A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  The colonel had explained to the junior officers in the ante-room that morning that the brigadier after drinking a toast always dashed his glass upon the floor, so that no other toasts could be drunk from it. It was an ancient custom, said “Strawballs”, but—ah—with a glance in the direction of Phillip—no junior subalterns were required to emulate the brigadier’s customs.

  “How about another bottle of Veuve Cliquot? It’s my turn,” he said, after the fish. He raised a finger, and a waiter came forward.

  “No, no, my boy, hold your horses,” said O’Connor. “One bottle’s enough. Your pay will not run to such extravagance.”

  “I jolly well like that! Why, you paid for the other bottle, so now it’s my turn. Another bottle, waiter.”

  “You should not have done this, my boy,” said O’Connor, raising his glass. “Here’s to us all.”

  Before the capon, as the menu called it, was finished, Phillip’s bottle was empty. “Chick” offered to stand another one; but O’Connor said no, they had had enough. The mess-room was now merry with voices and laughter. Looking round, Phillip thought what a wonderful thing it was he was there; less than three months ago he had been in the Diehard T-trench. He wanted more to drink, to keep the fun going. Who cared for the morrow? Eat, drink, and be merry, and to hell with everything else.

  “I’m damned thirsty, O’Connor.”

  “The very thing,” said O’Connor, pouring him a glass of water, then one for himself. “The normal healthy human liver objects to more than two, at the most three, fluid ounces of alcohol. The Widow Cliquot laces her wine with liqueur cognac. Hock is the best drink for food with company, in my opinion, or a dry wine from the Moselle. For that, we must wait till we get to Berlin.”

  The dinner went on timelessly. No table-cloth was ever so white or silver in gleam with candle and glass and leather; the table seemed to float in laughter and happiness.

  *

  The waiters, having served caramel, and then cheese, cleared the table. A decanter of port wine was placed in front of the colonel. He removed the stopper, and put the crystal jug by the left hand of the brigadier, who poured himself a glass and passed on the decanter until it had gone all round the table and come back to the colonel, who thereupon filled a glass for himself; and after a pause the Mess president, Major Fridkin, rose to his feet and said to the subaltern who was orderly dog for the day, sitting at the far end of the table, “Mr. Vice, the King!” Whereupon a new second-lieutenant got up and called out in a voice firm and much rehearsed mentally, “Gentlemen, the King!” And they all stood up saying, “The King!”, followed by a diminishing muttering chorus of “God bless him”, then drinking the toast, while from the brigadier known as “Crasher” came a belated deep grumble of “God bless ’er”. He always drank the toast to Queen Victoria. There followed a brittle crash as the brigadier turned and flung his glass into the marble fireplace.

  Then they sat down, and the colonel said, “Gentlemen, you may smoke.”

  Phillip was interested in what O’Connor told him about the brigadier. His nickname had come from the Galway Blazers, in which country all the stone walls had to be flown as though they were fences.

  “Why is that?” asked Phillip.

  “You wouldn’t know!” said Baldersby shortly.

  “He was a wild man in a country of many wild men in an age of wildness. In the hunting field, I have heard my father say, he was a top-sawyer all the time, stone, bank, or blackthorn bull-fence. They still tell stories about him in the Shelbourne in Dublin. Have you done any huntin’, my boy?”

  “A little.”

  “In whose country?” enquired Baldersby.

  “Oh, ours.”

  Baldersby, pulling a yellow moustache, leaned across the table. “May I enquire where your country is?”

  Phillip thought he might be going to say something about him being part-German. “I—I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

  “Do you have the button of any particular hunt?”

  Not knowing what this meant, he replied, “Well, not exactly.”

  In a spreading silence Baldersby went on, “When you said just now, ‘Our country’, what country did you mean?”

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “Well, then, whose pack did you follow?”

