“I don’t think so. I mustn’t tell about it. That’s why I came to see you.”
“About not talking about not going to France?” said Angela in something of her old teasing way.
Cedric began to talk about the house; he hoped Angela would keep on to it, even if anything happened to him; he thought he saw some glimmerings of taste in the boy; he might grow to appreciate it later. Angela was inattentive and answered absently.
“I’m afraid I’m tiring you.”
“Well, I’m not feeling terribly well to-day. Did you want to see me about anything special?”
“No, I don’t think so. Just to say good-bye.”
“Daddy,” came a voice from the next room. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Oh dear, I wish I could do something about it. I feel there’s something I ought to do. It’s quite an occasion really, isn’t it? I’m not being beastly, Cedric, I really mean it. I think it’s sweet of you to come. I only wish I felt up to doing something about it.”
“Daddy, come on. We want to get to Bassett-Lowkes before lunch.”
“Take care of yourself,” said Angela.
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Why will you all ask questions?”
And that had been the end of the visit. At Bassett-Lowkes, Nigel had chosen a model of a Blenheim bomber. “The fellows will be jealous,” he said.
After luncheon they went to see “The Lion has Wings,” and then it was time to put Nigel into the train back to school. “It’s been absolutely ripping, Daddy,” he said.
“Has it really?”
“The rippingest two days I ever spent.”
So after these ripping days Cedric sat in the half-dark, with the pool of light falling on the unread book on his knees, returning to duty.
Basil went to the Café Royal to keep his watch on “the woman Green.” He found her sitting among her cronies and was greeted with tepid affection.
“So you’re in the army now,” she said.
“No, the great uniformed bureaucracy. How are all the Reds?”
“Very well thank you, watching your imperialists making a mess of your war.”
“Been to many communist meetings lately?”
“Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“You sound like a police spy.”
“That’s the very last impression I want to make,” and, changing the subject hastily, added “Seen Ambrose lately?”
“He’s over there now, the lousy fascist.”
Basil looked where she indicated and saw Ambrose at a table by the rail of the opposing gallery, sitting with a little, middle-aged man of nondescript appearance.
“Did you say ‘fascist’?”
“Didn’t you know? He’s gone to the Ministry of Information and he’s bringing out a fascist paper next month.”
“This is very interesting,” said Basil. “Tell me some more.”
Ambrose sat, upright and poised, with one hand on the stem of his glass and one resting stylishly on the balustrade. There was no particular feature of his clothes which could be mentioned as conspicuous; he wore a dark, smooth suit that fitted perhaps a little closely at waist and wrists, a shirt of plain, cream-colored silk; a dark, white spotted bow tie; his sleek black hair was not unduly long (he went to the same barber as Alastair and Peter); his pale Semitic face gave no hint of special care and yet it always embarrassed Mr. Bentley somewhat to be seen with him in public. Sitting there gesticulating very slightly as he talked, wagging his head very slightly, raising his voice occasionally in a suddenly stressed uncommon epithet or in a fragment of slang absurdly embedded in his precise and literary diction, giggling between words now and then as something which he had intended to say changed shape and became unexpectedly comic in the telling—Ambrose like this caused time to slip back to an earlier age than his own youth or Mr. Bentley’s, when amid a more splendid décor of red plush and gilt caryatides fin-de-siècle young worshippers crowded to the tables of Oscar and Aubrey.
Mr. Bentley smoothed his sparse grey hairs and fidgeted with his tie and looked about anxiously for fear he was observed.
The Café Royal, perhaps because of its distant associations with Oscar and Aubrey, was one of the places where Ambrose preened himself, spread his feathers and felt free to take wing. He had left his persecution mania downstairs with his hat and umbrella. He defied the universe.
