A Fox Under My Cloak (29 page)

“Rather soon after last week, don't you think, General?”

“Mebbe you're right, Willie. Well, so long as they clear up this mess before the 'osses walk by in the mornin', Willie.” The general paused. “Raggin', Willie, did ye say? That reminds me of the letter in
The
Times
yesterday, d'ye recall it, Willie? That foreigner fellow the Prince o' Wales dubbed—what's's name, one of those Kimberley mushroom knights.”

“Otto Beit, General?”

“'Ats'r feller, Willie! Son was a cornet, shot himself in the Cavalry Barracks at York, didn't know the form, so the others bully-ragged 'im. Chivalrous letter, I thought, Willie, well put together. Pleaded for consideration towards new types of officers in the Militia. I'm in favour of reasonable kindness, Willie—I served under that blackguard Raglan at Crimea, and b'God, Willie, when the ‘Thunderer' got the news by electric telegraph, and m'lady mother thought I'd been snuffed out, she had the pair o' greys dyed black—did I ever tell 'ee that, Willie?”

“Yes, indeed, General.”

“Well, the carronadin' seems over, so Bedfordshire, Willie, Bedfordshire!”

Followed the sound of a prodigious yawn, after which the two figures went jingling slowly up the hill towards brigade
headquarters
.

Phillip had heard only snatches of what was said; he
recognised
the brigadier and his brigade major, and kept well back
in shadow until they had gone. By now he thought it was all rather funny; and thinking to add to the fun, he turned to the left before Godolphin House, which was on the corner across the road, and going some way up the street, crossed over and so came to the back entrance in moon shadow all the way.

The interior doors were open. Listening, he heard laughter and the clink of glasses; and distantly, the nightingale singing. In a few moments he was up the stone steps, two and three at a time, silent on naked feet; and listening outside Baldersby's door. No sound within. He turned the handle, entered. It was a quick matter to open the window, and then to place white ewer, basin, soap-dish and chamber pot under the window, ready for a salvo. Then he went to the iron rail outside, listening. Reassured, he crept back, and stripped Baldersby's camp bed of rugs and sleeping sack.

These, with the pillows, went out of the window when he had dropped the drawers full of shirts, socks, breeches, trousers, and other things, and heard them spike themselves on the railings below. Then, one after another, hurled sideways to burst into the middle of the road, went the china bedroom-ware, each splaying out with a satisfactory ringing crash upon the void.

Soon there were voices below. Faces looked up. There were shouts. Phillip's heart began to thump. Should he await them, or dash down to the next floor, and through O'Connor's
bedroom
to the main staircase?

While he hesitated, he heard footfalls clambering up the stone steps. Could he get out of the window and so on to the roof, and hide among the chimney pots? He dared not; he would fall So he awaited his pursuers in his attic room.

He was grabbed, lugged downstairs for what Baldersby called the kill. The sentence was in two parts: to run the gauntlet of wet-knotted towels, between two rows of junior officers across the ante-room floor, who lambasted him on head, shoulders, and back while cries of high delight came (from them, while Baldersby sounded the mort-blast, and Jonah the Whale beside Hairy Harry Fridkin stood by the open door, much amused. It was Hairy Harry, Phillip learned later, who had, on both occasions, suggested to Baldersby the idea of the subalterns' court-martial. Phillip was glad that the towels were very wet, for they hid the marks of tears: tears not of pain, for the towels did not really hurt, but of loneliness.

The second part of the sentence was the more humiliating. He was ordered to stand naked upon the ante-room table, china pot in hand, and dance a jig. This he refused to do, so he was lifted up, while hands tore at the flannelette pyjama suit his mother had made for him, as he strained and pushed against them. Baldersby tried to crown him with the pot. Somebody—it was O'Connor, a spectator, holding towel in hand since, considering himself a guest of the battalion, he must make a token conformation with the ruling—shouted out “Steady!” Too late: the mind of the phrensied youth, as though torn across in response to the tear in the jacket his mother had sewn for him, momentarily passed into a lower stratum, where fear or death-thought ruled, akin to that which had screamed as a child under the cane of the father, to that which screamed out of men physically dislocated, mortally stricken upon the battle-field.

