“‘Many men, many minds’,” said Phillip, quoting Mrs. Portal-Welch. “I suppose to a sailor the ship he serves in is a world entirely on its own?”
“Well, not altogether on its own, perhaps. There is some sort of remote connexion with Whitehall, so I’ve heard.”
“Oh yes, of course, by wireless!”
Roger looked round the table with his faint smile. Phillip, who had drunk several glasses of wine, persisted. “Just before Jutland, the Navy was in touch with Whitehall, who knew the German fleet was out by their wireless signals to Kiel. The Germans didn’t think to change their wave-lengths, did they?”
Roger looked round the table again, faintly aloof, and made no reply.
Phillip withdrew into himself. He thought of other faces around that table, far away in time, the Kingsmans and Father Aloysius, and that wonderful night when he had first discovered Julian Grenfell’s Into Battle. Even then he had made an idiot of himself by talking about the absence of the R.F.C. at Loos—to learn later that the Kingsmans’ only son had been shot down and killed during that battle. One day—one day—he would write the story of Loos—the gas blowing back—Colonel Mowbray and the adjutant wounded—‘Spectre’ West taking command for the third assault on the Lone Tree position—‘Spectre’ knocked out—then the terror of the Regimental Sergeant-Major’s request, Will you take command of the battalion, sir—and his incredible luck during the next two or three hours.
Across the table the General sat, nearly as silent as Phillip had now become. Was he still mucked up inside by Queenie, the more so because ‘Woppy’ Raymond, sitting beside Queenie on the other side of the table, was now home on three months’ leave? What a strange undercurrent there was in the family: Queenie vamping a man old enough to be her father, Sophy after himself, who was after Annabelle—where was it leading them all? Was he himself but a spiritual seducer, as Jack O’Donovan had suggested? Had he betrayed himself first? He wanted to make a note of this idea; for Donkin, as he developed, must be absolutely real. Especially when he felt himself to be, as now, unreal.
At Sophy’s suggestion after dinner he fetched his new boots to be looked at. The pale leather interiors were slippery with french chalk; even so, he found it difficult to pull them on, despite the thinness of his silk socks.
“Of course they will feel a bit tight now that your trousers are tucked into the legs. Walk around, and see how they feel, old man.”
He felt ridiculous when Annabelle laughed, and pretending to be amused said, “In the army my nickname was ‘Sticks’. But now I feel like a half-stuffed bustard, or a capercailzie!”
“‘Caper-cailly’, you mean, don’t you?” asked Queenie.
“The capercaillie is extinct. I mean capercailzie, cousin to the oo-ja bird,” he joked, to cover up the mispronunciation.
If it was not easy to get the boots on, it was much harder to got them off. It took ‘Woppy’ and Roger five minutes while on his back he was drawn about the floor. At the General’s suggestion he sat in an armchair and gripped the arms while a tug-of-war took place between the General holding the back of the chair, in turn held by Queenie, and Queenie by Annabelle, while the two young men lugged and jerked at the boots until they became detached, amid much laughter.
More trouble followed the next day. He rode a 16.3 hands high raw-boned gelding which, like Roman Nose, was used to carrying side-saddle, judging by the sinuous way it cantered, throwing its rider forward and to the offside with every rise of its shoulders. He sweated much, and as the field was going through a gate the hunter shied at the eye-look of a mare with a red riband tied to the base of her tail, and stopped abruptly. Phillip felt a muscle tearing in his back. Thereafter every motion of the horse grated, so that he held his breath against the pain. It was humiliating; he sought relief by standing up in the irons, and managed to keep his seat to the end; but the pain remained when he got out of the open Sunbeam tourer in which Sophy drove the four of them home.
This time the new boots appeared to be immovable. Jacks were useless. Foolishly he had put on socks of a wool-silk mixture. The butler heaved and pulled, ignoring Phillip’s suggestion that his trousers and cuffs were being ruined. ‘Woppy’ and Roger joined the tug-of-war, and accompanied them to the bathroom, where Phillip held his boots under the cold tap, hoping to shrink his swelled feet.
