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«Harm! Why, Samuel, I must guard our coast from invasion. The Normans, the Vikings, the Saxons. In the coming years I'll walk the entire isle, stand guard from Dover north on round the reefs and back through Folkestone, here again.»
«Will Hitler invade, chum?»
«He and his iron ghosts just might.»
«And how will you fight him, Harry?»
«Do you think I walk alone? No. Along the way, I may find Caesar on the shore. He loved it so he left a road or two. Those roads I'll take, and borrow just those ghosts of choice invaders to repel less choice. It's up to me, yes, to commit or uncommit ghosts, choose or not choose out of the whole damn history of the land?»
«It is. It is.»
The last man wheeled to the north and then to the west and then to the south.
«And when I've seen all's well from castle here to lighthouse there, and listened to battles of gunfires in the plunge off Firth, and bagpiped round Scotland with a sour mean pipe, m each New Year's week, Sam, I'll scull back down-Thames and there each December 31st to the end of my life, the night watchman of London, meaning me, yes, me, will make his clock rounds and say out the bells of the old rhymed churches. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens. Bow bells. St. Marguerite's. Paul's. I shall dance rope-ends for you, Sam, and hope the cold wind blown south to the warm wind wherever you are stirs some small gray hairs in your sunburnt ears.»
«I'll be listening, Harry.»
«Listen more! I'll sit in the houses of Lords and Commons and debate, losing one hour but to win the next. And say that never before in history did so many owe so much to so few and hear the sirens again from old remembered records and things broadcast before we both were born.
«And a few seconds before January 1st I shall climb and lodge with mice in Big Ben as it strikes the changing of the year.
«And somewhere along the line, no doubt, I shall sit on the Stone of Scone.»
«You wouldn't!»
«Wouldn't I? Or the place where it was, anyway, before they mailed it south to Summer's Bay. And hand me some sort of sceptre, a frozen snake perhaps stunned by snow from some December garden. And fit a kind of paste-up crown upon my head. And name me friend to Richard, Henry, outcast kin of Elizabeths I and II. Alone in Westminster's desert with Kipling
«You might, and who would blame you?»
Samuel Welles bearhugged him again, then broke and half ran for his waiting machine. Halfway he turned to call back:
«Good God. I just thought. Your name
«Not bad.»
«Forgive me for leaving?!»
«The sun forgives all, Samuel. Go where it wants you.»
«But will England forgive?»
«England is where her people are. I stay with old bones. You go with her sweet flesh, Sam, her fair sunburnt skin and blooded body, get!»
«Good-bye.»
«Good be with you, too, oh you and that bright yellow sport shirt!»
And the wind snatched between and though both yelled more neither heard, waved, and Samuel hauled himself into that machine which swarmed the air and floated off like a vast white summer flower.
And the last man left behind in great gasps and sobs cried out to himself:
Harry! Do you hate change? Against progress? You do see, don't you, the reasons for all this? That ships and jets and planes and a promise of weather piped all the folk away? I see, he said, I see. How could they resist when at long last forever August lay just across the sill?
Yes, yes! He wept and ground his teeth and leaned up from the cliff rim to shake his fists at the vanishing craft in the sky.
«Traitors! Come back!»
You can't leave old England, can't leave Pip and Humbug, Iron Duke and Trafalgar, the Horse Guard in the rain, London burning, buzz bombs and sirens, the new babe held high on the palace balcony, Churchill's funeral cortege still in the street, man,
Upon his knees, at the cliffs edge, the last and final king of England, Harry Smith wept alone.
The helicopter was gone now, called toward august isles where summer sang its sweetness in the birds.
The old man turned to see the countryside and thought, why this is how it was one hundred thousand years ago. A great silence and a great wilderness and now, quite late, the empty shell towns and King Henry, Old Harry, the Ninth.
He rummaged half blindly about in the grass and found his lost book bag and chocolate bits in a sack and hoisted his Bible, and Shakespeare and much-tumbed Johnson and much-tongued Dickens and Dryden and Pope, and stood out on the road that led all round England.
Tomorrow: Christmas. He wished the world well. Its people had gifted themselves already with sun, all over the globe. Sweden lay empty. Norway had flown. None lived any longer in God's cold climes. All basked upon the continental hearths of His best lands in fair winds under mild skies. No more fights just to survive. Men, reborn like Christ on such as tomorrow, in southern places, were truly returned to an eternal and fresh-grown manger.
Tonight, in some church, he would ask forgiveness for calling them traitors.
«One last thing, Harry. Blue.»
«Blue?» he asked himself.
«Somewhere down the road find some blue chalk. Didn't English men once color themselves with such?»
«Blue men, yes, from head to foot!»
«Our ends are in our beginnings, eh?»
He pulled his cap tight. The wind was cold. He tasted the first snowflakes that fell to brush his lips.
«O remarkable boy!» he said, leaning from an imaginary window on a golden Christmas morn, an old man reborn and gasping for joy, «Delightful boy, there, is the great bird, the turkey, still hung in the poulterer's window down the way?»
«It's hanging there now,» said the boy.
«Go buy it! Come back with the man and I'll give you a shilling. Come back in less than five minutes and I'll give you a crown!»
And the boy went to fetch.
And buttoning his coat, carrying his books. Old Harry Ebenezer Scrooge Julius Caesar Pickwick Pip and half a thousand others marched off along the road in winter weather. The road was long and beautiful. The waves were gunflre on the coast. The wind was bagpipes in the north.
Ten minutes later, when he had gone singing beyond a hill, by the look of it, all the lands of England seemed ready for a people who someday soon in history might arrive….
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