This fear, of one who had not learned to submit, charged nerves with power and muscles with strength, so that he writhed from the clutches of the laughing-weak, who received violent heel-blows upon chests and chins, catapult-like thrusts of legs straightening abruptly from bends, skull-butts in midriffs; and thus escaping from the worry, Phillip whizzed the pot sideways into the marble mantelpiece, where it shattered to many pieces.

He was lugged and tugged to the floor; so were many laughing subalterns, while Baldersby advanced, cigar between teeth, to add his weight to the
mêlée.
Phillip saw his light yellow shoes and managed to thump first one then the other on the toes with his clenched fist, making the senior subaltern howl and hop away, to the great amusement of Jonah the Whale and Hairy Harry Fridkin standing in the doorway. Major Fridkin saw Baldersby's discomfiture with a certain satisfaction: for if Phillip was an outsider, cause of anger and exasperation to Major Fridkin, he considered St. George Baldersby to be the fool of the regiment, and an over-bred nonentity: an attitude of interior scorn which may have had its origin in envy that Baldersby was the only member of the regiment, except Major the Hon. Arthur Wayland, whose particulars of family tree and pedigree, covering several centuries, appeared in Burke's
Peerage,
a copy of which, living on the colonel's desk, was frequently consulted by Major Fridkin, who longed to be armigerous.

He chuckled, cigar in mouth. “That will teach him not to chuck his weight about.”

The adjutant agreed; while thinking that the outsider was putting up a dam' good fight.

Gasping and twisting, thrusting and sobbing, the culprit broke from the worry, and with one hand holding pyjama trousers, fled up the stone steps to the attic room. He would put in an application, in the morning, to return to the front: and this time he would take it to the orderly room. O'Connor followed him to the attic, and telling him not to take the ragging to heart, for it was all over, advised him to wash in cold water at the bathroom tap, put on his uniform, and come down to the ante-room.

“You acquitted yourself well, my boy. And we all have to go through a tempering at some time or other in our lives, to break the cast of our own conceit.”

“Well, thank you, O'Connor, for what you did for me.”

“Oh, 'tis very little, I'm thinking. But if you will take a tip, my boy, don't talk about the war, or the enemy. I know there is some truth in what you have been saying—after all, it is in
The
Times
today, which hints that Sir John French himself has broken the news about the shell-shortage—but
timing
is important, indeed it is everything in life. A joke at a funeral will be in bad taste; the same joke at a coming-of-age party may cause a man to be considered the very soul of wit. Now to the bathroom, and don't forget a clean shirt, and hair brushed—it's wonderful how a change of linen can effect a change of mind.”

Phillip, holding to the idea of going back to the front, felt strangely other than himself sitting next to Dimmock, who wore the magical two cloth pips sewn on his shoulder straps, and sipping a whiskey-soda that Dimmock had invited him to have. Most of the others had gone; unknown to Phillip, they were cleaning up the litter in the High Street outside.

Lieutenant Dimmock, who had come back sick from the B.E.F., after five weeks with the first battalion in a quiet sector around Arméntières, did his best to make the ranker officer see what was wrong with himself, as they sat somewhat uneasily side by side.

“Well, I don't want to preach, but when I heard that you had not been to school, I mean the kind of school most of us go to, with fags and prefects and particular codes—at Harrow if you turn up your trouser-ends in Lower School you get beaten,
elsewhere if you don't turn them up you do, sort of thing—what was I saying?—Good luck!—Well, the best thing is always, when one is new in a job or school or 'varsity or regiment, to lie low, to conform like blazes, and certainly not to utter the first thought that comes into one's head, don't you know.”

“I see.”

“Where were you in France, by the way?”

“We went to Messines first, and then to Ypres.”

