The Kindly Ones, Page 3

‘Them Redcaps ain’t loved all that.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’

  ‘Not likely.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Run a bloke in soon as look at him.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They’ll find somethink.’

  ‘What happens to him?’

  ‘Does a spell of clink.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Put behind bars.’

  ‘But they let him out sometime?’

  ‘Twenty-eight days, might be, if he’s lucky.’

  ‘In prison?’

  ‘Some blokes want to get even when they comes out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Waits behind a hedge on a dark night.’

  ‘And then ‘

  ‘Takes the Redcap unawares like. Makes an ambush like. Give him a hiding.’

  I accepted this picture of relaxed discipline in the spirit offered by Bracey, that is to say, without expression of praise or blame. Clearly he had described one of those aspects of army life kept, generally speaking, in the background, a world of violent action from which Stonehurst seemed for ever excluded.

  Nor was our separation from the army only geographical. Military contacts were further lessened by my mother’s distaste – her morbid horror, almost – of officers’ wives who were ‘regimental’ – ladies who speculated on the Battalion’s chances of winning the Cup, or discussed with too exact knowledge the domestic crises in the life of Mrs Colour-Sergeant Jones. My mother did not, in fact, enjoy any form of ‘going out’, military or civilian. Before marriage, she had been keen enough on parties and balls, but, my father having little or no taste for such amusements, she forgot about them herself, then developed greater dislike than his own. Even in those distant days my parents had begun to live a life entirely enclosed by their own domestic interests. There was a certain amount of routine ‘calling’, of course; subalterns came to tennis-parties; children to nursery-tea.

  Bracey’s invitation to the football match was therefore welcome, not so much because I was greatly interested in football but more on account of the closer contact the jaunt offered with army life. Permission was asked for the projected excursion. It was accorded by authority. Bracey and I set off together in a dog-cart, Bracey wearing blue walking-out dress, with slight screws of wax at each end of his moustache, a small vanity affected by him on important occasions. I had hoped he would be armed with a bayonet, but was disappointed. It seemed just worthwhile asking if he had merely forgotten it.

  ‘Only sergeants carries sidearms, walking out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Regulation.’

  ‘Don’t you ever?’

  ‘On parade.’

  ‘Never else?’

  ‘Reckon we will when the Germans comes.’

  The humorous possibilities of a German invasion I had often heard adumbrated. Sometimes my father – in spite of my mother’s extreme dislike of the subject, even in jest—would refer to this ludicrous, if at the same time rather sinister – certainly grossly insulting – incursion as something inevitable in the future, like a visit to the dentist or ultimately going to school.

  ‘You’ll carry a bayonet always if the Germans come?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘You’ll need it.’

  ‘Bayonet’s a man’s best friend in time of war,’ said Bracey.

  ‘And a rifle?’

  ‘And a rifle,’ Bracey conceded. ‘Rifle and bayonet’s a man’s best friend when he goes to battle.’

  I thought a lot about that remark afterwards. Clearly its implications raised important moral issues, if not, indeed, conflicting judgments. I used to ponder, for example, what appeared to be its basic scepticism, so different from the supreme confidence in the claims of heroic companionship put forward in all the adventure stories one read. (Thirty years later, Sunny Farebrother – in contrast with Bracey – told me that, even though he cared little for most books, he sometimes re-read For Name and Fame; or Through Khyber Passes, simply because Henty’s narrative recalled to him so vividly the comradeship he had himself always enjoyed under arms.) Bracey shared none of the uplifting sentiments of the adventure stories. That was plain. Even within my own then strictly limited experience, I could see, unwillingly, that there might be something to be said for Bracey’s point of view. All the same, I knew Bracey had himself seen no active service. His opinion on such subjects must be purely theoretical. In short, the door was not irretrievably closed on the romantic approach. I felt glad of that. During the rest of our journey to the Barracks, however, Bracey did not enlarge further upon the theme of weapons versus friendship.

