousands of others, on Blackheath, as it was Saturday afternoon. The rows of ribbons he had on his breast, everything from the V.C. to the Temperance Medal. Oh, it was all very smart, very smart indeed!”

“What happened? How did they know he was a fraud, Mrs. Neville?”

“He vanished into thin air, after he had led a recruiting march, still on the horse, beside the colonel. There the bands were playing, the flags flying, and lots of recruits following the procession. They signed on and he rode away down Belmont Hill and no-one has heard from him or seen him from that moment!” Another shriek. “Soal’s horse arrived back without the saddle or bridle! What a nerve, Phillip, what a nerve! Of course,” went on Mrs. Neville, now recovered, “enquiries were made by the colonel. The War Office said it knew nothing about him. There was no-one like him known there. They had sent no-one down to any inspection. The War Office paper he used had been stolen. No, he had not defrauded anyone; he had even paid in cash for his uniform, at a tailor’s in Fordesmill!
Obviously
he did it all for a spoof. What a nerve, Phillip, what a nerve! You know, I jolly well admire a man like that!”

“I seem to remember a cobbler doing something like that, before the war, with the German Army—the cobbler of Zabern—no—Zabern was where the Prussian officer cut down a cripple in his path, wasn’t it—oh, anyway, it was a spoof, as you say, Mrs. Neville.”

“Such men have missed their vocations, obviously,” said Mrs. Neville. “Well, dear, you won’t say a word about what I have told you at home, will you? Your father must never know about it. Shall I tell you what I think he did it for, Phillip? For a spree! And now he’s done his bit, he’s retired!” she ended with another explodent shriek, which set off the laughter again.

Mrs. Neville in more sedate mood went on to say that Mother
was getting about nowadays quite a lot, going up to London with Gran’pa, riding in omnibuses, even going to the theatre for matinées. Sometimes they met Aunt Dora, who was still working in the East End.

“I do so admire your aunt, you know, dear. She is a brick, the way she has helped the poor mothers whose men have gone into the army. She is so good for your mother, too, who deserves her little bit of gallivanting. I often see her trotting down the road with Papa, usually they set off about eleven o’clock, and come back in time to give your father his dinner. She leaves the front-door key with me, so that Doris can call for it. Now don’t you go mentioning this, will you, you know how strict your father is about such things. So don’t breathe a word, dear. Well, Desmond will be home shortly, he is on night-duty every other night, on the searchlight in Hyde Park—they’ve got only two for London now, but more are coming, he says. You’ll stay and have tea with him, won’t you?”

O
N
the following Tuesday Hetty and her father set out to visit Dora in the East End. Their way led over the Hill, and down through streets of houses and so to the electric tube station which ran under the Thames. It was a warm sunny day, but Thomas Turney wore his overcoat, as he had recently been in bed with bronchitis. They sat down on the wooden scat
half-way
up the gully, under a laburnum tree in flower, and rested, the old man supporting his chest on his hands clasping his lemon-wood walking-stick.

Hetty’s mind wandered into the past, seeing Phillip as Sonny when he had run away from home, and she had found him sitting on that very seat, looking lost, pale, a mite whose world had collapsed under his father’s anger. She had taken his hand, and led him home again, trembling, nervous,
apprehensive
.

“You would hardly think, would you, Hetty,” said Thomas Turney, “that in this beautiful spring weather, such terrible
things could be possible. Nearly two thousand poor souls in the deep water south of Ireland! What foolish people the Germans are! They have done their cause irreparable harm in the eyes of America. They gave notice in New York, it is true, but no-one apparently took it seriously. One thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine passengers and crew, and of that total ninety of them little children and thirty-nine infants in arms. Terrible, terrible.”

The newspapers that morning had given details of the recent sinking of the Cunard liner
Lusitania
by submarine torpedoes off the Old Head of Kinsale in Southern Ireland.

In the light morning air, made brighter with clusters of white buds everywhere on the thorns growing above the gully, a faraway cuckoo’s voice floated to where they sat. The cemetery behind the houses of Charlotte Road was, with its shrubs and bushes and flies breeding upon the heaps of wilting flowers, a sanctuary for small birds; to Hetty and her papa, a place of memory, of suspended acts and thoughts still arising from the past, still valid, still existing in their lives, for there lay mother and brother, wife and son, at rest, at rest.

“Well, Papa, how do you feel? Ready to go on?”

“Yes, my dear, there’s life in the old dog yet! Ah, here’s Bolton. Poor man, how he has aged!”

Mr. Bolton, led by his pug-dog, was coming slowly up the gully, one arm held behind his back, in his eyes a look of the dead. He lived until he could bring home the bones of his only son, killed with the London Highlanders six and a half months ago, and buried, as Phillip had told him, in the German cemetery east of the road along the Messines crest.

