A Test to Destruction (43 page)

At the beginning of February the adjutant told him that he was to report for duty at No. 1 Dispersal Unit, Shorncliffe, Kent. Thus, except for a brief time with the 1st Battalion later on, ended Phillip’s service with the Gaultshire Regiment.

In the front room of his house, No. 12 Hillside Road—semidetached in the language of house-agents, but almost totally attached in the opinion of his son-in-law Richard—Thomas Turney was sitting before a fire. Outside the sun was still high enough in the late September sky to send down its rays unreddened by the lower atmosphere of London south of the river. It was not yet autumn; the weather still held the warmth and brilliance of the first summer of peace-time, the middle months so hot and clear that he had felt, while sitting on the Hill, that he was almost back in the summers remembered in youth—of ripening corn, of meadows forever green as he played with friends, brothers, sisters: golden day following golden day, all thoughts of death denied by the summer sun upon the Hill; and then the picture had tilted, the sky glared, and he was stricken by Spanish influenza, and thereafter his living was wrecked upon the fevered seas of memory: Papa, Mamma, brothers, sisters, long since shrunken to dust and bone in the dry-rot of coffin death. He cried out for the one who would save him—Marian, whom he had sent away.

Thomas Turney had survived the epidemic which was said to have killed more people in Europe than combatants during the four years of war upon the battlefields of France and Flanders. Unknown to him, the virus had taken off Marian, who had lived austerely in a little room in Greenwich, existing on an income of £8 a quarter, from which had been found rent, food, and gas; and although Papa was now ‘allowed down’ by the doctor, Hetty had not yet told him the sad news.

“Here’s your spectacles, Papa, and I’ve brought you some of your favourite books. You’ll soon be out and about again, meanwhile try not to worry, promise me?”

“Have you heard anything about Phillip, Hetty?”

“Not yet, Papa. He has left Folkestone, thank goodness, and is now at Cannock Chase, with the first battalion.” She put a volume of
The
Letters
of
Jane
Welsh
Carlyle
on the table beside
him. “Miss Cole will bring in your tea, and I’ll be in later, to play our usual game of cards, Papa!”

Thomas Turney did not want to read. He was gone beyond it, he thought with a dead feeling. Until his illness, in the eightieth year of his age, life had been sustained in part by the companionship of books. For more than two decades he had seen himself as a sinner, and had lived much in remorse; yet he had found comfort in the reassurance that he was as other men, as revealed in the pages of Dickens, Hardy, Fielding, Carlyle, and the Brontës; but his chief prop had been Shakespeare. More fortunate than Lear! Wolsey! Richard the Third! Aye, and Richard the Second. He knew that broken king’s lament by heart.

In the past he had been able to read the Bible to find peace within himself, and fortitude for what he knew could not be far off. When his spirits were raised, he could criticise the Old Testament objectively, saying that the chroniclers of military history and political intrigue lacked a sense of humour; but, he was wont to add to Hetty, who shared his enthusiasm for Shakespeare, it was one thing to be born in a pleasant, well-watered, fertile island remote from enemies, and another to be a nomadic tribe whose security was based on the desert and its own determination to survive by eternal diligence and a sublime conceit
in its own superiority over all other Semites. What was a miracle, he had been wont to say in the shelter on the Hill—ignoring the scepticism of Warbeck, whom now he avoided in thought, lest he be quelled by that pedantic, scoffing feller—was that a desert race should have produced inspiration of such quality and magnanimity, as was revealed in one of their number, Jesus born in Nazareth. That they did not accept Him was inevitable, for He was of all time, whereas they were of their own time. God was Love, that was all one needed to realise. Interpretations of dogma by men, professional clerics, did not interest him; and having no care for suburban respectability, he had not gone to Church (except for funerals) since coming to live in what he had called ‘a deadly swamp’ in the late ’nineties.

