How Dear Is Life

by Henry Williamson

  “Yes, Mr. Graham. He’s quite well, thank you.”

  What did Mr. Graham mean? Had he smelled a rat about Cranmer, and then, thinking about it, remembered Timmy Rat? For that was how people thought, he had discovered—one picture in the mind led to another. If you wanted to hide your real thoughts, you had to be careful what you said.

  Feeling rather ashamed at the way he had ragged the decent Old Boy, he went with Tom Cundall to join Cranmer down by the pease-pudding shop at Lee Green. But Cranmer was not there—nor did Phillip see his old friend again until the following summer, in different circumstances.

  *

  Very soon, the team seemed to disintegrate. The last match was at Dulwich. To the captain’s unhappiness, only four turned up; even Cundall seemed to have got tired. The match with the Old Alleynians ‘C’ was scratched. Gildart Fitcheyson, who had come over on his N.U.T. motor-bike to see them, said that perhaps they would have better luck next season, when the Old Boys’ Club would have had new entries from the school.

  “Thank you for the keenness you have shown, old man,” he said, reversing his cap as he prepared to push off his 10-h.p. twin-cylinder J.A.P. engine. “I think, if you agree, we’d better scratch the remaining fixtures. Don’t let’s lose touch, though. We started the team rather late in the season, perhaps. Next year we’ll have more chaps to reinforce us. You’ll be keen, will you?”

  Phillip said he would.

  “Right-o! If I don’t see you at the club-house or the school before then, we’ll meet next year, about the middle of September, for the nineteen-fourteen season.”

  Then the great man, hand on valve-lifter, shoved his dark brown machine until abruptly it roared into life. Vaulting into the saddle, he disappeared in a clatter of blue smoke.

  Chapter 5

  PATTERNS

  ON THE last Sunday before Desmond went back to school, Phillip asked his mother if he might invite him to tea in the front room, by themselves.

  “Will Father mind?”

  “I don’t see why not,” replied Hetty, “if you are quiet. You know he always goes to sleep on Sunday afternoon.”

  Phillip and Desmond went for a walk, returning with muddy shoes, after a farewell expedition to Whitefoot Lane Woods, now nearly part of the spreading suburbs.

  Pleasantly tired, they reclined on the small of their backs before the fire, feet up. Desmond smoked a Marsuma cigarette, Phillip his new and ‘Splendiferous’ Artist’s Pipe.

  He had recently bought this heavy curved object from a shop under the arches of London Bridge station. It was his first pipe. It held nearly half an ounce of tobacco and weighed nearly half a pound. It was a bargain at ninepence, marked down to half-price after Christmas, he told Desmond. The first pipeful had made him feel faint; so he had changed from St. Bruno Flake, which was dark, to Hignett’s Cavalier, which was fair. With this Virginian leaf he hoped to season the huge bowl. He had rubbed the bowl beside his nose as recommended by Bertie, in order to give it a gloss. The trouble was that the bowl was far too big for the grease to go round. And grease or no grease, the Artist’s Pipe remained very much unseasoned.

  Despite pipeful after pipeful of Hignett’s Cavalier being pushed in, lighted, sucked at, relit, blown upon to keep alight, before being tapped out and a fresh start made, the desired maturity or seasoning did not come about. Doubting that it was real briar, and suspecting paint, Phillip had boiled it on the kitchen gas, afterwards scrubbing it with soda and nail-brush. Ah! it was a fraud. Bits of putty in a pale-pink bowl lay disclosed. He picked them out with nail-scissors; dried the bowl in the oven; started the seasoning afresh, and hoped meanwhile to improve its appearance with sandpaper. After that, the Artist’s Pipe seemed little more than scratched wood so he recoloured it with brown boot polish. Would it never become seasoned?

  “It will take a dam’ long time whichever way I try. Des. This bowl is fake, I am sure. You can taste pine-wood burning, when you smoke it.” He blew through it: smoke rose vertical, with a spark or two.

  “I know, why not season it with a bicycle pump? That will prevent the rank taste while it’s new.”

  Thereafter the front room began to fill with smoke, as the bowl became a kiln. As each packing of tobacco was blasted away, the bowl was refilled. Soon tiny brown beads were bubbling in the grain; and it cracked.

