“Now don’t stop me—let me finish, Muriel,” the General said. “That’s just what Svenson did say, and after that when we were going to have a Saturday night poker game I used to tell him that things were sort of dry, and I would pass him five dollars and he’d come back with the Oke. I suppose he got it around Nuuanu and the district. I never asked him, but he had a very special source. We got to calling it ‘Svenson’s Oke’ on Saturday nights. We used to have pretty high-class poker games at Schofield, didn’t we, Muriel?”
“I wish we could play some poker now,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “only it would be like taking money from children, wouldn’t it, Mel?”
But the General was still thinking about his orderly and the Oke.
“As time went on,” the General said, “I began to get the idea that I was handing out those five-dollar bills to Svenson at shorter intervals and that Oke was becoming more and more expendable around my quarters. Finally, one day Svenson came in with a gallon and put it on the upper shelf of my clothes closet, and the very next morning when he brought my riding boots and opened the closet door I happened to look up and discover that one third of that gallon was gone. It was time to do something. It was time to put Svenson on the carpet.
“‘Just a minute, Svenson,’ I said, ‘I know that this is a hot tropical climate, but look at that gallon of Oke.’
“Svenson came right to attention and looked at it, just one squint and then eyes front.
“‘It certainly is a hot climate,’ I said, ‘to have one third of a gallon of Oke evaporate in twenty-four hours with the cork in it, don’t you think so, Svenson?’
“‘Yes, sir,’ Svenson said, ‘but I can account for it, sir.’
“‘I thought you could,’ I said. ‘How do you account for it?’
“‘Well, sir,’ Svenson said, ‘it’s a liquid, sir, and liquids flow downhill to find their own level, and I was standing under that shelf yesterday afternoon. It kind of started leveling off before I thought much about it, sir.’”
The General looked at us mirthlessly, and Colonel Flax and I both gave way to merriment. It was all part of an act that we had been through with other generals.
“What did you say to Svenson then, sir?” the colonel asked. “It certainly was a logical excuse.”
“I just told him not to get below it again,” the General said. “I just told him in the future if he wanted to look at the Oke to get a stepladder and stand above it. The Oke lasted longer after that. I wonder what ever happened to old Svenson.”
Oscar had opened the door to the dining room. The General put down his cocktail glass and smiled at Helen.
“I guess you’d better lead the old man in to lunch, my dear,” he said, “and see that he doesn’t stagger.” Helen took his arm, and he patted her hand. “Let’s stay like this and let the others go in first,” the General said. “It’s been quite, a while since a pretty girl took me in to lunch.”
No one sat down in the living room when we returned there after lunch. I saw Phil Bentley look at his wrist watch and the General saw him, too.
“I’m ready to go back there if you are,” the General said. “We may as well put the show back on the road.”
“Sidney,” Helen said, “do you have to be in there all afternoon? Camilla was saying this morning that she hardly saw you yesterday. Can’t you take a walk with her later on or something?”
There was no reason why I should sit in at all the conferences now that everything was moving reasonably well.
“All right,” I said, “if the General will let me off.”
It was the conditioning. There was no reason why I should ask his permission to see Camilla. Then before Helen could answer, Melville Goodwin joined us and slapped his hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s step outside for two minutes, Sid,” he said, “and get a breath of air before we start.”
We were both embarrassed when Helen asked the same question again about Camilla. There was no reason at all for me to be there, he said. He realized that he was monopolizing me too much. He realized that he had just moved in here and Helen mustn’t ask any such fool questions again or he would move right out. When all this was over, he and Muriel and Helen and I would have to get to know each other. We would have to have a long visit together as soon as things were arranged in Washington. He had said just the right thing and Helen said the right thing back, but I knew why he wanted to see me for two minutes.
“Say, Sid,” he said, when we stood outside in the drive, “did you call up Dottie?”
He had passed the stage of bringing her name casually into a conversation, and perhaps it was better to be direct about it.
“She wanted to know how you were,” I told him. “As a matter of fact I’m having lunch with her tomorrow.”
“God damn,” the General said. “She understands how I’m fixed here, doesn’t she? Tell her I want to see her as soon as I get to New York.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell her.”
“This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever been through,” the General said, “having the Secretary ask me to sit around here and talk. Well, let’s go in and keep on talking.”
XVII
“Nor Certitude, nor Peace, nor Help for Pain”
It had occurred to me several times while the General was retailing his reminiscences that the simplicity of his childhood and the uncomplicated quality of his background must have been of great value to him in all his subsequent adjustments. He could not have been unduly or neurotically enmeshed in the lives of his parents, whose lives as he described them had been unspectacular and happy. If there had been any clashes or frustrations, they had escaped his power of observation. In fact the Goodwins without ever knowing it must have been ideal parents for a soldier. Except for a few precepts and simple rules, they had never interfered with Melville’s development. As far as I could see, they had never loved him too much or worried over him too much. The whole social pattern of Hallowell, too, made it a suitable cradle for a soldier and a hero. There had been no violent distractions, there had been an even distribution of everything, and leadership demanded an unconfused approach and a fixity of purpose. Melville Goodwin’s had been a normal life with few intense joys and sorrows and few areas of fear or regret. If it could have been described in a graphic form, you would have seen only a gradually ascending curve.
