Читать книгу Royal Regiment - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 42
Оглавление§ 1
Rockingham, contrary to his habit, had not slept well; and woke feeling slightly depressed. Outside, a little drizzle was falling. On the way to his bath he encountered Bryce-Atkinson, unshaved in a flamboyant dressing gown of purple and yellow.
“Thought I’d better warn you”, said Bryce-Atkinson. “We shall all be dragged to church.”
Breakfast, announced by a gong and served at nine-thirty to the second, was rather a silent function.
“Discipline”, pronounced Hawk Wethered, as the three men smoked their pipes afterwards. “I don’t want to go any more than you probably do. Especially with this leg of mine. But when one possesses an ancestral home the least one can do is to live up to the traditions.”
“Is the church far, sir?” asked Rockingham from one of the hall windows.
“About a mile by the short cut. Camilla’s driving me. Her car only takes three. If it’s stopped raining, you two had better walk.”
He hobbled off.
“Throwing his weight about a bit”, commented his brigade major over the rim of a Sunday paper. “Not as young as he was. That toss hasn’t done his temper any good. Has the rain stopped?”
“More or less.”
“Then we may as well foot it. Just wait till I’ve had a word with Diana.” And he, too, went off, leaving Rockingham alone with the papers—from which he was soon disturbed by Camilla, already in gauntlets and a short leopardskin coat.
“Guy’s being rather peremptory this morning”, she smiled. “We could just as easily have had the big car out. I expect you find this churchgoing rather an imposition anyway.”
Told, “Oh, no. I always attend service if I possibly can”, she expressed surprise.
“Somehow I didn’t think of you as religious”, she said.
That she should have been thinking of him at all was a strange pleasure. Realising that such thoughts had been mutual, he experienced a renewal of selfconsciousness, a difficulty in continuing the conversation.
“Guy isn’t”, she went on. “Neither am I. Though I was brought up very strictly. Perhaps that’s the reason. But we’ve rather a good preacher. You’ll enjoy listening to him.”
“They’re rare nowadays.”
“Not with us. Oratory comes naturally to Americans.”
“I suppose you are more talkative ... As a nation, I mean.”
She smiled again—obviously at his change of front. A spark of understanding leaped between them. Nevertheless he felt glad when Bryce-Atkinson called from the doorway, “We’d better be getting a move on, Rockingham. Otherwise we’ll be late for the parade”.
§ 2
The rain had stopped by the time the two majors set off to the sound of church bells across the fieldpath at the back of the house.
“My young woman is as sick as mud”, confided Bryce-Atkinson. “She does like her long lie on the Sabbath. But, as I tell her, it’s no good rubbing the old man up the wrong way. Besides, I like him. Always have and always shall. Sounds silly, I know, but he’s my ideal soldier. If only he weren’t given to rubbing people up the wrong way, he’d be a lot higher up the ladder.”
“Quite.”
They followed the path—one talkative, the other answering in monosyllables—till they came to a stile. Clambering over this, they reached the side road Rockingham had taken on the previous afternoon. Five hundred yards brought them to the village war memorial—a cross set in a square of green turf backed by the wall of a churchyard.
“Rather good, that”, commented Bryce-Atkinson.
He stopped to read the names engraved on the plinth of the cross.
“Seems a hell of a long time ago”, he went on. “Makes one feel about a hundred. Wonder when we’ll have the next one. Pretty soon, I imagine. Nice mixup it’ll be too. Hope the Boches’ll be on our side this time. I can’t stand the French at any price.”
He reflected a moment before continuing, “When it breaks out, I think I shall send those kids of mine down to Di’s mother. She lives in Devonshire. They ought to be safe enough there”.
“You’re joking?”
“Well—I shan’t send ’em this month. But it’s the sort of thing one has to think about.”
“Aren’t you letting the Hawk influence you?”
“Possibly. His idea is——”
But, before Bryce-Atkinson could finish that sentence, Camilla drove her black and red coupé slowly past them, and parked it alongside the wall with its radiator cap close to the nearby lychgate.
The bells were sounding their last peals by then. They ceased, almost as though by order, just as Hawk Wethered shepherded his party into his family pew.
§ 3
The church—small, but beautifully proportioned, and mellow with old glass—was tolerably full; the service, from the minister’s first, “Let us humbly confess our sins to Almighty God”, as short as ritual permitted; the music and the singing well above the average.
So much, Rockingham realised—but no more. Willy nilly, his mind strayed. Had this man beside him really been joking when he spoke of sending his two little girls to Devonshire? Or did he agree with that other man, who only sat while the rest of them were kneeling, at the end of the pew? War again? The prospect seemed so impossible, so utterly cruel, so hopelessly stupid. And yet ...
“One imagined it was impossible last time”, he remembered; and his thoughts turned from the Hawk to Camilla. Lovely, she looked again this morning. But somehow sad.
His mind still wandering, he knew that he must have caught her off her guard. She had been gazing towards the altar. Now she half-turned her head. It seemed to him that her lips forced the semblance of a smile. “Is she happy?” he asked himself.
But the low voice of Diana Bryce-Atkinson stopped thought.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t dwell on the sermon”, she whispered. With the minister in his pulpit, however, even her wandering attention was caught and held.
The man—tall and prematurely white of hair—spoke without preamble in a voice that betrayed nothing of affectation.
“I’m afraid I haven’t prepared anything today”, he began. “As some of you will realise, I’ve had rather a busy week. But I’ve good news for you. We shall have our main water in the village before the summer; and by the winter we should have our electric light. These benefits—I venture to suggest to you—are a reminder that God helps those who help themselves. I had thought of making that my theme this morning. But it seemed a little presumptuous. So, instead, I’ve chosen a text you all know—it is from the first epistle of Saint Peter, the seventeenth verse of the second chapter—‘Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king’.”
“Honour the king”, repeated the tall man in the pulpit; and, just for a second, his inspiration failed.
“Like good soldiers”, he said next; and again inspiration seemed to fail him.
Then, abruptly, he was continuing:
“We in England have good reason to honour our new king, who fought for us in wartime, who has worked for us in peacetime”.
And after that for many minutes—or so it seemed to Rockingham—the gift of tongues fell on him; so that it was no more the simple parish priest but a very “man of God” who swept into his peroration:
“Love the brotherhood! I feel that he is of our very brotherhood, this young man upon whom it has pleased the Almighty to lay the burden of kingship. I feel that it might well be of his father that the poet wrote, ‘Over all whose realms to their last isle, Commingled with the gloom of imminent war, The shadow of his loss drew like eclipse, Darkening the world’; and of our new king himself:
“Not swaying to this faction or to that,
Not making his high place the lawless perch
Of wing’d ambitions, nor a vantage-ground
For pleasure; but thro’ all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,
Before a thousand peering littlenesses,
In that fierce light which beats upon a throne ...
“That fierce light”, repeated the preacher. “My friends, before we leave our church this morning, let us all pray for him upon whose every action it will beat unceasingly. Let us pray that the light may find no blot to blacken; and that England’s Edward the Eighth may remain, like his father before him, laborious for her people.
“Laborious for her people and her poor”, quoted the tall man with the prematurely white hair; and to Rusty Rockingham it still seemed that he was God’s man as he ceased, and came slowly down among them, and turned from them, and went to his own place.
