Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘Are you depressed by the prospect of exchanging this for India?’ she asked him suddenly but he said no, on the contrary he was relieved but he did not add why. She said, after a pause, ‘Well, if ever you want to talk, Ikey, I’ll listen and do anything I can to help. We’ve at least made that much progress today.’

  He came back to her then, holding his head slightly to one side as though considering. And then he did something he had never done in the ten years she had known him. He bent and brushed her cheek with his lips and was gone before she could decide what had prompted the gesture. When she thought of him afterwards, however, it was not as the brash, affable young man of whom she had once been so wary, but rather of a youth as confused and uncertain as any of them, despite a convincing show of self-containment.

  IV

  Claire was learning about him. The shifts of his life had taught him how to deceive most people, to cod them into believing that he had all the self-confidence necessary to make a place for himself wherever he went, but he had stopped deceiving himself long ago, soon after finding himself in a straitjacket tighter than any he had worn at High Wood or Shallowford. Yet he still might have worn it comfortably had it not been for Hazel Potter who stood squarely between past and future and was always there, clutching her rags and freedom no matter how many new friends he made, how many cadet sprees he embarked upon, how enthusiastically he threw himself into the business of learning to be a gunner. He would see her in his mind’s eye at odd times of the day and night, when his thoughts should have been engaged elsewhere and it was not only his body that yearned for her. She had the power to make everything he did seem profitless, sometimes almost fatuous, as if she alone was the one substantial force in his world and everything else—the ritual of mess life, the airs and opinions of instructors and fellow cadets, the menace of the great tools he was learning to use, were toys in a nursery of men and women clinging to the fantasies of childhood. Yet he did not accept this duality without a bitter, inward struggle for he sensed, somehow, that it would bring him down in the end whichever way he turned and he was still tormented by the demands of loyalty to the Squire, the man who, from the kindest of motives, had turned him loose in this desert. But it was Hazel Potter who triumphed. Only a day or two after he had returned home for his first leave his good intentions were forgotten. Shedding his fashionable clothes with his army drawl he slipped off into the woods to find her and here, so long as they were alone, he was happy again, his tensions miraculously eased.

  They did not become lovers again, or not on that first occasion, for as long as their association remained innocent he could hold the door on the other world ajar but when he came home again in the spring the temptation to slam that door and go to Heaven or hell with a flower in his mouth was too strong for him; and having once recrossed into her world he had no regrets, although he sometimes wondered what would become of them both and how loud the crash would be when it came.

  He no longer felt shame or fear when he parted from her but he took great pains to ensure, as far as possible, that the woods kept their secret, riding out on his chestnut mare, Bella, and unsaddling and haltering her below the hill where Hazel kept her little house. As long as he went out mounted Paul and everyone else would assume him to be riding for exercise and sometimes on his return he would describe the imaginary route he had taken. Chivers might have noticed that Bella always looked fresh when he stabled her but Chivers was an unimaginative soul and would have found it difficult to believe that horse and rider had gone no further than the north side of the mere, there to part company for an hour or longer.

  Hazel received him gladly but without excitement. She was aware of the obligations he owed the world beyond the screen of the woods and had long grown accustomed to his erratic comings and goings at odd times of the year. Whenever she saw him emerge from the rhododendrons and begin to climb the hill she would slip down from her rock, mend the fire and, after propping the polished tin lid on a niche, shake out her hair, crooning softly to herself and admiring her reflection in the surface. Then she would fill her battered kettle at the spring and put it to boil, for he always liked her strong bitter tea and the honey she gathered to spread on bread baked in her Dutch oven.

