“Ha ha!” he cried. “Now we shan’t need a Navy any more!” Waving a stick at his nephew, Hugh Turney stopped by the iron cannon embedded in the asphalt of the footpath. This greeting threw him off his balance, and to prevent himself from falling he clutched the mouth of the cannon, which, being filled with mortar, gave a grip for clawed fingers. Having maintained himself upright, Hugh stared jauntily at the boys, while giving the hongroised ends of his moustache a twist between finger and thumb. Then putting on a droll face, he stared gravely at Freddy Payne, whose wide-awake was now upon his ears, and turning to Phillip, said,
“Who is this figure of martial grandeur and indomitable aspect? How old is this modern Napoleon? Is it a case of, ‘Lost in London; found under the hat’?”
“He’s only a tenderfoot, Uncle Hugh. He’s nine, you see. We’re just about to march off.”
“Only nine! Ah, to be ‘only nine’ again! Why, you must have been born during the war, young feller. Don’t tell me your name—I can guess it!”
Whereupon Hugh Turney, resting his sticks against the churchyard railings, raised his straw-yard with one hand, and clutching the mortar in the mouth of the cannon with the other, sang in an imitation music-hall voice,
‘The baby’s name is Kitchener Carrington
Methuen Kerkewich White
Cronje Kruger Powell Majuba
Gatacre Warren Colenso Boojer
Capetown Mqfeking French
Ladysmith Thorneycroft Bobs
Fighting Mac—Union Jack
Lyddite Pretoria—Blobbs!’
Am I right?”
“No, it’s Freddy Payne,” replied Phillip, wishing Uncle would go away.
“Can he sound a tucket on his trumpet, enough to rouse the dead?”
“It’s a bugle, not a trumpet, Uncle. Anyway, he’s only learning still.”
“Well, let’s hear him sound the charge! We need men like Freddy Payne to wake up this district of soot and puritanism, which would, by God, be the same thing as waking the dead! Come on, Napoleon, let’s see you blow out those front teeth!”
“I told you, he’s only learning, Uncle Hugh!”
“Come on, let me have a go, then! Let an old trumpeter of the C.I.V.s show what he can do! The old war-horse smells powder!”
Phillip shook his nose at Freddy. Uncle Hugh had a bad illness, as Father had warned him many times. It was highly catching.
“We must go now, Uncle, we’re late already. Goodbye. Fall in men. You go the right, Desmond, you’re tallest. Freddy, will you lend me your bugle, please? Then I’ll give you a sausage at the camp-fire. I promise.”
The instrument was handed over, and slung on Phillip’s shoulder.
“What about your old pal Peter the Painter?” said Hugh Turney.
“He’s formed his own patrol.”
“Ah! The old, old story! Tadpoles become frogs, grubs become beetles, bloodhounds become greyhounds, our old shirts become fine quality of laid paper; while Napoleon”—he pointed at Freddy Payne—“is reincarnated! Phillip, old war-horse, take heart! Recruits are like women, there’s always one to be picked up on every street corner.”
Before Uncle Hugh could say any more awful things, Phillip gave the order to trail poles, left-turn, and quick march. Raising the half-size pewter bugle, he blew what he hoped would be notes as resounding as those of the full-size copper bugles of the Boys Brigade when they marched to church on Sundays.
“H’m, a your notes are of the lost, stolen, and strayed variety, I see,” said Uncle Hugh, as the three small boys marched off. “Eyes right!” he called out, as he drew his frame approximately upright, and raised a hand to the salute.
*
As the Bloodhound patrol disappeared round the corner into what was known among certain individuals as Love Lane, the bell in the cemetery chapel beyond the high brick wall began to toll. Bravura left the stilted figure balancing itself by the cannon. Hugh Turney’s face became haggard.
“Christ!” he hissed through teeth loose in their puffy gums. “Christ, I can’t bear it any more! I can’t! O, Christ! I can’t! Et tu, Brute!”
He knew that Phillip was ashamed of him.
Breathing heavily, he clung to the iron cannon, overcome with loneliness, with the anguish of ruined hopes. He shut his eyes against the horror of the forty brick-walled acres, filled with serried lines of white marble tombstones, amidst ever-new mounds of yellow clay covered with wilted flowers of gaudy hues; and among them, perpetually, women in black, heavily veiled, weeping, with red eyes and noses; while the bell tolled through almost every period of the day.
