“I ought to be,” Phil Bentley answered. “You see, it’s the way I earn my living.”
“Come on, Flax,” the General said. “They’re going to let us off now.”
He and Flax could find their way upstairs themselves, he said. If it was all right, we would have breakfast at eight sharp, and he would be glad to start again directly after breakfast.
“Well, good night, young lady,” he said to Miss Fineholt. “Good night, Sid.” He stopped at the library door as though he had forgotten something. “I wouldn’t say I’m obliged to you for this,” he said to Phil Bentley, “but just the same, it’s quite an experience. I have been before a lot of examining boards and a couple of investigative bodies, but I have never been through anything quite like this. Good night. I suppose you want to sit around and have a Goodwin session, don’t you?”
Of course it was exactly what we were going to do, but Melville Goodwin spoke again before any of us could answer.
“Well, go ahead. I don’t blame you,” he said. “I didn’t know I’d remember so much. It’s a funny thing—the past.” His voice trailed off, and his gaze was not focused on anything. “Maybe there isn’t really any past. Maybe it’s all back there waiting for you to find it.… Well, good night.”
The door closed on General Goodwin, and Phil Bentley looked as though his efforts as Master of Ceremonies had tired him. He took off his glasses and put them in his pocket. Without them his face looked blank and naked. He glanced at Miss Fineholt, who was arranging her notes, and then he found his handkerchief and rubbed it across his forehead.
“Sid,” he said, “did you ever go through anything like that?”
“No,” I said, “not exactly.” And for a second we were bound together by some unspoken sort of understanding.
Phil Bentley and I had been trained in the same practical school and spoke the same trade language. I was familiar myself with the problems of an interview. I knew that he was trying to find some salient feature in Melville Goodwin’s character which, when properly stressed, would make the General stand out as an individual, and I could almost see Phil’s mind retracing those last three hours in search of a central theme.
“You know,” he said, “I have a certain reputation for these pieces I do. I’ve worked on actors and artists and producers, judges, politicians, labor leaders, industrialists and pugilists, but I’ve never seen anyone like Goodwin.”
“Well,” I said, “everyone’s different. At least everyone ought to be.”
“Yes,” Phil Bentley said, “but with everyone I’ve done up to now, there has been some sort of reference point. I wish I knew what bothers me about this. I can’t seem to put my finger on it. I don’t know whether he’s bright or stupid. He’s all there, but I don’t know how to begin taking him apart.”
“Listen, Phil,” I said, “maybe you’ve never done a general. Generals can’t afford to be individuals until they get three stars, and this one has two. He’s only a major general.”
Phil Bentley did not answer me directly.
“Maybe I’ve underrated him,” he said. “Maybe he’s got a sense of humor and his tongue in his cheek. Maybe Horatio Alger had a sense of humor.”
“What’s Alger got to do with it?” I asked.
Phil Bentley stood in the center of the room looking lost without his glasses.
“You see what I mean, punching that boy in the nose and the parade, and the ‘Old Glory Boys’ and ‘Horatius at the Bridge.’ It’s all too good, Sidney. If Horatio Alger had wanted to write a boys’ book about a military hero, that’s exactly the sort of stuff he would have used. That’s what I mean. It’s too damned perfect to be true. Goodwin can’t be the way he describes himself. No one can be a complete ‘Old Glory Boy.’”
We stared at each other silently, each trying unsuccessfully to identify himself with Melville Goodwin.
“Look, Phil,” I said, “maybe we were ‘Old Glory Boys’ once ourselves. The Alger books made a lot of sense to me once.”
Phil Bentley shook his head impatiently and his hands moved in quick, nervous gestures.
“Yes, Sidney,” he said, “yes—I’m not a damn fool; but everyone outgrows that sort of thing. No one could possibly stay that way and keep out of an institution. Nothing is as simple as that, Sid. Goodwin isn’t as easy as that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just possible he might be.”
It was just possible, I was thinking, that Bentley and I had both become too complicated to appreciate any longer the simplicity of a single driving purpose.