  There was nothing urgent or impetuous about these occasions. Sometimes, after they had kissed in greeting, they would sit together and look out over the Valley and she would tell him of her trivial encounters since he was last here, of lumbering badgers visiting one another’s sets on the slope, or another attempt of the stoats to rob the woodpecker’s nest and the struggle that followed. There were always fresh flowers in a jam jar on her ‘table’, not only the more homely flowers of the woods, bluebells, harebells, primroses, foxgloves and campion, but much shyer plants that she alone knew where to find and had gathered to give brief splendour to the cave. Then, when they had talked and sipped their tea, he would sometimes stroke her hair, caressing it with a gentle, unhurried touch and looking at her as if he never ceased to wonder at the texture of her skin, the lights in her hair, or the suppleness of her limbs tanned nut-brown by sun and wind. Whenever he spoke to her he used her familiar burr but without selfconsciousness, for it seemed to him an affront to talk to her as he talked to the cadets and the people up at the Big House. He would say, stroking her breasts, ‘Youm beautiful, Hazel! Youm the prettiest creature yerabouts, that you be! An’ I loves touching ’ee, do’ee know that?’ and she would smile a gratified, vacant smile and shiver under his hand or lift her own to trace a path down the side of his face with a forefinger, as though to assure herself that he was real. Then, without explanation, he would be gone again and she would busy herself renewing the bracken on the floor, or scouring her battered pots, or would resume her aimless movements about the Valley. She was always happiest in the hour when he had gone for then her memory of what passed between them was fresh and she could compose one of her long, rambling prose poems in which they ranged the woods and river valley together but soon she would half forget him until some sixth sense told her he was home again and it was time to resume her vigil on the rock. They had tried to coax her back to the Dell or to take service with one of the farmers but she resisted their persuasions, disappearing completely for days at a stretch so that, short of locking her up, there was no way of stopping her wandering. Meg saw her and talked to her from time to time, but Meg did not join the crusade to tame her; she alone, with the single exception of Ikey, understood what freedom of movement meant to the only true gypsy in the family and would do nothing to threaten it.

  Two or three days after the dispute about Simon, Ikey set out across the woods on foot in the dusk of a dry autumn day. He did not hurry for he was depressed at not having had the courage to tell her that he would be gone in the morning, this time for at least three years. He knew that she took little heed of time and that even if he told her the truth she would not be much concerned but the finality of the occasion weighted on his mind nevertheless. It was almost dark when he threaded his way through the rhododendrons but she heard twigs crackle under his feet and lit a candle to guide him to the screen of the gorse at the mouth of the cave. He was a long time coming up and the kettle, which had been simmering, was boiling when he reached her little house.

  ‘Will ’ee tak’ tea now?’ she said, as though she had been a polite hostess welcoming a guest and he said he would and squatted on a truss of bracken, balancing himself on his heels. Sitting in that posture, with the candlelight flickering over his dark hair and strong features he looked a little like an Arab pondering a purchase and she said, handing him tea, ‘Youm sad, Ikey boy; be ’ee off outalong tomorrow?’ He said this was so and that he would be outalong much longer than usual for they were sending him across the sea. This did not frighten her but it must have astonished her for she uttered the low hissing sound she used to express surprise.

  ‘Across the sea?’ she repeated. ‘Baint ’ee scared?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I baint
scared but I’m mumpish, mumpish to be leavin’ ’ee so long.’

  ‘Aw giddon,’ she said, carelessly, ‘you’ll be back zoon enough, dornee mope along o’ that!’ and she sidled up to him and tweaked his ear. He seized her then with an urgency he had never used, not even when he was drunk on his mother’s hedgerow wine, throwing her across his knees and covering her face with kisses so that she laughed and pretended to resist and they rolled sideways into the bracken, their shadows dancing a crazy pattern on the wall. Then, breathlessly, she freed herself and said, ‘Wait on, boy! Dornee rush zo! Tiz dark now, so why dornee stay the night zince youm going? Tiz mild too and us’ll be snug if I mends the fire!’

  He said, for once not using the brogue, ‘I can’t stay, Hazel; it’s my last night and they’ll expect me to dinner,’ but he made no effort to go and she was puzzled by his sudden listlessness. ‘I don’t like leaving you and that’s a fact,’ he added and she smiled for he had never previously committed himself so deeply, ‘I don’t like to think what might happen to you up here alone with me thousands of miles away. Dammit, you can’t even read a letter I could write! Why the devil won’t you go and live in the Dell, at least until I get back again?’