“I was once young!” cried Hugh, lifting his eyes to the sky. “The years like great black oxen tread the world, and I am broken underneath their feet.”
He sighed deeply. Then he heard a cuckoo calling. Thank God, in that marmoreal desolation! With a shrug of thin shoulders he turned to retrieve his sticks. “I hope to God that when my turn comes a wisp, or a covey, or a veritable gaggle of cuckoos will shout over my grave as they lower what is left of me into the pit, and the clay thuds on m’coffin! ‘Criste did not spare to visite poore men, in the colde greve’,” he quoted. Dear Jesus, He understood. He was the friend of all, however rotten the tenant in the house of flesh.
Hugh Turney consoled himself with various other thoughts, among them that many a better man than he had gone the same way before him: Beethoven, Chatterton, Nietzsche, Keats. With a feeling of being in some sense companioned, he set his straw-yard, with the colours of Trinity round the brim, more securely on his head, and hobbled away up the Hill.
A victim of locomotor ataxia, he could move forward only by throwing out his feet before him, so that to a beholder it looked as though his boots were loosely attached to the bones of his legs, like weights. As he progressed, he fancied himself as an old soldier, veteran of the financiers’ swindle of the South African War; at least he was alive, and not dead from enteric or Boer bullet!
“Sidney, old friend, why didn’t I get that blasted enteric, and accompany you into death’s dateless night?”
Resting half way up the slope, he recited to an imaginary audience,
With a wench of wanton beauties
I came unto this ailing!
Her breast was strewn, like the path of the moon
With a cloud of gliding veiling.
In her snow-beds to couch me,
I had so white a yearning,
Her pale breast ’gan, like a naked man
To set my wits a-turning.
Save may you been, from Venus queen,
And the dead that die unrightly!
Two urchins, after passing him, turned to jeer. “Yah! Laugh at ’im! Scatty! Scatty! Laugh at ’im!”
“How I agree with you, gentlemen,” said Hugh Turney, gravely, to the shouts behind his back.
He sneered as he recalled the fat, corset’d, malodorous female, with painted face and lampblack’d lashes, whom he had, confounded fool, with two bottles of claret inside him, allowed to steer him out of the Empire Promenade on that September night nearly fifteen years before. Why had he been such an Elsinorian idiot as to go against his own grain, just because he had set mind and heart on an unattainable refuge—ideal—idol—Theodora Maddison. All men killed the thing they loved, as Oscar Wilde had written in Reading gaol—knowing full well that the thing a man loved was his own soul! That had to be killed, usually in childhood by a tyrant father, before a man could become, by chance circumstance, what in the eyes of the world was known as a murderer. O, if he could but have peace and quiet, if only he could have known in youth what he knew now, what novels would he not have written! He would make George Moore appear the poseur he was! Now all was lost.
“I am dying, Egypt, dying——” he groaned to the air. “I have immortal longings for thee!”
The bell from the cemetery chapel tolled as he stood, a man partly paralysed from the pelvis downwards, upon the gravel path leading to the Hill dominated by the old red brick buildi
ng of the West Kent Grammar School. As though desirous of getting away from the sound of the tolling bell, Hugh Turney threw his legs out before him, one after the other, while into his mind came a desperate hope, in which he did not really believe, but which he must adhere to: that if he exercised his body hard, he might sweat-out some of the poisonous toxin from his blood, and at least arrest the paralysis of his nerves. After all, the doctors had declared that spirella spirocheta was no longer active in his blood, and that the mercury rubbed into his skin, during the secondary stage of his illness, had probably gone from his system. Human will might yet triumph over the flesh! Up, up, get into a good lather, left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg! Keep it going Hughie, my boy, get into a lather! Sweat the vice out of the vehicle of worms and epitaphs!
From below, as he rested again, came a thin and puny note—the Bloodhounds’ bugle. Phillip had seen Cranmer.
Chapter 10
BLOODHOUNDS ON THE TRAIL
WHAT a relief it was to see dear old Cranmer, a grin on his “physog”, waiting for them! Cranmer wore the cricketing hat Mother had found, and starched, especially for him. Cranmer’s shorts were rather big for him, obviously made out of a pair of old man’s trousers cut off below the knees. Phillip blew another salute on the bugle: half the notes were of the “lost, stolen, or strayed variety”, as Hugh Turney had remarked.