He sat by his fireside, on the mid-September afternoon, in a wooden chair which looked too frail to carry him. The arms and legs, and the back shaped like a bullock’s shoe, set with arrow-thin spokes, were slender. The chair weighed only a few pounds, but it was strong; except for the seat, which was of elm, the framework was of yew—straight-grained and cleft, not turned—and the design of the frame was such that the pressures or weights that each part bore were carried, by tension, to the four legs and so to the ground. Thomas Turney used to say that the chair was built like a cathedral, which owed its strength to stresses and strains defying the force of gravity. All life could be illustrated by that chair, he would say: the fundamental forces of life in eternal opposition could be used by men for happiness and goodness, or for wretchedness and evil. They were there; and each man was free to choose how he used them in his own life.

Upon the back of the yew-wood armchair hung a closely-knitted draught-shield, a sort of prolonged antimacassar, in brown and yellow worsted, the work of his elder sister Marian. The sight of it, the feel of the thick wool, gave him comfort; dear, patient Marian must come back. He must send her fifty pounds for a present. To Thomas Turney, one generation removed from yeomanry, the chair was as much part of his life as were his own legs and arms. Made in Jacobean times by a ‘hedgerow carpenter’, it was part of the history of his family, which had been tenants of the dukedom of Gaultshire for more than four centuries. His father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, all had sat in the chair: they too had known suffering and disappointment. They had endured, and in course of time had handed
down their work to their sons. But now—sitting in the chair, clasping its thin wooden arms of yew, once pink, now faded, polished by the touch of many hands—he groaned in spirit. What of his own sons? Charley—Hughie—Joey——

The chair had been of his household since the earliest London days of married life in Camberwell; in the tenacity and strength of the yew-wood were two hundred years of the spirit of the farmhouse standing on the blue gault clay two score and ten miles north-east of London. Turneys had farmed such land, according to the records, after the Wars of the Roses; according to that poor, dead, silly fellow Hugh, they were dispossessed of the Le Tournet estates at the battle of Bosworth, since they had supported Richard III. Unfortunately Shakespeare had omitted to mention the Le Tournet knights in his plays of the period; but Hughie had had a wit, once declaring, “The upstart from Stratford-upon-Avon had his limitations, sir!”

His mind wandered. With eyes unfocus’d, he recalled once saying to his dead boy, “Ah, Hughie, if this chair of bow-wood could speak! It would need the pen of Shakespeare to interpret what it would say——!”

“It would no doubt resound like a gatling gun to many a pot-gut overstuffed with crone-mutton, sir.” He could see Hugh now, as he sat, thin legs showing under his trousers, crutches extended beside him, his expression relapsed into brooding melancholy for an ambition never even attempted—“One day the world will know me for what I am—a great writer, of love and death and royster and laughter, beyond the lilies and languors of Victorianism”. Poor foolish fellow, all words, words, words.

*

Thomas William Turney was born in 1840, in the troublous times of the Reform Act. Besides the chair, he possessed, equally dear to him, the original duodecimo set of the works of William Shakespeare, which had belonged to his maternal grandfather, an Irish captain of the Royal Navy. The set was imperfect, for Hugh, before his death, had taken at various times one after another of the volumes and sold them to a bookseller at Charing Cross.

In the past Thomas Turney had suffered spasms of anguish, showing in bursts of rage, for this treachery of his own flesh and blood, this betrayal by one who once had been his cherished, dark-haired, quick-witted ‘little fellow’. Alas, alas, that he,
the boy’s father, had been in some part responsible for the poor boy’s tragic ending!

He stirred on the chair; spoke harshly of himself to himself as Hugh arose alive in his mind: instantaneously changing from grey-haired cripple groaning into death with tertiary syphilis to disdainful dark-haired undergraduate, to nervous, half-frightened, half-laughing child glimpsed in ancient sunlight. Hughie, Hughie, he groaned, to the ghost tottering, with angry eyes and thin set lips above the dark ramparts of his mind.
You
killed
my
mother!
,
and the apparition had collapsed, stick legs and stick crutches, upon the floor by the open door. Tell him, Sarah, tell the boy not to fret away what little life he has left in him; in Christ’s mercy tell him, Sarah, now that you are dead and know the truth.

