The Bridge at Arta

by J. I. M. Stewart

  It was to be remarked, too, that Sir Charles, although he well knew whose was the hand responsible for those punitive visitations upon his nostrils, always had a civil word for Richard Howland when he encountered him. This was because, like the General, and unlike the majority of his more rustic neighbours, he retained a clear and undistorted memory of this sober gardener’s early history. That history is the subject of the present brief narrative.

  General Arthur Alford had at one time been the youngest field officer in the British army: a dedicated professional soldier who was tipped to go far. When this promotion came to him he was already the owner of Thorley Park, since his father had died in early middle age. Having been as precocious in the marital as the martial sphere, he was also married and with several children. So a new and spacious home was a welcome accession in itself. He had at once decided, however, that he would not allow this responsibility to interfere with his military career, and this meant that for a long time he was something of an absentee landlord. His family saw much more of Thorley than he did. When he did get down to the place, and moved about the estate, it was almost with the feeling of being a visitor. The house had not been his boyhood home, since his grandfather had predeceased his father by only a few years. It had, however, been a regular holiday resource, and when it eventually came his way he was already decently fond of it. He tried to get to know his tenants and the local people generally, and he found a little time for squirearchal activities of one sort and another. As the years passed and his seniority rapidly increased, he found that he could be influential in various ways. Ten miles away there was a minor public school; he was helpful about its OTC, making sure that it was a decent chap who was sent down from the War Office to cope with Cert. A, and that the right things were done when the General Inspection came along. He gave a similar leg-up to the Territorials. He accepted some titular rank or other with the Boy Scouts of the county. It was as a Boy Scout – or perhaps as a boy aspiring to be a Boy Scout – that he first became aware of his future head gardener.

  He had gone for an evening walk with his wife and his daughter Anne, who was home from school on her half-term holiday. It was already dusk, but the air was warm after an autumn day of steady sunshine. The Alfords strolled through the gardens, and then straight ahead through two lines of beech trees which would have constituted a long avenue had any roadway ever been laid down between them. Old prints showed that there had never been anything of the kind, but only a broad ribbon of grass opening upon a level pasture where the trees came to an end. This transition however was marked by two imposing stone columns, crowned with elaborately carved cornucopias tumbling out flowers, fruit and corn – no doubt by way of symbolising the productivity of the region. The wrought-iron gates which these pillars were designed to support had disappeared long ago, and before that can never have supplied any useful office, the whole affair having been designed merely to lend consequence to the vista commanded from the terrace in front of the house.

  The Alfords paused at this point, turned, and in silence surveyed Thorley Park. It was no sort of gem of the guide-book order, and like the lady in the song perhaps looked best in the dusk – as now – whether or not with a light behind it. The fabric had come slowly into being in bits and pieces over several centuries, and not every part was even approximately congruous with the whole. But a building that has thus changed through processes of accretion, demolition and re-edification through many generations renders, perhaps paradoxically, a strong impression of permanence. It was a satisfaction to Arthur Alford, standing between his wife and daughter and keeping his thoughts to himself, to reflect that this gracious and essentially unassuming place would be the home of Alfords yet unborn.

  ‘Just the right distance, this,’ he said to his wife – much as if that song from Trial by Jury had actually been in his head. ‘You could never tell it all needed a good lick of paint. But it may be possible to get going on that now. There ought to be a bit of leisure to give my mind to it.’

  ‘I think it’s wonderful news – quite wonderful.’ Mrs Alford, who didn’t often say things like this, emphasised her words with a brisk nod. And it was true that, earlier that day, something extremely agreeable had happened. Her husband had received word that a tour of duty overseas which appeared to lie directly ahead of him had been cancelled so far as he himself was concerned by a stroke of some august pen, and that his own position was at once to become a much more exalted one on the Imperial General Staff. For some years ahead, his place of domicile during the greater part of the year could be entirely of his own choosing. There would be high-level conferences in plenty. Below that, the chaps from the Dominions and so on would simply be invited to Thorley, and his own subordinates would be summoned there, and great matters would be settled in the course of modest country-house entertainment. General Alford (for he was now to be the youngest General in the British army) told himself with some complacency that the Empire’s strength lay very much in that sort of approach to things.

  ‘Shall we go round by the Long Spinney?’ he asked. ‘We’ll have plenty of time before it’s anything like dark.’

  ‘And see the magic cottage,’ Anne said. She had given this name in an arbitrary manner to a commonplace little structure, in fact a lambing hut, which stood in a shallow coomb beyond the spinney and at no great remove from the group of cottages connected with the home farm. ‘The necromancer may be at home.’ Anne Alford was not a particularly fanciful child, but from near-infancy she had been provided with what were judged the appropriate books for the decade or so after the mere dawn of life. This had led her conscientiously to people the environs of Thorley with fairies and similar supernatural creatures of the adult imagination.

