Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘It did, Paul,’ she said, urgently and he ripped out, showing his first flash of impatience, ‘Good God, woman, I know it did! Do you imagine I wouldn’t have known after all this time?’

  Suddenly she felt both relieved and deflated, as though she was a child with long plaits confessing a fault to an indulgent parent, expecting a slap and getting nothing but amused tolerance. The transition from one extreme to the other was so painful that tears welled in her eyes and she made a helpless gesture with her hands. He must have realised how she felt for amusement and impatience left him at once and he said, quietly, ‘All right, Claire. I’ll listen, if you really want to unburden yourself and I don’t mean that cynically! What exactly did happen between you and that ass? He kissed you once or twice, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes he did, half-a-dozen times.’

  He still looked indulgent, even when he said, ‘And let his hands stray a little, I wouldn’t wonder? Well, I hope his private technique is better than his public display for his tactics went out with the crinoline! Dammit woman, chaps like him are ten a penny in every mess or were until we got caught up in a real war! I suppose he told you he was being drafted to France and hadn’t long to live?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘he did, only this morning and I . . . I . . . was on my way to say good-bye when I saw you! He’s going overseas tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s going tomorrow but not overseas,’ Paul told her, shortly. ‘When I saw him preening himself on his progress I asked the adjutant about him. He’s going on a course to Aldershot, then straight back here and after that he’ll land a staff appointment that’ll keep him out of the firing line! He’ll work it all right, the Lane-Phelps of this world generally do but what was it that made you “come to your senses” as you say?’

  ‘When I looked in the window and realised why you were there.’

  He pondered a moment. ‘And suppose I had been upstairs with the girl? Would that have resulted in Lane-Phelps getting another scalp?’

  ‘Yes, I think it would.’

  ‘Well, I dare say you would have been justified, for I suppose it did seem I was lying about going to Whinmouth. I met the postman in the drive and thought I’d pop over and read her letter before I crossed the river. It’s all rather silly, isn’t it? I mean, not just this but the situation we’ve allowed to develop between us, and I daresay it’s partly my fault; I couldn’t have been easy to live with during the last few months.’

  She was by no means disposed to grant him his share of the blame. ‘That’s rubbish!’ she said, ‘you’ve been grossly over-worked and because you identify yourself with the Valley you suffer for everybody in it! You always did but now it’s a hundred times more strain and I should have tried to help instead of fooling around with a man like Lane-Phelps. Most men in the Valley would have given their wives a damned good hiding for far less!’

  ‘Well,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘I haven’t the slightest desire to knock you down and black your eyes but I’ll turn you over and smack your handsome bottom if you insist!’

  His facetiousness confused her, so much so that, in a perverse way, she felt cheated.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t laugh it off, Paul. The truth is I’ve never felt so small and mean and wretched in my life!’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, more seriously, ‘but I find it difficult to go berserk over a show-off like Lane-Phelps!’

  ‘But it isn’t Lane-Phelps,’ she argued, ‘I see now that he was just a kind of game I was playing with myself. This afternoon was different. How could I have been so wrong and stupid? And suppose I hadn’t waited and had ridden off to the Battery?’

  ‘Well you didn’t!’ he said and she replied, biting her lip, ‘I came within an inch of doing so and that makes me unfit to share a bed with a man as honest as you!’

