I paused by the dog-rose, remembering how my wife had looked forward to the gentle scent of this loveliest of English flowers. She had never liked India. Her life consisted of boredom and the anticipation of ‘coming back’ in equal measure. Alas, that the greedy sub-continent had claimed her just a month before I was due to retire! Nature’s laws are importunate and harsh. How she would have loathed it, had she known her final resting-place would be the vast cemetery at Chittagong, under the rattling palms — and not in a green and secluded English churchyard.
I wept a little beside the dog-rose, and felt foolish.
I met the Squire the next day. I was on foot, he was in his latest motor-car, whose breeding appeared impeccable — but I confess that I cannot recall the exact stable. It was large and red and curving, with an impressive brass horn which Allun would apply without fail at every corner, serving much the same purpose as the trumpets sounded before the royal train in days of yore. It had a canvas top which, this being a fine day, was fully lowered; we talked, therefore, without impediment, though I have to say that my eyes were uncomfortably full of the dust that the motor-car had churned up in her wake, and which now gently blew down the high street towards us. I had not wanted to talk with the Chief, but my passing had coincided with Allun applying the brakes very hard to avoid a grocer’s dray at the corner by the church, and the Squire had hailed me from his temporarily stalled position.
I admired his steed, and so on, but soon enough we were conversing on the approaching enterprise. I had expressed a doubt the previous week about my physical prowess, being a gangly fellow the far side of sixty. I returned to this theme by the church but the Squire once again dismissed my trepidations and stated that my exact mind and quiet presence would fully make up for any muscular defects. He slapped the side of the car with great vigour and brought up the subject of Cullurne. I tip-toed about it, but the Squire’s bristly, pale, slightly swollen visage thrust itself towards me; although the dray had clip-clopped off, the road was not yet clear in the Squire’s head. There existed a peculiar dependancy in the mind of our village Chief which thralled both us and him; the lowliest member of the community could exert a hold over the Squire by the merest hint of disapproval. This was the burr that snagged him. If the employees of the Manor did not support his various schemes to the hilt, they were the subject of furious enquiry. Four maids were dismissed for making faces at his steam-powered dining-room trolley. It was thrown out soon after — almost certainly because their ridicule had not, nay, could not be assuaged. This is the reason he preferred furious cajolery on his part to outright rejection: knowing this, the village preferred to let him be, and wore two faces.
‘Impudence, Fergusson! Damned impudence!’
I replied that, having talked to the guilty party the previous day, there were feelings involved which amounted to a kind of religious dread.
‘Absolutely,’ he thundered out, causing Allun in front to wipe the windscreen carefully with a rag, ‘the man’s not only impudent but craven! A lot of bunkum, Fergusson. The man’s about as religious as my left ****!’
Knowing the Squire’s unfortunate capacity for ‘saucy’ talk, and feeling this was a prelude to such, I steered away from further considerations of the theological content of his anatomy, and pointed out that his exacavating ‘team’ was quite sufficient in number, given the size of the barrow. But the Squire’s concern was not with practicalities, but the deeper realms of our soul, those murky darknesses that others’ actions swirl into and slap and clap against: voicing our earliest fears; sounding our pro-foundest terrors.
‘Treasure-hunt!’ came the spittle-spumed response. ‘That’s what they call it, Fergusson. Treasure-hunt! Now where d’you think they got that from, eh? The Vicar and his cronies. Eh? What? Treasure-hunt!’
A great thump on the door of the motor-car, a bark at Allun, and the road swirled once more into clouds, from which tiny chips of granite were expelled towards me — a most suitable afterword. An old man on a bench outside the Green Man inn, by the name of Harry Dimmick, added to the general contamination by expectorating in the direction of what the village termed ‘that bloody stink-pot’ (showing as little sense of differentiation between the various models as I), and cackling in a manner I found alarming.
A few days after the first of our finds, or a few days after the declaration of war — on whichever hook the reader would prefer to hang that 4th of August — the sound of hammering resounded around the square in Ulverton, small children with hoops (as much in fashion then as now, I seem to recall) gathered in knots about the personage hammering, and some of them shouted out, as best they could, the words RECRUITMENT and MEETING. This meaning nothing to them, they ran to the fields to tell their parents or elder siblings, who — being waist-deep in docks and thistles, et cetera — told them to be gone (if in less delicate and probably unprintable terms), thus returning the children posthaste to the elusive source, whose polysyllabic mysteries were stared at on the basis of the same principle that had the unlettered Charlemagne sleeping with the Bible beneath his pillow: knowledge may be yielded up by sheer proximity.
Thus it was that, returning from the excavation somewhat earlier than usual, owing to a mild attack of heat-stroke, I was accosted by piping voices, and explained as best I could to the gathered throng of dirty knees and faces and dirtier skirts (the recent habit of dressing little boys in boys’ garments was not yet taken up in 1914) the meaning of RECRUITMENT; while the elders of the village, some of whom must have been familiar with the King’s shilling, looked on with their customary suspicion at the newcomer’s lofty cognisance of things beyond the Fogbourne vale.
Suffice to say that explaining to those little scruffy beings the principles of our conduct of war, which necessitates the calling forth of suicidal impulses, and the separation of husband from wife, son from mother, brother from sister, but most especially alarming in their eyes, father from child, was not the easiest task allotted to me, and quite surpassed the stickiest situation ever encountered in India. One charming little fellow, by the name of Stephen Bunce, hand in hand with his minuscule sister, stared up at me with such a profound look of innocence on his wee face that tears all but sprang to my eyes as I talked. That this onerous task was given to me at all is still to be regretted, for ever since (I feel) those same children have looked upon me as some kings in ancient plays look upon the Messenger: as somehow culpable of the havoc he brings news of. Though they are now (even the innocent little Stephen) all large and lusty and grown-up, it is not just my outsider complex that causes me to feel a chill, a little shiver of hatred and blame, as one of them passes me in the lane. Now imagine that sense increased tenfold, twentyfold, in the friable mind of the Squire — but the reader will perceive I am jumping ahead.
In the days before the meeting, only one urn and a small food vessel were uncovered from the newly-exposed layers of the barrow, but anticipation, and the hypnotic rhythm of the trowels, somehow made talk of the war superfluous. The last was a general blur of excitement and dread; this was a carefully delineated reality. Indeed, I would sleep at night with the same patch of chalky earth revolving before my eyes in vivid proximity and detail, with the mournful calls of peewits still sounding in my ears. It was at least an improvement on shakily bobbing fans and the bloated corpses of dogs.