“The decline of England, my dear Geoffrey,” he said, “dates from the day we abandoned coal fuel. No, I’m not talking about distressed areas, but about distressed souls, my dear. We used to live in a fog, the splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood. The golden aura of the Golden Age. Think of it, Geoffrey, there are children now coming to manhood who never saw a London fog. We designed a city which was meant to be seen in a fog. We had a foggy habit of life and a rich, obscure, choking literature. The great catch in the throat of English lyric poetry is just fog, my dear, on the vocal chords. And out of the fog we could rule the world; we were a Voice, like the Voice of Sinai smiling through the clouds. Primitive peoples always choose a God who speaks from a cloud. Then my dear Geoffrey,” said Ambrose, wagging an accusing finger and fixing Mr. Bentley with a black accusing eye, as though the poor publisher were personally responsible for the whole thing, “Then, some busybody invents electricity or oil fuel or whatever it is they use nowadays. The fog lifts, the world sees us as we are, and worse still we see ourselves as we are. It was a carnival ball, my dear, which when the guests unmasked at midnight, was found to be composed entirely of impostors. Such a rumpus, my dear.”
Ambrose drained his glass with a swagger, surveyed the café haughtily and saw Basil, who was making his way towards them.
“We are talking of fogs,” said Mr. Bentley.
“They’re eaten hollow with communism,” said Basil, introducing himself in the part of agent provocateur. “You can’t stop a rot that’s been going on twenty years by imprisoning a handful of deputies. Half the thinking men in France have begun looking to Germany as their real ally.”
“Please Basil, don’t start politics. Anyway, we were talking of Fogs, not Frogs.”
“Oh, Fogs.” Basil attempted to tell of a foggy adventure of his own, sailing a yawl round Bear Island, but Ambrose was elated to-night and in no mood for these loose leaves of Conrad drifting in the high wind of his talk. “We must return to the Present,” he said prophetically.
“Oh dear,” said Mr. Bentley. “Why?”
“Everyone is either looking back or forward. Those with reverence and good taste, like you my dear Geoffrey, look back to an Augustan age; those with generous hearts and healthy lives and the taste of the devil, like Poppet Green over there, look forward to a Marxian Jerusalem. We must accept the Present.”
“You would say, wouldn’t you,” said Basil, persevering, “that Hitler was a figure of the present?”
“I regard him as a page for Punch,” said Ambrose. “To the Chinese scholar the military hero was the lowest of human types, the subject for ribaldry. We must return to Chinese scholarship.”
“It’s a terribly difficult language, I believe,” said Mr. Bentley.
“I knew a Chink in Valparaiso…” began Basil; but Ambrose was now in full gallop.
“European scholarship has never lost its monastic character,” he said. “Chinese scholarship deals with taste and wisdom, not with the memorizing of facts. In China the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. European culture has become conventional; we must make it hermetic.”
“I knew a hermit in the Ogaden desert once…”
“Invasions swept over China; the Empire split up into warring kingdoms. The scholars lived their frugal and idyllic lives undisturbed, occasionally making exquisite private jokes which they wrote on leaves and floated downstream.”
“
I read a lot of Chinese poetry once,” said Mr. Bentley, “in the translation, of course. I became fascinated by it. I would read of a sage who, as you say, lived frugally and idyllically. He had a cottage and a garden and a view. Each flower had its proper mood and phase of the climate; he would smell the jasmine after recovering from the toothache and the lotus when drinking tea with a monk. There was a little clearing where the full moon cast no shadow, where his concubine would sit and sing to him when he got drunk. Every aspect of this little garden corresponded to some personal mood of the most tender and refined sort. It was quite intoxicating to read.”
“It is.”
“This sage had no tame dog, but he had a cat and a mother. Every morning he greeted his mother on his knees and every evening, in winter, he put charcoal under her mattress and himself drew the bed-curtains. It sounded the most exquisite existence.”
“It was.”
“And then,” said Mr. Bentley, “I found a copy of the Daily Mirror in a railway carriage and I read an article there by Godfrey Winn about his cottage and his flowers and his moods, and for the life of me, Ambrose, I couldn’t see the difference between that young gentleman and Yuan Ts’etsung.”
