The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Of course he was okay. It was cold, bitterly cold, but mercifully dry and he was well bundled up, with top coat, scarf, fur gloves, woollen underclothes, and two pairs of socks. In addition he had his flask and his medals, and a glow of anticipation that spread from his ribs to the extremities of his body. He had no intention of watching the procession from the window, or its progress down from Westminster on a television screen, for it was not the procession he had come to see. It was the people, and by that he did not mean the notabilities. As soon as Simon’s car had sped on down the hill between the two phalanxes of spectators he set out in pursuit, aiming to get as close to St Paul’s as possible. But first, to fortify himself, he had a quick swallow from his flask in the shelter of a doorway.

  The crowd was very orderly but the first thing that struck him was that it was not a gathering of mourners. Neither was it the kind of assembly he remembered on other State occasions he had witnessed, the second Jubilee, when he was a lad of eighteen, the coronation of King George V in 1911, and the Victory Parade of June, 1919. Those had been national celebrations, of the kind in which the British, for all their alleged restraint, had delighted. The mood here was something he had never sensed among English­ people, a compound that defied accurate analysis, for it had about it elements of solemnity, good-temper, gaiety, inevitability, awe, and an overall sense of achievement, as though they were here to witness something half-way between the completion of an enormous national shrine and the pageantry that would attend the burial of a mediaeval king.

  It was, he decided, a very elusive mood indeed and the only constituent entirely absent on the streets was grief, even the pseudo-solemnity that passes for grief at the funeral of a paladin or a city father.

  He edged down behind the four-deep pavement crowds until he could get a glimpse of the forecourt and steps of St Paul’s. Because he was tall, and carried himself very straight, he could see over the heads of most and he found a spot within a stone’s throw of the statue at the foot of the steps where the knot of sightseers between him and the roadway were short, with shoulders hunched against the wind. It consisted of a sallow little man, his sallow little wife, and three children with almost traditionally authentic Cockney accents. The youngest kept asking, ‘When’s he coming, Mum?’ and Mum made the same reply over and over again. ‘Soon Ernie, soon.’ They had, it seemed, an inexhaustible supply of thermos flasks and the steady consumption of tea obviously worried the father because he said in a low voice, ‘You’d better go easy on that, Lil, or they’ll be fidgeting to go somewhere and they can’t, not ’ere.’

  He stood there arching his neck and stamping his feet, taking it all in and distilling it methodically, the way he winnowed the seasonal impressions of the Valley. They were all, he thought, very patient and orderly, and friendly without being pushing, for the woman offered him a drink from the cup of the latest thermos flask and when he smiled and shook his head, tapping the pocket that held his flask, she nodded, almost as though he was the eldest of her flock and thus qualified for something stronger than tea.

  Round about ten o’clock they started arriving, car after car sliding up to the foot of the steps and their doors were discreetly opened by a bevy of smart girl redcaps—he had not known such a unit existed—so that he forgot the cold and the tea-swilling family in watching the history of the century unfold in a steady procession of V.I.P.s.

  The first he picked out was the striking figure of de Gaulle, whose kepi made him think of the rout at Chemin des Dames and then the solid figure of General Eisenhower, whom he had always thought of as a man of compassion, so unlike the blockheads who had initiated the wholesale slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele. Then, advertised by a long ripple in the crowd, the Royal party arrived and he watched the slim figure of the Queen ascend the broad, shallow steps as the flank guard of dismounted Lifeguards brought their swords to the salute and Prince Philip said something to Prince Charles who nodded and turned his head to look. Even from this distance his sharp old eyes caught something else that he supposed the watchers took for granted, a smile directed by the Queen Mother at the person who handed her out of the car. He liked that very much. It confirmed his opinion of her as a person of warm dignity and expertise, who knew instinctively how to radiate the good manners one expected of someone whose whole being was concerned with the mystique of ceremonial.

