England, Their England E-Book

A. G. Macdonell

• Herausgeber: idb
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 381

Beschreibung

Macdonell became famous with the publication of England, Their England. The book gained considerable critical and popular acclaim, and won the James Tait Black Award. It is regarded as one of the classics of English humour and is much-loved by readers for its evocation of England between the wars.

Leseprobe

* An idb Ebook * w England, Their England Macdonell, Archibald Gordon ISBN 9783963759970

CHAPTER I

The events which are described in this book had their real origin in a conversation which took place between two artillery subalterns on the Western Front in the beginning of October 1917.

But although this first short chapter has to be devoted to the circumstances and substance of that conversation in order that the rest may be more intelligible, and although the words of the conversation were spoken upon the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, no one need be afraid that this is a war book.

From Chapter II. to the end there will be no terrific descriptions of the effect of a chlorine-gas cloud upon a party of nuns in a bombarded nunnery, or pages and pages about the torturing remorse of the sensitive young subaltern who has broken his word to his father, the grey-haired old vicar, by spending a night with a mademoiselle from Armentières. There will be no streams of consciousness, chapters long, in the best style of Bloomsbury, describing minutely the sensations of a man who has been caught in a heavy-howitzer barrage while taking a nap in the local Mortuary. There are going to be no profound moralizings on the inscrutability of a Divine Omnipotence which creates the gillyflower and the saw-[Pg 2]bayonet, and Shakespeare and Von Mackensen (or, as in the translations, Unser Shakespeare and Ferdinand Foch), on the lines of the Ode to Baron von Bissing which borrowed, and rightly borrowed, Blake's famous question, "Did He who made the lamb make thee?"

And, finally, there are going to be no long passages in exquisite cadences and rhythms, shoved in just to show that I am just as good as Ruskin or any of them, about the quietness of life in billets in comparison with life during a trench-mortar bombardment, and about the blue spirals of smoke curling up from the tiny French hamlet nestling in the woods which have echoed and re-echoed the thunderous footsteps of the army of Charlemagne, which have waved their green leaves above Hugh Capet and Louis the Saint and Henry of Navarre (always a sure card), which have screened the rustic lovers and the wheeling hawks and the marching Emperors, and so on and so on and so on.

In a word, after this first chapter there will be, to borrow the name of an ardent society of left-wing pacifists, No More War.

The conversation between the artillery officers took place in one of those rectangular, reinforced-concrete, frog-like boxes with which the German military engineers sprinkled Flanders in 1915 and 1916 in order that their effete and pampered infantry, unlike the more virile troops of Britain, of Belgium, and of Portugal, and of one French corps, should not have to sleep in six inches of water under a quarter-inch sheet of corrugated iron.[Pg 3]

It was in 1917 that the British High Command got wind of the existence of these structures, or "pill-boxes," as our irrepressible combatant-soldiers had christened them when they first appeared. It is thought that the news reached G.H.Q. in its peaceful little backwater of Montreuil from an agent in Berne, who had it from an agent in Amsterdam, who had got it from a journalist friend in Rio de Janeiro. But some people believe it was the special illustrated supplement in the Chicago Tribune, giving pictures of twenty-seven different types of pill-box, that first put our Intelligence Service, admittedly the finest in the world, upon the track. But whichever it was, there is no doubt at all that by February 1917 British G.H.Q. had decided, in principle, that a good way of checking the alarming wastage of man-power through influenza, frost-bite, and trench-feet, with all their accompanying opportunities for malingering, would be to house the front-line troops in pill-boxes. There was some opposition, of course, from the tougher-fibred, harder-bitten school of fighter, who maintained, at Montreuil, that nothing sapped the morale of troops so quickly as temporary security from shell-fire. The only way one could steel the nerves, this school argued, was to expose oneself all the time to shell-fire, until one got so accustomed to it that one simply did not notice it at all. This weighty argument was only silenced in the end by the production of the influenza-statistics and, especially, the estimated malingering-statistics.

But the High Command, having decided in principle that pill-boxes were, on the whole, desirable,[Pg 4] was not so foolish as to make a present of them to the already over-mothered infantry. There is no maxim so true as the one about gift horses and their mouths. Small boys despise free seats at cinemas and unearned chocolates, and fighting soldiers are very like small boys. And the High Command at that moment was still smarting from a painful experience of the truth of this maxim. For, in a moment of warm-hearted, impulsive generosity, it had decreed that combatant officers might in certain circumstances be considered to be entitled to as much as half the amount of leave which every staff-officer always got, and the reception of this free gift had not been so full of enthusiastic gratitude as the High Command had expected, and had been justified in expecting.