If any boy wanted to go to the Point, the General said, it was a pretty good thing for him to start as a pretty simple kid with just a few essential loyalties. It was a good thing for this hypothetical young lad to have been used to eating plain food, to sleeping in a cold room, to manual labor, and above all, to telling the truth. It was also desirable for him not to have a swelled head or too many preconceived ideas that would only have to be knocked out of him. Rich boys had a harder time than poor boys at the Point. You threw away your past the minute you started walking up the hill from the railroad station, and everyone was like everybody else once the crowd was all checked in. It would not be such a bad idea to have an arch at the entrance to the Point on which would be written some statement to the effect that you brought nothing inside there with you except yourself. Pocket money, family and chauffeurs did not matter at the Point. You didn’t give a damn what any other plebe had been, at least not for quite a while, when you met him at the Point.
He was Mr. Dumjohn or Mr. Ducrot just like you and he would have his past kicked out of him just as yours was going to be. You all went through the same necessary hell together, right by the numbers. It was dished out by experts and you took it. It was up to you how well you took it, but all of you had to be pretty much alike when you came out the other end, more alike, perhaps, than you ever believed. This was what the Point was for. You learned to love and respect it, but perhaps respect was greater than love, at least it was for him.
One’s experience at West Point was something that its graduates seldom discussed at length later, because discussion was needless. Personally Mel Goodwin had nev
er put his thoughts about West Point into any order until once, some years after graduation, when he had accompanied his commanding officer there, a Colonel Savery, who had written three articles on the First Battle of the Marne for the Infantry Journal and who had also collected a nice set of lantern slides on the subject. The colonel had been invited to give a lecture on the battle to the cadets, and he had brought Lieutenant Goodwin with him to handle the projector. They had arrived early one spring afternoon and to kill time before the lecture Lieutenant Goodwin had walked about by himself for nearly an hour. He had not seen the place since he had left it after his graduation, and he had never been so deeply impressed by the Gothic mass of the buildings or by the unforgettable vistas of the Hudson. He could have moved blindfold on the double from place to place, but never before had he seen it all of one piece. He had never before been so conscious of the institution’s permanence or of the memories enshrined within it. He had never realized the enormousness of what the Point had done to him and for him, until he stood by the Battle Monument that afternoon, breathing the fresh scent of growing things and listening to the bells and calls. The Point was oblivious to his existence now. Yet he was still a unit of the long gray line that marched endlessly back to the dawn of its history, and by God it was something to be a part of the Corps.
The Point had made him earn all that it had given him, but while he stood there by the Battle Monument doing nothing, he made a rough list of what he had been given. For one thing there was the resilience and co-ordination of his body. Even as he stood at ease his posture was correct. He had learned to ride and fence and box and swim. He had become passably proficient in golf and tennis. He had learned personal order and cleanliness and how to look anyone in the eye. He had learned truthfulness and respect. He had learned the whole school of soldiering and a good deal more besides, not that schooling ever stopped in the army. He was well grounded in mathematics. He had a good working knowledge of general history and geography and of law and a reading knowledge of French and Spanish, although he had always been poor at languages. Also he could express himself satisfactorily in expository English. He could go further with the list, but all these accomplishments could be summarized in one way. He had learned that if he were obliged to do so, he could turn his mind and hand to almost anything.
You could not possibly, the General said, explain the place satisfactorily to an outsider, any more than you could explain what went on inside yourself. West Point’s primary function was to turn out leaders who could win wars for their country. It was not intended to turn out philosophers or artists. West Point was neither a boys’ school nor a university. It was a professional institution for professionals. Its product was a soldier who could fight, who could submerge his individuality in prompt implicit obedience and still be an individual. If you wanted him to be frank—off the record—West Point was a hell of an experience. If he saw a cadet now, he could feel both sorry and glad for him and also proud of him. If officers seldom talked with each other at great length about the Point, certainly he was not going to talk about the Point at length to amateurs. Of course if he wanted, he could tell a lot of stories, especially about plebe year. No one could forget “beast barracks” or “bracing” or the formal jokes that plebes must learn by heart. They were an integral and useful part of the whole system. No one could forget his first sight of a perfect upperclassman. There would never be such neatness and polish again. No one could forget, either, the exhaustion and discouragement of the first weeks. Well, he had come through it all, and you could look upon him as an average product.
Certain harassing memories beset him as he stood by the Battle Monument. One was his fear that he would be busted out. He could still hear the voice of the cadet adjutant in mess hall, reading off the names of classmates who would leave the Corps. Often he would dream that his name was on the list. That fear of separation was always his greatest drive and it impelled him toward elaborate care and conservatism. He had never been as relaxed as some of his other classmates, and there had not been much time for ordinary friendship on account of that fear. Yet if you were to ask any of his contemporaries, he believed that they would tell you that Mel Goodwin had not been such a bad Joe. He could afford to feel a little sorry now for Cadet Goodwin at the Point, worrying about his haircut, about his shoeshine and the crease of his trousers. Outwardly he had been adjusted, but he sometimes wondered whether anyone was completely inwardly adjusted to the Point.