It was cruel of Mr. Bentley to say this, but it may be argued for him that he had listened to Ambrose for three hours and now that Basil had joined their table he wanted to go home to bed.
The interruption deflated Ambrose and allowed Basil to say, “These scholars of yours, Ambrose—they didn’t care if their empire was invaded?”
“Not a hoot, my dear, not a tinker’s hoot.”
“And you’re starting a paper to encourage this sort of scholarship.”
Basil sat back and ordered a drink, as an advocate in a film will relax, saying in triumph, “Mr. District Attorney, your witness.”
There were four hours of darkness to go when Cedric arrived at the port of embarkation. There was a glimmer of light in some of the offices along the quayside, but the quay itself and the ship were in complete darkness; the top-hamper was just discernible as a darker mass against the dark sky. An E.S.O. told Cedric to leave his gear on the quay. The advanced working party were handling that. He left his valise and carried his suitcase up the gangway; at the head an invisible figure directed him to the first-class quarters forward. He found his C.O. in the saloon.
“Hullo, Lyne. You’re back already. Lucky. Billy Allgood broke his collar-bone on leave and isn’t coming with us. You’d better take charge of the embarkation. There’s a hell of a lot to do. Some blasted Highlanders have come to the wrong ship and are all over our troop decks. Had any dinner?”
“I got some oysters in London before starting.”
“Very wise. I tried to get something kept hot. Told them we should all be coming on board hungry, but they’re still working peace-time routine here. This is all I could raise.”
He pointed to a large, silvery tray where, disposed on a napkin, lay a dozen lozenges of toast covered with sardines, slivers of cheese and little glazed pieces of tongue. This was the tray that was always brought to the first-class saloon at ten o’clock at night.
“Come back when you’ve found your cabin.”
Cedric found his cabin, perfectly in order, complete with three towels of different sizes and the photograph of a mustachioed man putting on his life-jacket in the correct manner. He left his suitcase and returned to the C.O.
“Our men will be coming on board in an hour and a half. I don’t know what the devil these Highlanders are doing. Find out and clear them off.”
“Very good, Colonel.”
Cedric plunged down again into the darkness and found the E.S.O. They studied the embarkation orders with the aid of a dimmed torch. There was no doubt about it; the Highlanders were in the wrong ship. This was the Duchess of Cumberland; they should be in the Duchess of Clarence. “But the Clarence isn’t here,” said the E.S.O. “I daresay they were told to go to the Cumberland by someone.”
“By whom?”
“Not by me, old man,” said the E.S.O.
Cedric went on board and looked for the C.O. of the Highlanders and found him at length in his cabin asleep in his battledress.
“These are my orders,” said the Highland Colonel, taking a sheaf of typewritten sheets from the pocket on his thigh. They were already tattered and smeared by constant reference. “Duchess of Cumberland. Embark 2300 hrs. with full 1098 stores. That’s plain enough.”
“But our men come on board in an hour.”
“Can’t help you, I’m afraid. These are my orders.”
He was not going to discuss the matter with a subaltern. Cedric fetched his C.O. Colonel to Colonel they talked the thing out and decided to clear the after troop decks. Cedric was sent to wake the Highland duty officer. He found the duty sergeant. Together they went aft to the troop decks.
There were dim lights along the ceiling—electric bulbs recently daubed with blue paint, not yet scratched clear by the troops. Equipment and kit-bags lay about the deck in heaps; there were Bren gun boxes and ammunition and the huge coffin-shaped chests of the anti-tank rifles.
“Oughtn’t that to be stored in the armory?” asked Cedric.
“Not unless you want to get it pinched.”
Amid the heaps of stores half a battalion lay huddled in blankets. Very few of them, on this first night, had slung hammocks. These lay, with the other gear, adding to the piles.
“We’ll never get them moved to-night.”
“We’ve got to try,” said Cedric.