  Her contrition, carried to these extravagant lengths, exasperated him. He said, impatiently, ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Let’s forget the whole bloody thing!’ expecting her to shrug and climb resignedly into bed. In all their previous clashes she had remained open to reason and tact on his part, had even managed to half-heal the one serious rupture in their relationship. Tonight, however, it was as if she enjoyed wallowing in guilt and she stood staring at him with a curiously wooden expression that he had never seen on her face all the years he had known her. She said, at length, ‘I don’t seem to be able to convince you do I?’ and he snapped, ‘No, you don’t! I think you’re just being stupid and enlarging a peccadillo into a crisis!’ but because she still regarded him with that odd, woebegone expression he suddenly relented and made one more attempt to laugh her out of it, saying, ‘Look here, if it will soothe your conscience at the expense of your rump wait while I slip down and fetch my riding-crop!’ and he reached out, intending to gather her up and throw her on the bed. To his dismay she stepped back sharply and backed against the cupboard. ‘Whatever happens this is going to take me a very long time to live down,’ she said. ‘Your come-come-now-now approach isn’t likely to help, Paul!’ She turned then, flung open the cupboard and picked up the brown switch, thrusting it at him and throwing up her head with what struck him as a gesture of almost hysterical defiance. Then his astonishment was doused by laughter and he said, taking the cane, ‘Very pretty, but if I took you at your word I daresay I’d never hear the last of it!’

  Her head came down again and now, as defiance ebbed, she looked spent and defeated. She said, very quietly, ‘It wasn’t such an empty gesture, Paul. What you can’t understand is that a woman who has behaved as I have would prefer a week with a sore backside to a lifetime with a sick conscience. Very well, leave it at that, but for God’s sake don’t stand there making excuses for me!’

  It was only then, as she made a step towards the bed, that he realised she was in earnest, that she was in desperate need of some kind of penance and would have been grateful for a blow across the face the moment she had confessed to Lane-Phelps’ fumblings and her suspicions regarding Hazel. He understood too that her emotions were essentially primitive, far more so than his, a newcomer to an area where the emotional relationship between man and wife had nothing to do with statutes and codes of behaviour written into books. He felt pity for her and compassion made him wiser yet without altogether banishing humour from such a grotesque situation. He said, thoughtfully, ‘Has anyone ever beaten you?’

  ‘My mother, when I deserved it.’

  ‘Never your father?’

  ‘He left that kind of thing to her. Perhaps it’s a pity.’

  ‘It’s not too late. Bend over that chair and stay there until I tell you to get up!’

  Even then she had power to shock him. Without a word or a change of expression she did as he bid, hoisting her nightgown and bending low so that her hair brushed the carpet. She was trembling but not from fear and no longer for shame. The very humiliation of her posture brought a sense of release as though, by calling his bluff, she was already atoning in some degree for the self-abasement of the day. She might have felt differently about this had she seen his expression as he stood contemplating her defenceless buttocks. It held no trace of irritation or astonishment now. He was grinning, broadly, and as the cane dropped to the floor, she felt in place of its bite, a tremendous slap that would have precipitated her over the back of the chair had he not saved her by grabbing the folds of her nightgown and robe. Then, before she had half-recovered her balance, he had spun her round and was holding her in a grip that drove the breath from her body.

  ‘Don’t be such a damned fool!’ he shouted through his laughter. ‘I’m no wife-beater and you’re no Potter girl! Take those damned things off before I tear them off and get into bed and turn out the light! I know a way to teach you who is boss around here!’ and he kissed her, swung her off her feet and tossed her bodily on the bed.

  It was his tone more than the gesture that sobered her, that and his abrupt stalk round the end of the bed and into th
e dressing-­room where he kept his riding clothes.

  She got up and stood in the centre of the room massaging her tingling behind and then, catching sight of her reflection in the tall mirror, was amazed to discover herself smiling. They were over it, through it, and had the rhythm of their lives by the tail again and she could have shouted her relief and thankfulness at the top of her voice. She heard him grunting as he tugged at his long boots and called, after a moment, ‘Do you want a hand with those?’ and he shouted back, ‘No! Get into bed for God’s sake woman!’ and a few moments later he was beside her handling her as impatiently as she ever recalled.