  “With what pack did you hunt, he means, my boy,” said O’Connor, as the port decanter reached him on its second coasting. Refilling his glass slowly, while feeling hot and entangled, Phillip tried to recall some of the fox hunts in The Field, but all he could think of was Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds in the novel by Surtees.

  He must say something. Then having passed on the decanter he raised his glass to the glowering Baldersby across the table, and said:

  “Here’s to all sportsmen, including Mr. Facey Romford, the immortal Jorrocks and ‘them stinking violets’, coupled with the name of Crasher, the broth av a bhoy among the Galway Blazers!” and drained his glass as if it were beer.

  “Steady on, my boy, or you’ll find you have the drink taken,” said O’Connor. “What you need is black coffee.”

  O’Connor could see that Phillip was attracting more than immediate attention. The room was not a large one, Godolphin House being of moderate size, similar to a score facing the High Street.

  “Some more black coffee for Mr. Maddison,” whispered O’Connor to his servant, who with other batmen was waiting at table.

  When the Colonel rose they all stood up. In decorous silence the senior officers followed the jingling rowels of “Crasher” into the ante-room. Then the subalterns trooped in. They had been warned to behave quietly in the presence of the brigadier, as a mark of respect to both his rank and his great age; he would not, the adjutant said, stay very long.

  Phillip found himself near the brigadier and his brigade major, “Little Willie”. He wondered where he had seen the brigadier’s face before. Then he remembered: in old pages of Punch, and cartoons of Bismarck. “Crasher” looked just like Bismarck. He heard him say to Major Fridkin, polite and smiling by his side, “In my day we had a crackin’ good spree after guest night, the faster the better. Damme, time flies like a duck-hawk.”

  “Yes, indeed, General,” said Major Fridkin, raising his eyebrows, as he puffed at a long, fat cigar between his fat lips.

  When the brigadier and “Little Willie” had departed, the fun began. There was a competition to see who could pick a coin off the carpet, bending down while the heels of your feet placed closed together against the wainscoting did not shift. Phillip fell over. Then couples were matched to stand with arms stretched sideways, to press with chest and flat hands in an attempt to shift the other backwards. This was Baldersby’s special trick: he was short, Saxon and stocky, and tall, Celtic Phillip could not force him back. On the contrary, Baldersby pushed Phillip into an armchair and bent him over until Phillip felt his back about to break, so he yelled, “Let go, oh, you’re hurting!” Then Baldersby, stooping, got him round the knees and tossed him feet over head into the chair; and jerking out Phillip’s tie, pulled the ends tight.

  “Steady there,” exclaimed O’Connor, seeing that the other could not breathe. He worked the tie free, and Phillip sat down to recover.

  While he was in the armchair, the others started cock-fighting: a couple sat on the floor, broomstick behind knees held by elbows, hands clasping knees, the idea being to tip an opponent off balance with toes. Meanwhile, at the far end of the ante-room a small group had gathered around the piano, singing They’d Never Believe Me.

  When the colonel returned with Captain Whale, the adjutant, there was a sudden break in the noise, and all officers got to their feet, except Phillip, who was struggling against a swirling feeling, through which he heard the colonel saying, “Continue as before, gentlemen, let the fun be fast and furious. I do hope you are going to give us your awful good ‘Stonecracker’ song, Jonah?” at which there were cries from the far-away piano of “Yes, come on, Jonah! Give us The Orderly Room Song,
sir!”

  Thus encouraged, Jonah the Whale stood by the piano, ready to let his rich baritone voice fill him and others with sentiment.

  O, I sits here and cracks ’em

  With great regularity

  Yes I taps ’em and whacks ’em

  For Highway Authority

  The colonel picked up The Times, which he read usually after mess-dinner in his room, and sat down in a wicker upholstered armchair, paper across knees, spectacles pushed up over bushy brows while he relaxed.

  Yes I do now, yes I do now

  I earns all my pay

  Yes I do now, sure I do now

  ’Tis but ninepence a day.

  With a ripfoll, a riddle oll

  A riddle ole-a-ray

  All for ninepence a day.