The infantry were to have pill-boxes—good. But they were to get them for themselves. In this way a double purpose would be achieved. The pill-boxes would be appreciated, valued, and kept clean, and the infantry would get further practice in the art of offensive warfare. And, besides, Montreuil was a little uncertain how to set about making pill-boxes. And, besides, Montreuil had only just mastered the art of making deep dug-outs, invented by the Germans in late 1914, and was reluctant to dabble in new mysteries.

So during the month of August, in which it rained three-quarters of the time, and during September, in which it rained half the time, and October, when it rained all the time, the infantry were busily employed in getting hold of these pill-boxes, and, at the end of the three months, at the cost of a good many lives[Pg 5] and a good many shells, they had acquired several hundreds of them.

It was true that they smelt most vilely of stale cigars and that the entrances all faced the wrong way and that the mud was inclined to ooze into them when no one was looking. But, as the Fifth Army staff-officer said who was detailed to make a report upon their structure, composition, thickness, seating capacity, field of fire, siting, and shell-resistance, and who examined what he thought was one of them through a powerful telescope from the roof of the Château des Trois Tours, behind Brielen, "After all, you can't have everything." With which eternal verity upon his lips, the staff-officer handed the telescope to one orderly, dictated his report to another, stepped into his motor-car and departed on leave. But he was well rewarded for his hazardous toil, for in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia he was now able to add enthralling accounts of his experiences in the Front Line, almost, to his predictions about the trend of forthcoming campaigns and the plans of forthcoming battles, on which he had previously had to rely for the captivating of feminine hearts. And a few weeks later he received a well-merited bar to his D.S.O.

Upon the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, about two hundred yards east of the Steenbeek river (when I say "east" I mean on the wrong, or German side, and when I say "river" I mean a ditch about nine feet wide at its widest) and about two hundred yards west of the front line, there stood a pill-box so large,[Pg 6] and with walls so thick, that it served as the headquarters for two adjoining battalions, and as no battalion headquarters ever dreamt of stirring a yard without the company of an artillery subaltern, there were consequently two gunners in this particular box.

The reason for the indispensability of these young gentlemen—for they were seldom more than twenty or twenty-one years of age—was a curious one. It had been discovered long before, right away back in the almost pre-war days of the early days of the war, that by some mysterious freak of Providence no infantry soldier, of whatever rank or with however long a row of campaign medals, can distinguish between shells that are fired from in front of him and shells that are fired from behind him. Whenever, therefore, a heavy artillery barrage fell upon their trenches, the infantry, their natural optimism damped by interminable digging and carrying, always assumed as a matter of course that it was their own artillery firing short. Indeed there were times at the beginning of the war when it was difficult to convince them that the German artillery ever fired at all, and the fact that a British six-gun field battery of eighteen-pounder guns had a strict ration of thirty-six shells, all shrapnel, to last them for an entire week, was held to be no proof that it had not plastered our front line with a thousand six-inch high-explosive shells in two hours.

The result was that a young artillery gentleman had to be attached to each battalion headquarters in the Line, whose duty it was to point out the fundamental difference between east-bound and west-[Pg 7]bound projectiles and thus soothe the fighting-troops into a feeling of partial, at any rate, security.

The two battalions, of which the colonels, adjutants, signal officers, runners, batmen, and general hangers-on were housed in this long, gloomy, dank, cigar-smoky, above-ground tunnel during the second week of October 1917, were the seventeenth battalion of the Rutland Fusiliers and the twenty-fourth battalion of the Melton Mowbray Light Infantry. The artillery officers were Lieutenant Evan Davies, tenth East Flint Battery, Royal Artillery, Territorial Force, who was attached to the Rutlands, and Lieutenant Donald Cameron, thirteenth Sutherland Battery, R.A., T.F., attached to the Melton Mowbrays, each for a period of four days.

The East Flint artillery belonged to a Welsh Division, the Sutherland to a Scottish, but it was the usual practice to leave the gunners in the Line while their infantry was out at rest, thereby doubling the artillery strength of the Line, and sometimes, when divisions were plentiful, trebling and quadrupling it. It is true that this practice had its drawbacks, and a perspicacious civilian, a temporary major, who had by an error of drafting been placed in quite a high-up position in the Montreuil backwater, pointed out that it meant that the artillery never got a rest at all. The perspicacious major—in happier times a professor of Greek, a man of subtle intelligence, and great learning, and a capacity for working seventeen hours a day—was duly transferred to the command of a Chinese Labour battalion, and spent the rest of the War in building a wharf at a fishing village near Finisterre,[Pg 8] which was to be used as a base for the British Army in the event of one of Von Ludendorff's brisker drives capturing Le Havre. But though the major had gone, the dilemma remained. If the artillery strength in the Line was to be doubled, trebled, or quadrupled, the artillery personnel would get no rest. The ultimate solution was simple, as all ultimate solutions are, and consisted of the words, "Oh well, it can't be helped," and everyone was delighted, except, of course, the artillery personnel.

