The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

One morning a pleasant surprise awaited my arrival at the dugout in Burgin Park.

Colonel Parker, of The Manor House, was naturally one of the leaders in the work. With a battered old Ford car he had become the Transport Officer, and spent much of his time in helping the men who lived at a distance from Burgin Park by driving them to and from their homes. Frequently I had met him rattling along the country lanes with one of the workmen beside him, and he had always given me a cheery wave of the hand. As I arrived at the gates of the Park that morning I stood aside to allow him to drive by, and he pulled up to ask me whether I would dine at The Manor House on the following evening.

My pleasure at this unexpected invitation was twofold. It was a great compliment to dine with ‘the Village Squire’, but it gave me even greater pleasure to think that it must have been Pat and Robin who had asked their uncle to invite me.

I saw my two young friends almost every day, for they were valiant workers upon the Beadle dugout. Robin delighted in proving his muscular powers and volunteered for every job that threatened to break the human back. I caught a glimpse of him straining at a rope around the trunk of a mighty beech tree that Lord Burgin’s forester was felling for some timber planking, and he was so vigorous with his wheelbarrow that one day it ran away with him down the hillside and he nearly killed himself by going head first into the quarry.

Dr Hax sent him home to bed, but he appeared next morning, very proud of a large white bandage around his head. I think he showed off a little too much as the ‘wounded hero’ that morning, but he was very young and high-spirited and really no more than a boy playing at building a stockade against pirates.

Pat aroused a good deal of comment amongst the village women when she first appeared at the dugout, for she was dressed exactly like her brother, in grey shorts, cricket shirt and sweater. But she quickly disarmed criticism with her gay spirit and devotion to her job. She collected wood and built the fires and kept the working parties supplied with piping hot, strong tea: she insisted upon being at her post at dawn each morning to make hot soup for the tired men, and did little First Aid jobs to cut fingers and splinter-wounded hands that were beneath the notice of the arrogant Dr Hax.

We were too busy to talk very much at our work, but when she passed me she had always given me a cheerful smile. I had taken it as the smile that she gave to everyone around her, and had not dreamed that she would one day ask her uncle to invite me to The Manor House. As I passed her that morning she looked up from her fire: the great cauldron of tea was bubbling before her and her cheeks were smeared with grime –

‘Uncle’s been looking for you,’ she said. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Just a moment ago.’

‘Can you come tomorrow night?’

‘I’d like to… very much indeed.’

‘Splendid!’… and she gave me that flashing, impish smile.

I tossed my coat beneath a tree, rolled my sleeves to the elbow and for an hour my happy whistling drowned the squeak of my wheelbarrow.

Remembering a remark that Robin had made upon the evening of our first meeting upon the downs, I got out my dinner jacket and dressed for the occasion and walked across the valley in the haunting glory of the waning moon.

Although but half of it remained, it lit the earth as with a golden sunset: the gaunt window-panes of the church received it, and filled the old building with a lurid blaze of fire.

Many a time had I passed the gates of The Manor House but never until this evening had I entered that long, winding drive. Giant cedars and stately beeches stood out against the golden sky and wild banks of rhododendron billowed upon the carriageway. The gardens were beautiful, but even in that eerie, glowing light I could sense the gathering decay that was encroaching upon them. The Vicar had told me one evening as we were playing bridge that Colonel Parker had mortgaged three-parts of his land to send Robin to Eton and Pat to Oxford. The Parkers had been rooted in The Manor House of Beadle since the head of the family had backed the right King at the Battle of Bosworth Field. For nearly five centuries the family had flourished and declined with the fluctuating acumen of succeeding Parkers. The Colonel had no children of his own and Robin was his heir. The Colonel was poor, but that Robin should go to a lesser school than Eton had never entered his thoughts: Eton and one-quarter of his land was infinitely more desirable than the whole of his land to the sacrifice of a great tradition.

It occurred to me, as I walked that neglected, weed-grown drive, that the great schools of England took very little fresh-grown money for their nourishment: they lived upon the mellowed land of the manor houses – the cattle of the squires – the table silver of the country clergyman and many a cherished oil painting of a small boy’s ancestor.