  Yet it was she, exhausted by the emotional demands of the day, who slept first while he lay awake awhile, going about his familiar business of sorting out and docketing his impressions, his thoughts returning to her accurate diagnosis of his ill-humour over the last few months—his personal identification with the turmoil that had reigned in the Valley since Franz had ’phoned that August night telling him that war was inevitable and would be anything but the field-day-jubilee that everyone expected. She was right of course; she knew him better than anyone, better even than John Rudd who had shared the adventure from the very beginning. He saw the Valley people as a family, as dear to him as Grace’s boy Simon and the twins, and his daughters Mary and Whiz, all sound asleep in their quarters along the corridor. He shared the mounting desperation of wives like Elinor Codsall and the misery of mothers like Marian Eveleigh, at war not only with the Germans but with her own husband. He worried, with Old Honeyman, over the shrinking manpower of the farms and dreaded the impossible tasks that would face them all at harvest time. He brooded, with Rose Derwent, on the probable fate of her horses, bought up and driven away by Government scavengers to drag great hunks of metal along foreign roads. He had saved the old timber of the estate for the time being but how long would it be before they presented him with fresh ultimatums? And if the deadlock in France showed no signs of breaking how would it be possible, in two years or three, to reharness the Valley to his dreams? It was a depressing role, this witnessing of twelve years’ thought and toil being swept away like bubbles of silt on a Sorrel freshet but tonight, for the first time in months, he felt comparatively optimistic and this was not on account of his victory over the timber pirates. His cheerful mood stemmed directly from the woman asleep in his arms, a wife of eight years’ standing and the mother of four of his children but also, at this moment, a living symbol of the Valley, of its fruitfulness and beauty season by season. Her breasts were its contours and in her thighs lived its abundancy. ‘And not so damned fanciful either!’ he thought, ‘for there were Derwents hereabouts when the first Tudor arrived and probably before that if they could be traced! I didn’t get my hands on this land simply by paying the Lovell family a cheque but by taking her into partnership and giving her children in this house. All I’ve done since I got here is to play stud-horse and caretaker, and I daresay I’ll go on doing just that as long as I live for it won’t become Craddock land in the real sense until her children, and her children’s children, take on where I leave off!’ The conclusion and the glow of possession engendered by it, was a balm and warmed his belly like a glass of Burgundy. He pulled her closer, his lips brushing her hair and as he drifted off to sleep the knowledge that whole armies were locked in conflict across the Channel seemed a trivial thing compared to the eternity of red soil and the race who cared for it.

  Chapter Five

  I

  John Rudd, Eveleigh, Sam Potter, indeed anyone who claimed to know Paul Craddock at all well would have argued that he was anything but an impulsive man. He had a reputation for slow, cud-chewing thought, and carefully weighed decisions, for assembling every scrap of available evidence and carrying it away to study in privacy before taking action on any matter involving the administration or development of the estate. And yet, viewed in retrospect, all of the important decisions of his life had been arrived at impulsively, almost recklessly—the purchase of thirteen hundred acres after a twenty-four hour survey; his marriage to Grace Lovell and later to Claire Derwent; his adoption of Ikey Palfrey and, finally, in the summer of 1915, his final conclusions on the war which led, more or less directly, to his personal participation in it.