  ‘If the necromancer is there,’ General Alford said, ‘we can have a little chat with him.’ The General was feeling well-disposed to all the world this evening, and took pleasure in indulging his daughter’s charming nonsense. So they walked on to the lambing hut. It was a solid stone structure, like a very small ancient barn. The remains of its roof, which had long ago fallen into decay, had been removed some years before on the instructions of Colonel Alford (as he then was) when he had heard that the village children sometimes played there and might be endangered by it.

  The Alfords negotiated a stile and emerged from the spinney. There, the dusk had been deepening, but over the pasture now before them there seemed to lie no more than a first twilight. The hut itself, although shadowed by a great elm, stood out clearly enough as a grey wall pierced by two black holes: a small one where there had formerly been a window of sorts, and a larger one where there had hung a door. They were already moving towards it when there momentarily appeared through both these apertures a flicker of light. A few seconds passed, and the flicker was repeated.

  ‘Glow-worms!’ Anne exclaimed with a correct excitement. Glow-worms went with fairies, being much in demand among them as an illuminant of festive occasions. It was very probable that necromancers similarly employed them when boiling up toads in kettles.

  ‘We must investigate,’ General Alford said. He rather wanted to add, ‘You two wait here, while I nip over and see.’ This was because he had at once decided that what the lambing hut sheltered was a tramp – a tramp taking comfort from lighting up an evening pipe. If it were so, he would send the fellow about his business; again because of the village children who might conceivably come larking here in the gloaming. A tramp can frighten small children, and he wasn’t going to have anything of the sort happen on his land. Of course he would give the man five shillings and address him with proper politeness; nevertheless he would somehow prefer not to perform this slightly heavy-handed action before his womenfolk. But by this time his wife – an active woman whose rheumatism still lay in the future – was halfway to the hut, with Anne skipping gleefully beside her; General Alford was suddenly a little irritated by Anne. Anne was much too old to skip gleefully. And – what was more – the gleeful skipping was a turn, put on because t
he child thought her parents still expected it. General Alford, who was a highly intelligent man (as you must be if you are to become the youngest general in the army), had really tumbled to this about the fairies and so on some time ago. The truth about his daughter was that she owned a thoroughly rational cast of mind. And this, after all, was something to find satisfaction in, since it distinguished her from the majority of her sex. It would similarly have distinguished her, he thought, had she been a male and become an army officer. General Alford, a modest man, when contemplating his own meteoric career sometimes reminded himself that in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

  He lengthened his stride, and they all three arrived before the lambing hut together. Meantime there had been two more flickers of light, and their character was such that there could be no doubt now that it had been the striking of a match that had occasioned them. The tramp must be having difficulty with his pipe. The General felt in a pocket for his tobacco pouch. He’d add to his effect of firm benevolence the little grace note of inviting the old chap to have a fill.

  He entered the hut first, as was proper where there was an unknown situation. It was a square, bare place, and there was no tramp in it. The matches were being struck by a small boy. He was alone, and his occupation so absorbed him that he remained for a moment unaware that he was now pursuing it in the presence of spectators.

  ‘Three!’ the boy said to himself aloud. ‘It mun be three!’ And in apparent despair he threw his matchbox into a litter of twigs on the earthen floor of the hut.

  Although the light was poor, it was possible to see that the boy wore a scarf and a bleached khaki shirt with a couple of small badges sewn on one of its short sleeves. General Alford took in the situation at a glance.

  ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Practising for your next test, eh? What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Dicky, sir.’ The boy had turned and was staring, wide-eyed and apprehensive, at the intruders. But he had answered as a properly drilled village child should.

  ‘Dicky Howland,’ Anne said informatively. Anne was well-briefed on the village, having frequently gone round with her mother on charitable and disciplinary missions. ‘From the pub,’ she added.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The General, although not so well acquainted with the locals as he would have liked to be, knew that it was a fellow called Howland who kept the pub. ‘Well, Dicky, let’s see.’ It was clear that General Alford (himself connected, in some fashion he wasn’t quite certain of, with the Boy Scout Movement) was disposed to take young Howland’s meritorious efforts seriously. ‘Just forget about us, and try again.’

  A shade reluctantly, Dicky Howland retrieved the matchbox. He was slender, dark-haired, black-eyed, and there was something wary, almost feral, in his sidelong glance. He might well have been a gipsy child. One could imagine him as an odd-boy-out in the little bucolic community around Thorley. His movements were nervous. He was gathering twigs, rapidly but a little fumblingly, from the litter around him. The Alfords watched silently, having cast themselves in the role of examiners of the rehearsal now in progress. Dicky made a small tent of twigs; it tumbled once, twice – and then at the third attempt seemed stable. He struck a match and inserted it with a trembling hand within the structure; it went out at once. He tried again. There was a little upward drift of smoke this time. A tiny flame climbed up one of the twigs, only to extinguish itself a moment later. Suddenly Dicky gave a yelp of pain and jumped to his feet. He had burnt his fingers on the match end.