The struggle was renewed with additional grips of hand towels. The butler and ‘Woppy’ puffed and grunted and lugged, and then the butler had to go and supervise the laying of the table for a score of guests. Phillip’s right boot by this time had been shifted about an inch and a half, so that the arch of the foot was fixed in a painful position. In desperation he cut the stitches, and was free. As for the other boot, it might have been human; for when he tried for the last time to remove it before using the knife, it came off at once.
*
Among the guests for dinner was the General’s daughter, a polite and amiable young woman with spectacles, who at first spoke alertly upon a number of subjects, while Phillip sat on his hands to ease the pain in his back.
The party began to move when ‘Woppy’, who had been eyeing the General blandly and treating him with scrupulous politeness, suddenly, after receiving a glance of languishing tenderness from Queenie, became droll in what evidently was an approved way. He balanced glasses on his head; he threw up salted almonds and caught them deftly in his mouth; he pretended to tear off the General’s waistcoat buttons one at a time with a realistic sound of ripping cloth; he imitated animal cries presumably to be heard in the Far East; he told stories of comic argument in two voices; and generally was entertaining in a way that kept them amused and laughing.
Phillip then volunteered an imitation of the bagpipes, by pinching his nostrils with thumb and finger of one hand, jabbing his adam’s apple with the other, and with nose upheld like a dog when howling he gave The Campbells are Coming until he saw that Sophy was not looking amused. He wondered whether her information, given to him quietly before dinner, that Raymond was the younger son of an Irish peer had to do with her tolerance of what she considered to be not quite the thing in himself.
This speculation was confirmed shortly afterwards when, à propos of nothing, Roger looked across the table at Queenie and said, “Do you remember that night in the fog, when we were living at Blackheath, and we lost our way going to a dance at the Montmorencys, and found ourselves asking the way at some church mission room in a ghastly hole called Wakenham?”
Phillip remained still: the implication was clear. They knew about him. Obviously this had been arranged. Perhaps Roger was resentful of their mother’s interest in him. Of course: Sophy had told him that she hadn’t seen Roger since the funeral of his father, just before she had taken away the rest of the family to Devon for a change of scenery; and for Sophy, though he had not fully realised it at the time, to find hope of renewal in—himself. Sophy had been twenty years younger than her husband, she had told him.
“There was a frightful bounder there, do you remember, Queenie? A fellow with a red beard who tried to get off with you, and when we didn’t go in, asked you for your address? The sort of fellow who would try and borrow a fiver—probably been in Wormwood Scrubs, or somewhere——”
“Sounds like a friend of mine,” Phillip said. “Only Julian hadn’t got a beard then. He only grew it when we were in Devon. And he’s avoided ‘porridge’, so far.”
Had Julian spoken in the pubs, and to Irene, about his own month in prison at the end of 1919? How else would they have found out? Anyway, it was obvious that Roger looked on him as an adventurer after his mother’s money. He would make an excuse to go away after the hunt ball.
“Do you have a conductor at the local hunt balls, can you tell me?” he said to Sophy. “You remember the Indian Army captain at the Tennis Tournament at Queensbridge last year? The one with the steel racquet? I saw him conducting the Felix Hotel band at Felixstowe one night after the Armistice, with a poker.”
“You’re talkin
g rather a lot,” said Sophy, as her hand touched his wrist delicately, while she gave him a tender, reassuring glance.
The General seemed to be withdrawn into himself, with his third whisky and soda. Phillip imagined that he felt lost now that he had retired from the Army. Most of the men of his generation must have died during the Retreat, or at the first battle of Ypres. He began to feel concern for the General. Sophy had told him that his only son had been killed in the last year of the war, and recently he had lost his wife. He wondered what his name was: when being introduced, he had not registered the surname. And his daughter had been only, “This is Cynthia.”