  The huge doors of the Cathedral kept opening and closing and he supposed the people inside must be very sensitive to draught. Mounted policemen on well-mannered bays pivoted gracefully as car-bonnets nosed within inches of shining bits. The trim little redcaps kept advancing and retreating as new arrivals appeared. The stream of cars and chauffeurs deposited their passengers and then disappeared without trace, as though whisked out of sight by the wave of a conjuror’s baton. It was astounding—the smoothness and synchronisation of the entire operation and he thought, ‘It’s like something that’s been rehearsed once a week by many generations. Nobody will believe it when I tell them,’ and then he remembered that he wouldn’t need to tell them because they would have seen it all on television and more besides. But that wasn’t the same, somehow.

  He could not have said why it was not the same until his ear caught the first far-off notes of the ‘Dead March’ but then he knew, because everyone around him heard them at the same time, and a tide of tremendous but curiously controlled excitement swept up Ludgate Hill, making itself felt like a long, sighing breath that challenged the penetrating probe of the cold air they were breathing, and as everyone round him cocked an eye to the right the notes closed up to form the terrifying finality of the measured rhythm, and the sallow dispenser of thermos flasks said, in the voice people used in church, ‘There, Ernie, it’s coming,’ and the child hopped and pranced as though his father’s fears were about to be realised.

  It passed like a carefully unrolled carpet, a great strip of patterned colour and, in what seemed to him, a stupendous silence, despite the measured tramp of so many boots, the thud of the music, and the faint rattle of the gun carriage where the wheels passed over the specks of grit in their path. It was a spectacle of a kind he had never seen before and never hoped to see, and he stood very straight, his seven medals trapping a ray of winter sunshine as the guardsmen formed up alongside the coffin and expertly transferred its terrible weight to their shoulders. The pallbearers went ahead in a loose group, Attlee, looking like an old but indomitable Chinese mandarin, relying upon the discreet elbow-touch of Eden, Macmillan walking on the outside, hunched against the cold, and somewhere there so many others who had been stirred or exasperated by the slurred exhortations of the man now resting on the shoulders of the straining guardsmen.

  The very passage of the cortège up the steps towards the slowly-opening doors was the finale of an epoch that no film producer, however talented and inspired, could conjure out of celluloid and stage carpenters. It was as though, in that moment of time, a century of human experience peculiar to these islands and to the people standing about him, was being taken out of the stream of history and stored away with all the other experiences assembled in that place, the Great Fire, the Duke of Wellington, Trafalgar, the Jubilees, and the latest of them, the fire-blitz of 1941 when, on a rare visit to London, he had made his way here and seen the enormous bulk of St Paul’s standing almost alone amid acres of blackened rubble. His taxi-driver, equally impressed, had said, unconscious of bathos, ‘Marvellous, ain’t it? Bloody marvellous,’ and that, he thought, was as good an estimate as any. It was marvellous. Bloody marvellous! Every last aspect of it, all the way from a cavalry charge at Omdurman to St Paul’s.

  He turned, giddy with cold or emotion, and let himself be carried along down Ludgate Hill to an Espresso bar where he drank two cups of scalding coffee and then crossed the road to the newspaper office to await Simon. He experienced no sense of anticlimax but instead a kind of emotional repletion that revealed itself in a slight unsteadiness of gait on the steep stairs and a
breathlessness that had nothing to do with the cold or his age. He sat by a singing gas-fire thawing his toes and taking another sip or two from his flask. Overhead, like the rush of wild geese down the Valley in autumn, aircraft of the R.A.F. swept in salute, and down by the river he heard the defiant whoops of ships’ sirens.

  He was engaged in piecing together impressions to form a whole and the process was familiar to him, the method smoothed by the sixty-three years he had spent in the Valley. What he sought, as he sat there musing, was a compendium of British virtues, some kind of justification for the intense national pride that brought a sparkle to his eyes, and he assembled it like a man building a utensil from odds and ends that had strayed within reach. There was dignity there, expressed in a pageantry that some might feel verged upon the ridiculous but it was not ridiculous because it was motivated by impulses worthier than pride—by respect and by an unconscious groping after traditions that had survived the passage of centuries. There was courage, too, of the kind he had witnessed so often in Flanders and in the Valley when hostile aircraft flew in from the sea. And underneath it all there was patience and kindness and wonder, expressed in the voice of the mother—‘soon, Ernie, soon,’ in her diffident offer of lukewarm tea to an aged stranger, and in that taxi driver’s involuntary tribute to the indestructibility of St Paul’s—‘Marvellous ain’t it? Bloody marvellous.’