  ‘It won’t do at all, you little duffer.’ General Alford said this good-humouredly and indeed almost affectionately, but was at once aware that it hadn’t been quite right. Even in the half-light it had been possible to see the child flush darkly, as an offended adult might have done. ‘Will you let me have a go?’ the General went on quickly. ‘First there’s the twigs, you see. It’s not their size that matters, so much as that they should be dry. Don’t use them if they bend. Use them only if they snap. Cast around, Dicky.’

  The boy obeyed, captured by this brisk expertness. In no time there was a little pile of dry twigs to the General’s hand.

  ‘And now try it another way,’ the General went on, standing back. ‘Not a tent or pyramid, Dicky. That tumbles in no time, and out goes your fire. Criss-cross and four-square – as you’ve seen timber stacked when the men have been felling it. Leaving a little square chimney in the middle. Carry on, boy.’ General Alford was enjoying himself. He might have been a young subaltern again, rapidly and lucidly explaining some simple operation to his platoon. Dicky was not so much enjoying himself as keyed up. His hands had steadied. He went to work on this new structural principle with the concentration another child might have put into building a house of cards, and this time with complete success. The fire required not the three matches allowed but only one. Had the Alfords been Dicky’s real examiners, he would have passed his test triumphantly. And now he was enchanted. Rigid and oblivious, he stood gazing at the tiny blaze as if it had been a vast combustion. Then suddenly he sprang into life, darting here and there about the hut to gather further twigs, placing these – first carefully and then in careless handfuls – amid the flames, so that presently the whole place had become a flickering chiaroscuro. The boy halted once more, froze, stood staring into his achievement entranced, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his shabby khaki shorts.

  ‘So there you are,’ General Alford said, laughing. ‘We must be getting home now, Dicky. Good luck with your test.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ It was almost as if Dicky Howland had jerked awake in order to produce this surprisingly well-mannered response. ‘Just one match! I won’t forget how easy it is.’

  ‘And you had better cut along home, too. Otherwise, darkness will catch up with you.’

  ‘I like the dark.’ Dicky spoke decidedly. ‘You can see things then.’

  ‘I’d say that’s just what you can’t do.’

  ‘You can if you try. You can see things that don’t come out in the day-time – or hardly ever. Like the badgers.’

  ‘Perfectly true, my dear lad. But don’t forget listening as well as looking. Listening’s the key to quiet movement in the dark.’ The General produced this military lore in an approving tone. It was evident that he thought well of this budding field naturalist. But Mrs Alford appeared to have been affected differently.

  ‘Arthur,’ she said during dinner, ‘do you know I much doubt whether that boy is a Scout at all? He didn’t look like one.’

  ‘In his rig, you mean?’

  ‘Yes—or that chiefly.’

  ‘I rather agree with you. It wasn’t very trim. Wouldn’t do on parade – if they hold parades. But he knew about the tests and things. What they call proficiency badges, and so forth.’

  ‘The Howlands must be quite well off. If they really had a son in the local troop, they’d see that he was properly dressed.’

  ‘Perhaps so. Yes. He may be pretending a bit. Dug an older brother’s abandoned togs out of the rag bag.’

  ‘Possibly some enquiry should be made.’

  ‘My dear old girl!’ The General was a little given to this sort of indulgent address. ‘If the boy isn’t a Scout, but wants to dress up and dream of himself as a Scout, good luck to him. It would scarcely make the worthy Baden-Powell turn in his grave. And you couldn’t call it a case of masquerading in the King’s uniform.’

  ‘I think Daddy is quite right,’ Anne Alford said importantly. Anne had lately been promoted to the dinner table on domestic occasions, and was a shade uppish as a result. ‘After all, Dicky was getting fun out of it, wasn’t he? He was tremendously excited by his silly little fire. Just like when he danced in the stubble.’

  ‘When he did what?’ the General asked, puzzled.

  ‘It was when they were burning off the twelve-acre. I found it rather exciting too. Little licking lines of fire moving across the field, like waves on a beach. And Dicky Howland danced among them. He danced like a wave of the sea.�
�� Anne had lately been turning away from the nursery bookshelves with their empty jingles and digging grown-up poetry out of the library. It was mostly incomprehensible, but thrilling all the same.

  ‘Burning off!’ Abruptly, General Alford quite ceased to be interested in Dicky Howland. ‘There’s another instance of its being high time I took matters in hand. It’s a beastly practice – and I don’t doubt brought in from America. Dangerous to property, for one thing. And destructive to no end of harmless and interesting insect life. It has to happen in war: the snail crushed by the felloe-rim, and all that.’ (It was the General himself who had put most of the modern poetry in the library.) ‘But peace and scorched earth don’t go together. I’ll have something pretty stiff to say about it. Laziness at the bottom of it, if you ask me.’ General Alford was quite clear that, as a landowner now to be much around his own properties, he was going to see that his word would be law.