Men at Arms Read Free Page A

He took his younger son’s share of the diminished family fortune, and settled in Kenya, living, it seemed to him afterwards, in unruffled good-humour beside a mountain lake where the air was always brilliant and keen and the flamingos rose at dawn first white, then pink, then a whirl of shadow passing across the glowing sky. He farmed assiduously and nearly made it pay. Then unaccountably his wife said that her health required a year in England. She wrote regularly and affectionately until one day, still affectionately, she informed him that she had fallen deeply in love with an acquaintance of theirs named Tommy Blackhouse; that Guy was not to be cross about it; that she wanted a divorce. ‘
And, please
,’ her letter ended, ‘
there’s to be no chivalrous nonsense of your going to Brighton and playing “the guilty party”. That would mean six months separation from Tommy and I won’t trust him out of my sight for six minutes, the beast.
’
    So Guy left Kenya and shortly afterwards his father, widowed and despairing of an heir, left Broome. The property was reduced by then to the house and park and home farm. In recent years it had achieved a certain celebrity. It was almost unique in contemporary England, having been held in uninterrupted male succession since the reign of Henry I. Mr Crouchback did not sell it. He let it. instead, to a convent and himself retired to Matchet, a near-by watering-place. And the sanctuary lamp still burned at Broome as of old.
    No one was more conscious of the decline of the House of Crouchback than Guy’s brother-in-law, Arthur Box-Bender, who had married Angela in 1914 when Broome seemed set unalterably in the firmament, a celestial body emanating tradition and unobstrusive authority. Box-Bender was not a man of family and he respected Angela’s pedigree. He even at one time considered the addition of Crouchback to his own name, in place of either Box or Bender, both of which, seemed easily dispensable, but Mr Crouchback’s chilling indifference and Angela’s ridicule quickly discouraged him. He was not a Catholic and he thought it Guy’s plain duty to marry again, preferably someone with money, and carry on his line. He was not a sensitive man and he could not approve Guy’s hiding himself away. He ought to take over the home farm at Broome. He ought to go into politics. People like Guy, he freely stated, owed something to their country; but when at the end of August 1939 Guy presented himself in London with the object of paying that debt, Arthur Box-Bender was not sympathetic.
    ‘My dear Guy,’ he said, ‘be your age.’
    Box-Bender was fifty-six and a Member of Parliament. Many years ago he had served quite creditably in a rifle regiment; he had a son serving with them now. For him soldiering was something that belonged to extreme youth, like butterscotch and catapults. Guy at thirty-five, shortly to be thirty-six, still looked on himself as a young man. Time had stood still for him during the last eight years. It had advanced swiftly for Box-Bender.
    ‘Can you seriously imagine yourself sprinting about at the head of a platoon?”
    ‘Well, yes,’ said Guy. ‘That’s exactly what I did imagine.’
    Guy usually stayed with Box-Bender in Lowndes Square when he was in London. He had come straight to him now from Victoria but found his sister Angela away in the country and the house already half dismantled. Box-Bender’s study was the last room to be left untouched. They were sitting there now before going out to dinner,
    ‘I’m afraid you won’t get much encouragement. All that sort of thing happened in 1914 retired colonels dyeing their hair and enlisting in the ranks. I remember it. I was there. All very gallant of course but it won’t happen this time. The whole thing is planned. The Government know just how many men they can handle; they know where they can get them; they’ll take them in their own time. At the moment we haven’t got the accommodation or the