“No, no,” Phil Bentley said, “no one could be like that.”
Yet I was still thinking that we should face the possibility, and that memoirs I had read written by military men all fell into the same harsh pattern.
“Just remember, he isn’t like you and me, Phil,” I said. “He hasn’t had to be worried by the same things. He’s led a very protected life.”
Phil Bentley shook his head. He was laying aside his problems for the night.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s close up shop for a while. Make a note to call up the office tomorrow morning and have them send someone down to take candid photographs of him, will you, Myra?”
After putting out the lights, and before I started upstairs, I saw Farouche in his large, comfortable basket beneath the table in the hall. As soon as he saw me, he leaped up and seized his rubber ring and walked toward me wagging his plumed tail.
“Go back to bed,” I told him, but instead of going, he dropped the ring carelessly at my feet and only grabbed it when I stooped to pick it up. Farouche himself had a simple mind and in his own way was an “Old Glory Boy.”
The lights were out in our room upstairs, but Helen, like Farouche, was still awake.
“Is that you, Sid?” she asked.
“Who did you think it might be?” I asked her. “The Joint Chiefs?”
“Naturally,” she said. “I’ve been learning a lot about rank.”
“Oh,” I said, “you mean you’ve been talking to Mrs. Goodwin?”
“Who else would there be?” she said. “We sat up until half past ten. She was very sweet to me, but I didn’t have the rank.”
“What else did you talk about?” I asked.
“Mostly about the General when he was a younger officer at a place called Fort Bailey,” she said. “It was before they were ordered to the Philippines. Robert was born at the base hospital. Sid, it all gave me a very funny feeling.”
She had to think for a while when I asked her what sort of feeling.
“I seemed so detached from it,” she said. “I couldn’t place myself in it at all.”
It is not wholly fair to say that Melville Goodwin intentionally made a command post out of Savin Hill. Actually he did his best to be a guest and not an occupying force. His only difficulty was that he had not been obliged for years to adjust himself to any environment, because circumstances had invariably compelled him to manufacture his own. He was most appreciative at breakfast the next morning. If I felt rebuked at finding him waiting with Colonel Flax when I arrived downstairs at four minutes after eight, this only arose from old habit on my part and not because of his attitude.
“I should have told you to sit right down, sir,” I said, “and to ring for breakfast.”
He smiled in a gracious way that indicated that no apology was necessary. His face shone from assiduous shaving, and he did not need to say that he had slept well.
“Think nothing of it, Sid,” he said. “Bentley and the girl aren’t down yet either. I guess I ran that writer ragged last night.”
Nevertheless I had kept him waiting, and without meaning to do so, he was implying that Phil Bentley, too, was keeping him waiting—but there was no need for apology, he said. He was a grateful guest in a civilian house and he was not a martinet. He was only accustomed to having things run on schedule.
“You didn’t run him ragged,” I said, “but these newspaper people are always late
in the morning. What would you like for breakfast, sir?”
“Bacon and eggs and coffee,” the General said, “the eggs sunny side up. I’m just a country boy, and I like a country breakfast, but I can settle for anything, as long as there’s coffee.”
“It’s just the same with me, Mr. Skelton,” Colonel Flax said, “as long as there’s coffee.”
“Are you just a country boy, too, Colonel Flax?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Colonel Flax said, “I was raised in Kansas.”
“Is that so?” the General said. “Whereabouts in Kansas?”
“Forty miles outside of Topeka, General,” the colonel said.
“Topeka?” Mel Goodwin said. “I saw Topeka last back in ’40 on my way to Texas when I was with the Inspector General’s office. There was a hotel there with pitchers shaped like birds.”
“You mean the Jayhawk, sir?” the colonel said.
“That’s right,” the General said. “It was summer and it was hot as hell.”
“It does get pretty hot there in the summer,” Colonel Flax said.
“But I had a fine T-bone steak,” the General said, “and it was reasonable. I was trying to save money out of travel pay.”
“They still have good steaks in Topeka, sir,” the colonel said.
