Brensham Village (15 page)

‘These Bedouins would have liked to hand me over, see, to old Johnnie Turk. It was during the last war, I don't know if I told you? I always liked the Turk funnily enough, always a gentleman. But those Arabs, dirty rats, they'd hand you over to whichever side they thought would pay most, see. And if they took it into their heads to kill you, Lord, I shouldn't like to say what they did to you afterwards! I could never get used to the thought of lying dead like that. ‘Twas their women did it. Where was I?'

‘Nearly caught by a lot of Bedouins,' said Joe Trentfield helpfully.

‘Oh, yes. Well, to cut a long story short, there I was in a little wadi with nothing but my gun, see, when along comes these damned Arabs, twenty of them there must have been but they left some behind to hold their horses. Now on account of the conformation of the ground, as they say, these Arabs had to crawl up the wadi right into my line of fire if they wanted to get me; so I just lay there and waited. And as I waited, I thought, if they kill me, I know what they'll do. Their women will do it. Always have their
women handy, the Arabs do. And there I shall be, stretched out on the sand—'

But just as Sammy was about to describe to us the unpleasing appearance of his hypothetical corpse, which as a matter of fact he'd done a good many times before, a car drew up outside and there came in with a blast of cold air and a spatter of rain Lord Orris' daughter. She was hatless and big raindrops ran down her flushed cheeks. Her old mackintosh was torn, and she carried in her arms a bloody bundle. She strode up to the bar and said to Alfie:

‘Here he is. I found him in a trap. Those devils with their traps! I'd like to kill them. It's bust his leg, I'm afraid.'

She put Rexy down on the counter. Through the torn flesh of his foreleg I could see a protruding splinter of bone. Alfie stroked him and with a rather painful attempt to sound casual said:

‘Yes, it's bust all right. I wonder if we ought to finish him off, Sammy?'

Sammy, who had great gentle hands, picked up Rexy and examined the broken limb.

‘I should get a vet,' he said. ‘They can do wonderful things with splints nowadays.'

‘I'll ring him up,' said Joe, and went out. We heard him in the back-room calling to Mimi to fetch the iodine.

Rexy lay still and whimpered. There was a short silence and then Alfie, who had gone very white, said:

‘It was awfully kind of you, Miss Jane.'

‘I took him to your house,' she said, ‘but they told me you were here.'

‘How did you find him?' asked Mr Chorlton.

‘I was up on the hill. I love walking in the rain. I got to the larch plantation - you know, your old bug-hunting place, they got it off Father years ago because he owed them
some money - and then I remembered that somebody had told me they'd killed off the fallow-deer. I thought I'd go and see. So I went in and then I heard Rexy yelping. I suppose he'd been yelping for hours, and these devils must have heard him because they'd been shooting all day in the coverts just below where he was. But of course they wouldn't care about a dog.'

‘Did you have a job to get him out of the trap?' said Banks.

‘Well, I did as a matter of fact. He bit me,' said Jane factually. Then we noticed for the first time that she'd a handkerchief tied round her hand.

‘Better let me fix it,' said Banks. ‘I can do first-aid.'

‘It's nothing. We'll put some iodine on it when Joe comes back. But listen: aren't they horrible, unspeakable, beastly?' Jane turned to address us all. She was splendidly and beautifully angry. I knew what Mr Chorlton had meant when he said she wanted a Crusade. ‘What can we
do
about them? They're rich and they're powerful and they've got everything they want in the world; and yet they always want more. They've got thousands of pheasants; but they set those cruel traps to catch the vermin in case they should lose half a dozen. And they killed the fallow-deer because they were afraid they might do a few pounds' worth of damage. They were gentle and delicate and graceful; so the Syndicate killed them. They kill everything that's lovely. One day they'll gobble up this village as they're gobbling up my father's land now. They'll squeeze you out one by one, they'll offer you a tempting price for your cottage or your bit of land and if you don't take it they'll break you. Can't we do something,
now
, before it's too late?'

She was so splendid and passionate, I wanted to cheer. Sammy said:

‘They'll never get Brensham. We'll see to that.'

‘Don't you be so sure,' said Jane. ‘My father once said they'd never have the larch plantation.'

‘They've got the big guns,' said Alfie. They're helluva powerful.'