Mr. Davies and Mr. Cameron naturally gravitated towards each other in the corner of the pill-box furthest from the door—artillery officers always seemed to drift into the corner of the pill-box furthest from the door—and in a short time were deep in conversation. They discussed the usual topics, the general bloodiness of the war, the shocking hold-up in the leave-rotation since the Passchendaele offensive first began, the tragic sublimity of the Staff, and the foulness of the weather. They compared the number of consecutive days on which their respective batteries had received marmalade in their rations instead of jam—the East Flint battery apparently was leading by a hundred and eighteen days against ninety-six—returned to the general bloodiness of the war, and then settled down to discuss, in discreet whispers, their infantry hosts and, finally, the general characteristics of the nation from which both Rutland Fusiliers and Melton Mowbray Light Infantry were recruited.

"I've lived for five years in London," said Davies, a big, pleasant man whose five-and-thirty years were an exception to the general youthfulness of liaison[Pg 9] officers, with steel-rimmed glasses and a heavy black moustache, "and I must admit I find the English are extraordinarily difficult to understand."

"I was never in England before the War," replied Cameron, "so I've really only seen them as soldiers. I've been in London for a day or two when I was on leave, of course."

Donald Cameron was a boy of about twenty, slender and fair-haired with a small fair moustache and small hands. He was about five feet nine or ten, and even the changes and chances of war had not battered his natural shyness out of him. He spoke the pure, accurate English of Inverness-shire.

"What do you think of them as soldiers?" asked Davies.

"They're such an extraordinary mixture," replied Cameron. "The last time I was liaison to an English battalion was about a month ago. It was a battalion from Worcestershire or Gloucestershire or somewhere. The Colonel wore an eyeglass and sat in a deep dug-out all day reading the Tatler. He talked as if he was the Tatler, all about Lady Diana Manners and Dukes and Gladys Cooper. We were six days in the Line and he had the wind up all the time except once, and that time he walked up to a Bosche machine-gun emplacement with a walking-stick and fifty-eight Bosche came out and surrendered to him. What do you make of that? Do you suppose he was mad?"

"I don't know," replied Davies, puffing away at a huge black pipe. "We had an English subaltern once in our battery who used to run and extinguish fires in ammunition-dumps."[Pg 10]

Cameron dropped his cigarette. "He used to do what?"

"Used to put out fires in shell-dumps."

"But what ever for?"

"He said that shells cost five pounds each and it was everyone's duty to save Government money."

"Where is he buried?" asked Cameron.

"In that little cemetery at the back of Vlamertinghe."

"I know it."

Donald Cameron lit another cigarette and asked:

"Why do the English always laugh when Aberdeen is mentioned?"

"Heaven knows," replied Davies. "Why do they have a Welsh Prime Minister and a Scotch——"

"Not Scotch. Scots. Or Scottish."

"Sorry.—A Scottish Commander-in-Chief and a Scottish First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, and think it funny?"

"Lord knows."

"And here's another thing, Cameron. The English pride themselves on having always beaten the French except at Hastings."

"Yes."

"Then why is it that the French Army is so much more successful in this War than the English?"

"The French staff-work is supposed to be miles better."

"It must be, I suppose. Because the English soldier, the chap who actually does the fighting, is amazingly good."[Pg 11]

"Why do the English," asked Cameron, "crack up the French seventy-five as being the most marvellous gun in the War? Our own 18-pounder is just as good."

"If not better."

"Exactly. If not better."

"But then why does the average Englishman," said Davies, "pretend he is a perfect devil with his fists when really he is the most peaceable soul in the world, and then, in spite of his peaceableness, suddenly turns into a first-class soldier?"