Very slowly the inert mass was got into movement. They began collecting their own gear and swearing monotonously. Working parties began man-handling the stores. They had to go up the ladders on to the main deck, forward through the darkness and down the forward hatches.
Presently a voice from the top of the ladder said, “Is Lyne down there?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been told to bring my company to this troop deck.”
“They’ll have to wait.”
“They’re coming on board now.”
“Well, for God’s sake stop them.”
“But isn’t this D deck?”
“Yes.”
“Then this is where we are to come to. Who the hell are all these men?”
Cedric went up the ladder and to the head of the gangway. A stream of heavily-laden men of his regiment were toiling up. “Go back,” ordered Cedric.
“Who the hell’s that?” asked a voice from the darkness.
“Lyne. Take your men back to the quay. They can’t come on board yet.”
“Oh, but they’ve got to. D’you realize half of them’ve had nothing to eat since midday?”
“There’s nothing to eat here till breakfast.”
“Oh, but, I say, what rot. The R.T.O. at Euston said he’d telegraph through and have a hot meal ready on arrival. Where’s the Colonel?”
The line of soldiers on the gangway turned about and began a slow descent. When the last of them was on the quay, invisible in the darkness, their officer came on board.
“You seem to have made a pretty good muck-up,” he said.
The deck was full of the other regiment carrying stores.
“There’s a man there smoking,” shouted a ship’s officer from above. “Put that cigarette out.”
Matches began to spurt up on the quay. “Put those cigarettes out, down there.”
“—y well travelling all the—ing day. No—ing supper.—ed about on the—ing quay. Now a—won’t let me have a—ing smoke. I’m—ing—ed with being—ed about by these—ers.”
A dark figure passed Cedric muttering desperately, “Nominal rolls in triplicate. Nominal rolls in triplicate. Why the devil can’t they tell us beforehand they want nominal rolls in triplicate?”
Another dark figure whom Cedric recognized as the E.S.O.
“I say, the men are supposed to strip down their equipment and pack it in green sea bags before embarking.”
“Oh,” said Cedric.
&n
bsp; “They don’t seem to have done it.”
“Oh.”
“It upsets all the storage arrangements if they don’t.”
“Oh.”
An orderly came up. “Mr. Lyne, sir, will you go and see the C.O.”
Cedric went.
“Look here, Lyne, aren’t those infernal Scotsmen out of our troop decks yet? I ordered that deck to be clear two hours ago. I thought you were looking after that.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel. They’re getting a move on now.”
“I should bloody well hope so. And look here, half our men have had nothing to eat all day. Go up to the purser and see what you can rout out for them. And find out on the bridge exactly what the sailing orders are. When the troops come on board see that everyone knows where everything is. We don’t want anything lost. We may be in action before the end of the week. I hear these Highlanders lost a lot of kit on the way up. We don’t want them making up deficiencies at our expense.”
“Very good, sir.”
As he went out on deck the ghostly figure brushed past him in the darkness muttering in tones that seemed to echo from another and even worse world, “Nominal rolls in triplicate. Nominal rolls in triplicate.”
At seven o’clock the Colonel said, “For God’s sake someone take over from Lyne. He seems to have lain down on the job.”
Cedric went to his cabin; he was unspeakably tired; all the events and emotions of the last forty-eight hours were lost in the single longing for sleep; he took off his belt and his shoes and lay on his bunk. Within a quarter of a minute he was unconscious; within five minutes he was woken by the steward placing a tray by his side; it contained tea, an apple, a thin slice of brown bread and butter. That was how the day always began on this ship, whether she was cruising to the midnight sun or West Indies. An hour later another steward passed by striking a musical gong with a little hammer. That was the second stage of the day in this ship. He passed, tinkling prettily, through the first-class quarters, threading his path delicately between valises and kit-bags. Unshaven, ill-tempered officers who had not been asleep all night, scowled at him as he passed. Nine months ago the ship had been in the Mediterranean and a hundred cultured spinsters had welcomed his music. It was all one to him.