  “I told you so, it’s a swizz! Look, it’s glue bubbling! Anyway, no decent briar would ever crack. God, it doesn’t half stink! Damned swindle, to sell a pipe like that as a French briar. I’ve a good mind to take it back, only it’s too far gone now.” Indeed, the Artist’s Pipe was blazing, so it went into the fire.

  O, it was wonderful to be with Desmond: what fun life was: as Mrs. Neville said, they were like David and Jonathan. Never, never, never would they cease to be friends.

  The next day Phillip bought a half-crown Civic, which the salesman said was a very sound pipe. It had a silver band. It was a beauty. It had little burrs all over the bowl. “Don’t pack it too tight, sir, if you don’t mind me telling you,” said the salesman. So the Civic consumed Hignett’s fair threads in cool fragrance; and every day was a day nearer that blissful time when it would have a little charred crater, surrounded by tar and carbon, like all Mr. Hollis’ pipes had.

  *

  What happened in the big world outside his private world, Phillip little knew nor cared. He never read the main items of news in his ha’penny paper, now a picture one. Father, with his snortings, protests, and Daily Trident readings-out-loud to Mother in the evenings at home was just part of the half-fossilised world of grown-ups who had forgotten their own youth. What did it matter about politics, whether Lloyd George said this, or Asquith that, when soon the chiffchaff, the sand-martin, and the willow wren would be returning? He avoided whenever he could the sitting-room where Father everlastingly rustled the paper before saying, “Listen to this, Hetty——” If it wasn’t the Germans dumping their goods in England under a rotten Liberal Government it was Carson and Irish Home Rule, the Suffragettes, Income Tax, or the Socialists—all the same to him. The coming of Spring was the only thing that really mattered—and Helena Rolls.

  Pale green and white luncheon tickets ran out a fortnight before Ladyday; he ate cheaply in refreshment shops in Leadenhall Market. It was an adventure, exploring little streets and alleys during the luncheon forty minutes. It was fun to imagine himself very poor, to economise, like Father did after he was born, Mother had told him, to pay the doctor’s bill. Penny salmon-roll, penny cup of coffee, penny cheese-cake with head like a white chrysanthemum made of coconut shavings, eaten to the last crumb pressed on finger-tip—then a stroll around the poulterer shops, where wildfowl hung on hooks, tier upon tier reaching high up under the glass roof, lifted down on long poles. A salesman told him they came from Holland. He wore, like all the others, white apron, and jacket, and straw-yard. Tier upon tier of mallard, pochard, teal, widgeon, golden-eye, pintail, under electric lights, on foggy days, with figure-of-eight carbon filaments. O leaf-mottled woodcock, bog-haunting snipe, wild geese and swans, from polar regions, and—could it be? it was—it was—a bittern!

  As soon as he saw the long sharp beak, the yellow-black-brown-reedy plumage, he bought it for half a crown. It would mean no more salmon-rolls or cheese-cakes for ten days, but what was that beside a bittern? With pride and suppressed importance he carried it back to the office, showing it with glee to Edgar, and asking him to deliver it that evening to Watkins and Doncaster, the taxidermists in the Strand, to be stuffed and mounted. He gave Edgar his last sixpence for bus fare, telling him to keep the change. He was a sportsman who had shot the bittern by mistake for a goose in the Blackwater estuary! Edgar was his man, his ghillie.

  Edgar hung the bird by its lanky legs, tied together, on a nail in the wall above his picture gallery. Its shady wings fell open. And there it remained, to draw varying comments from some of the better-dressed visitors to the office that afternoon.

  “My junior is equipping a natural-h
istory museum in his spare time,” said Mr. Hollis to a short, chubby-faced man with a little black moustache whose scented personality, left in the air behind him, always excited in Mr. Howlett a sort of glee when he had gone. The visitor was ‘Little Freddy’ Fanlight, an inspector of the Fenchurch Street branch of the Moon Life Insurance Company. The Moon Life had no official connexion with the Moon Fire, beyond name and device of the lunar face; but the officials, as Mr. Hollis told Phillip, of each company were “automatically” agents for the other, on the basis of usual commission.

  It was, Mr. Hollis had explained further, Little Freddy’s job to visit agents, stimulate them to acquire new business, and to inspect proposals.