Phillip had also told Mr. and Mrs. Wallace that their sons were in the cemetery; and he had visited Baldwin’s girl, in Bereshill, with the same tale. It was untrue that he had seen any names there that he recognised, in his brief and nervous stopping before the low wooden crosses, the few hanging
glengarries
; but they
could
have been there, he had told himself. Anyway, he had told the Wallace parents as a fact during his uneasy visit, eyes downheld out of nervousness from the feeling that Mrs. Wallace, in her withdrawn attitude, was despising him. He had mentioned Baldwin’s name then; and so had to keep up the story when he went to see Baldwin’s girl. The awful thing was, supposing David and Nimmo were prisoners, after
all? Peter was dead; several had seen him bayoneted, and heard his screaming cries dying away, as he was stabbed again and again, rolling on the ground with the Bavarian whose head he had been pummelling.

*

On the crest of the Hill, within the first shelter, sat Mr. Krebs, a little less pink of neck and head and face nowadays, a little shrunken with the thoughts of a mind which saw the two sides of the war at once: a mind which had, until recently, aspired with almost every conscious breath that a synthesis of
reconciliation
might be found; yet had had to remain mute, not from fear, but because he regarded himself as a guest in the native country of his wife. News of the gas attack at Ypres had come as a partial asphyxiation of the spirit which yearned for compromise; again, he had been like a man drowning when the Cunarder from New York had been torpedoed; he had walked from curtain-dark room to curtain-dark room of his house, tears running down his satin-smooth Kropp-razor’d cheeks as he thought of children in mothers’ arms stifling in the waves, mothers praying to God to be saved—yet knowing that the Fatherland was surrounded on all sides, blockaded by the power of the British Navy, which would in the end strangle his people, reduce them to destitution, destroy them as it had destroyed Napoleon dreaming of a self-sufficient Europa freed of the satrapies of usury, so that the “canaille might become the best educated in the world”. The British Navy had swept the seas clear of all ships trading with the Fatherland; the Fatherland had replied with the submarine. So thought Mr. Krebs; while in his ears were the cries of lost little children, becoming feebler in the massive green drifts of ocean,
mutter,
mutter.

Pride and courage had brought Mr. Krebs upon the Hill that morning. His wife had accompanied him in ordinary loyalty of love, to reassure him, and to stand by him should what she dreaded, after reading
The
Daily
Trident
’
s
call for all Germans to be interned, occur: that his acquaintances on the Hill show him the cold shoulder. To her great relief she heard Mr. Turney greeting him as genially as ever, while Mr. Bolton was his invariable courteous self.

As the Krebs were returning home later, on what was to be their last walk together across the Hill, the pink and almost hairless South German said to his greying English wife, “You
know, my dear, the English are at heart a most kind people, taken all in all. We old fellows were so happy, to meet in the little Chalêt every day, until this bad vaw came.”

“Yes, dearest,” replied Mrs. Krebs, with sudden
unconventionality
taking his arm (since only children were near), “and we are the cousins of your people, never forget.”

*

Having made her visitors a pot of tea, Dora sat down for a few minutes’ rest. “A wonderful work you have achieved here,” remarked Thomas Turney.

“Oh, I am but a very small cog, Mr. Turney. Sylvia is the originator, the dynamo. I am sorry she is not here just now, and she will be sorry too, when I tell her you have called. She has gone to see Herbert Samuel again about sweated-labour conditions, here in the East End. Yes, Hetty, Sylvia’s is the inspiration, the will, and the intellect. She is Great-heart. Sylvia will go down in history, with Florence Nightingale.”

They were visiting
The
Mothers’
Arms,
a clinic made out of what until recently had been an empty public house,
The
Gun-
makers
’
Arms,
a dirty dark place with floors encrusted with fishbones, and walls stinking of thick-twist tobacco smoke and paraffin soot mingled with beer and foetid human breath. Now it was clean and fresh, painted white inside; pictures were on the walls; the rooms set with cribs and cots.
The
Mother
s
’
Arms
was scrubbed and soaped and polished.

The spirit of
The
Mothers’
Arms
was such that Hetty was like a girl again. If only she could help with the little ones! What a brave and beautiful spirit Dora had. Oh, the little children, so clean and happy, in the cots, or playing in the nursery! Yet what tragedy lay in some eyes: the fixed stare as of very old and sick people, the stare of fear, of fright fixed in the children’s eyes: their thin little arms and legs, stalk-like necks; sharp features; bony, skull-like faces. And all the result of starvation, fathers away at the front, or “fallen down”, as the widows said; and neither allowance nor pension sufficient to pay the rent and feed the mother and her children. Some of the mothers had had to pawn all their household goods, Dora said. Price of the staple food, bread, was nearly doubled: from 4½
d
. to 7
d.
the quartern. Sugar was 3¼
d
., instead of 1¾
d
. before the war; skimmed milk 7
d.
a tin, from 3¾
d
. Meat had doubled
in price, and the cheapest cuts, scrag and shin, almost thrice the peace-time prices.

“One woman’s baby at fifteen months weighed seven pounds six ounces, instead of the normal eighteen, Hetty. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of ‘Death from natural causes’. It had been fed, from necessity, on water in which white bread had been boiled. There were six other children in the family; and all that was coming in was twelve shillings and sixpence. That, I ought to add, was before the scale of allowances for a soldier’s wife and family.”