  The assessment brought to him a sense of belonging that he had never felt in these noisy crowded streets, a comfort that he had never found in religion or the promise of survival after death. He was at one with that strange, growling volcano of a man now on his way to Oxfordshire, and with all the people who had witnessed his passage, and there was immortality enough in this fellowship and in the loins of his sons, daughters and descendants.

  Somewhere close at hand a typewriter clacked, perhaps recording what he felt about what he had seen or something like it. For what was going on to that page was quarried from English thought dressed in the English tongue.

  III

  That, towards the end, was his self-analysis as a patriot. His final self-assessment as patriarch and man was more complicated and he delayed making it for a long time.

  The rest of the winter passed quietly. He was still able to get out and about, and twice rode the grey to a meet, although he only stayed on an hour or two for he tired very easily now and sometimes his chest gave him a little trouble, so that the young doctor who came in from Coombe Bay, warned him to cut down on his cigarettes. He did not take the warning seriously, telling the doctor that a man within weeks of his eighty-sixth birthday was not obliged to cut down on anything.

  ‘I’m not one of those drooling old buffers who want to make a century just to get a telegram from some flunkey at the Palace and have a lot of relatives goo-gooing over a cake I can’t digest,’ he said, and the young man had looked flustered until Paul invited him to help himself to a whiskey from the decanter.

  ‘I wouldn’t have had to tell that to either of your predecessors,’ he said, with a dry chuckle. ‘Both Maureen, and before her old Doctor O’ Keefe, expected a tot of Irish every time they came to read my pulse. Matter of fact the old doctor died of it, running away from blue monkeys so his daughter told me.’

  He was not ill but he was not himself, not even when the spring came round and he could make his way down to the lodge, or potter about the rose-garden that Grace had conjured out of the tail of the east paddock. Simon, seeking information from the doctor, was only moderately reassured.

  ‘Nothing specific,’ the man said, with the patronage inseparable from his profession, ‘just anno domini. There’s a whisper under his ribs. He had a couple smashed at one time, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, ‘but that was ’way back in 1906, when he was injured fishing sailors out of the Cove.’

  ‘It’s the weak spot in his overall defences,’ the doctor said, ‘but allowing for that, a bullet through his knee, and a lump of shrapnel calling for the kind of surgery that shows under his hair, he’ll do very well if you can get him to take it easier and switch to a pipe.’

  Simon, without actually disliking the man, could not find much confidence in him and talked to Evie about getting one of Maureen’s specialist friends in from Paxtonbury, but she gave it as her opinion that Paul wouldn’t thank him for it so he let it go until word came that the old man had taken to his bed with bronchitis.

  He was obliged to give up his smoking then, for the cough resulting from a puff or two made his eyes water and his old bones rattle. Andy, visiting him at weekends, found him testy but far from helpless, and as the days lengthened and May sunshine came flooding into his room he became restive, pottering about in his old-fashioned dressing-gown, dismissing the nurse they found for him, and appearing downstairs the week of his birthday when he seemed almost himself apart from that cough.

  A week or two after his birthday they brought him the news he had been awaiting. Vanessa had won the great-grandchild race, and produced a nine-pound boy on the anniversary of her wedding. She only just kept her promise. Two days later Whiz rang from Ross, to say that she was a grandmother. The close finish amused him but he was glad Vanessa had won because it would mean more to her and her jovial cross-country runner than to Whiz’s daughter and her poker-faced husband.

  He lugged out the estate diary and leaved it through, losing himself in memories as he read of droughts and crop records and Valley gossip, some recorded in his own writing, some in Claire’s. Before he put it away again, however, he made the two entries and totted up his live descendants, making a tally of twenty, covering three generations.

