Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  At least Alex paid him the compliment of reflecting a moment, but he remained unrepentant. War does that to the best of us, Adam thought. Once you've seen men you respect dead and dying, you tend to judge everything in black and white, and if you didn't you wouldn't be much good at your job.

  Alex said, presently, "That's all very fine, Gov'nor, but surely to God what happened to Hugo would cause a fellow to think twice about getting up on his hind legs and giving aid and comfort to the men who shot his brother's sight away? That's what Giles is doing if I hear correctly. I confess I've publicly disowned him in the mess, and I'm damned if I'll shake his hand now, even for your sake and mother's. He and Hugo used to be thick, didn't they?"

  "Very," Adam said, "and they still are. And Hugo isn't bitter about what happened to him. If you can get him to talk about it, which I doubt, he'll probably express concern at making several Boer women widows before they got him down. Kitchener wants peace, doesn't he?"

  "We all do," Alex said, "and you don't have to preach to me about the cost of war. I've been through half-a-dozen. But a man's loyalty should rest with his tribe, shouldn't it?"

  "I'm not so sure about that. There have been reports here that some Boers are coming over to our side, and wishing to God Cronje and his commandos in hell for prolonging the agony."

  "Well, as to that, I think no more of them than I do of Giles," Alex said, stiffly. "I'll keep out of his way, that's all," and he went out quickly, his tall boots striking hard on the stone flags as though to emphasise his flat rejection of pro-Boers, Frocks, and Boers who were eager to compromise.

  Adam thought, gloomily: Now here's a how-de-do, to be sure… I hope he has enough horse sense to limit his prejudices to a scowl or two. We don't want a family shindig on a day like this… He looked out into the hall, caught one of Stella's boys hurrying past carrying a pyramid of muffins hot from the kitchen, and called, "Hi, there, lad! Find your Uncle Giles and tell him I want to see him in the sewing-room. Tell him it's urgent and he's to come whatever he's doing." The boy said, "Yes, sir!" and scuttled off while Adam, retreating into the little room again, lit one of his favourite Burmese cheroots and puffed at it gratefully until Giles came in, closing the door and saying: "You don't have to break it to me gently. Romayne was bothered about it the moment they showed up, and she's slipped away to pack. If Martindale can run us over to Bromley, we could get an evening train into town."

  He said, sullenly, "I won't have that! You're under my roof and your mother's."

  "Wouldn't it be better all round? I've got two choices. To tell Alex and Lydia what I felt about that war, or back down and apologise for myself. I couldn't do that, Father."

  "I'm not asking you to, son."

  "Then what?"

  "Let 'em both stew awhile. Bury 'em under a load of paper, in this case Christmas wrappings. I don't ask that for my sake but for your mother's."

  "Suppose Alex raises it with Hugo and Sybil?"

  "I've ordered him not to and he'll mind what I say. Meantime, steer clear of him, as he means to of you."

  "What a mess it all is," Giles said, dismally.

  "Nothing new about it, son. It always has been a mess one way and another. That's your problem if you ever get into Parliament. Find a way through it, treading on as few corns as possible."

  "Compromise? With people like that mob who tried to lynch Lloyd George a week ago?"

  "Not compromise, wait. Give 'em a chance to cool off. They will, if someone throws 'em another bone to gnaw. They'll soon be hurrahing L.G. and throwing their brickbats at Joe Chamberlain. Some people would call that proof of national instability, I suppose, but it never struck me as that. It's the way a democracy functions. The public take the soundings and you chaps trim your sails to the wind, the way the Frocks do in a free country. It oughtn't to warp your private convictions. Never did mine."

  Giles smiled. "You're a wise old bird," he said.

  "Not wise, son," Adam replied. "Wily. And I should be. I've had time enough to learn. I've always got my way in the end, and I promise you that you and the fire-eater L.G. won't have so long to wait for a swing around in public opinion. You'll sweep the board at the next election, then everyone will scramble to get on the winning side. You'll have to search for a man who owns up to ever having wanted to wring Kruger's neck."

  "You really believe that?"

  "I believe it. Seen it happen over and over again in the last fifty years. Go up and tell that gel of yours to leave her packing until tomorrow. You'll leave with the rest of 'em and keep the peace meantime."

  And so it might have been but for an unlucky chance the following day when Giles, carrying his grips out to the carriage that was to run Romayne and himself over to the station for the first leg of their journey home to Wales, passed under the horse's head at the entrance of the courtyard archway and came upon Alex at the precise moment he was riding one of the hacks into the forecourt for a canter across the Downs.

  There was no way they could avoid one another, short of a deliberate attempt on Alex's part to ride his brother down. He reined back, staring hard over Giles's head to the leafless trees of the avenue and looking so pompous that Giles had to smile. He said, on impulse, "Come, Alex, can't we even shake hands? None of us hold a thing against you chaps. We're opposed to the fools who sent you over there to protect city interests," and when Alex did not respond he shrugged and stood aside, giving Alex room to pass under the arch. He would have passed, no doubt, had not everybody's luck been out.