The conversation moved in a well-worn groove. We were back in an officers’ mess where one talked politely about nothing, while one thought of the day and the timetable.
“I wonder where that writer is,” the General said, and he rose abruptly and placed his napkin on the table.
“Maybe I had better go and find out, sir,” I said.
“Oh no,” the General answered, “don’t disturb him, Sid. Let’s you and I go for a walk. I like a walk after breakfast. You wait for the writer, will you, Colonel? Tell him we’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
It was another fine bright morning with a cool faint haze over the fields around us.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get moving. I want to see those stables.”
“There’s nothing in them,” I said.
“That’s all right,” he answered, “let’s see them anyway,” and then he added, “I’d like to get this interviewing over. Muriel says I ought to be down in Washington, finding out what’s cooking.”
He was walking rapidly, and I fell into military step beside him.
“It looks as though you’re all fixed here, son,” he said. “I wish I knew what’s going to happen to me.”
Somehow I was disturbed when Mel Goodwin said I was all fixed.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “This is all new to me. We only bought this place this spring, and as you said last night, it’s quite an installation.”
He was striking out at a four-mile-an-hour marching clip, eyes front.
“You want to take it easy, son,” he said. “That’s what I keep telling myself, and that’s what I’ve been telling Muriel. She ought to know there’s a shake-up whenever a war is over.”
“I don’t like being tied down,” I told him, “but Helen does.”
“You can’t blame her,” the General said. “Women don’t like uncertainty. I don’t blame Muriel, but she ought to know that I can’t tell her what the score is. I’m a combat leader, and there isn’t any combat, and I’m too young to retire. I can’t pick up the marbles yet.”
We had reached the stable. The door stood open, and we walked inside and looked over the empty box stalls that still smelled of Mr. Winlock’s vanished horses.
“I feel sorry for horses,” Mel Goodwin said. “They were bred and trained for centuries as a means of locomotion and now they’re ornamental pets. Maybe I’m like horses. Anyway, right now I feel empty like this stable. I’ve spent all my life learning how to fight in a war. Being in the field has spoiled my taste for desk work. Well, I’ve had my chance, and now the whole show’s over.”
“Maybe there’ll be another one,” I said.
Mel Goodwin turned on his heel, striking out again at the same cadence. “I was just getting to be good,” he said. “Son, I can handle a division the way a chauffeur drives a car, and I could do the same with a corps, and now I’ve got to forget it. I don’t want to sit around waiting for another war.”
The way he spoke of himself aroused my sympathy but obviously it was impossible to maintain a continual state of war to give him happiness.
“A lot of other boys are growing up,” I said. “You can still teach them, Mel.”
I had used his first name again without thinking of it, but then we were on a different basis from any we had been on since his arrival.
“I suppose Muriel was talking about me at dinner last night,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered, “of course she was.”
“Did she ask you questions?”
“No, she just told me about you,” I answered.
“I wish she wouldn’t always tell about me,” he said.
“Why, she’s proud of you, Mel,” I answered.
“Sid,” he said, “I wish I weren’t so restless. By the way, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
I knew immediately what it was that he had been meaning to ask me. He had been intending to ask it ever since he arrived at Savin Hill, and the question stood between us like a tangible shape, of which we were both painfully conscious.
“Has—er—Dottie Peale ever mentioned me when you’ve seen her?”
“Why, yes,” I said, “occasionally.”
“I suppose she’s heard about this Berlin thing. I suppose she’s in New York now,” he said.
“Why, yes, Dottie’s in New York,” I answered.
We were both trying to speak casually, and suddenly I felt old and weary of the world. I wanted very much to tell him not to make a fool of himself and to forget Dottie Peale.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get back and get started. Maybe that writer’s awake. I really ought to be in Washington.”
As a matter of fact, Phil Bentley, who only took orange juice and coffee in the morning, was down and through with his breakfast by the time we reached the house.
“Are you ready for me, General?” he asked.
Melville A. Goodwin was himself again. He fixed Philip Bentley with a steely eye before replying.
“Yes,” he answered, “I’ve been ready and waiting for some time, Mr. Bentley.”