Silence; the face of Sarah had avoided him at that terrible moment, after Hetty had come down the stairs, crying, “She is gone, she is gone”.

Ah, had he but shown more understanding, more sympathy, particularly to the children’s mother! Too late, too late! If ripeness was all, it involved the withering of the blossom, the death of its heyday beauty; if wisdom was the fruit, to what purpose could it be put, since only the old recognised it? A bitter fruit! His grandson Phillip came into his mind—foolish boy, foolish boy! Would he break his mother’s heart, as Hughie had broken Sarah’s?

The old man sighed, as he thought of forgiving, gentle Sarah, suffering all selfishness—he winced away from his own part in crucifying her—until she had died of a stroke; he thought of Charley, his eldest boy estranged, living abroad, perhaps never to write to him again, for Charley had not replied to his last three letters, even to the one which had been sent to console him for the death of young Tom. Sarah, poor, dear woman, in her grave beside Hughie, poor little fellow, in the cemetery, slowly shrinking away in yellow clay. Gone also Dome, his eldest girl widowed in the South African war, that splendid fellow, Sidney Cakebread, buried somewhere on the veldt; Sidney’s eldest boy, Hubert, in the chalk of Artois. He thought of Hamlet’s cry in the grave-digging scene.

“God, who knoweth the hearts of all men,” he muttered; and wiped his eyes with his red silk handkerchief. Then, blowing his nose, he felt more cheerful, and went to the sideboard for the schnapps bottle. Hetty had hidden the key in the aspidistra bowl on its mahogany what-not; there the key was, under the plate at the bottom.

The drink made him feel easier. Hetty—thank God for his younger daughter’s love and care! His little Hetty, gay despite what she had to put up with from that narrow-minded fellow, her husband, next door. Thank God too for Joey, a good boy from the beginning, never giving any trouble! Not much brain, certainly—but brains were a handicap, unless accompanied by stability of character!

The fiery spirit warming his belly, he reflected upon the scarce-believable fact that he had, very swiftly and in some unaccountable way, entered upon his ninth decade. He must live for the moment always—no corroding regrets. Why, bless his soul, he felt younger and clearer in spirit already!

Yes; but the nights? Those small hours of night when mistakes and stupidities and cruelties of his past life returned to garotte him with the triple bow-strings of remorse, guilt, and despair. Keep the watch-dog, liver, free to see off such spectres! Schnapps was good for the liver, as well as the kidneys. He poured himself another little drop.

It was curious how he was tormented by his
own
shortcoming in the hours before cock-crow; and never by
material
losses. Never once, in the dark and grinding small hours, had he been worried by thoughts of the loss of over five thousand pounds of his capital since the war. That was a regret of the day. It was the seeming little personal mistakes and acts of a man’s self that had power to torture his mind, decades afterwards, when they recurred in the lost landscape of night.

During the day, the depreciation of most of his holdings in both equities and commodities dragged at his spirit at least once a week; and, seeking consolation and solution, he usually talked about it with Hetty with another ever-present problem: How should he make his new Will? The trouble was that, as soon as he had resolved what he should do, his doubts invariably rose again to the fore. On scores of occasions, and more, Hetty had listened to his perplexities.

“Five thousand pun’ is a lot of money for a man of moderate
means, y’know, Hetty, especially in these uncertain times. That sum means that you and Dorrie and Joey, when I am gone, and your children and their children after you, and Charley’s two children in South Africa, will be deficient by that amount of my accumulated energy. That’s what money is, you know—stored-up energy. However, our friend Dora regards money as the root of all evil, he-he-he! She may well be able to afford such fancies—she lives on interest of her portion of her grandfather’s estate! People who talk of the evil of money might as soon talk of the evil of energy stored in the flywheel of a steam-engine turning a dynamo supplying electric light. But what I wanted to consult you about was this question of m’will, and more particularly, about the debentures of Emm, Cee, and Tee.”