The Wish House and Other Stories (64 page)

There’s a pasture in a valley where the hanging woods divide,
   And a Herd lies down and ruminates in peace;
Where the pheasant rules the nooning, and the owl the twilight tide,
   And the war-cries of our world die out and cease.
Here I cast aside the burden that each weary week-day brings
   And, delivered from the shadows I pursue,
On peaceful, postless Sabbaths I consider Weighty Things –
   Such as Sussex Cattle feeding in the dew!

At the gate beside the river where the trouty shallows brawl,
   I know the pride that Lobengula felt,
When he bade the bars be lowered of the Royal Cattle Kraal,
   And fifteen mile of oxen took the veldt.
From the walls of Bulawayo in unbroken file they came
   To where the Mount of Council cuts the blue…
I have only six and twenty, but the principle’s the same
   With my Sussex Cattle feeding in the dew!

To a luscious sound of tearing, where the clovered herbage rips,
   Level-backed and level-bellied watch ’em move –
See those shoulders, guess that heart-girth, praise those loins, admire those hips,
   And the tail set low for flesh to make above!
Count the broad unblemished muzzles, test the kindly mellow skin
   And, where yon heifer lifts her head at call,
Mark the bosom’s just abundance ‘neath the gay and clean-cut chin,
   And those eyes of Juno, overlooking all!

Here is colour, form and substance! I will put it to the proof
   And, next season, in my lodges shall be born
Some very Bull of Mithras, flawless from his agate hoof
   To his even-branching, ivory, dusk-tipped horn.
He shall mate with block-square virgins – kings shall seek his like in vain,
   While I multiply his stock a thousandfold,
Till an hungry world extol me, builder of a lofty strain
   That turns one standard ton at two years old!

There’s a valley, under oakwood, where a man may dream his dream,
   In the milky breath of cattle laid at ease,
Till the moon o’ertops the alders, and her image chills the stream,
   And the river-mist runs silver round their knees!
Now the footpaths fade and vanish; now the ferny clumps deceive;
   Now the hedgerow-folk possess their fields anew;
Now the Herd is lost in darkness, and I bless them as I leave,
   My Sussex Cattle feeding in the dew!

Unless you come of the gipsy blood
   That takes and never spares
Bide content with your given good
   And follow your own affairs.
Plough and harrow and roll your land,
   And sow what ought to be sowed;
But never let loose your heart from your hand,
   Nor flitter it down the road!
     
Then you can thrive on your boughten food
     As the gipsy-vans come through…
For it isn’t nature the Gorgio blood
     Should love as the Romany do.

Unless you carry the gipsy eyes
   That see but seldom weep,
Keep your head from the naked skies
   Or the stars’ll trouble your sleep.
Watch your moon through your window-pane
   And take what weather she brews;
But don’t run out in the midnight rain
   Nor home in the morning dews.
Then you can huddle and shut your eyes
   As the gipsy-vans come through…
For it isn’t fitting the Gorgio ryes
   Should walk as the Romany do

Unless you come of the gipsy race
   That counts all time the same,
Be you careful of Time and Place
   And Judgment and Good Name:
Lose your life for to live your life
   The way that you ought to do;
And when you are finished, your God and your wife
   And the Gipsies ‘Il laugh at you!
   
Then you can rot in your burying-place
     As the gipsy-vans come through…
For it isn’t reason the Gorgio race
   Should die as the Romany do.

S
EEING
how many unstable ex-soldiers came to the Lodge of Instruction (attached to Faith and Works E.C. 5837) in the years after the war, the wonder is there was not more trouble from Brethren whom sudden meetings with old comrades jerked back into their still raw past. But our round, torpedo-bearded local doctor – Brother Keede, Senior Warden – always stood ready to deal with hysteria before it got out of hand; and when I examined Brethren unknown or imperfectly vouched for on the Masonic side, I passed on to him anything that seemed doubtful. He had had his experience as medical officer of a South London battalion, during the last two years of the war; and, naturally, often found friends and acquaintances among the visitors.