  Until then he had qualified as a guarded neutral, an object of distrust by the Kaiser-hating fire-eaters, men like Horace Handcock who saw in the conflict vindication of the prophecies of a decade. Almost alone among the menfolk of the Valley Paul was not visited by the virus of war-fever, devoting his energies exclusively to buttressing the Valley against the pressures exerted upon it from the hour Paxtonbury’s newsagents’ boys had run shrieking along the down platform proclaiming Armageddon and summoning the more impressionable to the Bosporus and the Sweetwater Canal. On that momentous occasion Paul did not even get his feet wet. He looked upon the involvement of Britain in the Franco-German quarrel as a grave misjudgement on the part of the Government, whom he had always regarded as pacific and conciliatory. When it was clear that there could be no withdrawal and that, for good or evil, there would be a few months’ carnage, he moderated his attitude, saying that he supposed they would all come to their senses sooner or later and he made no secret of the fact that he intended to continue minding his own business, taking full advantage of the Government’s reawakening interest in the land. Fortunately for him (for patriotism could be menacing) he was qualified to stand aside. He was thirty-five when the war began and still suffered from the leg wound gained in the last epidemic of patriotic hysteria. He also had considerable responsibilities, including a wife, a young family, a seat on the local Bench and suzerainty over six prosperous farms each expected to do its share in stocking the national larder. At that stage, indeed, at any foreseeable stage in the war, he could have been said to be serving national interests more usefully at home than overseas and he continued to tell himself this until the war was about a year old. Then, brick by brick, the protective barricade he had raised against the outside world began to crumble so that he was obliged to take stock of it and ponder how long it could sustain mounting pressures from all sides and how much longer he could justify his neutrality. For thirteen years now his life had been the Valley, the people who lived there, the crops they raised and the cattle they reared, and for him no other obligations existed. Under the tremendous stresses of a war however, with half the world already involved and every participant bent on total victory, the entire social structure of the Valley began to change at a velocity that made his head spin. The slatternly camp arose on the moor and raucous north-countrymen flocked in like so many Viking invaders. Machines proliferated and their stench poisoned the air of the countryside but, what was worse, his own men drifted away in twos and threes leaving every farm short of labour and at a time when official demands on the yield of the land were assuming fantastic proportions. In one way he welcomed those demands. They gave him plenty to do and justified his faith in the land and in the improvements he had made over the years. With the expert knowledge of John Rudd, and his own not inconsiderable experience to help him, he grappled with manpower and equipment problems, solving them all one way or another but hard work and improvisation could not rescue him from personal involvement in domestic problems, or as time passed, from involvement in the tragedies of the Valley. It was here that his detachment foundered.

  In the last ten years Paul Craddock had developed a knack found in the best type of regimental officer. He had a remarkable memory for the kind of personal trivia that convinced tenants and estate workers that their interests were his and this was neither a pose nor an oblique way of keeping the estate machinery oiled. He really did think of the Eveleighs and the Codsalls as his friends and the Derwents and Rudds not as relatives or deputies but as allies and he went far beyond that, reaching right down to the level of the two or three-score hired men and maids employed on the farms and in the workshops of the Valley, craftsmen who were all, in some degree, dependent upon the estate. He
knew everybody in the vale by Christian name. He knew whether they were married or single, how much they earned and how many children they supported. He knew the age of most of them and, in some cases, how long they had occupied their cottages and what kind of home-makers they were. Thus, when the men began to drift away to face death or disablement he was concerned for every one of them and for their families. Each brick knocked from his wall had a name upon it and when a sufficient number had been removed, or knocked askew, he was as deeply committed to the war as the least of them and they all knew it and looked to him to solve some of their immediate problems.

  The first of these to confront him was the loss of Will Codsall’s labour at Periwinkle, smallest of the Valley farms and as time went on, he and John Rudd formed a pool of part-time, migratory labour to fill this and other vacancies so that soon Valley farming became almost a communal venture. This system broke down, however, after a mere eight months and with far more land under the plough than in peacetime, adjustments had to be made in the way of concentrating stock and merging machinery and even borders. Some local trades withered altogether. Thatching was the first of them and Nick Salter and his boys went to work at High Coombe and Four Winds. The fishing industry at Coombe Bay died after the recall to the Navy of Tom Williams and two of his crewmen and the local building industry was soon at a standstill, for Ephraim Morgan lost Walt Pascoe and three other specialists and although, in a sense, the failure of subsidiary trades was no immediate concern of the estate, Paul felt it incumbent upon him to do all he could to keep them alive against the return of the volunteers. Apart from using all available manpower on the denuded farms he also reduced nearly a score of his cottage rents and provided cart-horse transport for the pupils of Mary Willoughby’s little school. He maintained good relations with the camp and indulgent officers sometimes turned a blind eye to his temporary enlistment of a craftsman or agriculturist from among the swarm of recruits.