Cranmer replied with his four-finger-in-mouth whistle, a veritable screecher.
Hardly had the patrol, or what was left of it, halted when an elderly man with a face of salt looked out of an upper window of one of the small houses of the lane, and cried out irritably,
“Be quiet, you boys! Can’t you see what is coming?”
Phillip saw it was Mr. “Lower” Low, father of Lennie Low, known to him only because he sometimes came to the house to fetch Mrs. Low, who sewed for Mother and Grannie.
The reason of Mr. “Lower” Low’s warning was an approaching funeral procession. Phillip stared at the black high-stepping horses with top-knots like sweep’s brooms on their heads, at the top-hatted mutes standing behind the crystal and nickel-plated sides of the coach, at the polished coffin, covered with white lilies, within. When all had gone through the iron gates, the patrol fell in again, and marched down the road to Randiswell. They hurried, for it was already late. At the High Street they decided to go by tram. It was a ha’penny fare each to Fordesmill.
When they arrived there Phillip, to show off his prowess and pride as patrol leader, decided to jump off before the tram stopped at the terminus. He was standing, when he jumped, with his face towards the rear of the tram, just as it was rattling over the points to take position for the return journey. He landed, not as expected, upon his feet, but on his back, with feet in air. His broomstick bounced into the gutter, upsetting an urchin who was carrying a ha’penny pail of horse-dung hopefully for sale to some local gardener. Phillip lay in the remains of the scraping, an agonised pain at the end of his spine. Then, remembering the bugle, he twisted over, to see with relief that it was not damaged. Slowly he got to his feet, and was picking up the “pole” when he saw Father on the Sunbeam crossing the road towards him.
“Why didn’t you wait until the tram stopped, you silly boy? Why, you might have been run over, if a cart or motorcar had been following! This isn’t the horse-tram any longer, you know. Well, it will be a useful lesson for the future. Do you feel all right?”
“Yes—thank—you, Father,” Phillip managed to say. His back hurt, but his concern was lest Father should forbid him to go scouting any more. And supposing Father saw Cranmer? He dared not look to see if Cranmer was waiting with Freddy and Desmond by the tram-stop, in case he should give a clue to his thoughts.
Cranmer, having recognised the bearded figure on the bicycle, had skedaddled, to hide among the Saturday afternoon fruit, china, and lace-curtain stalls on the other side of the Green. From behind a barrow piled with mussels and cockles he watched anxiously, wanting to go to his great friend’s aid, while realising that Phillip’s Ol’man might give Phil a ’iding later on for ’aving ’im in the Blood’arnds. Waiting there, Cranmer forgot the kind of hat he was wearing: a hat which served the opposite purpose of that for which it had been imagined.
Richard recognised the face under the hat before the head bobbed from view. He said nothing, then or later; but reflected, as he cycled away from the litter of paper, banana skins, and cabbage leaves around the stalls, that if his son’s so-called friend had had any decent feeling in him, he would surely have gone to that friend in trouble, instead of skulking until any possible trouble had blown over.
By the time he got to the bottom of Brumley Hill, a pleasant sweat had relieved Richard of this and similar grievous thoughts; and after cycling to the top of that tree-shaded slope, he was free to enter a private world of pleasure in the lanes winding through the orchards of north-west Kent. There had been no rain for a week and more; the white dust was thick and loose, glinting with particles of flint; various birds, including partridges and turtle doves, dusted themselves in front of him as he pedalled along to the haven of the Salt Box, for an ideal tea.
About half a dozen miles London-wards from the North Downs, Phillip and his shrunken patrol sat round their camp fire in Whitefoot Lane woods. They had seen no sign of Peter Wallace; and after a period of anxious deliberation, had made their fire, cooked their sausages and sliced potatoes, and made tea of the compressed pellets. Phillip imagined, as he gazed proudly at his pennant on the pole stuck in the ground, that they were a band of hunters, in the depths of Africa. Now was the time to teach his men the Zulu’s chant, from Scouting for Boys.