Brother C. Strangwick, a young, tallish, new-made Brother, hailed from some South London Lodge. His papers and his answers were above suspicion, but his red-rimmed eyes had a puzzled glare that might mean nerves. So I introduced him particularly to Keede, who discovered in him a headquarters orderly of his old battalion, congratulated him on his return to fitness – he had been discharged for some infirmity or other – and plunged at once into Somme memories.

‘I hope I did right, Keede,’ I said when we were robing before Lodge.

‘Oh quite. He reminded me that I had him under my hands at Sampoux in ‘Eighteen, when he went to bits. He was a runner.’
‘Was it shock?’ I asked

‘Of sorts – but not what he wanted me to think it was. No, he
wasn’t shamming. He had Jumps to the limit – but he played up to mislead me about the reason of ’em…. Well, if we could stop patients from lying, medicine would be too easy, I suppose.’

I noticed that, after Lodge-working, Keede gave him a seat a couple of rows in front of us, that he might enjoy a lecture on the Orientation of King Solomon’s Temple, which an earnest Brother thought would be a nice interlude between Labour and the high tea that we called our ‘Banquet’. Even helped by tobacco it was a dreary performance. About half-way through, Strangwick, who had been fidgeting and twitching for some minutes, rose, drove back his chair grinding across the tesselated floor, and yelped: ‘Oh, My Aunt! I can’t stand this any longer.’ Under cover of a general laugh of assent he brushed past us and stumbled towards the door.

‘I thought so!’ Keede whispered to me. ‘Come along!’ We overtook him in the passage, crowing hysterically and wringing his hands. Keede led him into the Tyler’s Room, a small office where we stored odds and ends of regalia and furniture, and locked the door.

‘I’m – I’m all right,’ the boy began, piteously.

‘Course you are.’ Keede opened a small cupboard which I had seen called upon before, mixed sal volatile and water in a graduated glass, and, as Strangwick drank, pushed him gently on to an old sofa. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘It’s nothing to write home about. I’ve seen you ten times worse. I expect our talk has brought things back.’

He hooked up a chair behind him with one foot, held the patient’s hands in his own, and sat down. The chair creaked.

‘Don’t!’ Strangwick squealed. ‘I can’t stand it. There’s nothing on earth creaks like they do! And – and when it thaws we – we’ve got to slap ’em back with a spa-ade! Remember those Frenchmen’s little boots under the duckboards?…What’ll I do? What’ll I do about it?’

Some one knocked at the door, to know if all were well.

‘Oh, quite, thanks!’ said Keede over his shoulder. ‘But I shall need this room awhile. Draw the curtains, please.’

We heard the rings of the hangings that drape the passage from Lodge to Banquet Room click along their poles, and what sound there had been, of feet and voices, was shut off.

Strangwick, retching impotently, complained of the frozen dead who creak in the frost.

‘He’s playing up still,’ Keede whispered.
‘That’s
not his real trouble – any more than ’twas last time.’

‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘men get those things on the brain pretty badly. ‘Remember in October—‘

‘This chap hasn’t though. I wonder what’s really helling him.
What are you thinking of?’ said Keede peremptorily.

‘French End an’ Butcher’s Row,’ Strangwick muttered.

‘Yes, there were a few there. But suppose we face Bogey instead of giving him best every time.’ Keede turned towards me with a hint in his eye that ‘I was to play up to his leads.

‘What was the trouble with French End?’ I opened at a venture.

‘It was a bit by Sampoux, that we had taken over from the French. They’re tough, but you wouldn’t call ’em tidy as a nation. They had faced both sides of it with dead to keep the mud back. All those trenches were like gruel in a thaw. Our people had to do the same sort of thing – elsewhere; but Butcher’s Row in French End was the – er – showpiece. Luckily, we pinched a salient from Jerry just then, an’ straightened things out – so we didn’t need to use the Row after November. You remember, Strangwick?’

‘My God, yes! When the duckboard-slats were missin’ you’d tread on ’em, an’ they’d creak.’

‘They’re bound to. Like leather,’ said Keede. ‘It gets on one’s nerves a bit, but—‘

‘Nerves? It’s real! It’s real!’ Strangwick gulped.

