“How did you get up here, Goodwin?” the major asked, and Melville looked at him straight and respectfully, explaining why he was there, and the major in reply said that he was serving in the tactical department on the usual four-year tour.
“Is there anything special you’d like to see?” the major asked, “or did you see too much of it when you were here?”
“If it’s all right, I’d like to see the barracks,” Melville said.
They walked side by side in careful step, and the closer they approached the barracks the faster the clock turned backwards. There was the usual meticulous, spotless order in the corridors. When the major rapped on a door, the hasty scuffling inside conveyed to Melville exactly what was going on. Two cadets stood at attention in their quarters, each behind his chair, correct in his carefully buttoned coat, though ten seconds before, Melville knew, they had been studying at their table with their coats hung on the chair backs. Either of those two cadets might have been an old image of himself. He was a first lieutenant now, with his service ribbons and his decorations, but at the same time he was young Mel Goodwin, who had been writing a letter home before the “Tac” had knocked. He could look at those two cadets impersonally, as he had learned to look at soldiers, but at the same time they were as familiar as old shoes. He had not realized that cadets could be so uniformly beautiful, so clean and so precise. He had forgotten how perfect the curtain of impersonality had been that you learned to draw at any second.
He was almost back in his own old quarters, with its regulation furnishings, clean, bare-walled, uncarpeted, devoid of almost any individual possessions. As he saw the straight-backed chairs, he realized that during his whole stay at the Point he had scarcely ever sat in a comfortable seat—except in the First-Class Club Room and the quarters of the Dialectic Society—but then his posture had never made him feel the lack. He saw the iron beds with the mattresses folded back and every bit of property ready for sudden inspection. He saw the shoes, spotlessly clean, all in their proper order, uniforms all hanging in alignment, and other garments neatly folded on their shelves, nothing out of place by a fraction of an inch. He saw a framed picture of a girl on the upper shelf on which it was permissible to keep a photograph. He was surprised that it was not his old picture of Muriel.
When the major introduced him to the cadets, he saw their eyes move from his face to his ribbons, and he smiled at them mechanically. Those cadets had their own problems and he did not want to waste their time, but he asked them a few agreeable questions, suitable to the occasion, such as “Where do you come from, Mister?” and he saw that one of them had been writing a letter.
“A letter home?” he asked.
“No, sir,” the cadet answered, “not exactly.”
It was the first and only crack in the veneer. It might have been the same room from which he had written to Muriel twice a week, seldom more often. It might have been the same room from which his thoughts had escaped to Muriel for an allotted space. He might have been one of the cadets, and the other might have been his roommate, Spike Kennedy, who was now down in Texas with the Cavalry.
“Thank you very much, sir,” he said to the major, because the major was the one to thank and not the cadets, but he smiled again at the boys and wished them both good luck. It was a great experience, being a cadet at the Point, though you could hardly write a “sweet college years” song about it.
“Would you like to go through it again?” the major asked.
“No, sir,” Melville told him, “not exactly.”
They both grinned because it was something that was behind them now like World War I, and when something was behind you, its outlines generally softened—but not the outlines of the barracks. He remembered studying after taps by an electric light bulb concealed in the leg of a pair of trousers. He remembered going with Spike to an illicit food party, known in cadet slang as a “boodle party.” They had not been caught, but you could not get away with much.
During his particular years at the Point, you studied tactics and engineering and the handling of small bodies of troops, for good and sufficient reasons. You had a thirst for knowledge and you said your prayers in chapel, for good and sufficient reasons. You studied maps and orientation, knowing that you might have real use for them in the next few months. There was less time in the war days for social functions and consequently Muriel had not come to West Point often. She had only been there for one week-end hop, for Hundredth Night, and for a Summer Camp Show, until she came with her mother and the Goodwin family for the graduation and their wedding. He and Muriel were married, like a good many other girls and graduates, in the chapel, the day after his graduation. He was to report at Merritt in two weeks’ time to proceed to France in a school detachment. In a way this was a compliment, and he was delighted to get overseas, but, even so, he was afraid that he would not see action before the war was over.
Everything was compressed like a jack-in-the-box in those last few days, what with parades and the graduation and the ball and the details of his new uniforms and equipment, and at the end of it, marriage. He could never forget the confusion of the time. He was a cadet and an army officer and a bridegroom all at once, and strangely enough he seemed to know very little about anything, almost nothing about routine troop duties, for instance. Nevertheless he could stand up straight and answer when he was spoken to, and he had learned how to take prompt action after estimating a situation. If he did not know how to win a war singlehanded, he knew as much as a lot of others in his class.
The graduation order list had already been printed, and he stood in the middle of the first quarter. Some people were surprised that he had chosen Infantry instead of Artillery or Engineers, but he supposed he was simply one of those individuals who was born for Infantry. He had always been an infantryman at heart, just as he had always been an admirer of U. S. Grant.
It had not seemed possible that Muriel could be at the Old Hotel when he signed out of barracks to meet her on the afternoon of the graduation hop. He would have two hours to be with her, and when he saw her with her mother on the porch of the hotel, it was like a moment in a dream—but he was trained to handle it.