  “H’m, what is it?” remarked Little Freddy Fanlight, in his tenor voice, as he gave a glance at the bittern. “An oof bird?” Thereupon he swung round on the heel of fawn cloth-topped boots, brushed up ends of moustaches first with one forefinger-back, then the other, and disregarding Phillip, began to talk to Mr. Hollis about the insurance of a sports-club pavilion at Mill Hill. As he talked, he moved about the confined space of the office as though he were on the stage of the pavilion, in the annual Gilbert and Sullivan production of his club. He was a dapper little man, almost a fop. Phillip thought he looked conceited, strutting there in his bowler with very curly brim and red satin lining.

  He went on filling in a policy form, until something Little Freddy said made him listen intently.

  “By the way, Hollis, have you had a proposal recently from a George Lemon, solicitor of Lincoln’s Inn? He has two pretty big endowments with us, and from his recent behaviour it might well be a case of——”

  “Hi, my lad! You! Maddison!!” exclaimed Mr. Hollis. While Little Freddy paused, Mr. Hollis said in an even voice, “Maddison, would you be so good as to go out and get me a Star evening paper? I don’t want any other kind. You’ll get one from the boy standing outside the London Tavern.”

  “I’ll go, sir, shall I?” volunteered Edgar.

  “No, Edgar, I want you for something else in a moment,” replied Mr. Hollis in an even voice.

  Phillip knew Mr. Hollis wanted to get rid of him. He would ask Edgar what was said, later. But while he was going out of the door, he heard Mr. Howlett say, “Come on upstairs to my office, Freddy. There’s a little matter I would like your opinion on, if you can spare a moment.”

  Phillip arrived back with the evening paper as Little Freddy Fanlight and Mr. Howlett came downstairs. When he had gone, Mr. Howlett described to Mr. Hollis how he had seen Little Freddy, at three o’clock that afternoon, lying back in the barber’s shop in Crutched Friars, stretched out full length in a chair, hot towel swathing his entire face and head, only his upcurled moustaches in their regulating cup strapped round his head being visible, while a manicurist held one hand as she worked at his nails.

  “I suppose Little Freddy gets his work done somehow,” said Mr. Howlett, amiably. “Oh by the way, Hollis, I’m just going down to see Vandenberg’s man about that guarantee risk at Ohlenschlager’s Wharf. In case anyone rings up in my absence, I’ll be back in about ten minutes.”

  Mr. Hollis looked across at Downham as the manager went out. “What the devil was Howlett doing in a barber’s shop at three o’clock in the afternoon I should like to know?”

  “Getting his hair cut and singed, I should imagine,” replied Downham, airily.

  “H’m,” grunted Mr. Hollis. “Where would this Branch be, if it wasn’t for me?” He looked at Phillip. “And for our taxidermist here, or should it be Sportsman of Leadenhall Market?” Seeing his junior’s eyes wince, he added, “Don’t mind my joking, Maddison. Thank God you show keenness about something, unlike most of the youth of this generation! And thank you for the paper, my lad.”

  Phillip murmured gratefully that it was quite all right.

  The next visitor was Mr. Thistlethwaite, familiar in curly-crowned silk hat and frock-coat. At once he began to talk in a low, bass voice to Mr. Hollis. Phillip listened. Mr. Thistlethwaite told a story of how the powers-that-be stick together; there was a conspiracy against him: for he had not only lost his action against Metropolitan Assurance for wrongful dismissal, but his ex-gratia payment as well.

  “Entre nous, Hollis, I am convinced, Hollis, that my lawyer was in with the other side,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite before opening the glass door.

  “I told the idiot often enough that he could not possibly win his case,” remarked Mr. Hollis, after Mr. Thistlethwaite had gone. “So did his attorneys, but he is so damned conceited, he’s impervious to any ideas except his own. His mind still exists in the easy, early years of the century, before the Boer War. Just like Howlett.” He looked severely at Phillip. “What you hear in this office, my lad, is on no account to be repeated, mind!”

  “It’s all the same to me, Mr. Hollis.”

  “I don’t want things to get around to Head Office. What is said here is purely private to this Branch, remember! Although from what I know of your respected parent, he is the last man to talk about other people.”

  Mr. Hollis obviously said this as a question, so Phillip replied that his father never said anything to him.

  “Nothing at all? Joking apart, aren’t you and your father on good terms?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered Phillip, getting on with his work.