‘But at your time of life, it’ll all fall behind you in a year or so. I’ll give you another sip of – paregoric, an’ we’ll face it quietly. Shall we?’”

Keede opened his cupboard again and administered a carefully dropped dark dose of something that was not sal volatile. ‘This’ll settle you in a few minutes,’ he explained. ‘Lie still, an’ don’t talk unless you feel like it.’

He faced me, fingering his beard.

‘Ye-es. Butcher’s Row wasn’t pretty,’ he volunteered. ‘Seeing Strangwick here, has brought it all back to me again. Funny thing! We had a platoon sergeant of Number Two – what the deuce was his name? – an elderly bird who must have lied like a patriot to get out to the front at his age; but he was a first-class non-com., and the last person, you’d think, to make mistakes. Well, he was due for a fortnight’s home leave in January, ‘Eighteen. You were at BHQ then, Strangwick, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. I was orderly. It was January twenty-first’, Strangwick spoke with a thickish tongue, and his eyes burned. Whatever drug it was, had taken hold.

‘About then,’ Keede said. ‘Well, this sergeant, instead of coming down from the trenches the regular way an’ joinin’ battalion details after dark, an’ takin’ that funny little train for Arras, thinks he’ll warm himself first. So he gets into a dug-out, in Butcher’s Row, that
used to be an old French dressing-station, and fugs up between a couple of braziers of pure charcoal! As luck ’ud have it, that was the only dug-out with an inside door opening inwards – some French anti-gas fitting, I expect – and, by what we could make out, the door must have swung to while he was warming. Anyhow, he didn’t turn up at the train. There was a search at once. We couldn’t afford to waste platoon sergeants. We found him in the morning. He’d got his gas all right. A machine-gunner reported him, didn’t he, Strangwick?’

‘No, sir. Corporal Grant – o’ the trench mortars.’

‘So it was. Yes, Grant – the man with that little wen on his neck. Nothing wrong with your memory, at any rate. What was the sergeant’s name?’

‘Godsoe – John Godsoe,’ Strangwick answered.

‘Yes, that was it. I had to see him next mornin’ – frozen stiff between the two braziers – and not a scrap of private papers on him.
That
was the only thing that made me think it mightn’t have been – quite an accident.’

Strangwick’s relaxing face set, and he threw back at once to the orderly room manner.

‘I give my evidence – at the time – to you. sir. He passed – overtook me, I should say – comin’ down from supports, after I’d warned him for leaf. I thought he was goin’ through Parrot Trench as usual; but ’e must ‘ave turned off into French End where the old bombed barricade was.’

‘Yes. I remember now. You were the last man to see him alive. That was on the twenty-first of January, you say? Now,
when
was it that Dearlove and Billings brought you to me – clean out of your head?’…Keede dropped his hand, in the style of magazine detectives, on Strangwick’s shoulder. The boy looked at him with cloudy wonder, and muttered: ‘I was took to you on the evenin’ of the twenty-fourth of January. But you don’t think I did him in, do you?’

I could not help smiling at Keede’s discomfiture; but he recovered himself. ‘Then what the dickens
was
on your mind that evening – before I gave you the hypodermic?’

‘The – the things in Butcher’s Row. They kept on comin’ over me. You’ve seen me like this before, sir.’

‘But I knew that it was a lie. You’d no more got stiffs on the brain then than you have now. You’ve got something, but you’re hiding it’

“Ow do
you
know, doctor?’ Strangwick whimpered.

‘D’you remember what you said to me, when Dearlove and Billings were holding you down that evening?

‘About the things in Butcher’s Row?’

‘Oh, no! You spun me a lot of stuff about corpses creaking; but you let yourself go in the middle of it – when you pushed that telegram at me. What did you mean, f’rinstance, by asking what advantage it was for you to fight beasts of officers if the dead didn’t rise?’

‘Did I say “Beasts of Officers”?’

‘You did. It’s out of the Burial Service.’

‘I suppose, then, I must have heard it. As a matter of fact, I ‘ave.’ Strangwick shuddered extravagantly.

‘Probably. And there’s another thing – that hymn you were shouting till I put you under. It was something about Mercy and Love. Remember it?’