“Well,” Phil Bentley said, “then let’s get going, General. Is it all right to use the library, Sid?”
It was perfectly all right to use the library.
“Now let’s see,” Phil Bentley said, “where were we?”
Physically we were just exactly where we had been the night before. The General had seated himself in an armchair in the half-relaxed, half-alert way that I remembered in Paris. If it had not been for Phil Bentley and Miss Fineholt, we might have been in any army office talking over a military problem.
“General Goodwin was talking about the books he used to read,” Miss Fineholt said, thumbing through her notes.
“Oh, yes,” Phil Bentley said, “that’s so,” and he adjusted his horn-rimmed spectacles. “I wonder, General, if you read the personal memoirs of U. S. Grant back there in Hallowell.”
It was clever of Phil Bentley.
“I read them when I was about fourteen,” the General said. “The book was in the Memorial Library along with Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.”
Phil Bentley smiled faintly, and I knew that he liked the answer.
“I had never read it until last evening,” he said. “Sid has it here, and I took it upstairs with me. It’s a good book, isn’t it?”
He was like a trial lawyer as he asked the question, moving gently into a telling phase of a cross-examination.
“It’s a great book,” the General said. “I’ve read it a good many times since. Personally, I think many military critics underrate U. S. Grant.”
Phil Bentley nodded, but his voice was quietly impersonal.
“How do you thin
k he compares with Robert E. Lee, General?”
There was a careful silence before Mel Goodwin answered.
“I don’t like making broad pronouncements,” he said carefully, “and maybe we still use the Civil War too much in military thinking. I don’t want to stick my neck out in print and I know that Lee said that McClellan was the best Union general he fought against by all odds. Mars’ Bob must have been losing his memory when he said that. For my money Grant was a better man than Lee any day in the week and twice on Sunday. If Grant had been Lee at Gettysburg, that Fancy Dan, J. E. B. Stuart, wouldn’t have ever kited off to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Longstreet would have moved when he was told in the Peach Orchard, instead of tidying himself up. Otherwise he would have been busted home and Pickett or some quick boy would have replaced him—but don’t quote me. Sam Grant doesn’t need me to back him up in print.”
“Would it be right to say he’s a special hero of yours?” Phil Bentley asked.
Mel Goodwin passed his hand over his closely cropped hair.
“I haven’t any heroes now,” he said, “but every kid has heroes. When things weren’t going right for me at the Point, I used to think that I was Grant.”
“So you used to try to be like him?” Phil Bentley asked.
Melville A. Goodwin stared at his questioner with a reserve that I had seen on the faces of other officers speaking to someone outside the service.
“That’s too easy, and don’t put that in your article, son,” he said. “I’m not another Grant. He had small feet but his boots are too big for me, but—all right—every kid has to have a hero. All right, I used to think about him quite a lot when I was there in Hallowell.”
XI
Clausewitz Would Have Concurred
He liked Grant, Melville Goodwin said, because young Grant had been brought up like him, in a small provincial town, the child of plain parents. Grant’s father kept a tannery, and his own father ran the local drugstore, and this gave them a bond in common. In many ways Sam Grant’s small Ohio town resembled Hallowell. Everyone had about the same standard of living in Hallowell, and even today Melville Goodwin was frank to confess that he did not understand much about large sums of money, except in terms of military appropriation. His life there in Hallowell, he used to think, helped him with troops later, because he was always able to identify himself with the backgrounds of most enlisted men. No one in the service was provincial, except possibly in a service way, yet underneath the service polish lay the small-town mark, and he was proud of it. The youth in Hallowell were just boys together and later boys and girls together, when they began pairing off. He was never a leader, because he had never liked to stick his neck out in Hallowell or anywhere else. He was not even a conspicuous figure there, because he never wanted to be different from the crowd. He would never have lived it down if he had told anyone that he wished to go to West Point, because everyone would have called him “Soldier” Goodwin or something of the sort. He never did tell anyone except Muriel Reece, but as he had said earlier, the world of Hallowell lay behind him intact.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 18