‘Wait till
we
get into power,' said Briggs. ‘We'll clip their wings.'

‘When you get into power,' said Jane, swiftly, ‘they'll clip
your
wings. They've done it twice already.'

‘That's all very well, Miss Jane; we never had a clear majority anyhow.' Briggs worshipped Jane but he could never quite forgive her for being Redder than he was. ‘Suppose I ask you what you'd do about it if your lot got into power?'

‘There wouldn't be any need for us to do anything. If ever we got in we'd go in on a great tide of anger which would sweep the Syndicate and all such things away.'

‘Like the French Revolution?' said Mr Chorlton.

‘Yes!' said Jane.

‘I'm all for it,' said Mr Chorlton with a little smile, ‘if you'll cut off the right heads. But people get excited and, well, indiscriminate.'

Jane said:

‘Well, I'm going to do
something
, anyhow. While I'm still angry I'm going to drive along to their shooting-box or whatever they call it and tell them what I think of steel traps. I'll go now. Alfie, with all my heart I hope Rexy gets better. Goodbye, everybody.' She turned to Mr Chorlton. ‘Goodbye. You're terribly wise, and perhaps a tiny bit cynical and you're laughing at me, aren't you?'

Mr Chorlton shook his head.

‘My dear,' he said, ‘I promise you I'm not. I was thinking - shall I tell you what I was thinking?'

‘Go on,' said Jane, at the door, ‘I shan't mind.'

‘These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows that I am with them, in some ways.'

She laughed, and went out. We heard her furiously bang the car door. I thought I wouldn't like to be the members of the Syndicate, whoever they were. Mr Chorlton said to me: ‘I hope they don't offer her a cocktail. It'd be such an anticlimax.' But I felt sure they wouldn't. They wouldn't dare to. You couldn't offer a gin-and-bitters to an avenging angel.

Meanwhile Billy Butcher had been sitting alone in the corner and drinking whiskies almost as fast as Mrs Trentfield could serve them. He was long past the clowning stage — I dare say the Elmbury pubs had seen something of that, during the afternoon - and he looked terribly ill. I went across to him and asked him if he felt all right. He blinked and grinned.

‘In the bag,' he said. ‘It's in the bag.'

‘You're
in the bag.'

‘Yes. Three bags full. Black sheep, black sheep, that's me. One for the somebody and one for the something and one for the little boy who lives in the lane. Mrs Trentfield! Please! One for the little boy who lives in the lane.'

‘You've had enough, Master Billy,' she said.

‘One for the little boy who lives in the lane.'

She poured him out a small one; but he was watching, and he shook his head. ‘Double! Double, double, toil and trouble. How right those witches were!'

‘Billy,' I said, ‘you are a BF.'

‘Many do call me a fool,' said Billy, almost startling me because I had so often thought of him as clowning like Andrew Aguecheek.

‘That foolish knight,' said Billy, ‘had a vacuum inside him.' He got up unsteadily and staggered to the bar, where Briggs, Sir Gerald, and Mr Chorlton were listening to another of Sammy's stories which I recognized immediately as the one about the geisha girl. Alfie and Joe had taken Rexy into the back room, where they waited for the vet.

Billy leaned against the bar and waved his glass in the air. He looked terrible. His eyes were red, his hair was falling over his forehead, and his features were becoming curiously blurred. In spite of his years of drinking Billy had a fine face; it was a face which even had a sort of nobility, but tonight the whisky had begun to rub out the nobility as moss and erosion and weathering Time will blur the crumbling features of a piece of sculpture. He was approaching the last stages of his bout; he'd blow up soon; and whether the eruption would be one of poetry or of window-breaking was simply a matter of chance.

‘The foolish knight,' he repeated ‘- I am not referring to you, Sir Gerald - had a vacuum inside him. But I am different. I am full. Full of whisky, and also of devils. Did you know that, Chorlton? I am possessed by devils.'

‘I think we are all aware of it,' said Mr Chorlton.

‘But they are no ordinary devils,' Billy went on with terrible seriousness. (It would be poetry and not windows, I thought with relief.) ‘Their names are Ideas, Philosophies, unattainable Dreams, tormenting Thoughts, unwritten Epics, Sonnets, Songs, Ballads and Balderdash. If they were cast out into a herd of Gadarene swine the poor pigs would certainly run mad.'