*
The ball was held in a house three quarters of an hour’s drive away. Phillip rode in the Daimler with the General, his daughter, and Sophy; the four ‘young people’ went in the Sunbeam. The long drive to the house was lit by Chinese lanterns hanging on lower branches of trees.
Inside the shining floor of the ballroom, with its portraits, Phillip said, “Thank you for giving me two dances, Annabelle. Of course, if you find anyone you prefer to dance with, you can cut mine.” He meant this in service to her, feeling that he was too old, too dull a companion; and so was not prepared for Annabelle’s immediate response—she struck out his name on her programme with the little pencil attached to it by a red and brown tassel. “All right—I will!”
He had no idea of Annabelle’s feelings; she had no idea of his wish to abash himself before her—to be chivalrous, to stand apart, he so much older; she so much younger and living in the light of her own heart; he in the dark of a world gone for ever, to be resurrected by a scent, a sound, a name. The smell of burning oak-log—or of a piece of deal wood on a sea-shore fire—genii of an entire division, of a square mile of the Ancre valley. He thought of the first lines of Owen’s Greater Love, one of a few poems in a slim volume given to him by his mother.
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead—
Annabelle stood, laughing, beside a blond young man who had asked for a dance: an almost disguised Annabelle, in a frock of white with the fashionable waist-line round the hips, and a pink rose-bud on her shoulder. Phillip sauntered up to her, unbuttoning the white kid glove on one hand.
“What, you again?” She was radiant.
“What I meant was that, for your sake, I hoped you would find someone better to dance with.”
“That’s what I understood! I suppose you’ll tell me next that you can’t dance?”
“I’m not much good, I admit, but I can more or less waltz and do the fox-trot, but I don’t know the pattern of the reels or the black bottom!”
“The black bottom isn’t on the programme anyway!”
“Annabelle, don’t you know that I——” He dared not go on.
“Well, finish what you were going to say!”
“You ought to know.”
“Know what? Hurry up, the band’s starting, and I’m having the first dance with Brian Talbot. What were you going to say?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
It was half-past nine; the band struck up The Merry Widow waltz. Standing against the wall, he watched Sir Claude, in whose home the dance was being held, leading his wife to the centre of the floor, while the other couples waited. He recognised the scarred pugilist face, seemingly a little too large for the slight but sturdy figure dressed in red claw-hammer tail-coat with dark brown facings, black silk knee breeches and stockings with silver-buckled shoes. When working for The Weekly Courier Phillip had been sent to interview that famous sportsman and swashbuckling baronet with the magnificent Norman name on his seventy-third birthday anniversary to get a message for modern youth. He could hear the gravelly voice now, “I ride at ten stun four, as I have for fifty years. I swim every mornin’, winter and summer the year round. I dive from forty feet through the ice if there is any. I drink a bottle of port every night with m’ dinner. Tell ’em to follow my example, and they’ll live to be my age! And I can still use me mitts!” Whereupon he had squared up to Phillip and playfully pummel’d him in the ribs before taking him into the house for a glass of milk. “You want to put on a couple of stun, young feller.”
Now he watched the old boy pushing his wife round the floor, and in imagination saw him wielding a double-handed sword as tall as himself at the battle of Hastings. Then Sophy passed with the General and said, “Why aren’t you dancing?” and he said, “I’m so interested in watching the dancers!” Before they could come round again he went to the buffet in the next room for a glass of champagne—another—another. Colonel Kingsman, your health. Do you feel the roots of Picardy wheat in your brain? What speedwell has borrowed the blue of your eyes, for a fresh summer morning? Spectre, my dear friend, have you spent the farthing your father dropped in your grave, while the farewell volley was fired into the air? Father Aloysius, have you found your friend Grenfell yet? Is he cracking his stockwhip in the fields of heaven, or has his poetry taken him to the bands of Orion, with William Blake?
He made notes on the back of his programme, and moved to the ballroom, presenting himself with a bow to the General before leading Sophy on to the floor to the tune of Look for the Silver Lining.