  Mr. Hollis screwed up an envelope into a ball, and threw it at him. Phillip went on with his policy, saying loud enough for Mr. Hollis to hear, “Somebody’s got to do the work in this Branch.”

  “Ha ha! Good for you, my boy!”

  “Come and check some figures with me, Maddison, will you?” said Downham, a minute later. Phillip went over to his desk. Downham whispered, “Go and clip Hollis’ ear with the tongs, not hard, just a slight nip.”

  Phillip entered into the joke. The steel tongs, kept bright in the fire-place by the early-morning charwoman, lay in the hearth. Picking them up silently, he hid them behind him, watched by grinning Edgar, and Downham ostensibly opening a ledger; and passing behind his stool, pretended to be going to take down one of the big black policy record books beside Mr. Hollis.

  The unsuspecting chief clerk, frowning through pince-nez as he worked out a short-time premium for a £30,000 risk on Merchandise at the Surrey Commercial Docks, felt the lobe of his right ear touched, and looking up, saw the tongs extended in his direction.

  He dropped his pen and shouted, “Blast your donkey soul to hell!” Seeing him pick up a round ebony ruler, Phillip dodged away. It whirled past his head and struck the wall between the bittern and Edgar, who stared open-mouthed with a green halfpenny stamp on his tongue as Mr. Hollis, leaping off his stool, started in pursuit of his junior now darting through the door.

  Scared by his anger, still holding the steel tongs, Phillip fled up the Lane. He ran on until, looking back, he saw Mr. Hollis shaking his fist at him in the doorway under the hanging sign of the Moon.

  When after a minute he returned ready to apologise, he saw Mr. Howlett, standing back to fire, apparently enjoying Downham’s account of what had happened.

  “Hullo,” said Mr. Howlett. “You passed me just now, with the office tongs. I thought perhaps your precious bittern had escaped.”

  Mr. Hollis went on writing as though nothing had happened; so Phillip did the same.

  “Well, you March Hare,” he said, when handing over the paying-in book, “how I wish I could feel the Spring in my blood at eighteen, again!”

  *

  Richard Maddison had a visit from his brother one afternoon at Head Office in Haybundle Street. From Hilary he learned of the plight of their sister Victoria, and that steps were being considered to certify George Lemon insane. Apparently, in addition to buying back an old family property in Cornwall, he had asked Knight, Frank, and Rutley to find him a steward, ordered a Rolls-Royce landaulette from Barkers in St. James Street, and arranged with Tattersalls to purchase bloodstock. Two Harley Street specialists, after Wasserman blood-tests, had diagnosed G.P.I., a tertiary sta
ge of infection by spirella spirocheta.

  “That’s the aftermath of syphilis, as you know, Dick. Apparently he got it when Viccy was pregnant, in the time of the Boer War.”

  “Hush, Hilary—not so loud, my dear fellow.”

  Startled, shocked, repelled, Richard recalled the red-haired demi-mondaine in Leicester Square who had said to him, as she passed, My word if I catch you bending; with horror he relived his temptation to reply. Thank the Lord he had not given way to erotic impulse! A few moments afterwards he had watched George Lemon raise his hat to her, and the two had gone off together. Syphilis! And now, General Paralysis of the Insane!

  “Just like Hugh Turney, Dick old man,” said Hilary, and stopped, surprised at the expression on his brother’s face. “Why didn’t they take precautions, that’s what beats me. Viccy is shattered, as you can well imagine.”

  “What is her position, Hilary?”

  “None too good, I fear. George’s financial affairs are in a mess. He went to a quack, instead of telling a proper doctor, when he first got it. Well, Viccy’s the one to be considered now. She’ll have to leave Epsom, of course, and find a smaller house elsewhere. At her age, it’s not easy to have to give up the friendships of a lifetime. Rotten bad luck for George, too——”

  “I call it worse than that, Hilary!” replied Richard. Hilary saw, for the first time, the resemblance between his brother and his sister Victoria. He had been perturbed at her attitude towards her husband: she had refused to see him, saying she was done with him, he had disgraced her, he had disgraced the family. And now, in Dick’s face, he saw the same expression. Richard was pale. He recovered himself, and said with a show of affability, “Well, I shall say no more, Hilary. Thanks for looking in, old chap. Give my kind regards to your lady wife, won’t you?”