  He had suggested this many times, just as he had urged her to return to Miss Willoughby’s school and learn to read and write, but tonight she saw that he meant it and his sudden concern baffled her.

  ‘Now whyfore should harm come to me up yer?’ she demanded. ‘ ’Er never has, has ’er?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘it never has, and I suppose you can look after yourself for if you can’t, who can?’

  ‘I likes it yer,’ she said, doggedly, ‘so yer I stay ’till I dies!’

  ‘Why do you like it so much, Hazel? Tell me, if you can.’

  ‘Because I can zee what goes on,’ she said, but then he saw that she was teasing him and that this was not the real reason, and said, ‘That isn’t why! I don’t mind about you being here by day, it’s sleeping out that matters.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, now looking at him slyly, ‘but mebbe I stay on because ’o you!’

  ‘Because of me? But I only get up here once in a blue moon!’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘that’s zo but when I’m yer youm always along o’ me in a manner o’ speakin’. Do ’ee mind that, now?’

  He minded it well enough and it filled him with a tenderness that no words, in or out of the brogue, could convey. He put his arm round her and drew her close so that they sat there with their backs to the shelving wall, her head on his breast as he stroked her tumbling mass of hair. They sat thus for so long that he thought she was asleep and presently the candle guttered and went out but as though to replace it a sliver of moonlight crept into the cave. Time passed and neither of them moved but when, shifting slightly to glance at his luminous watch, he saw that it was already long past dinner-time, she stirred and said, plaintively, ‘Youm tumble mumpish tonight, Ikey! Dornee want me no more?’ and he took her face between his hands and said, ‘I’ll always want you, Hazel, wherever I am and I’ll always come back to you, don’t ever forget that! I’ll always come back!’ It seemed to satisfy her for she brightened up at once, saying cheerfully, ‘Well then yer us be an’ tomorrow you’ll be outalong zo tiz no use frettin’, be it? Us best make the most of it, Ikey-boy!’

  Her philosophy, thus expressed, boosted his spirits for he thought, ‘They all call her “mazed” but she’s more sense than any one of us! She doesn’t live by the week or the day but by the hour, so that’s how I’ll think of her, always!’ and he pulled her down and would have taken possession of her with the impatience he usually displayed when time was short, but tonight a subtle difference entered into their relationship; after the first moment or so it was she who led, as though she realised he was the one standing in need of comfort.

  It was after ten o’clock when he kissed her for the last time and, taking his lantern, went out along the track to the north end of the mere and home by the long but less overgrown route, approaching Shallowford from the east. He slipped in by the yard door and up the backstairs to change his clothes and when he came down to the library he found Paul and Claire waiting up but they did not ask him where he had been, or why he was so late, remembering that he was almost twenty-one and might well have some private good-byes to say in the Valley. In fact they had laid a wager on the subject, over dinner, Paul betting that Ikey was mildly interested in the eldest Eveleigh girl, Claire wagering that Deborah Eveleigh was not Ikey’s type and suggesting that his fancy had strayed over the county border during his summer furlough and fixed on the daughter of a retired cavalry major called Ella Stokes, who lived at Brandon Chase or the next village on.

  ‘It’s a damned long walk in the dark,’ Paul said, when ten o’clock struck, ‘so you’ve lost your money, old girl!’

  ‘Not so long at his age, and with the prospect of three years pig-sticking and polo playing in the company of men,’ she said. ‘In any case, don’t you dare question him unless he volunteers information!’

  ‘Not me,’ he told her chuckling, ‘I know that much about Ikey!’

  He apologised for missing dinner when he came at last but he did not explain where he had been, except to say, off-handedly, that he had lost track of time. Claire, kissing him good night, noticed that he still looked a little wan and decided that the bet would be null and void, for he had almost certainly been mooching around in his own company all evening and this did not surprise her. If she had been exchanging Shallowford for India it was what she might have done.