"Yes, but then why does the Englishman——"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake!" cried Davies laughing, and hauling a great flask out of his pocket, "this is going to drive us mad. Have a drop of Scotch. I beg your pardon! Have a drop of Scots or Scottish." They each had a good swig at it, and then Davies went on: "I'm a publisher by profession—I've got an office near Covent Garden—and the more I see of the Englishman as a business man, or as a literary man, or as any kind of man, the more bewildered I become. They're the kindliest souls in the world, but if they see anything beautiful flying in the air or running along the ground, they rush for a gun and kill it. If an earthquake devastates North Borneo, they dash off to the Mansion House and block up all the traffic for miles round trying to hand over money for earthquake-relief, but do you think they'll lift a finger to abolish their own slums? Not they. If you assault a man in England and bash his teeth down his throat and kick him in the stomach, that's just playfulness and you'll get fourteen days in jug. But if you lay a[Pg 12] finger on him and pinch his watch at the same time, that's robbery with violence, and you'll probably get eighteen strokes with the "cat" and about three years in Dartmoor. You can do pretty nearly anything you like to a stag or a fox. That's sport. But you stand up and say you approve of bull-fights, and see what happens to you! You'll be lucky if you escape with your life. And there's another thing. They're always getting themselves up in fancy-dress. They adore fancy-dress. Look at their Beef-Eaters, and their Chelsea Pensioners, and their barristers' wigs, and their Peers' Robes, and the Beadle of the Bank of England, and the Lord Mayor's Show, and the Presenting at Court, and the Trooping of the Colour, and all that sort of thing. Show an Englishman a fancy-dress, and he puts it on."

"They sound rather fascinating," murmured Donald.

"They're fascinating, all right," replied Davies. "I love them. I don't understand them, but I love them. I've got a theory about them, which I rather want to test some time, if I can extract myself unpunctured from this bloody Armageddon."

"What is it?"

"I've got an idea that all their queernesses and oddities and incongruities arise from the fact that, at heart, fundamentally, they're a nation of poets. Mind you, they'd be lurid with rage if you told them. Imagine what Colonel Tarkington over there would say if you told him that he was a poet."

Colonel Tarkington was the C.O. of the Melton Mowbrays. He was a cavalry major who had trans[Pg 13]ferred into the infantry for the sake of promotion—a neat, dapper little man who ate sparingly in order to keep his weight down for post-war polo.

"I'd rather like to write a book about them some day," said Cameron thoughtfully.

"It's a book that wants writing," replied the Welshman. "Come and look me up after this bloody war is over, and we'll discuss it."

"Seriously?"

"You bet your life I'm serious. I told you I was a publisher once, and I hope to be a publisher again. That's a bargain. If ever you want a job in London, come to me and we'll talk it over. You'll find me in the telephone-book, Davies and Llewellyn Glendower, Henrietta Street."

Cameron made a note of it in his gun-registration book, and in his turn produced a large flask.

Evening was drawing on. The rain was falling steadily, in grey sheets, hour after hour. The German artillery was tuning up for its evening performance, and an occasional thud shook the pill-box when a shell pitched near. But it was not the shells that worried the two gunners. They were in the corner furthest from the door, and both knew that the reinforced concrete was twenty-eight inches in thickness, for both of them had measured it independently as soon as they had arrived, and both knew perfectly well that nothing short of a direct hit from an eleven-inch or eight-inch howitzer, both fortunately rare in Flanders mud, or repeated hits on the same spot from a 5.9, which was unlikely, could do them any real harm. The real danger was that the infantry might[Pg 14] get agitated, and ask for an S.O.S. to be sent to the protecting artillery.

The two gunners shuffled their feet uneasily, and tried not to watch the Colonels and their staffs at the other end of the pill-box. A lot of talking was going on at that other end, and runners kept on arriving with messages. The air was now throbbing and thudding and hissing and quivering, and the pill-box was filling up with orderlies and signallers, taking cover from the thickening barrage. The atmosphere was heavy with smoke and the smell of wet macintoshes and sweating runners and the bitter fumes of a shell which had pitched at the entrance. The adjutant of the Rutlands came elbowing his way towards them through the crowd. Davies saw him coming and sighed.

"Hell! Now we're off," he murmured. "Retaliation wanted. Five pounds to a bun that my wire is down." He stretched out for his gas-mask and tin-hat.

"All the wires will be down," said Cameron. "Listen. It's a regular corker of a barrage."

"Have you got any rockets?" asked Davies. "Mine were blown into a shell-hole on the way up."

"Four. Two red and two green; we might try them first."

The adjutant reached them, with the usual request for an S.O.S. "It might be an attack," he explained.

The two gunners struggled through the mob to the door, carrying their clumsy rocket-apparatus. Outside was a maelstrom of noise and mud and death.

"God Almighty!" exclaimed Davies as he peered out. "If they don't see the rockets, Cameron, one or[Pg 15] other of us will have to run for it. No one in the world could mend a wire in all that."

"Let's hope the damned things work," said Cameron, feverishly propping the rocket-stand against what was left of a parapet. A moment or two later the first rocket soared up into the dripping twilight and burst into a rain of green stars. The second, the red one, followed at once and failed to burst.