  Phillip, when the swirling feeling had partly subsided, began to giggle, as he visualised the adjutant in the orderly room, cracking nuts, and eating them, for ninepence a day. Then he became aware of the colonel’s brown shoe on a knee-slung leg revolving at the ankle. This turning movement continued clockwise until the end of The Stonecracker; and was resumed anticlockwise, to his distress, when Father O’Flynn rolled out like very neat brown rich cigars from the corner by the piano, gleaming cigar-shapes of sound.

  “Awful good song, Jonah, awful good,” said the colonel, and opening The Times, covered all of himself from view except part of his fingers, trouser’d thighs and knees, sock’d and shoe’d feet.

  Hoping to dispel the swirl about him, Phillip sat up in the armchair opposite the figure reading the spread newspaper. Thank God the swirling was now entirely gone. When Captain Whale sang again, a new and very beautiful song, he got up and started to go to the piano; but he felt safer in the armchair, and sat down again, quietly, to avoid any creaking of wickerwork, and attention to himself.

  O, the clang of the wooden shoon

  O, the dance and the merry tune

  Happy sound of a by-gone day

  It rings in my heart for aye.

  When the boats came in,

  And the decks were all a-glow

  As the moon shone down

  On the rippling tide below.

  He watched with fascination the toe of the shoe opposite revolving on the ankle, just as his own foot turned at times, working off energy. He began to laugh to himself, the indrawn breath laugh, imagining Desmond beside him at the Hippo, when Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds had jumped high off the elastic billiard table, turning somersaults, and then, while one rested in an armchair reading a newspaper the other somehow lighting the methylated spirit on his boot-cap, lifted his foot and set fire to the newspaper. It would be terribly funny if “Strawballs” suddenly saw his paper on fire from the bottom upwards! Act of a “mad devil”! Feeling that the joke would set everyone roaring with laughter he took a box from his pocket, struck a match, and creeping to the other chair put the flame at the bottom of the page in the centre. The flame started small, but ran up quickly, and a harsh throaty voice behind the paper exclaimed, “What the devil?” before the paper was crunched up, and through smoke and pounding hands Phillip saw the open-mouthed face of “Strawballs”. “Oh, it’s Mr. Maddison!” said the colonel’s voice, changing its tone to one of mingled exasperation and resignation. Before he could say any more, Phillip left the ante-room, and hurried up the stone steps, with their curving iron rail, to his attic, not quite certain what had happened to his frightfully funny joke; but after all, the colonel had said, Let the fun be fast and furious.

  *

  He decided to go to bed, having a feeling that he was going to spew. In pyjamas, he went into what Baldersby called The Throne. This ancient lavatory outside his door consisted of a mahogany box enclosing an old-fashioned pan patterned with purple ferns. He waited; tried to accelerate matters with a finger; went back and got into camel-hair sleeping sack, flap turned down by batman all ready on green canvas camp-bed, and left the candle burning just in case. His forethought was justified; and ten minutes later he crept back again, cold and shivering, vowing that never again would he drink champagne or port.

  He was aware of Chick coming in; then the candle going out; then a dancing light by the door, voices, and someone saying quietly, “Chick, a telegram has come for you, and you’re wanted downstairs to sign for it,” then Chick’s drowsy grumbling voice saying, “Why can’t the damned thing be brought up?” It was urgent, said the voice, and the special messenger was waiting. Chick got up, rubbing his eyes, and putting on slippers and British Warm went away down the stone steps, leaving the door wide open.

  Phillip raised himself on an elbow, listening. The telegram was a ruse to get Chick away. Was he going to be arrested? He lay down again. He saw his life in ruins, as so often in the past. “Strawballs”’ paper on fire, the Backfield grass on fire, also for a spree, then lying under his bed, saying to Mother, Ought I to kill myself, in terror of the police, as the whole field crackled and rose in yellow-brown smoke behind the wooden garden fences. His jokes had never really gone well. As Mother always said, he was his own worst enemy. He had always known that they were idiotic, before he acted; it was always as though someone inside him prompted him. Why was he such a fool, why, why, why?

