“May I introduce you to William Frolich?”
Against the newel post at the bottom of the stairs stood a short man with a round face scarred by a razor slash down his right cheek, listening, half indifferent, to what was being said, but listening without discourtesy or egotism. Phillip recognised Birkin’s ex-director of propaganda. Was this the man who, having rejected Birkin as the greatest patriot in Britain, the destined Leader to bring to full glory of service the Empire, now spoke contemptuously of Birkin as ‘the bleeder’. What had happened? Phillip sensed in him a calm, easy force, a simplicity of nature, a singleness of mind. Hurst introduced him.
“Is Birkin the weakest man in Britain?” he asked, avoiding the razor scar.
“In no sense of the word is Birkin a weak man,” replied the other, in a quiet, slightly nasal voice. “But he is not Britain’s man of destiny, as the Führer is Europe’s man of destiny.”
“How can a man of destiny be known before he has ‘achieved what was once only imagined’?”
“First, he knows himself to be that man. After agonised meditation, his life becomes clear. When others encounter him, they find themselves becoming clear. Those who are truly clear become his disciples, and endure to the death.”
The scarred man hung by his elbow to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and slowly swung round upon it as he smiled a little, as though to himself. A line of A. E. Housman came, without relevancy, into Phillip’s head—He wears the turning globe.
The white-headed man who had been chairman at the meeting returned up the stairs. Seeing him close, Phillip saw that his umber eyes had a hurt look in them, as though he had passed through much mental confusion.
“He used to be a dipsomaniac,” said Hurst, half contemptuously. “Birkin sent him to Germany to be cured. So he never forgave Birkin.”
“He lost his fanaticism, perhaps? I suppose all eccentric ideas arise from a psychological basis, or condition.” And how often do we use scapegoats by which to escape from our own inner chaos. Hitler and the Jews; himself and Lucy.
Now he must return for the corn harvest, a half-and-half man: a failure, as once his father said of himself. Poor father. Not one of his children ever thought of him as Daddy.
Poor Daddy.
*
Billy came home for the holidays from his school under Cran-borne Chase, whither the sale of the Old Manor had helped to put him. He was eager to help with the harvest. On his first afternoon he went with Matt, who with a scythe cut round the field, ‘opening of it up for the binder’—and helped to gather up the stalks into sheaves. Next morning he helped to put on the steel wheels of the tractor, and to fit the extension to the towing plate. The binder was drawn out of the barn by hand, lest the iron spuds of the tractor dig into and scrape the asphalt floor. It was the same old binder that had been used by the previous farmer. Phillip had bought it for £8 at the auction. Now it had been reconditioned, and he hoped it would change some of its habits, which were, literally, eccentric.
The binder being fastened to the towing plate, the slow procession went up to the Steep wheat. The steward drove the tractor, while Phillip’s son sat on the high iron seat of the old horse-binder, stick in hand to bang the sheet-iron chain-cover should the thing become temperamental. The last of the old discoloured 1914 paint on the sheet-iron cover had long ago been thwacked off; for that binder in previous harvests had been liable to do the oddest things. Having cut a certain amount of corn, it would suddenly refuse to bind the stalks into sheaves, but throw them out loose instead. After a rest, and apparent adjustment by pokes of Luke’s Shut-knife or Screw-hammer (the steward’s two infallible tools), the binder would, on restarting and as though in repentance, drop off a series of sheaves tied together like sausages. BANG! THUMP! WALLOP! on the sheet-iron cover of the main driving chain. Another stop for adjustment. Onwards once more, a hundred yards or so of perfect tying, then BANG! again. This time the string was in a tangle: the sheaves looked as though a metallic spider had been at work. At each stoppage the steward with patience spoke to the machine, uttering soft and patient words of encouragement—a sort of incantation—“Yar’ll see, we shan’t be in no muddle.” After this, for a period anyway, the reaper-and-binder behaved perfectly.
*
“I wonder what price we’ll get for our barley this year, Luke.”
“You won’t lose like last season,” replied Luke. “Not if the war come.”