Robin himself answered the door in response to my knock. He helped me off with my coat and led me through the wide, dim-lit hall to his uncle’s study.

Colonel Parker was at work at his desk as I entered, and he rose to meet me with a friendly smile. I recognised at once the three deep latticed windows that I could always see from my library window across the valley: in summer they were only partly visible through the foliage of the trees, but in winter those three warm, amber panels of light had often, in years gone by, sent a silent message of friendship to my lonely room.

‘Typical example of country neighbours!’ said the Colonel, as he stood by the windows. ‘Here we’ve sat looking across at one another’s windows for five years and it never occurred to either of us to take a five-minute stroll across the valley!’

It was an odd sensation to look at my house from a room that I had known for so long but never entered: I felt like Alice, just after she had jumped through the mirror into Looking-Glass Land: I stood staring at my own house as if seeing it for the first time. It was a fairly modern house of red brick and could not, of course, compare with The Manor House in mellowness or dignity. The light over my front door looked rather small and mean and I decided that, if the moon did nothing serious to us on the 3rd of May, I would have an iron lantern fitted, with amber glass that would throw a warmer message to my new friends at The Manor House.

‘If you’ve never been to each other’s houses before, it’s entirely your fault, Uncle. You were here years before Mr Hopkins and it was your clear duty to call on him.’

I turned quickly at the sound of Pat’s voice: I took her hand: she glanced up at me with a smile of welcome and then at her uncle with a charming frown of rebuke.

‘My fault entirely,’ murmured the Colonel. ‘But excellent excuse! Mr Hopkins came to Beadle so quietly that nobody knew he was here for a year!’

I laughed at this gentle dig at my modesty as Pat took up the decanter from the side-table and poured me a glass of sherry.

It seems almost ridiculous to admit it, but as I walked home upon the close of that delightful evening I could not for the life of me remember the colour or texture of the dress that Pat was wearing that night. Never before, and never after, did I see her in evening clothes: I think that it was a soft blue – or perhaps it might have been a bluish-grey – I just remember thinking how delightfully simple it was and how perfectly it suited her, but for the rest my whole mind was captured by those three faces beneath the shaded candles at the table: they formed one fleeting, fragrant page from a book that had never been within my reach before – a book that was wrenched from my hand and destroyed even as its fineness was exalting me.

The dinner was simple but I felt that it had been arranged with thought and care: soup with little pieces in it shaped into the letters of the alphabet; a fillet of sole – a roast fowl and a trifle flavoured with brandy. We were served by a maid who did not appear to come or go: she just materialised in the pool of amber light from the candles and dissolved into the shadows of the big curtained room. We drank an elegant Moselle, and Pat was allowed to remain with us at table as we smoked our cigars.

I had never known that conversation could flow with such effortless pleasure: I had thought that my dinner party to the Vicar and his wife and Mr Fayne-Higneth had been a success, but it was jerky and artificial compared with this: we had ‘told stories’, some of which had left difficult patches of silence behind them, but upon this evening at The Manor House there were no ‘stories’ – no forced laughter – just a delightful family party of which I had become an honorary member.

We talked of the village, and Colonel Parker referred to every man by his Christian name without a touch of patronage. I found myself talking quite freely about myself. Robin pretended to be immensely frightened of me when it transpired that I had been a schoolmaster – he said: ‘Please, sir, can I have some more trifle if I spit the brandy out?’ – but how different was that boy’s ‘ragging’ to the torment of those hateful little creatures of my memory! Colonel Parker spoke of the sacrifices that schoolmasters made for the sake of their duty: how they let the chances of worldly success pass them by in order to devote themselves to a noble calling. With a glance of his kindly eyes he made me picture myself as a man who might have been Prime Minister of England or Governor of the Bank of England had I not turned aside from such mundane things for the mastership of arithmetic at Portsea Grammar School.