  We had a brief conversation at the gate with the Orderly Corporal, stabled the pony, set off across the parade-ground. The asphalt square was deserted except for three figures pacing its far side, moving briskly and close together, as if attempting to keep warm in the sharp weather of early spring. This trio marched up and down continually, always turning about at the same point in their beat. The two outside soldiers wore equipment; the central file was beltless, his right hand done up in a white bandage.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Prisoner and escort.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Exercising a bloke under arrest.’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Chopped off his trigger finger.’

  ‘By accident?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘How, then?’

  ‘With a bill.’

  ‘On purpose?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Saw his name in Orders on the draft for India.’

  ‘Why didn’t he like that?’

  ‘Thought the climate wouldn’t suit him, I reckon.’

  ‘But he won’t have any finger.’

  ‘Won’t have to go to India neither.’

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘Not particular.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Nothing those young blokes won’t do.’

  Once again Bracey expressed no judgment on the subject of this violent action, but I was aware on this occasion of a sense of disapproval stronger than any he had allowed to take shape in relation to assaulting Military Policemen. Here, certainly, was another story to make one ponder. I saw that the private soldier under arrest must have felt a very active dislike for the thought of army life in the East to have taken so extreme a step to avoid service there: a contrast with the builder of Stonehurst, deliberately reminding himself by the contents and architecture of his house of former Indian days. Like Bracey’s picture of ambushed Redcaps, the three khaki figures, sharply advancing and retiring across the far side of the square, demonstrated a seamy, menacing side of army life, one which perhaps explained to some extent the reprobation in which Edith and Billson held soldiers as husbands. These haphazard – indeed, decidedly disreputable – aspects of the military career by no means entirely repelled me; on the contrary, they provided an additional touch of uneasy excitement. At the same time I saw that such episodes must have encouraged Bracey to form his own strong views as to the ultimate unreliability of human nature, his reliance on bayonets rather than comrades. In fact his unspoken attitude towards this painful, infinitely disagreeable, occurrence fitted perfectly with that philosophy. What use, Bracey seemed by implication to argue, would this bandaged soldier be as a companion in arms, if he preferred the loss of a forefinger to the completion of his military engagements when their circumstances threatened to be uncongenial to himself? That was Bracey’s manner of looking at things, his inner world, perhaps to some extent the cause of his ‘funny days’. A bugle, shrill, yet desperately sad, sounded far away down the lines.

  ‘What is he blowing?’

  ‘Defaulters.’

  We passed through hutted cantonments towards the football field.

  ‘Albert cut his finger the other day,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of blood.’

  ‘Lot of
fuss too,’ said Bracey.

  That was true. Albert’s world of feeling was a very different one from Bracey’s. A nervous man, he disliked violence, blood, suffragettes, anything of that kind. He was always for keeping the peace in the kitchen, even when his own scathing comments had started the trouble.

  ‘I should not wish to cross the Captain in any of his appetites,’ he had once remarked to my mother, when discussing with her what the savoury was to be on the menu for dinner that night.

  Accordingly, Albert had been dreadfully alarmed when my father, on a day taken from duty to follow the local hounds, a rare occurrence (heaven knows what fox-hunting must have been like in that neighbourhood), having cut himself shaving that morning, managed in the course of breakfast, the wound reopening, to get blood all over his white breeches. Certainly the to-do made during the next half-hour justified perturbation on a cosmic scale. For my father all tragedies were major tragedies, this being especially his conviction if he were himself in any way concerned. On this occasion, he was beside himself. Bracey, on the other hand, showed calmness in the face of the appalling dooms fate seemed to have decreed on the bungalow and all its inhabitants. While my mother, distressed as ever by the absolutely unredeemed state of misery and rage that misfortune always provoked in my father’s spirit, attempted to prepare infinitesimal morsels of cotton-wool to stem the equally small, no less obstinate, flux of blood, Bracey found another pair of riding-breeches, assembled the equipment for extracting my father from his boots, fitted the new breeches, slid him into his boots again. Finally, all this in a quite remarkably short space of time for the completion of so formidable, so complicated, so ultimately thankless a series of operations, Bracey gave my father a leg into the saddle. The worst was over; too much time had not been lost. Later, when horse and rider had disappeared from sight on the way to the meet, the nervous strain he had been through caused Bracey to remain standing at attention, on and off, for several minutes together before he retired to the kitchen. I think the day turned out, in any case, no great success: rain fell; hounds streamed in full cry through a tangle of wire; my father was thrown, retaining his eyeglass in his eye, but hurting his back and ruining his hat for ever. In short, evil influences – possibly the demons of Stonehurst or even the Furies themselves – seemed malignantly at work. However, that was no fault of Bracey’s.