“I thought you weren’t going to ask me to dance with you,” she said, as they serpentined past and through black and red coats, cavalry heads with oiled hair parted in the middle and brushed back, trim moustaches, tall winged collars and starched bow-ties and the unroving eyes of gentlemen. Their partners wore long white gloves to their elbows, frocks of black and ivory, silver and gold lamé amidst the occasional paler hues of younger women’s dresses. Here and there in the eddy moved a dowager like an old sea-trout which had survived many spawning seasons and now out of custom had arrived with a new run of more eager, agile fish: ruined faces proud under piled white hair adorned with diamond tiaras lancing sudden rays of blue and green and red—the pure diamond shock of the beauty of light, concentrated fire of earth’s creation, precursor of the poetic soul of man.
“You’re unusually silent for you, old man.”
“I’m taking it all in, Sophy. It’s wonderful!”
“Is it your first hunt ball?”
He nodded, thinking this was the immemorial display of life, and was moved to tears.
“What’s the matter, child?”
“I think I’ve got flu’ coming on, Sophy.”
“The dancing will help you to sweat it out. But don’t drink too much wine, will you, child?”
My brain arises with your wheat, my eyes stare with your flower, you have shown me eternity, Father Aloysius. Dear Jasper Kingsman, did you dance here with your lady? Willie, where are you—I know what you feel, cousin—‘the song should never be silent, the dance never still, the laugh should sound like water which runs for ever’. The spirit of this house reveals the dance of life behind the visual scene, the hope of beauty in the dream of life. Yet I know that the world of peace is also the world of war, all life and death is for the sharpening of the spirit—the pressures of stupendous molten layers of stone, upheaved, riven, roaring in vast conturbed tortures of flame produce the diamond, that poem to the truth of light——
“There’s old Creepy, our host, dancing with my little Annabelle,” she whispered. “Come on, child, wake up!”
“Oh, I am so sorry——”
“You’ve had too much to drink, haven’t you?”
“Perish the thought!” he replied, thinking of Julian.
They passed the hero dancing with Annabelle, her eyes shining, and when they had gone by she said, “He’s game, isn’t he?”
“I love him, Sophy.”
“He was supposed to be on his death-bed last week, but when they sent for a specialist from London he sat up and said, “What the hell are you doing here, Sawbones?”
Sophy laughed, flushing slightly at the direct use of this strong language, since she had been a well-brought-up young lady in the politer suburbs of Sheffield.
“I
t’s wonderful, Sophy, how he keeps his weight down to ten-st’n four, year after year. Shouldn’t be surprised if he was diving into the Blackwater at Goldhanger Creek this morning. He told me, when I visited him here three years ago, that he dived from forty feet, and through the ice!”
“Now really, Phillip, you are too old for that sort of thing—you let yourself down—by—well—fibbing, you know!”
“Everyone fibs, don’t they? Roger at dinner, for example—did he and Queenie really lose their way to a dance, and end up at the hall of St. Sabinus, Wakenham?”
Sophy flushed deeply to her neck.
“Well, I expect they meant only to rag you, but it was rather naughty of them. How is your mother?” She repeated what she had said in the summer, “She’s a very sweet person, isn’t she? You take after her, I think, if only you would allow yourself to be yourself.”
“I allow myself to be myself?” But not wanting to challenge her he resumed his mask of innocence. “Really, you know, I did come here, about two and a half years ago. I called on Sir Claude for a message for modern youth, on his seventy-third birthday.”
She laughed. “Really, what will you be saying next!”
“We had a bit of a sparring match, and he gave me a glass of milk,” he went on.
“You have too much imagination, my dear.”
“That’s what Bloom, my editor, told me when he sacked me.”
“Oh, I see! You were a reporter then? Why didn’t you tell me, instead of leading me on?”
To tease her further he said, “Do you think I ought to go and renew the acquaintance, after this dance?”
“I think that perhaps it would be better if you didn’t, old man. He’s probably seen hundreds of reporters, and can’t possibly remember them all.”
She changed the subject. “How many dances are there on your programme?”
The Innocent Moon Page 38