  At that moment Hugo's sergeant emerged leading Hugo's hack and Hugo himself came out of the tackroom carrying his crop and hard hat. Alex said, glancing at him, "How about Hugo's interests? Don't they count?"

  "Good God, of course they do! Do you imagine I get any satisfaction out of what happened to him in a rough and tumble for South African gold and diamonds? He lies as heavy on Chamberlain's conscience as the women and children dying in those damned camps you fellows have set up! Try and see it from the human angle!"

  "I'm not concerned with one angle or another," Alex said, slowly. "Only as the difference between one man, doing his duty as he saw it, and another trailing round the country preaching treason," and he gave his mount a sharp cut and cantered off across the forecourt.

  Hugo called, urgently, "Hold on, Giles…!" and Giles, roused now, tossed the grips in the carriage, and stalked round behind the vehicle to where Hugo was standing with an expression of pain on his broad, good-natured face. He said, in a low voice, "I couldn't help hearing that. I'd like you to know I don't see it that way, Chaser."

  The use of his forgotten nickname, Chaser, acquired after their schoolfellows had learned that he was the son of the Swann whose Western Wedge manager had cornered a circus lion on Exmoor, touched Giles. So sharply that it brought him close to tears, evoking as it did a halcyon period twenty years ago when he and Hugo had loped across the moor together, building calf muscles that were to earn Hugo so many trophies yet lead, ultimately, to the incident that had cost him his sight. He said, "Don't let it worry you. We're well enough used to that kind of abuse, Hugo."

  But Hugo muttered, "Take my hack and unsaddle him, Sergeant. I won't be going out on the rein after all."

  "Now, sah!" the sergeant protested. "M'lady won't care to hear you've dodged the column! What'll I tell her?"

  "Tell her I've gone for a walk instead. With Mr. Giles. Give me a hand, Giles," and Giles took his hand and led him into the forecourt.

  "Go up behind, on to the hill. It's a rare place for blowing the cobwebs away."

  They went slowly up the winding path, worn into the rocky outcrop behind the house, heading for the wooded plateau where old Colonel Swann had spent so much of his time painting indifferent water colours from the upended whaler on the summit. The old, makeshift shelter was still there, its timbers seamed and split by a thousand southwesterlies. They sat together, Giles looking over the winter landscape. Hugo said, at length, "You never heard it, did you? Not the real story?"<
br />
  "I heard how you got word from an ambushed column and tackled a Boer outpost singlehandedly. It was in the papers, the time they pinned the medal on you."

  "Ah, the medal."

  Hugo moistened his lips and sat very still, hands resting on his enormous thighs. "The Boers didn't traffic with medals, did they? If they did that kid would have earned one, I daresay."

  "What kid, Hugo?"

  "The kid I shot, just before I was hit. Last shot of the battle barring this," and he raised his hand to the bluish circular depression at his temple. "The last I'll ever fire. Thank God."

  "Tell me if you want to, Hugo."

  "Don't know how, really." He smiled. "You were the one who always did the telling, Chaser."

  That was true, of course. All through their time on Exmoor, Hugo had come to him with questions. Questions on every conceivable subject, and had been content to accept any answer Giles gave as the voice of the oracle. To Giles he still seemed pitifully young to carry such a cross, but his helplessness and unwonted stillness were beginning to work on him, as though, for the first time in his life, he could sit in one place long enough to think things out and form independent judgments.

  "I've come to believe it was tit-for-tat, Giles. My stopping that bullet, I mean, a second or so after I'd shot the kid. I didn't know he was a kid until I looked at him. We'd heard they were using kids that age but I hadn't believed it, not until then. He was about your age when you first went down to West Buckland. I had a quick look at him lying there. Just a second or two. Then it was curtains. Matter of fact, he was the last person I saw. You get to remembering that, you know. At least, I did, sitting about and night times." Then, very levelly, "Do you still believe in God, Giles?"

  "Some kind of God, Hugo. I'm never sure what kind."

  "Not one that looks out for folks, the way they tell you in the church?"

  "No, or not the way they tell you in church. And God is only a word. A useful word, but it can fool people, to my way of thinking."

  "How about your kind of God?"

  "Maybe it's a plan, a providence, with good and evil roughly balanced. Part of the plan is how we tip it, one way or the other and it's our choice. Otherwise there's no sense at all in any of it. But you don't have to go on blaming yourself about that youngster. He was trying to kill you from cover. How were you to know how old he was? The fault lies with the men who gave him a rifle, and sent him out to do a man's job. And even more with our people, who drove those chaps into a corner where they had to fight or hand over to a lot of city sharks. The fault certainly doesn't lie with you, so get that into your head, once and for all."

  "Ah, she said that. The only other person I ever told."

  "Sybil?"

  "Yes." Then, "She's a wonderful person, Giles."

  "I know. I've watched. You're glad about the baby, aren't you?"

  Hugo smiled and seemed, fleetingly, almost himself again. "You bet I am. That's a turn-up for the book, isn't it? Sybil's thirty-three."