"Damnation!" exclaimed both gunners simultaneously. The S.O.S. signal was green followed by red. Green alone would not be enough. They fitted the other red rocket, and then the matches wouldn't strike. The matchbox was soaked. Cameron rushed inside and came out with another box. The rocket spluttered and soared away and broke into a beautiful red shower.

The two gunners crouched down behind the broken parapet and waited. Davies counted the seconds aloud from his wrist-watch. If the rockets were not seen by the artillery, one of the two subalterns would have to try to cross the open mile and a half to the nearest battery, with a five-hundred to one chance against getting through. And if he failed, the other Would have to try. It was of some considerable importance to them, therefore, that the rockets should be observed. The seconds passed. At seventy-five, Davies made a cup of his hand and shouted into Donald's ear, "It looks like a wash-out." At ninety he held up his ten fingers, and at a hundred, he half-turned to Cameron and yelled, "We'd better toss. Will you call?" He spun a franc and Cameron shouted "Heads!" and at that moment a gun fired[Pg 16] from behind them, and then another gun, and then five or six together in a straggling salvo, and then like a giant thunderbolt the whole of the British artillery sprang to life and the western sky was a blaze of yellow flame. The iron curtain was down.

With a huge grin across his face Davies sprang back into the shelter of the pill-box. Cameron paused to retrieve the franc from the mud and a 5.9 high-explosive shell pitched beside him, and he woke up a fortnight later, suffering from concussion and shell-shock, in the Duchess of Westminster's Hospital at Le Touquet.

[Pg 17]

CHAPTER II

One of the routes by which shell-shocked officers progressed from the base hospitals back to health was via a temporary row of huts in Palace Green, two enchanting private houses on the top of Campden Hill, and finally one or other of the monster hydropathics in Derbyshire or Scotland. Donald Cameron travelled this route, and ended in a monster hydropathic in Scotland, where the chief, indeed, the only, qualification of the Commandant for solving the three hundred separate psychological problems entrusted to him by the War Office was an unrivalled knowledge of the drainage system of the insalubrious port of Leith. But even this expert was unable to do much for Donald beyond applying his universal remedy for all shell-shock cases. This remedy was simple. It consisted of finding out the main likes and dislikes of each patient, and then ordering them to abstain from the former and apply themselves diligently to the latter. For example, those of the so-called patients—for the Commandant privately disbelieved in the existence of shell-shock, never having experienced himself any more alarming manifestation of the power of modern artillery than the vibrations of target-practice by invisible battleships—who[Pg 18] disliked noise were allotted rooms on the main road. Those who had been, in happier times, parsons, schoolmasters, journalists, and poets, were forbidden the use of the library and driven off in batches to physical drill, lawn tennis, golf, and badminton. Those who wished to be alone were paired with horse-racing, girl-hunting subalterns. Those who were terrified of solitude had special rooms by themselves behind green-baize doors at the ends of remote corridors. By means of this admirable system, the three hundred separate psychological problems were soon reduced to the uniform level of the Leith drainage and sewerage, and by the time that a visiting commission of busybodies, arriving unexpectedly and armed with an absurd technical knowledge and jargon, insisted upon the immediate sack of the Commandant and his replacement by a civilian professor of psychology, it was estimated that the mental condition of as many as two per cent of the patients had definitely improved for the better since admission to the hospital.

Donald was not among the fortunate two per cent. His natural shyness had been increased by the concussion of the high-explosive shell on the Passchendaele Ridge, and the Commandant's system, which had made Donald president of the Debating Society and compulsory speaker at all debates, had had the unfortunate effect of assisting rather than countering the efficient work of the German militarists and munition-makers. Indeed the professor of psychology, a man who not only believed in the existence of the subject which he professed, but also read books about[Pg 19] it written by foreigners, and Germans at that, allowed more than a year and a half to elapse before he felt that it would be safe to send Donald out into the world of civil life from which he had been so suddenly and so strangely excluded for six years. It was not until 1920, therefore, that Donald was furnished with a document which said that he would only be forty-hundredths of a normal man for the next seven years; that his physical rating for the rest of his life as a potential soldier in any future war that might elude the influence of the Great War to end War was C2; but that on the expiration of the seven years he would, unaccountably, become once again a hundred per cent citizen with no further claim upon the finances of the country. Such was the mathematical exactitude of prophecy with which the Ministry of Pensions was endowed in those years that immediately followed the War, and it is believed to be the first successful poach by Aesculapius upon the preserves of the Delphian Apollo. To this document was attached a statement that the missing sixty-hundredths of Lieutenant Donald Cameron were worth £85 a year—a mortifying comparison with the value put upon his services at that desperate crisis in world affairs when General von Kluck, the subject of so many admirable rhymes, was advancing nimbly upon Paris, and Colonel Repington was beginning his diary.

