The First of July(47)

Dick had said nothing about his intentions to be a soldier, and the first I knew of it was him coming to say good-bye. Mr. Richmond publicly gave him and another man, a young lad from stores, the five guineas he’d promised. Florence kissed him, confirming the view I’d formed of her excitability, not that Dick looked anything but embarrassed.

“These men are heroes,” Mr. Richmond said. I knew it was wrong of me but, after my course on the Greeks, I thought there was more to being a hero than signing your name, being kissed by Florence, and saying good-bye to a world of gentlemen’s trunks, valises, and Gladstone bags.

Dick looked a bit proud, as well as a bit awkward, when he came to shake my hand, knowing, I think, that my own position had just gotten a little harder.

“If you should ever think of joining,” he said, “the Bedfordshires seem a good lot. Infantry. Horses make me chesty.” Then he shook my hand again.

“By the by,” he said, “I’m giving up my lodgings for the duration and I don’t have any family, so I was wondering if you’d take the Hercules, look after it until I come back?” He must have misread the expression on my face, because he added quickly “Only if you want it, of course. It might be useful. I mean, you could ride it around. Even go to Box Hill.” He tried a smile.

So that’s how I came to have a bicycle for my own use, although I’d have needed a heart of stone not to feel some unease and I hoped the lads of the Bedfordshires would do all right.

About this time, my old father fell ill. Mr. Frederick Richmond gave me leave for one week, and I traveled back to Devonshire. My landlady let me leave the Hercules in the shed. I cleaned and greased it, sad that I had taken it out only once since Dick left but full of ideas for what I might achieve on my return.

The old man had gotten through the worst by the time I arrived, though it was a shock to see the years on him since I’d last been there. What was troubling him most, I thought, was spleen. The news was that soldiers who had fallen in battle were being buried where they lay. Without coffins. Or not buried at all, but left in fields to rot in their boots, one of the brothers from Leafield Farm had told him. I tried to reason with Dad. If there wasn’t a war, I said, they wouldn’t be dead, so they wouldn’t be in his coffins anyway.

“But they would have died sooner or later,” said my father. “And needed coffining then.”

I didn’t like to point out that these dead soldiers were lads of twenty and that in the normal way of things by the time they were of a dying age, he’d himself long have been six foot under. But then it turned out that even those locals who, in his words, “died like good Christians” (by which he usually meant paying his bill promptly) were, in respect of the war, seeking simpler service than in times past. Now even the magistrate, the gentleman farmer, and the lawyer’s widow wanted no display in matters funereal, no silk-lined coffins, no fine woods, no marquetry. So suddenly I did feel sorry for the old man, though at least his being irked at the War Office meant he wasn’t after me about volunteering. In fact, quite the reverse. It turned out nearly all my boyhood pals had gone. The 9th Devons had swept them up, and they were even now on their way to France.

“You won’t go, son, will you?” Dad had asked one evening. “You’re all I’ve got.”

Two feelings hit me hard. One was that I was fond of the old man, for all his curmudgeonly ways, and two was that maybe this war business was bigger than my own inclinations.

I got back to London and spent a while in the shed with the bike, buffing the saddle and easing the bell. I oiled the gears. The spokes shone like new; only a little wear of the tires revealed that it had been ridden at all. It was a fine evening and I had intended to ride to the Institute, for a talk on Alpine Beauty which Connie had been eager to catch, but I had the beginnings of a headache and things on my mind. Since I had tried to explain my predicament to Connie, there had been a cooling in her manner and, every time we met, Nancy was with her and talking nineteen to the dozen. Connie must have become deaf to it, because Nancy was forever spotting soldiers in the street and imagining how they would be with their sweethearts and comparing Army uniforms with those of Navy lads.

The next Monday, I was off to Messrs. Lord and Stevas, military outfitters of Duke Street, St. James. I would take a cut in pay, I would be more junior, but, in using my knowledge of selling goods toward military ends, I could do my bit for the war. Or so I thought. Mr. Frederick Richmond—any doubts about my patriotism having been assuaged by his wrongly held belief that my father was trembling on the brink of the final abyss and I was, with proper filial respect, sacrificing my own longing to serve my country until he was beyond my attentions—had provided me with a splendid reference.