“Last season the price fell a hundred per cent, Luke, because of that cheap foreign barley flooding the market, Luke.”
“You told me it was done to stop Hitler getting it.”
“It was bought in the City of London, and led to the virtual closing of the corn exchanges in Poland, Roumania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. All this caused a crisis in Berlin, since it upset the barter plans of a nation possessing only two million pounds gold reserve. And as you know, Luke, many farmers in this district went bust, and the banks foreclosing on mortgages couldn’t get rid of the farms at any price.”
“Come a war, you’ll get a good price for your barley,” said Luke.
“So you see, it’s the same problem this year for Hitler, almost a problem of starvation, and then civil war. So he may have to go East.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Luke. “But if war come, you’ll be all right.”
“Luke, we must cultivate the stubbles as soon as possible before the rains come. Cultivation will cut the thistles underground.”
Luke looked unhappy. “No one else about here does that,” he demurred. “It’s a waste o’ money in my opinion. If ’twas mine, I’d keep the money in my pocket.”
“But stubble cultivation is a usual practice elsewhere. The cultivator tines penetrate into, and cut through, the top three inches of soil, and all the thistle roots. Then you cross the work again, leaving behind a loose tilth which dries out in the sun and kills the exposed thistle roots. You saw it on the Steep. When the rain falls, all the weed-seeds in the soil chit, the field becomes green with charlock, dock, fat-hen, and crab-grass. Then you plough. Thus you turn the growing weeds under and rot them. They help to put humus into the soil, they are destroyed.”
“If ’twas mine I wouldn’t do that,” Luke repeated. He rolled a fag. “I never seen it done,” he said, lighting the ragged fringe of British Oak shag.
“Because the ‘art and mystery’ of arable farming roundabout here is decadent.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Luke said. “But the moles on the meadow do want trapping, and Horatio Bugg pays fourpence a skin, unless they’re damaged by fighting. Father can catch them, if you buy the traps.”
*
Interval for tea. All the wheat was cut (by permission of Messrs. Albion Binder, Shut-Knife, Screw-Hammer & Co.). After tea they were going to set up the heavy sheaves.
“Blast,” said Matt, admiringly, “these sheaves are corny. Yar’ll git twelve coombe an acre, yar’ll see I’m right.”
Matt went down to milk the cow for the house, feed his calves, and visit the sheep on the meadows with the bullocks. Then he would return and give them a hand. As he went to the sharp descent by the walnut tree at the edge of the wood he passed Phillip. “Come a war, guv’nor, and barleys will be making——”
“There mustn’t be a war, Matt.”
Matt looked at Phillip with his dark, Brythonic eyes.
“Yar’ll see, guv’nor, barleys will be making three pun a coombe next y’ar. They did in the last war, ah, did’n’m tho’?”
He turned and walked away, like an offended prophet, for Phillip had repeated, “There mustn’t be a war, Matt.”
They carted for the first time by the New Cut. The lorry, driven by Brother Laurence (who had come for the harvest) came down with sheaves thrown into its body, the sides up.
On the way up again it passed the tractor with green trailer, driven by Billy. Meanwhile a tumbril, with lades, was being loaded; the second tumbril waiting. Thus men in the stackyard and
in the field were kept going all the time. They didn’t like the idea, since they were on wages, it was not a ‘taken’ harvest for a fixed sum. This wasn’t practicable, since amateurs were involved.
When the three fields had been carried—a small corn harvest that year—when the last sheaf was pitched on top of the last load, Matt threw his cap into the air. That was on 28th August, 1939. Phillip never saw such an old rite happen again. He thought that perhaps it would never happen again anywhere in Europe.
Chapter 19
PRELUDE TO A WAR
Phillip backed the Silver Eagle from its bay in the hovel, filled up with petrol from the underground tank in the tractor shed, and with bag packed, set off for London with Brother Laurence.
Before leaving he posted two letters: one to Sir Hereward Birkin; the second to Lucy, enclosing his Last Will and Testament.
The day was fine, with much holiday traffic on the roads, most of it little black saloon cars, so that the superior speed of the sports-car was of little advantage until he got to the long road leading through the Brecklands to Heathmarket and the south.