The £85 per annum was to be paid in half-yearly instalments and was subject to income-tax. Income-tax was to be deducted at the source.

Donald packed his valise for the last time, saluted[Pg 20] a major for the last time, shook hands affectionately with the professor who had so unpatriotically called in Herr Freud to redress the balance of Frau Krupp, and departed in a first-class carriage, for the last time for many years, to Aberdeen, and from Aberdeen by slow train to the country district of Aberdeenshire which is called Buchan. His father, Ewan Cameron, was the proprietor of a farm in Buchan called the Mains of Balspindie, and Ewan was known as the best singer, the best violinist, the champion whisky-drinker, the story-teller par excellence, the scholar who could out-talk the minister, the quickest-tempered, the kindest-hearted, the handsomest old man, and the worst farmer, from the Mormond Hill to the foot of the Lecht. Ewan Cameron had not always been a farmer. He had once owned a small distillery near Edzell in Angus, but the distillery had failed because of the owner's sentimental attachment to his own wares. He could not bear the thought of other people drinking the precious fluid. At another period of his life, Ewan Cameron had kept a general store in the village of Forres, but this too had failed. For Ewan contracted a habit of putting up the shutters earlier and earlier every week in order to indulge his passion for fishing, an art in which he was a complete master, as even the pundits of Deveronside and Spey admitted. The result, of course, was that as the creel filled the till emptied, and Ewan Cameron packed his belongings, filled his silver snuff-mull—it had a huge cairngorm on the top—and moved on. Tomintoul, highest village of Britain, saw him for a month or two. In Charlestown-of-Aberlour he stayed two[Pg 21] years, nominally as factor to a small laird, but actually spending all his days and a long part of his nights in making violins, which he offered for sale to those who could not play the violin and gave as presents to those who could. In Fochabers he taught Latin in the school for a while, but neglected his school hours in order to argue with the parish priest about the Infallibility of the Pope, a subject in which he was greatly interested at the time; and in Knockando for six months he drove the straightest furrow that had been seen in those parts for many a long day. His hair gradually silvered, his face grew wrinkled and old, but no amount of whisky and no length of nocturnal discussion and no fall from comfort to poverty could dim the brightness of his eye or roughen the clearness of his tenor voice, or shake the nimbleness of his fingers upon the violin-strings or the chanter. Only on two subjects he would never talk, and those were his father and his father's father. All that Donald knew about his great-grandfather was that he had "come over the hills" in about 1790 and that he was a very silent man; and all that he knew about his grandfather was that he was the most skilful poacher, although an amateur, from Donside to Fort George, and that he too was a very silent man.

In 1921 the farm in Buchan was gradually going the same way as the distillery and the shop and the schoolmastering and the rest of them had gone. Ewan Cameron did not care. His wife had been dead many years; his only son had been supported by the Government since 1914, and he had just discovered Dante. He had no cares in the world. A weird machine which[Pg 22] the English call a char-à-banc, and the French an autobus, had begun to ply between the district of Balspindie and Aberdeen, and twice a week the old man went to plague the life of the librarian of King's College in the Old Town by demanding obscure Continental books of which the librarian had never heard, and to chase the lecturer in Italian of Marischal College in the New Town. His conversation with lecturer and librarian was as learned and dignified as his repartee in the char-à-bancs was lewd and swift. "Auld Balspindie" or "the auld deevil" was respected and feared and admired in that country-side of lewdness and learning.

When Donald went home in the spring of 1921 with his £85 per annum, the old man was surprised.

"This is no place for a young man," he said, looking sternly at his son from under his white eyebrows and pouring out two whiskies. "I won't say I'm not glad to see you for my sake, because I am. But not for your sake. Balspindie is for old men."

"And what for young ones, Father?" asked Donald.

"The world," replied the old man sharply, draining his glass and refilling it.

"But I've seen quite enough of the world for the time being," protested Donald.

"Ay," Ewan Cameron nodded, "I thought you might be thinking that. It's the child's instinct. You've been hurt and you run home to your mother. Your mother's dead and Balspindie has to do in her place. Well, you're welcome here. And you can stay till you're well again. But after that, it's the road for you, my boy. Come back here to die, if you like. But go out[Pg 23] there," he flung his arms wide as if he was King of All the Spains and Emperor of All the Indies, "go out there to live."

"I don't know that I want to," replied Donald timidly. He was feeling that he never wanted to stir five miles from Balspindie again for the rest of his life. By some amazing series of flukes he had escaped the Germans, the Staff, disease, and even the sewage-expert from Leith, and his instinct was to settle down and live a quiet life. He had no desire whatever for further adventures and experiences, and he said so, diffidently.