“Poor things,” murmured Hetty, thinking of Phillip as a baby, so thin, starving, while his father sat with him all night.

“One unhappy mother came here crying, ‘I haven’t had any food in the house for four days, and I have strangled my little boy!’ She was tried for murder, and was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude.”

Hetty broke into tears.

“Now, now,” said Thomas Turney, blowing his nose. “You’re upsetting Hetty with such tales, Dora.”

“Very well, I shall generalise, Mr. Turney. The War Office, until recently, refused allowances for children born less than nine months after their parents’ marriage.”

“But what about a seven-months child, Dora? Surely——”

“‘There hain’t no sich hanimal’, legitimately, in the eyes of the authorities, apparently, Hetty.”

“What is the soldier’s widow’s allowance?” asked Thomas Turney.

“It has been raised now, Mr. Turney, to seven shillings and sixpence a week, which allows a shilling for food, clothes, gas, and coal, after the average rent of six and six is paid. The first child gets five shillings; the second, third, and fourth half-a-crown, and two shillings for any others.”

“But the mothers go out to work, surely?”

“It is a little better, Mr. Turney, now that the factories are going again. Even so, the prices paid are very small indeed. Let me give some examples. A clothing factory near us, on army contracts, works every day until eight o’clock, including Sundays, paying wages less than those before the war—there is so much unemployment, you see, the old question of supply and demand. The wages work out at twopence farthing an hour. There are several firms giving out piece-work, you may judge
for yourself when I tell you that officers’ khaki shirts, all the sewing together, all the buttons and ribbed button-holes, are paid for at the rate of two shillings and a penny, less twopence farthing for the reel of cotton——”

“Well, that sounds very good to me, Dora—just under two shillings for a shirt——”

“That’s for a dozen, Mr. Turney! The dark material tries their eyes, and they cannot make more than a dozen in a long day of sixteen or eighteen hours.”

“This sounds like the times of Dickens come again, Dora! Are you sure of your facts?”

“They are confirmed by the figures of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, sir. Complete khaki uniforms, jacket and trousers, for private soldiers, are taken for
eighteen-pence
. But that is not the worst. Contracts are often sub-let as many as four times——”

“Ah, that’s the reason! The sub-contractors are making the money! Many are Jews, of course.”

“Yes, Mr. Turney; with the result that soldiers’ trousers are being finished for as low as a penny farthing the pair. Soldiers’ kit-bags, of stiff white canvas, take four hours to finish seven, the sempstress receives under sixpence; while the eyelet holes, to be bound with stiff thread, are paid ten for a penny. A mother of three children and a six-month babe told me she received five shillings and sevenpence for the work of forty-two hours. We have written and complained to the Home Office, and to the Director of Contracts at the War Office; we have taken deputations to both places, and been put off, if not actually snubbed. Recently the Army Clothing Stores at Pimlico sold one and a half million Indian body-belts at four shillings a dozen, which were bought up at eighteen shillings, and sold again at a still higher price, to the soldiers.”

“Well, as I told you before, there is bound to be a muddle until we change over to war-time economy, Dora. First
everything
was at a stand-still; now it is confusion; but things will get better, ye’ll see. Meanwhile you and your friends here are doing a fine job of work, a fine job of work. Well, Hetty, we must not keep Dora any longer from her work. Come and see us when you can spare an hour or two, Dora, won’t you?”

“I shall be delighted, Mr. Turney. Oh, thank you, thank you!” for he had slipped a five-pound note into her hand at parting.

“Now,” said Thomas Turney, at the turning out of Old Ford, “I want to see my broker in Lothbury. D’you think you can walk so far? It’s a fine day, we could go by bus to Liverpool Street Station if you wish, Hetty.”

“Are you sure you will be all right, Papa?”

“Right as rain, Hetty. Now we can go down here as far as Whitechapel, or cross over and go down the Bethnal Green road. What d’you say?”

For Hetty the walk was of great interest; all she saw was new to her, the Yiddish lettering on coloured posters outside little picture theatres which were slightly wider than the shop-fronts; orthodox Jews, who she thought must be rabbis, dressed in long black robes, wearing hats of astrakhan and other furs, all black like their own long beards and whiskers, hair looking as though it had never been cut, but left to grow naturally. Their faces had the yellowness of old candles, skin unsunned, as though they cared only for righteousness within, fortified by truths revealed to the prophets who still lived in their minds though they had died thousands of years before. Other Jews passed, some
desperately
poor, in tatters. One had half a dozen hats on his head, one fitted neatly into the other, while two bulging sacks, one of waste paper and the other of cloth trimmings, were slung over his shoulder, as his broken boots shuffled in the gutter. A few soldiers were about, many ragged children; one little girl was hastening along with a pig’s trotter held tightly in one fist, a look of suppressed excitement in her face. It was all so
dreadfully
sad, how the poor lived.