  Chapter Two

  I

  Keith Horsey’s wooing of Rachel Eveleigh was progressing but at such a pedestrian pace that sometimes Rachel would lie awake for hours wondering how to bring him to the boil. It was almost two years since she had correctly assessed the worth of Sydney Codsall and, miraculously it seemed at the time, switched to Keith who had undoubted possibilities as a swain but whose technique was even more cumbersome than Sydney’s, although for very different reasons. Sydney had held off because he had no intention of committing himself, whereas Keith was clearly enslaved but was so humble about it that it had taken him nearly twelve months (spaced by absences at Oxford) to reach the hand-holding stage. Now that the fine weather had arrived, and they could take long walks together in the cool of the evening, she had managed to apply the spur once or twice but the entries in the diary she kept recorded only three kisses and two of them were hardly more than pecks in the region of the right ear. It was depressing to compare her recent experience with those of her pre-Sydney period, when, in the company of Debbie, her sister, she had attended harvest suppers and an occasional hop in the Coombe Bay Village Institute. Here she had had the greatest difficulty in extricating herself from bucolic embraces without crossing the line that might have led to a thrashing from father, endless nagging from mother, a shotgun wedding and a life-sentence in a tied cottage behind one of the farms. Faced, however, with Keith’s abject humility Rachel sometimes wished that the Devil his father was always preaching about would take fleeting residence in his son, just long enough to enable her to turn temptation to permanent advantage.

  It was not to be, however. Keith must have imbibed so many warnings against the lusts of the flesh that he was more or less inoculated against the Devil’s wiles, for even when their fingers touched he trembled and began to stutter, and once, when he was helping her over a stile and her dress had caught on a briar to expose about two inches of shin, he had blushed the colour of a ripe plum and they walked all the way home unlinked.

  Reviewing the situation as it was when he came home for the summer vacation in June, 1913, Rachel concluded that she could only hope for an appreciable advance if something dramatic occurred during one of their silent evening rambles, something calculated to galvanise him into action and precipitate his suit by involuntary personal contact. She visualised a number of bizarre situations—Keith throwing
his arms about her to shield her from a falling bough, Keith clasping her to him in defiance of Honeyman’s prize bull, or, better still, Keith lifting her dripping wet from Sorrel and attempting artificial respiration on the bank. In the event she was not required to set the stage for any of these occurrences.

  It happened on a warm June evening as they were moving round the shoulder of the great escarpment north-west of the mere, using the overgrown path above the hill where the Shallowford badgers had their sets. Their walk had been even more uneventful than usual for the ground was rough over most of the route and for the last two miles they had been walking in Indian file, with Keith ahead, beating a passage through the brambles. Like most countrybred girls Rachel took the glories of nature for granted. Woods, ferns, wildflowers and brambles were to her little more than a growth on what might be converted into arable land and she was sorry now that she had agreed to turn off the sunken lane that ran a half-circle behind the Big House. Since he had returned home a few days earlier she had been growing desperate. Stile after stile had been negotiated and she had seen any number of available logs to sit upon but he had passed every spot where, on such an evening as this, and under a bronze and heliotrope sunset, lovers might have been tempted to linger. She finally made up her mind to try the simplest of all, a stumble and a sprained ankle, that would encourage him to stop and perhaps try a little gentle massage, for by now Rachel was convinced that only close physical contact would give her a sporting chance of casting a net from which he, as a parson’s son, could hardly escape with honour. She did not expect miracles but a miracle was unnecessary, a little patting and probing would do the trick and a proposal would almost certainly follow, particularly if she prescribed the areas where the patting was done. And then, just as she was looking for a suitable briar to entrap her foot, the Valley mating gods took a hand and a low, choked cry issued from a gorse thicket within a few yards of the path. They both stopped, surprised, and a little alarmed to hear such a sound in such a place, and he said, seeking corroboration, ‘That was human! Somebody is hurt in there!’ and although the cry had sounded human common sense told her that it was far more likely to be the moan of an animal caught in a trap and she said as much. ‘Squire has forbidden the use of steel traps on the estate,’ he said. ‘I’ll push through and see!’ and he barged through the gorse that grew close against the summit of a large, flat-topped rock on the crest of the slope.