'… These geisha girls,' said Sammy indomitably, ‘they dance, you know, and they make you cups of tea. Don't you think, Billy, it's time you went home?'

Billy laughed.

‘And a Voice valedictory, Who is for Victory? Who is for
Liberty? Who goes home? There I go, you see: the devils are stirring. But I deal with them as if I were a lion-tamer, though they are much more dangerous than lions. I command them: Down, sir, down, Ponto, down - Give me another drink, Mrs Trentfield - with a host of furious fancies whereof I am commander: that's me. Well, down the hatch boys. Down, Ponto, down.'

‘Do shut up, Billy,' said Sammy Hunt. ‘As I was saying, to cut a long story very short, these girls—'

‘My trouble,' announced Billy in a loud voice, as if he were bearing witness to a sudden revelation, ‘is that I am a sort of bottle.'

We all laughed at that.

‘There's many a true word spoke in jest,' said Briggs.

Billy fixed us with a fierce and reproving look.

‘You may laugh,' he said earnestly. ‘I am a bottle, but not in the vulgar sense you mean. When I was a boy I was in the habit of swallowing poetry. In West Africa, where I was all alone in the jungle with a dusky lady and half a dozen books I swallowed a lot more. A terrible lot: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Keats, Swinburne. Then one day I put the cork in it; because it was bad for me, see, it was making me think. I put the cork in and took to whisky. No more poetry, I said; and except for the racing tips I haven't read a word since. But like parsnip wine when you bottle it too soon, it goes on working. This Skimble-Skamble stuff - who said that? I've forgotten - it fizzes inside me, and it's trying to blow out the bloody cork.'

Billy swayed and held on to the counter.

‘Give me a whisky,' he said.

‘No,' Mrs Trentfield had decided to be firm at last. ‘You're not well, Master Billy. It would do you no good.'

‘Presumptuous woman,' said Billy severely, ‘how do you know? Are you a physician of the mind? Can you prescribe
for my cerebellum? Whisky stops me thinking. Poetry makes me think. Thinking is disastrous. Ergo, whisky good, poetry bad. But nobody classifies Shakespeare as a Dangerous Drug. You don't have to get a licence to sell Swinburne. Suppose I ask you. Mrs Trentfield, for a half-pint of Housman? Ha ha! But it hurts, it torments, it keeps you awake, it gives you bad dreams; your whisky is harmless by comparison. Poetry is a curse, alcohol is a blessing. With a trifle of help from Mr Coleridge I made up a rhyme about alcohol the other day. Would you care to hear it? It goes like this:

‘In Xanadu did Kuhla Khan
A sacred pleasure-drome decree
Where Ale the sacred river ran
Through taverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless—

‘Mrs Trentfield, I shall offend you if I go on. Give me another whisky. Give me one more.'

‘Well, one small one and that's the last.' Mrs Trentfield poured it out reluctantly.

‘“Come, cordial, and not poison, go with me,”' said Billy, and drank it. He was very near the edge now, I thought; this last one would topple him over. He suddenly fell silent; and Sammy, seizing his opportunity, began again:

‘These girls are specially trained, you see, for the purpose of entertaining gentlemen—'

Billy cried angrily:

‘“This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips.” Christ Almighty, what a world! “ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. 'Tis an unweeded garden, that's gone to seed.” Like me. Gone to seed. Bloody well gone to seed at thirty-five.
“Methinks I have out-lived myself and grown to be aweary of the sun. I have shaken hands with delight.” You don't know who wrote that. None of you know. It came out of the bottle.'

‘A vintage,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘called Sir Thomas Browne.'

‘I don't know, I've forgotten. But it came out of the bottle, the deadly dangerous bottle of stuff that makes you think.' Billy put his head in his hands. ‘If man were drunk for ever,' he muttered. ‘Half a pint of Housman. Christ, what a drink!' He looked up and quoted savagely:

‘“But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts—”

‘There you see: just what I've been saying. Listen, you fools, listen:

“And when they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.”

‘Oh, God, I can't bear it,' he cried. We recognized the symptoms; and sure enough, already the tears were rolling down his cheeks and his broad shoulders were heaving. Mrs Trentfield had her arm round his shoulder and began to lead him through the bar.