Even when Brother Laurence was not reading his office, he never spoke unless Phillip spoke first: which was seldom.
The wind on his face, the exhilaration of moving at seventy miles an hour through familiar rows of twisted pines and sometimes tall poplars lining the road, the sense of personal freedom—leaving the farm behind, corn safe in stack—made Phillip optimistic, and he felt there could not be war, despite the power to decide having been given, virtually, to the Polish Government, so that any local brawl at a frontier inn followed by shooting might be the start of it. The real cause of the guarantee to Poland, he thought, was entirely unknown to the British public. What newspaper would print an account of the cosmopolitan financial interests in the Polish mines, whose workers were paid about fourteen shillings a week? Polish coal was bought, and sold in Britain at a price far below that of British coal; hence the years of dereliction in South Wales. Money was paramount; the Welshmen might rot so long as British rentiers could draw a good rate of interest on their Polish investments.
Back to farming ‘interests’. The great Metropolitan Assurance Company—which twenty years before had owned his farm, then part of the estate on a foreclosed mortgage from the noble family which had possessed it for centuries—now had nine million pounds invested in Polish utilities—electric light, trams, in Warsaw. Few realised what the Money System was; the minds of ordinary people were entirely occupied with their own affairs. No one set of people or class was entirely to blame for the deteriorated world condition, certainly not the Jews—they had merely taken advantage of it until it was, for some of their racial purists, the return of the Golden Calf. Everyone must be allowed to see all these factors plain, if the new world of so many diversified hopes was to be made real and actual. Had not Hitler himself declared, in a speech, that of two opposing sides in a quarrel, both sides could be right?
If only Hitler could be persuaded to extend that theme, with the understanding that he had shown in private, according to Piers Tofield, in the Kaiserhof hotel in Berlin, so that each opposing section in the European division might be able to say, That is our case put for us. But Hitler had done that again and again, towards Britain: and every gesture had been countered.
What a luciferic phenomenon was that man. His self-will: a gem-hard flame of oxyacetylene cutting through steel underwater. His gaze, his double-handclasp on greeting, the instant appreciation of himself in that hotel at Nürnberg: as though he had been given oxygen, so that his mind had felt clear and direct: master of himself, without strain, without aspiration.
And yet, behind all the self-built will, was—fear?
Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can hope for nothing but chaos …
That came from the better, truer side of the man behind the phenomenon of the clenched will-power, that amalgam of so many agonised contemplations upon a nation when it was in disintegration and dying. Behind the tensioned spring there was great sensibility, a dream of art and craftsmanship to replace mere counterfeit for greater profit. That was the side which, hearing that Chamberlain had offered to fly to see him a year before, had instantly offered to fly to England to save an older man possible air-sickness and exhaustion. Magnanimity, hope, generosity floated in that sensibility: a sensibility that easily became writhen when confronted by—professional chicanery.
What was the truth? People who knew said that Hitler had changed since 1935, more so since 1938. Was he, the ragged-voiced man, inextricably confronted by the implacable opposition of Money, being forced on to march … through fear? Money’s economic blockage—‘the strangulation’—had been on some time. Germany must export or die; and Germany SHALL NOT DIE, the blue-green flame had screamed at the last Rally. Seven million out-of-works had been put back to work on armaments: the vacant middle of Europe had been filled: the jigs were changed, the factories turned over to consumer goods, to … whither could they be exported? No one would, or dare, trade with such a system. Barter—or Batter.
Batter of guns, shatter of flying muscles …
How could that dilemma be resolved? Hitler, please do not march. Do not deny your true self. God, why am I not a ‘Spectre’ West, V.C., D.S.O., M.C. and bar, one eye gone, one hand off, and nine wound stripes? I would have prestige, I could hang myself up as a scarecrow, a scarewar.
I must think. If I could see Hitler, as the common soldier of nineteen-fourteen who fought the common soldier of his Linz battalion at Ypres, might I not be able to give him, the German common soldier, that amity he so desired from England—to beg him to halt his troops, and so save the two white giants of Europe, as Birkin has said, from bleeding to death, while Oriental Bolshevism waits on, to bring Asia to the chalk cliffs of Normandy?