  ‘Well, that’s not so bad, old girl,’ he said aloud, as though Claire was present and hanging upon the answer to the sum, ‘but it’s amazing there aren’t twice as many when you think of it.’

  Then, the book still open before him, he took a nap, and John and his wife Anne, one-time dispenser of hangover cures, came in at teatime and woke him up, saying they were down for the week. On seeing what he had written in the diary that afternoon they told him the score was likely to be twenty-one by the end of November. For once they succeeded in surprising him and he said, defensively, ‘Must be my eyesight. Wouldn’t have missed a thing like that a year ago. Your mother was the one, however. Regular Sherlock Holmes when it came to babies. She sometimes spotted them in advance of the mothers,’ and Anne said, not for the first time, that she always regretted not having known Claire because she sounded so much fun.

  ‘She was,’ he said, ‘in more ways than I can tell a woman your age.’

  John’s visit, and the fact that it brought Andy and Margaret and Simon and Evie into the house four times that week, had a far better effect upon him than any amount of cough mixture and tablets, so good in fact that John, after a private consultation with the others, cancelled a week’s holiday in Cornwall and decided to stay on, for the weather promised to be hot and he and Anne enjoyed water-skiing in the bay. Paul went down there with them once but the excursion tired him so that he spent the next day in bed and seemed listless or contemplative—they couldn’t decide which—the morning after that. Simon came about midday announcing a day’s holiday and they asked Rumble and Mary to look in for tea at four-thirty.

  About two hours before that, however, he sent for Simon, who found him sitting on the edge of the bed in a pair of khaki drill slacks.

  ‘Damned stuffy in here, boy,’ he said, ‘open the windows a bit wider,’ but when they were open as far as they would go he said, ‘It’s still airless. Somewhere up in the eighties. Should be a bumper harvest. Must make a note to ring Young Eveleigh and Jerry on their prospects.’

  ‘Rumble will be over for tea,’ Simon said. ‘He’ll know all there is to know, won’t he?’ and Paul said, so quietly that he seemed to be talking to himself, ‘Rumble … Rumble could fix it. He’d understand too, I daresay.’

  ‘Understand what, Gov’nor?’ asked
Simon, relishing neither the sound nor the look of him and Paul said, with a note of apology, ‘Sorry, boy, I was thinking …’ and then, more decisively, ‘Get Rumble over here now and tell him to bring the landrover. I’ve a fancy to go where I can breathe. It’s all right, nothing to get upset about. I only want him to take me up to my perch for an hour or so. I’ll be back for tea and I’m damned if I’ll have it up here on a tray. I don’t want to waste weather like this in bed. No damned sense in doing that at my time of life. Go on, Simon, there’s a good chap, phone Rumble and ask him to bring the Landy.’

  Simon, without confiding in the women, did as he was asked but privately took John on one side and said, ‘This is a bit dicey, kid. He wants to go up to French Wood this afternoon, just as he wanted to trail down to the bay the day before last. I think he’s got a feeling that if he takes to his bed he won’t get up again and it’s beginning to frighten him a little. I can’t remember him looking that way before.’

  John said, deferring to a brother thirty years his senior, ‘You’re the boss when he’s not around and it’s up to you. Knowing the Gov, however, he’ll do anything he wants to do, so maybe you’d better humour him. Is Rumble coming?’

  ‘On his way. I told him what I told you but he says he’s often taken him up there in the last year or so. Apparently you can drive to within fifty yards of the crest now.’

  ‘Then that settles it. It’s a Valley rite of theirs, and they must have decided to let us in on it. Tell the girls and I’ll get him ready.’

  But when he entered the bedroom John found that Paul had got himself ready. He was wearing, apart from khaki slacks, an old grey sweater and a pair of heavy brogues. He was also in the act of lighting a cigarette and said, in answer to his youngest son’s mildly reproachful glance, ‘I know, I know, but I felt like one. It’s the first in forty-eight hours,’ and he inhaled with pleasure, looking, John thought, like a defiant fifth-former surprised by a master in the Smokery behind the lumber-room trunks.