Another factor of course was the imminence of war. At his time at the Point—he was in the class of ’19 that graduated a year earlier—you always knew that war was coming and this gave everything a grimness and an urgency that was not there in peace years. There was certainly not the gaiety and lightheartedness, in his time, to which other graduates alluded, yet the ordinary routines remained. He could see Cadet Goodwin as Mr. Ducrot wiping off his smile and stepping on it and announcing in the mess hall the number of days till June graduation. He could see Cadet Goodwin braced on the edge of his chair, and running upstairs two steps at a time. He could see Cadet Goodwin in recitations and Goodwin on parade. He could still see Cadet Goodwin as a stag at one of the hops.
He had never been a “spoonoid” but like any cadet he had been obliged to learn his way around the dance floor at West Point. M. Viset, a French dancing instructor, was there especially to teach clumsy, gangling boys, and he had learned both to lead and follow, dancing with other cadets. Though his ear for music was always poor, he had been able to perform adequately in the waltz, two-step and fox trot—not sensationally but adequately—and the girls were always kind in those war days. Though he had never been around country clubs and had never been to the theater, still the veneer of the Point was on him and he had learned the rudiments of party manners by his last year there—but those girls at the hops meant very little to him because Muriel Reece was his one and only, his OAO, as cadets put it.
What with the study hour and taps, there was not much time for abstract thought or active discontent at the Point, and the pressure of time and the necessity for making the best use of it was something that was hard to lose. If he had done any reading in his spare moments, it had been in military memoirs and the history of battle. He had been exposed like everyone else there to the rudiments of poetry, including selections from the Oxford Book of English Verse, but the poetry he remembered best was the Scripture reading in Cadet Chapel. He only learned the value of poetry later when time was heavier on his hands.
In the South of France when he was recovering from the bayonet wound he had received in the Argonne, he had stayed in a Riviera hotel taken over by the army for convalescent officers and he had shared a bedroom there with a reserve officer, a Captain H. T. Wilbur, who was a graduate of Princeton University. This captain’s mind, though it was a good one, had seemed amazingly undisciplined, and Melville had been almost shocked by the tales he heard of lax student life at Princeton—of late hours, of clubs and of elective courses. According to what that captain told him, Princeton or any other civilian university was a sort of intellectual Garden of Eden where you could wander at will, plucking fruits from any tree of knowledge and tossing them away after a few swift bites. As far as he could see, you did not have to bother about where you stood in your classes or whether you were drunk or sober. When Captain Wilbur produced a bottle of cognac smuggled into convalescent quarters contrary to regulations, it took Melville some time to find the courage to tell the captain that he had never tasted liquor at West Point. He had never forgotten Captain Wilbur’s surprised look. In fact they had each looked upon the other as a freak. He was fascinated by civilian gripes about the army and its discipline. H. T. Wilbur could not wait, he simply could not wait, to get through with the whole business and to get home. He would tell in detail what he would do at home. He would take the family car and take a girl out to dine and dance. He would see all the shows in New York and he would sit up all night in a restaurant called “Jack’s.” H. T. Wilbur was speaking of a w
orld of which Melville knew almost nothing, and though it fascinated him, Melville could not help but be uneasy. He was in a different class with a different rating.
“Haven’t you ever read this?” Captain Wilbur used to say. “Frankly, Mel, haven’t you ever heard of that?”
Of course, H. T. Wilbur was an amateur, being one of those ninety-day wonders from Leavenworth, yet his capacity for learning was as good as Melville’s own and his mind was attractively adorned. Wilbur really showed him what poetry was while they drank illicit cognac. He had never realized until he read Wilbur’s copy of Housman that the music of words could have a power as great as cognac, and sometimes in his memory he could still see the Mediterranean in the twilight and catch the lilt of Wilbur’s voice. It was just as well not to keep too much poetry in your quarters, because some commanding officers might get odd ideas about you, but Melville had always kept the Housman and the Rupert Brooke books which H. T. Wilbur had given him.
On that spring afternoon by the Battle Monument he discovered that a stray couplet of verse was moving through his mind for no good reason. It came from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold—a sad poem, and he could think of no logical reason for being sad on his return to West Point.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain …
He liked words that made sense and the meaning of these restless words was annoyingly vague to him, except that the Parade Ground was always called the Plain. Perhaps he had learned at the Point that there was no peace nor help for pain, but he had been surrounded by certitude, even certitude of the hereafter. If you were sad, it was best to get your mind on something else—but he was puzzled by that phrase, “a darkling plain.”
Then suddenly as he had stood there thinking, he heard his name called and he turned to see an officer walking toward him. Melville’s mind moved like clockwork. The officer was Major H. A. Holton, in the Infantry like himself, and they had met once at Coblenz in the Army of Occupation.
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