It was said that Hitler now had only those about him who were afraid of hurting his feelings—afraid of precipitating one of those appalling moments of frustration and fear which came upon himself at times, as they came upon all sensitive men. Without reassurance, how could a man believe in his inspiration, that evanescent vision, indefinitely?
Hitler had said he believed in miracles; he had indeed achieved their equivalent. Would he then dismiss the offer of the common soldier’s mite?
*
And yet—would he immediately be swept aside as a nonentity if he managed to get to the Templehof airfield? Hitler had made many gestures; and every one had been snubbed. The only Englishman of the first magnitude who had treated him as an equal and been treated as an equal had been Lloyd George. But then Lloyd George had been assailed on all sides for writing, in the News Chronicle, several thousand words of the highest praise and appreciation of Hitler. That had just about put paid to the Liberal Party. Lloyd George had retracted; but he had known the truth. Lloyd George, an opportunist—a bit of a twister, but still a great man. He said one thing, he did another.
Hitler said one thing, and did another, it was knowledgeably said. Was he the only human being who did so? To how many men would that apply if they looked into their own souls with steady eyes? They would have to blink in the light of the inner truth. It was so much easier to blame the other fellow, to find a scapegoat, than to admit one’s own weakness.
And yet, if minds were out of tune, only disharmony could result. Once again the words of gentle, innocent, unknowing Lucy passed through Phillip’s mind. She had told him, laughingly, of what Ernest had said to her on his return to Dorset. If I lived to be a hundred years old, I would never see eye to eye with Phillip. And as he thought of that final judgment of himself and his ways by one whom he had only tried to help, a sense of frustration came over him, and with the need to hold himself against the thoughts that made him mutter to himself, as he felt strength being drawn from him.
“Just a little slower, d’you mind, Phillip?”
“Of course, mon père.”
He drove steadily at fifty miles an hour, and lifted his goggles to feel air rushing past his
eyes as they went between the grassy gallops before Heathmarket. By the Belvoir Arms they stopped and looked about the placid sunlit scene. Father Laurence left Phillip alone: he knew what the other man’s thoughts were.
Here Phillip had been stationed as a junior subaltern in nineteen-fifteen. He tried to recall the details of the outbreak of that faraway war. In London there was much excitement and cheering. There was, in the man in the street, an unspoken but implied feeling of the Royal Navy’s complete superiority over the Germans. Was there also a sense of impending tragedy? He could not recall any doubts, other than those in himself.
Was it the same war-psychosis in Europe now as in August nineteen-fourteen? Those cheering masses in London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin—the masses which, like himself, had no glimmering or comprehension of the other fellow’s point of view—were no more. Piers Tofield, who knew Germany well and who spoke the language fluently, had written that it was there, among the German storm-troopers: as well as a blazing determination to resist Hitler among the young Poles of the Corridor. Poles would always march to rescue Poles, Germans to succour Germans. And atrocity stories—mob-rousers—had already begun on both sides.
He was glad that Brother Laurence was with him, as they went into an inn with a gilt ham hanging over its green door. Inside were several York hams and barrels of ale. He sat down with a plate of sandwiches, and a pint of Burton, and tried to recall how the town looked when for a month or two he had been stationed there before going out to the battle of Loos. Twenty-four years ago, almost to the day! Strings of horses being exercised by thin small lads of all ages; Royal Naval Air Service men with Rolls-Royce tenders fitted with pom-pom gun or searchlight, dashing about the countryside at night supposedly following Zeppelins, and sometimes stopping to fire. The R.N.A.S. mess-room was in the Belvoir Arms. Beyond the open door one could hear a Decca trench-gramophone playing They’d Never Believe Me from the Gaiety musical comedy Tonight’s the Night. ‘Baldersby of Baldersby Towers, Baldersby, Berkshire’ the senior subaltern, over whose head in the bar he had emptied a jug of water after Baldersby had poured a whisky-and-soda over his own, and then squirted a syphon at him.
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