“We were south of you, in the more industrial area, coal mines and all that sort of thing.”

“Oh, I see. I say—er—well—I hope you won't mind my asking, but will you have a drink with me?”

“That's awful nice of you. There's just time before the hatch goes down. Just a small one this time, please.”

The mess-sergeant was his usual gravely deferential, unsmiling self.

Phillip racked his brains what to talk about.

“Are you interested in motorcars—er—may I call you
Dimmock
?”

“Of course. No, not particularly. Why d'you ask?”

“I wondered, that's all. Well, cheer ho!”

“Here's luck!”

“Have you been in the Pigskin Club yet?”

“The Pigskin Club, I think, it is a place to avoid, really, unless one is really interested in bloodstock, and all that sort of thing, don't you know.”

“Are you—er—Dimmock?”

“Oh yes, rather. It's in our midst all our lives, so to speak, friends, cousins, relations, you know, the horse is part of the life of the land.”

After ten more minutes of this bleak conversation—Dimmock was not interested in birds, fishing, electricity, or chemistry—Phillip said he thought he would go to bed. Yet Dimmock seemed to want his company.

“Oh, must you, so early?”

Phillip wondered what was coming next. He found out the reason for Dimmock keeping him when he went into his bedroom. Somehow or other somebody had obtained another set of bedroom china-ware and chest-of-drawers; while his camp bed, although a bit twisted, stood with sleeping-sack laid upon it as before. What happened to Baldersby's things he did not think;
the idea did not occur to him until after the war that he should have made a gesture, at least, towards replacing them, and by that time Baldersby was dead, having been killed on the morning of his first day in action.

Dimmock's kindness gave Phillip hope again, he did not put in the application to be sent to the front. He was, of course, unaware that his other application had already gone through.

*

Now, in the late spring of 1915, the ivory hawthorn buds were dropping, blushet pink in death; nightingales sung out; nearly all the talk in the town bars was of the coming July Races. The marching companies with their yellow Japanese rifles passed strings of bloodstock, and saw the flying thin-legged centaurs on the turf. Songs rose above the dusty hedgerows—
It
'
s a long, long trail a-winding, Into the land of my dreams
——

During the May Week inter-college boat races, held as usual for a fortnight in June, ladies appeared in Godolphin House for luncheon and tea, at the top table with the senior officers and their own particular friends in the regiment. The colonel had, before their appearance, addressed the junior officers on the matter of decorum. Among the visitors was a beautiful girl wearing a big picture hat, who was said to be going to marry Lieutenant Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, etc. She arrived with Mamma and Papa in a Rolls-Royce and they stayed at the Belvoir Arms Hôtel. How had Baldersby got such a peach of a girl, it was asked. The junior subalterns, warned to take no notice of the visitors, beyond the usual courtesies shown to guests of the regiment, took surreptitious glances and wondered among themselves in the ante-room afterwards.

The summery peace-time aspect of their lives received a jolt one day—when the names of four were posted on the ante-room board for Overseas. Rumour said Gallipoli, a place where all was not well. One of them was an attached officer, who was in Phillip's regiment.

By this time Phillip had learned more or less how to get from place to place on a horse, but it was still an embarrassment for him when it trotted, despite that he had learned to rise and fall in time, if not in harmony, with the rising of the various feet of the quadruped. He went over once or twice on horseback to the Green House, where he was now an old friend. A patch of oil was ever-fresh where
Helena
stood, against an out-house.

For some reason or other, he thought, Fairy fancied she was passionately in love with him. When he went over, as often as not her sisters left them alone, with the piano. Apparently she wanted to kiss him passionately sometimes on the lips, a procedure which embarrassed him. Hadn't he ever kissed a girl? she asked. No, he said. Had he ever
wanted
to kiss a girl? Not really, he replied. Had he ever kissed anyone? Only his mother; but it was so long ago he could not remember.

“Well, aren't you the strangest man! A heart of stone! I believe you hate me!”

“I like you. I say, do play that Chopin piece again, Fairy.”