  "Romayne was almost as old. I daresay you'll have a string now you've started."

  "Can't imagine. Me being a father, I mean. Don't think I was cut out for one."

  "Neither did I, but you'd be surprised when it happens."

  They sat in silence for a spell, Giles fighting an impulse to take his big hand and squeeze. It was a long time since he had been so close to tears. Finally Hugo said, "You remember that dream I told you about once?"

  "The one you kept having? That dream where you were lapping everyone else and there was a lot of cheering?"

  "You remember it that well?"

  "I remember it."

  "Funny thing. I never had it once I left school and that kind of thing began to happen all the time. Then I had it again, the first night I was back here, only it was different. I was sprinting across the veldt in those damned great boots, and they were like ton weights, dragging me back. I got there, though, and there was that Boer kid at the tape. Cheering and waving his hat like mad."

  Tears began to flow and nothing he could do would stop them. What did one say to that? What was there to say? And anyway, Giles could not trust himself to speak. Hugo said, after half a minute had elapsed, "Does that mean anything, d'you reckon?"

  "I… I'd say it did, Hugo."

  "What, exactly?"

  "That the kid understood, sympathised even."

  The heavy features relaxed. He said, sniffing the air, "Maybe. Glad I told you." Then, "I always liked it up here. Especially early on, when I was out training before breakfast. I'll get that chap to teach me the way up here on my own."

  "You do that, Hugo."

  He took his hand now and drew him up. Together they moved off down the twisting track to the forecourt and Adam, standing musing at the long window of the drawing-room, watched their approach. He thought, I'm damned sorry Alex isn't here to see that. Might loosen him up somewhat.

  Four

  Dreams at Tryst

  Who knew how many dreams still hibernated under the russet-coloured pantiles of the old house? How many and how varied, but they were there all right. They waited in odd corners. Distilled hopes, suppressed hatreds, thwarted and fulfilled loves, and secret fears often generations of islanders, all waiting for a chance, maybe, to slip out of the shadows and find a new post. For the house itself was the product of a dream, old Conyer's dream of dredging enough loot from the Lowland banks to build a home under the crag that had been his trysting place with the Cecil girl when he was a nobody.

  Adam had dreamed there often enough, and so had Henrietta, but Adam and Henrietta were rarely oppressed by dreams and when they awoke it was not often they recalled their substance. No more than an elusive expectation of the good luck or bad they could look for before the sun set again.

  All the children had dreamed here in their growing-up days, and sometimes Phoebe Fraser, nanny to nine, had been awakened by a cry and hurried in to them, soothing them in her broad Lowland brogue. Now Phoebe was past all that, even though she still regarded Edward and Margaret, the two youngest, as children. She was not qualified to interpret Hugo's dream, or hoist Helen out of the slough of the dreams she had had since returning to Tryst.

  Phoebe Fraser might, conceivably, have gone some way towards interpreting Hugo's dream, but Helen's would have shocked her half out of her spinsterish mind, and this was predictable. Phoebe knew much of boys but nothing of men, and her deep Calvinistic convictions had long since succeeded in repressing any stirrings of the flesh, stirrings she would have accepted as subtle overtures of Satan. In all the years she had worked there, nobody had ever seen her so much as flirt with a man, much less lie down in a ditch with one, as some of the maids had when it was high summer and they were out of sight and sound of the house.

  Helen Coles's dreams of public ravishment would have struck Phoebe as evidence that she had grossly neglected her duties in the process of Helen's upbringing, for a woman, even a married woman, had no business with dreams of that kind. They belonged, if anywhere, in the mind of a harlot. Certainly not in the subconscious of a widowed Christian missionary.

  And yet, in a perverse way, Helen welcomed them, for they replaced something more sinister. A recurrent dream she had dreamed often on the long voyage home and during her first weeks in Ireland, surrounded by Joanna's jolly family. In this dream, from which she awoke moaning and shuddering, she saw Rowley's head perched on that gate post, but there was a difference that made her flesh creep. It leered at her, in a way that was altogether uncharacteristic of Rowley, even when his head had been firmly attached to his shoulders. The dream persisted, with variations, for a long time, so that she grew to fear the prospect of sleep.

  But then, settled in the midst of the noisy Dublin family, her night fancies took a sharp new turn. Rowley, and Rowley's severed head, had no place in them. Instead they were dominated by the courteous, businesslike presence of Colonel Shiba, the Japanese military attache. He who had made such a gallant showing in the Fu area of the leg
ations during the siege. Yet Colonel Shiba's recurrent behaviour in Helen's dream was not gallant. Methodically, as though dismantling a barricade prior to a planned withdrawal, he stripped her naked and smilingly conducted her to his couch, a makeshift couch of sandbags sewn in patchwork. And there, with the same quiet deliberation, and in full view of the entire garrison, he ravished her, night after night, with a skill and despatch that Rowley had never once displayed, not even after they survived the awkward, experimental stage of the earliest days of the marriage.