Give Us This Day Read Free Page B

Weather,” as though, in dominating one-fifth of the world’s surface, the British had tamed not merely tribes but elements.
    Stationed at Hyde Park Gardens with his eldest daughter Stella, her farmer husband Denzil, four of Stella’s children, his own youngest son Edward, and youngest daughter Margaret, Adam was content to view it as “appropriate” weather. There had been times, during his long climb to affluence, when he had quarrelled with the cult of national arrogance, but success had mellowed him. At seventy, he saw nothing remarkable about a cloudless day for a tribal rite of these dimensions. It was to be looked for and, in the nature of things, it had arrived. God, he had often jested, was an Englishman. Nothing else could account for the astounding luck of the English since Waterloo. Today the jest was muted. It had to be in the face of the evidence spread below as the procession unrolled, before his eyes, like a vast, varicoloured carpet. There would come a time, his commonsense predicted, when the balloon would burst, possibly with a God almighty bang, but that time was not yet; and it occurred to him, as the throb of martial music was heard from the direction of Constitution Hill, that he might have been over-hasty in his claim that national pride was hurrying towards its inevitable fall. Every race and every creed under the sun was parading down there and at the very head of the procession, mounted on the huge grey he was said to have ridden to Khandahar, was a small, compact figure; this reminded him vividly of an occasion forty years ago when he and Roberts of Khandahar had shared barrack and bivouac in an India torn by strife and had later parted company with a touch of mutual acrimony, Roberts in pursuit of the new Rome, himself to join in the free-for-all at home.
    Forty years had not blurred the clarity of his recollection of that parting. He had been convinced then that the little man on the grey was a romantic visionary, who would soon get himself killed in a village that was not even marked on a map. Well, he never minded admitting a misjudgment, and here was the most glaring of his life. Roberts had not only survived and seen his boyish dreams translated into fact; he had also gone forward to become a legend in his own lifetime and here were the cheers of a million Cockneys to prove it. He said, as the grey curvetted below, “He had it right after all then…!” and when Henrietta asked him what he had said he smiled and shook his head, saying, “Nothing…nothing of any consequence, m’dear. Simply reminding myself that Roberts and I once rode knee to knee in battles neither of us expected to survive.” But although he dismissed his association with Roberts in such lighthearted terms, Henrietta took pride in it and showed as much by squeezing his hand. It wasn’t something you could let drop at a garden-party or a soiree—that one’s husband was on Christian-name terms with the most famous soldier in the world—but one could bask in the knowledge just the same.
    * * *
    Half-a-mile to the east, at a tall window looking over Green Park, Major Alexander Swann, eldest of the Swann boys, and the only one among them to follow the traditional Swann profession of arms, might have seen it as good campaigning weather. Under a sun as brassy as this the ground would lie baked and the rivers would run low, permitting the rapid movement of troops across almost any kind of terrain, yet there was scepticism in his survey of the colourful assembly that passed, with its companies of colonials, its emphasis on variety, sounding brass, good dressing, and spit-and-polish turnout. Alex, who regarded himself as a forwardlooking professional, saw it as a circus rather than a demonstration of military might. It was a parade rooted, not in the future and not even in the present, but in an era when his grandfather had ridden down from the Pyrenees to bring Marshal Soult to battle. A single Maxim gun, well-sited