Suddenly Robin looked at me and said: ‘We never think of it really – but it must be pretty grim being ragged.’ For a moment I felt myself stiffen – who said that I had ever been ‘ragged’? Nobody had: but all three, in their instinctive understanding, must have guessed. But I did not feel angry: I sipped my port and laughed. ‘That’s what schoolmasters exist for,’ I said. ‘We’re just a lot of Aunt Sallys at a circus!’ And then, for the first time in my life, I spoke freely of all that I had suffered: and the pent-up bitterness of years dissolved like magic in those understanding eyes. When I had finished I felt a wonderful freedom and happiness. Robin was immensely interested. He had never before sat face to face with a master who had actually sat on the drawing-pin so frequently prepared for him and so invariably discovered in time: he had never before heard from a schoolmaster’s own lips his reaction to a pellet of ink-dripping paper striking the bald patch upon his head.

The conversation swung to Robin himself: he admitted, with a flash of defiance, that his Latin and Greek were a little below par, but he had won the junior steeplechase that year and had covered nearly eighteen feet in the long jump for his House. I could see by his uncle’s face, as I wrung these achievements from the boy, that Colonel Parker was well satisfied to let the classics finish second to the steeplechase.

And then, for the first time in the evening, a lull came in the conversation – for the first time in that magic evening I was conscious of the gentle flutter of the glowing logs in the hearth. We sat, in that moment of stillness, with our eyes upon the shaded candles before us. It was as if, with one accord, we silently acknowledged the struggle our companions had waged against mention of the ghastly days so near at hand.

For my own part that evening possessed a dreamlike quality, but unlike a dream its memory has survived every horror of the seven years that followed it. As I gaze now into the blackness beyond my tattered window curtains I conjure up as clear as yesterday that peaceful, panelled room: I see those lines of care in the strong, grave face of Colonel Parker: I see the clear boyish profile of Robin to my right: I see the soft candlelight upon the little coral bracelet upon Pat’s wrist, and I feel the grace and mellowed courtesy of an old proud family.

In that fragment of silence the Colonel rose. I think that he knew that the spell was ended: he knew that an attempt to revive the conversation might lead us into the depths that we had so triumphantly avoided.

The clock was striking ten as we gathered around the fire in the Colonel’s study. We talked a little of our gardens – of the Christmas Pantomimes that Colonel Parker had seen with Pat and Robin in the holidays: we talked of the Norfolk Broads, where the Parkers went sailing in the summer: the future kept flickering to glorious life and dying in the little pits of silence that followed our gay words of make-believe.

And then Pat rose to bid goodnight.

‘I must be up at four to get that soup boiling down at the dugout,’ she said.

‘You might put that nasty little alarm clock of yours in a sock,’ suggested Robin.

I caught the gleam of Pat’s dress as she stood beside me. I took her hand. I looked into those friendly, lovely eyes of hers, with their strange, fascinating flecks of green: I felt the firm pressure of a hand that told me of steadfast friendship.

Robin’s hand was as hard as nails: he made me feel the hardened blisters that he had gained from hauling trees and shovelling the broken chalk from the dugout: he was just offering to take his coat off to display his muscles when Pat hauled him off to bed: how I envied him the hand that lay upon his shoulder as he left the room with Pat! How I prayed that, even now, fate might relent, and allow some other boy to feel that hand upon his shoulder while I, a proud guest of the wedding, was privileged to kiss the bride!

I was alone with Colonel Parker. I began to offer him my thanks for a delightful evening but he detained me.

‘Have a nightcap before you go.’

I sat once more before his fire as he brought me a whisky and soda. He took a pipe from the rack beside the open hearth. I followed his example and pulled out mine.

I had not until this moment discussed the days ahead of us with a plain, straightforward man in the privacy of his room. The gossip of the villagers was tedious and superficial – the sublime resignation of the Vicar, the arrogant outlook of Dr Hax and the ghoulish vulgarity of the publican were not the expressions of the normal Englishman… but I was alone with Colonel Parker; I lay back in the worn leather chair beside his fire, and glanced almost shyly at the man who embodied so much that I admired in the life of my country.