His father did not argue. He nodded repeatedly and said finally:

"You're not cured yet. When you are cured you'll leave me. Not because I tell you to, but because you'll want to. Meanwhile, there's plenty to do here."

There was plenty to do, and Donald did it. He got up early and went to bed early. He worked in the fields, and in time he ploughed a furrow that was quite creditable.

"I might have ploughed that one myself," said his father admiringly on one occasion, "If I'd been blindfolded and short of one arm and with a team of horses that rocketed about like steeplechasers."

For several years father and son continued their queer, incongruous partnership until the senior partner dissolved it by dying. Ewan Cameron made as little fuss about dying as he had made about living. He went to bed at about six o'clock one evening in late summer, windless and warm and scented with[Pg 24] the scent of corn-stooks, and told the dairymaid to go out into the fields for Donald. When Donald came in, breathless from running across stubble, he found the old man lying on his side in a doze. He knelt down on the stone floor beside him, and Ewan Cameron opened his great black eyes and smiled a smile that Franz Hals might have painted.

"I'm for off, boy," he said, in the only Buchan phrase that Donald had ever heard him use. And then: "Lochaber no more. Go to the Gordon barracks in Aberdeen to-morrow and bring a piper who can play a Cameron lament." He stopped and shook his great head a little and then went on. "I was a Catholic once. Go away from Buchan. It's not our country. Don't be afraid, I won't babble of green fields. If ever you meet Lochiel, give him a peat. The snuff-mull was carried at Culloden." Then he sighed and said, "I'll not see Achnacarry again," and then he shut his eyes and died.

Donald Cameron fetched a piper from Castlehill barracks, and all Buchan came to the funeral and listened to the Cameron lament, and there were no dry eyes for "Auld Balspindie."

On the day after the funeral, an advocate from a firm of advocates in Golden Square, Aberdeen, came out in a motor-car with the news that Ewan Cameron had left just over seven thousand pounds to his son Donald, on condition that he spent no more than one month in the year north of the Tweed until he was fifty years of age. Where the old man got the money no one ever discovered, but it must have been a long time before, the advocate said, for the original sum[Pg 25] had been about thirty-five hundred pounds and had been lying in Aberdeen at compound interest for over twenty years.

At first the advocate frightened Donald a good deal, for he had not spoken to a man of the world since leaving the military hospital, until it came out in the course of conversation that the man of feus and fees had himself commanded a battalion of Highland infantry in the War and that they had many battlefield friends, and had once had many more, in common. To this small, dry man, once a leader of desperate attacks and commander of a thousand incomparable soldiers, Donald entrusted the fortunes of the Mains of Balspindie, and a week or two later, having packed his military valise with his civilian clothes and procured two or three introductions from the librarian of the University Library and the lecturer in Italian to friends in the southern part of Britain, he set off once again for London, for the first time in his life making the twelve-hour journey in a third-class carriage. It was very uncomfortable.

[Pg 26]

CHAPTER III

Donald Cameron had no qualifications for any profession except the ability to drive a moderately crooked furrow and to direct the fire of a six-gun battery of eighteen-pounder guns, and so he resolved to try his fortune as a journalist. There seemed to be no other profession which required neither ability nor training. He was fortified in this resolution by the fact that his letters of introduction from the lecturer and the librarian were all addressed to literary men, the former having several times corresponded with editors about rejected articles and the latter being a member of the Librarians' Association, a body that occasionally came into touch with those who write books as well as those who read them.

But the double set of introductions led to a small difficulty at 7.30 on the morning of the day when the Aberdeen express drew up at King's Cross station and decanted a tousled and sleepy Donald from his third-class corner. For the lecturer in Italian had warmly recommended Chelsea as the only possible region in which a literary man could live, whereas the librarian had repeatedly affirmed that no one who was anyone lived further away from the British Museum than an average athlete at the Aboyne Games could throw a[Pg 27] stone. Donald's own experience of London consisted of an intimate knowledge of Reggiori's restaurant opposite King's Cross station, the few hundred yards between the Palace Theatre and the Piccadilly Hotel, and the leave-train platforms of Victoria Station; and in consequence Chelsea and Bloomsbury were all one to him, both as residential districts and as Movements in Art. To him Chelsea was "the Quartier Latin of London," and as for Bloomsbury, he had heard of Virginia Woolf but not of Miss Sackville-West.