  ‘Why did you think it wrong of Billson to give the little boy a slice of cake?’ I asked.

  We were still looking at the match, which, to tell the truth, did not entirely hold my attention, since I have never had any taste for watching games.

  ‘Not hers to give,’ said Bracey, very sternly.

  I can see now, looking back, that the question was hopelessly, criminally, lacking in tact on my own part. I knew perfectly well that Bracey and Albert did not get on well together, that they differed never more absolutely than on this particular issue. I had often, as I have said, heard my parents speak of the delicacy of the Albert-Bracey mutual relationship. There was really no excuse for asking something so stupid, a question to which, in any case, I had frequently heard the answer from other sources. All the same, the incident to which my inquiry referred had for some reason caught my imagination. In fact everything to do with ‘Dr Trelawney’s place’, as it was called locally, always gave me an excited, uneasy feeling, almost comparable to that brought into play by the story of the bandaged soldier. Sometimes, when out for a walk with Edith or my mother, we would pass Dr Trelawney’s house, a pebble-dashed, gabled, red-tiled residence, a mile or two away, somewhere beyond the roofs on the horizon faced by the Stonehurst gate.

  Dr Trelawney conducted a centre for his own peculiar religious, philosophical – some said magical – tenets, a cult of which he was high priest, if not actually messiah. This establishment was one of those fairly common strongholds of unsorted ideas that played such a part in the decade ended by the war. Simple-lifers, Utopian socialists, spiritualists, occultists, theosophists, quietists, pacifists, futurists, cubists, zealots of all sorts in their approach to life and art, later to be relentlessly classified into their respective religious, political, aesthetic or psychological categories, were then thought of by the unenlightened as scarcely distinguishable one from another: a collection of visionaries who hoped to build a New Heaven and a New Earth through the agency of their particular crackpot activities, sinister or comic, according to the way you looked at such things. Dr Trelawney was a case in point. In the judgment of his neighbours there remained an unbridgeable margin of doubt as to whether he was a holy man – at least a very simple and virtuous one – whose unconventional behaviour was to be tolerated, even applauded, or a charlatan – perhaps a dangerous rogue – to be discouraged by all right-thinking people.

  When out with his disciples, running through the heather in a short white robe or tunic, his long silky beard and equally long hair caught by the breeze, Dr Trelawney had an uncomfortably biblical air. His speed was always well maintained for a man approaching middle years. The disciples were of both sexes, most of them young. They, too, wore their hair long, and were dressed in ‘artistic’ clothes of rough material in pastel shades. They would trot breathlessly by, Dr Trelawney leading with long, loping strides, apparently making for nowhere in particular. I used to play with the idea that something awful had happened to me – my parents had died suddenly, for example – and ill chance forced me to become a member of Dr Trelawney’s juvenile community. Casual mention of his name in conversation would even cause me an uneasy thrill. Once, we saw Dr Trelawney and his flock roaming through the scrub at the same moment as the Military Policeman on his patrol was riding back from the opposite direction. The sun was setting. This meeting and merging of two elements – two ways of life – made a striking contrast in physical appearance, moral ideas and visual tone-values.

  My mother had once dropped in to the post office and general shop of a neighbouring village to buy stamps (perhaps the Health Insurance stamps commemorated in Albert’s picture of Mr Lloyd George) and found Dr Trelawney already at the counter. The shop, kept by a deaf old woman, sold groceries, sweets, papers, almost everything, in fact, only a small corner behind a kind of iron hutch being devoted to postal business. Dr Trelawney was negotiating the registration of a parcel, a package no doubt too valuable – too sacred perhaps – to be entrusted to the hand of a neophyte. My mother had to wait while this laborious matter was contrived.