Leader (in a shrill kind of whine):
“Een gonyama.”
Chorus (in astonishment):
“Gonyama?”
(with emphasis, and rising energy and enthusiasm):
“Invooboo!”
“Ya bo, ya bo. Invooboo!”
“Now when Cranmer whines ‘Een gonyama’, you, Freddy”—Phillip chose Freddy to make him feel important—“will translate, and say, ‘He is a Lion’. Then you all say together, in chorus, in sort of surprise, ‘Only a lion?’ Then you give a sort of triumphant shout, all together, ‘Invooboo!” Then you, Freddy, translate this again, into English, only louder, ‘No, he is greater than that, he is a Hippopotamus’. Hippo-pot-amus, Freddy. You can say just ‘Hippo’ if you like, it’s a bit of a tongue-twister, I admit. It means ‘River Horse’. Anyhow, you say it Freddy. Then everyone cries ‘Ya Bo!’ and then Freddy, you say the English ‘Yes sir, yes sir!’, and after that ‘Invooboo!’ once more. Then you all shout, ‘He is a Hippopotamus!’ Is that quite clear to everyone?”
Nobody replied.
“All right, you begin, Corporal Cranmer.”
Cranmer gave a faint grin, and remained silent. Suddenly he slapped his knee. “Blime, these mosskeeters ’v’ got beaks like bleedun parrits!”
“No swearing! Don’t muck about, men. Come on, ‘Een gonyama’. Then Freddy follows with ‘He is a Lion’. Look, look! Coo, what a sod! Let’s watch it!”
A mosquito stood on the back of his hand, gripping with its thin legs, slightly bent.
“Christmas, look at its blinkin’ proboscis boring for my blood! Keep your physog away, don’t breath on it, Freddy! It may fly away. Aough! It’s got through! Coo, look how it guzzles! Don’t snuffle so much, Freddy, keep your snout out of it. I want to see how much a mosquito can drink. Look, it’s filling out behind, like a little red airship.”
“Blime, it’s a soddin’ Invooboo wiv’ wings on,” said Cranmer, admiringly.
The skin of the insect was visibly swelling.
“Just like a hippopotamus, isn’t it?” said Phillip. “I hope the bloody thing busts! Don’t you worry, I won’t let it get away! Just let’s see if it can fly when it’s full. Then let’s torture it!”
The body was now thrice its original size.
“It’s got the best part of a whole drop inside it. Look, it’s pulled out i
ts beastly snout! Here goes!” Phillip squashed it, then rubbed off the smear of blood on a leaf.
“I votes we move on, there’s more of the beastly things humming about, men. We must leave no sign of our fire, we don’t want Peter to know we’ve been here.”
The fire was stamped out. Mess tins were cleaned with roots of grass, and fixed to belts again.
“I votes we go down to Cutler’s Pond! Fall in, men!”
Phillip was thinking of the tasty broken biscuits which could be bought in the little wooden shop standing below the empty, broken, ivy-grown mill house where once, Father had told them, knives were ground, and scissors sharpened.
A wizened dame, small in keeping with her shop, which was scarcely more than nine feet square, sat behind the counter. She sold farthing’s worth of broken biscuits, sweets, and licorice root, besides whipping tops, marbles, and in season, red chinese crackers. There was ginger pop, too, but this cost a ha’penny a glass; and the tram-ride had seriously depleted funds earlier that afternoon. However, Phillip had a penny left; with this he bought four paper cones of broken biscuits for himself and his men, each holding a quarter of a pound.
“We ought to hurry home now, men. My father said if I was late, he’d forbid me coming out again. Napoleon, would you like to play the bugle, going back?”
Phillip was anxious about Freddy Payne leaving the patrol. He might easily decide to join the Greyhounds, then there would be no bugle.
“Fall in! Quick march! Play, Napoleon! It doesn’t matter if the notes squeak a bit. You’re much better’n I am, anyway.”
Thus flattered, Napoleon did his best.
After Fordesmill, the pewter bugle swung cold and unblown against its owner’s blue serge hip; there was hardly a puff left in Napoleon’s body. Blisters on the balls of his feet corresponded roughly to the blakeys under them. The new tenderfoot Desmond also marched desperately, with blistered heels, carrying the coat which now weighed so heavily upon his arm.
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