It was the spin of a coin upon the arrival platform of the London and North-Eastern Railway's terminus that directed his taxi in the direction of Chelsea, and by tea-time of the same afternoon Donald was installed in a bed-sitting-room on the second floor of a Carolean house in Royal Avenue, just off the King's Road. The landlady was an elderly dame with a roving eye, who looked as if she had had her fling in her day, forty years before. Her daughter also had a roving eye, and looked as if she was ready to have a fling at any moment. Her name was Gwladys and she terrified Donald. She was tall and ladylike and full of little ways. Every morning Donald met her at the door of the bathroom, for his descent, at whatever hour he made it, invariably seemed to coincide with her entrance or exit—screaming modestly in a flurry of pink dressing-gown and lace-topped nightgown. And often when he was going upstairs to bed he would meet Gwladys on the stairs, and she would tell him all about her fiancé, a naval commander who was killed at Jutland and who was very fond of port wine. Donald shyly sympathized with her loss and put[Pg 28] forward the opinion, nervously, that port wine was infinitely preferable to Jutland. Gwladys' view was that in any case the present was better than the past.

Donald's first letter of introduction was to the literary editor of a well-known weekly paper which had leanings towards a mild form of intellectual Socialism. No one would have been more alarmed and bewildered than the literary editor if a sudden swing of the political pendulum had brought about the nationalization of the Means of Production, Distribution, and Exchange which his newspaper so elegantly advocated. For the literary editor was an Irishman who, if he despised money and made very lethargic and intermittent efforts to acquire any, nevertheless was heartily fond of many of the things which money can buy. He was a brilliant critic, a vile editor, and a superb luncher-out. He went to a lunch-party every day of the week, was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and was always welcome. For his conversation was not only easy, witty, learned, universal; it was enchanting as well. The man radiated charm. Charm was his capital and conversation his income, and both were inexhaustible. His name was Charles Ossory.

Donald presented his letter of introduction to Mr. Ossory's secretary, a small, dark lady of incredible sharpness and efficiency, one afternoon at 3 P.M., and the sharp little lady examined him briefly and explained that Mr. Ossory was out. She added that she had full authority to make appointments for Mr. Ossory, and that if Mr. Cameron cared to come along[Pg 29] at 4.30 on the following afternoon, Tuesday, it was possible that Mr. Ossory might by that time have come back from his lunch.

"From his tea," corrected Donald mildly.

"From his lunch," snapped the sharp little lady, and she turned to a gigantic card-index in a way that suggested only too plainly that the conversation was over. On the Tuesday afternoon Donald presented himself nervously at the dragonlet's den and waited until, an hour later, the butler of a Dowager Marchioness telephoned to say that Mr. Ossory was not going to return to his Bureau that day.

On the Wednesday afternoon it was the lady secretary of a Cabinet Minister's wife who did the telephoning, only she called it "his department," and on the Thursday it was a Countess whose quarterings were unimpeachable but whose income did not run to a telephonic intermediary, and so had to do it herself. On Friday Mr. Ossory went away for his usual week-end, returning on Tuesday just in time not to go to the office, and it was only by chance that a hasty visit on the Wednesday afternoon, to correct the proofs of a wise and witty article about Molière, happened to coincide with one of Donald's vigils. Charles Ossory came into the office in a great hurry and stayed, talking to Donald enchantingly, for an hour and a half, his eyes twinkling away and his lovely sentences tumbling out in his lovely soft voice. He was no longer in a hurry. His engagements were forgotten. In vain did the dragonlet dart in and out of the office, ordering him either to correct his proof or to go to Whitehall Gardens to have tea with Mr.[Pg 30] Bernard Shaw. Mr. Ossory, with enchanting blandness, refused to do either, and Donald thought it was the most flattering thing that had ever come his way. But that was all from Mr. Ossory that did come his way, except the task of compiling a list of autumn novels for a book-supplement of the mildly Socialistic weekly, for which he received three guineas; that, and a piece of information. For Mr. Ossory told him, in his soft lovely voice, that the literary profession was grotesquely overcrowded, and that it was only possible for men of exceptional talent to enter it, and then only if they had been already in the profession for years. Unless they had been in it for years, he pointed out, how could they show their exceptional talent?

It says a great deal for Mr. Ossory's charm that he made this sound quite reasonable, and it was not until Donald had returned home to Royal Avenue and pondered deeply over the position that he decided to give up Mr. Ossory as a potential Maecenas and to try his second letter of introduction.

This was from the librarian of King's College Library, and was addressed to Mr. Alexander Ogilvy, LL.D. of St. Andrews University, and editor of the Illustrated Planet. Mr. Ogilvy's business habits were different, apparently, from those of Mr. Ossory, for he made an appointment with Donald for 8.30 A.M., and at 8.31 A.M.