  ‘He looked as if he was wearing his nightshirt,’ she said afterwards, ‘and a very short one at that.’

  When the complicated process of registration had at last been completed, Dr Trelawney made a slight pass with his right hand, as if to convey benediction on the old woman who had served him.

  ‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True,’ he said in a low, but clear and resonant voice.

  Then he left the shop, making a great clatter – my mother said – with his sandals. We heard later that these words were his invariable greeting, first and last, to all with whom he came in contact.

  ‘Horrid fellow,’ said my mother. ‘He gave me a creepy feeling. I am sure Mr Deacon would know him. To tell the truth, when we used to visit Mr Deacon in Brighton, he used to give me just the same creepy feeling too.’

  In saying this, my mother was certainly expressing her true sentiments, although perhaps not all of them. As I have said before, she had herself rather a taste for the occult (she loved delving into the obscurities of biblical history and prophecy), so that, however much Dr Trelawney may have repelled her, there can be no doubt that she also felt some curiosity, even if concealed, about his goings-on. She was right in supposing Mr Deacon would know about him. When I myself ran across Mr Deacon in later life and questioned him on the subject, he at once admitted that he had known Dr Trelawney slightly at some early point in their careers.

  ‘Not a person with whom I ever wanted my name to be too closely associated,’ said Mr Deacon, giving one of his deep, sceptical laughs. ‘Too much abracadabra abou
t Trelawney. He started with interests of a genuinely scientific and humane kind – full of idealism, you know – then gradually involved himself with all sorts of mystical nonsense, transcendental magic, goodness knows what rubbish. Made quite a good thing out of it, I believe. Contributions from the Faithful, women especially. Human beings are sad dupes, I fear. The priesthood would have a thin time of it were that not so. Now, I don’t expect Trelawney has read a line of economics – probably never heard of Marx. “The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True,” forsooth. Then you were expected to answer: “The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.” I was too free a spirit for Trelawney in spite of his denial of the World. Still, some of his early views on diet were on the right track.’

  More than that, Mr Deacon would not say. He had given himself to many enthusiasms at one time or another, too many, he sometimes owned. By the time I met him, when Pacifism and Communism occupied most of the time he could spare from his antique shop, he was inclined to deride his earlier, now cast-down altars. All the same, he never wholly lost interest in Vegetarianism and Hygienic Clothing, even after he had come to look upon such causes as largely frivolous adjuncts to World Revolution.

  As it happened, the Trelawney teaching on diet brought the Trelawney establishment more particularly to Stonehurst notice. These nutritional views played a part in local legend, simply because the younger disciples, several of whom were mere children, would from time to time call at the door of some house in the neighbourhood and ask for a glass of milk or a snack. Probably the fare at Dr Trelawney’s, carefully thought out, was also unsubstantial, especially when it came to long, energetic rambles over the countryside, which stimulated hunger. In my own fantasies of being forced to become one of their number, semi-starvation played a macabre part. On one such occasion – it was a first visit by one of Dr Trelawney’s flock to Stonehurst – Billson, answering the door, had, on request, dispensed a slice of rather stale seed-cake. She had done this unwillingly, only after much discussion with Albert. It was a moment when Bracey was having one of his ‘funny days’, therefore, by definition, unable to take part in any consultation regarding this benefaction. When the ‘funny day’ was over, however, and Bracey was, as it were, officially notified of the incident, he expressed the gravest disapproval. The cake, Bracey said, should never have been given. Billson asserted that she had Albert’s support in making the donation. Always inclined to hysteria, she was thoroughly upset by Bracey’s strictures, no doubt all the more severe on account of his own warm feelings for her. Albert, at first lukewarm on the subject, was driven into more energetic support of Billson by Bracey’s now opening the attack on two fronts. In the end, the slice of seed-cake became a matter of bitter controversy in the kitchen, Bracey upholding the view that the dispensation of all charity should be referred to my parents; Billson sometimes defending, sometimes excusing her action; Albert of the opinion that the cake did not fall within the sphere of charity, because Dr Trelawney, whatever his eccentricities, was a neighbour, to whom, with his household, such small acts of hospitality were appropriate.