We talked of Pat and Robin first, and I told him of our meeting upon the downs. I told him of my memory of them as small, wild bundles of energy upon shaggy, galloping ponies.

He laughed: ‘Surprising they’re still alive,’ he said. ‘They both broke their heads and collar-bones before they were old enough to go to school.’

‘They’re splendid,’ I said – and there was silence. An owl hooted in the valley and the wind brushed the deep windows of the room.

Colonel Parker lit his pipe. ‘I hear the dugout’s ready for testing on Saturday,’ he said. ‘Sapper Evans is a good man: lucky to get him.’

It had come at last. The subject we had so carefully avoided had arisen quite naturally now that Pat and Robin had left us. I was longing to ask him what he honestly thought about it all – I had a far deeper trust in the opinion of this quiet, country squire than in all the scientists in the world, but before I could speak he said something that astonished me.

‘We shan’t go to the dugout that night,’ he said. ‘We’ve talked it over quite a lot. We shall stay here.’

‘But surely…’ I began.

He looked over his glowing pipe and smiled.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t bravado, or anything silly like that. The dugout idea was a grand one and the whole thing’s been splendidly done by the Government and the newspapers – it’s given people occupation – given them a hope.’

‘Do you feel,’ I blurted out, ‘do you feel there… there isn’t any hope?’

He puffed at his pipe and stared into the fire.

‘None of us can answer that,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I just refuse to believe it. You must have felt that, too… felt of it like one of those little troubles that hangs over our lives more or less all the time – one going – another coming – but all of them clearing up somehow in the end… Even this one will clear up somehow or other in the end… there’s bound to be peace and quiet again sooner or later… some sort of peace and quiet – because noise and disaster and blazing light and all that has got to burn itself out… and peace and quiet wins back in the end.’

It was a new idea to me, and for a moment I did not reply. ‘Some sort of peace and quiet’ – it was rather horrible – and yet this quiet, thoughtful man had gained philosophy in the hope of some kind of peace and quiet in the end. Far away from his own life and all our lives, lay peace and quiet that was better to think of, in the last extreme, than gross eternity…

‘Don’t you think,’ he went on, ‘that the quietest thing in all the world is the world itself as it goes rolling through space? If we were outside of it all, and stood watching it go by, it would not make a sound. A marble rolling across the floor must be an unholy racket beside the earth floating along in the emptiness. The moon’s the same – it never makes even a whisper as it goes around us…’

‘And now it’s going to make up for its long silence,’ I replied rather stupidly, for as I spoke I realised how crudely I was breaking into the Colonel’s strange, groping philosophy.

‘How do Pat and Robin feel?’ I asked.

‘They understand,’ he replied. ‘They understand better than we do, for they are young, and their minds can bend more easily than ours.’

A pall of darkness had fallen upon the valley with the setting of the moon, and for a while I groped like a blind man down the narrow lane. Not until I reached the stile that led me to my own meadow could I see the pallid glimmer of the closed spring flowers. Now and then came a thin, uneasy gust of wind. It came like something jerked from a powerful spring: it hissed through the bushes: twanged through the branches of the elms and sighed away to die upon the downs. And between these strange, unnatural gusts there lay a stagnant deadness, with a thin metallic flavour in the air that seemed to twist the back of my nostrils and bring a pain to my temples. It was the first night of the ‘disturbances’ that the newspapers so lightly brushed aside each morning – the first night of the strange whisperings that were now to remain with us until the end. No one sought to explain them: I doubt if even the scientists understood. The nights began to turn uneasily in their sleep – as if they no longer trusted themselves with the guardianship of the world and were impatient to hand us back to the safety of the day.

It was near to midnight as I sat for a last pipe beside my study fire. The room seemed cheap and musty and artificial beside the mellowed library of The Manor House, and I was glad that I had not risked the pitiable anticlimax of asking the Colonel and Pat and Robin to dine with me.

It was not that I was really ashamed of my home – it was just that I wanted my evening at The Manor House to endure until my death, and to endure it must remain isolated within the cherished groves of memory.