  He pulled the soft fawn flap of the sleeping sack tight round his neck when he heard a remote shuffling of feet coming from far below the stone steps: the shuffling of many feet came nearer, then light and shadow waggled in the open door-space and peering through eyelashes he saw someone with a tent candle-lantern and forms behind entering to move Chick’s bed and valise against the wall. Then after more shufflings and whisperings, Baldersby’s voice said, “One at a time, go steady, and don’t miss the cad,” and he saw they carried the black-painted leather fire-buckets which hung on the wall of the hall with their red coat-armour and then swish! all over him, water and carbolic acid. Swish! again, and again, continuing while more subalterns came through the door now carrying green canvas buckets. Colder and colder the sluicings became, as they penetrated all the sleeping sack, and his pillow, under which lay the gold locket containing the coloured miniature of Helena. Water gushed upon him, as he lay unmoving; and when the light was gone, and footfalls had clattered down the stone staircase, he drew out the locket, and felt that it was ruined.

  In silence, after a few minutes lying still, he began to cry. He stopped when the undulating notes of Baldersby’s hunting horn floated up, thinking of the last time he had heard such notes, when General Fitzclarence was leading the charge of the Guards brigade against the Prussian Guard in Nonne Bosschen, the Nuns’ Wood. Then, laughing to himself (hollowly, he said to an imagined Desmond in Freddy’s bar) he pulled and writhed himself out of the sopping, weighted sack, and stood up, shivering in pyjamas clinging to his skin. All the same, the locket must be ruined, the carbolic acid was very strong, it burned his eyes and lips, and stank horribly.

  He looked for matches in his tunic, but it was sopped through, so was the box. Footfalls came up the stairs, with light; he waited, wondering if more was coming; but it was O’Connor with his Orlix electric lamp, bringing his own British warm, and a laundered pair of pyjamas.

  “Here, my boy, put on these,” he said. “Then come downstairs with me, and sleep in my room. I have managed to get a spare camp-bed for you.” Seeing his face, and shudders, O’Connor said, “The thing for you is a hot bath, but the bathroom is in the colonel’s suite, so come down in the coat and I’ll give you a rub down with a stiff Turkish towel.”

  Phillip stuttered his thanks, and putting his new Loewe pipe in his mouth, he followed O’Connor down to a larger room on the second floor, which O’Connor shared with Brendon, the elderly subaltern, who had been a volunteer in the South African War. Brendon often referred to two things in the mess: that his wife, a cousin of the colonel’s wife, had not been able to join him owing to the lowness of a second-lieutenant’s pay, seven-and-six a day; and that he could not afford a whiskey-and-soda. He was rather stout, with ginger hair, a large moustache; he walked wit
h a bit of a swagger.

  Brendon came into the room while O’Connor was vigorously towelling Phillip, who now felt better. Conscious of his military superiority, Brendon began to hold forth with his usual condescending air of amusement when regarding Phillip.

  “A soldier is not a soldier, as Napoleon might have remarked in parenthesis, until he has learned to regard himself as the lowest thing on God’s earth, something that crawls on its belly. Until then, he will merely be something that is chucking its weight about. Before he can advance, he must first learn that his centre of gravity has to be lowered, like that of water, to the lowest level.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind a cold tub,” said Phillip with assumed nonchalance. “One way to keep fit!”

  “In other words,” went on Brendon, ignoring the interruption, “the tyro who chucks his weight about by speaking out of turn has to be taken down a considerable number of pegs. Or to change the metaphor: while remaining the newest entry, he must not assume for himself the prerogatives of a stallion hound, if you can follow my meaning. Until then,” continued Brendon, fixing Phillip with his eyes, “Until then, a mere puppy in the pack, in the old phrase of the classical side, he simply remains, as a soldier, simply non est.”