“Why, Melville,” Mrs. Reece said, “you look just as though you had stepped out of a bandbox.”
“That’s just a part of everything here,” he said. “I hope that you and Muriel had a good trip down, Mrs. Reece, and I hope your room is comfortable. Would you and Muriel care to walk around the grounds?” Other cadets were around him saying the same things to other girls and mothers.
“I think I’d better take a little rest and unpack Muriel’s wedding dress,” Mrs. Reece said. “Why don’t you take Muriel about the grounds of the Academy? She loves it so.”
There was nothing pleasanter in a cadet’s life than taking his One And Only around the grounds, and there he was with Muriel, with an hour and a half to spend.
“Melly,” Muriel said, “don’t stand here showing off in front of everybody. Do you want to go walking or what do you want to do?”
He was not showing off in front of anybody. He was simply trying to behave in a polite and natural manner. He was in the graduating class and he could not behave like a lower classman.
“Why, anything you want, Muriel,” he said.
“Well,” Muriel answered, “let’s not stand here like two bumps on a log.”
They walked past the equestrian statue of George Washington.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked him. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Yes, of course I’m glad,” he said.
“How glad?”
“Very glad,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad to see you, Melly darling, and I’m awfully proud.”
He was very proud of her, too, in her broad-brimmed picture hat, but it seemed strange to have anyone call him “Melly.”
“Do you know yet where you’re going to go—or anything?” she asked.
“No, not yet,” he
said. “We’re still waiting to hear.”
“Well, I hope you’re going to get overseas.” It was the right thing for her to say. From the very beginning Muriel understood the army.
An officer was walking toward them as they passed the statue, Captain Folsom, the Tactical Officer of Melville’s company. It was a compliment that the captain stopped after returning his salute. Captain Folsom during the last year had asked him several times to his quarters. They were almost friends and now they were almost brother officers. If the captain had often run him ragged, this was all forgotten. It had all been for Melville’s good.
“Well,” the captain said, “aren’t you going to introduce me?”
Melville blushed but he remembered the etiquette.
“Miss Reece, may I present Captain Folsom?” he said.
“How do you do, Miss Reece?” the captain said. “I recognized you from your photograph.”
“Oh,” Muriel said, “on Melville’s shelf.” She knew all about the Point from his letters.
“It’s always been a pleasant moment in my inspection, seeing it,” the captain said. “I’m the one who checks Mr. Goodwin’s locker, and I know he’ll never forget it … will you, Goodwin?”
“No, sir,” Melville answered.
“It’s a great pleasure to meet the photograph’s original You see, Mr. Goodwin and I have been through quite a lot together,” the captain said. “May I make a suggestion, Mr. Goodwin?”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
“If I were walking with Miss Reece,” the captain said, “I know where I’d be going—or are you on your way to Flirtation Walk?”
The memory of the captain smiling at him just as though he were not a cadet was one of his happiest memories of the Point, and the incident taught him a lesson that he never forgot. It paid to be kind to subordinates. He would have done anything for Folsom, but he was only to meet him twice again in the service, once in the War College at Washington and once dead in Africa at Kasserine Pass.
“Yes, sir,” Melville said. “I have had that in mind.”
“And thank you very much for bringing it up, sir,” Muriel told Captain Folsom. “I’m not so sure he was thinking of it.”
Right from the beginning Muriel understood the army. She always knew what to say to superior officers, and she very seldom said too much.
“He’s the one who’s your Tac, isn’t he?” Muriel said. It was wonderful that she even knew the slang.
“Melly,” she said, “I’m glad we’re going to be in the army. Now take me to Flirtation Walk.”
It was worth going to the Point just to be able to take a girl on that semirestricted walk along the Hudson. It was worth all the beating that you took to do it. Muriel always understood the service and she understood, too, that there wasn’t much time to learn about it back in June 1918.
You had to remember that 1918 was some thirty years in the past and he had never kept a diary, so the weeks before he went overseas had become scrambled in his memory like the eggs of an omelet. He could not remember exactly when he received his orders or much either about his wedding in the chapel. When you were caught up in the tides of war, you simply moved, a part of the machine. Their wedding in the chapel moved, too, by the numbers. The chaplain’s usual advice was to wait a while and think it over and not get married the day after graduation. Theoretically, of course, no one had any business turning into a shavetail and a husband simultaneously, but as far as he could remember, no one listened seriously to the padre, and personally he was glad he hadn’t. Nothing developed a capacity for enjoyment like a few years at the Point. What more could he have asked than what was given him that June? He was marrying the girl he had always wanted to marry. He was a soldier, and the biggest war the world had ever seen was getting bigger all the time, instead of petering out as he was afraid it might after the German breakthrough in March. He was like a football player who had been sitting on the sidelines, and now the coach was waving to him. That was the way he felt and it was the way any shavetail ought to feel. It was a great time to be alive—in June 1918.
Muriel had gone to a secretarial school after he had left for the Point, and she had been in the front office of the hat factory for two years, working for Mr. Reece and sometimes for Mr. Hallowell. It was a great relief that Muriel was able to take over the details of lodging and transportation. Muriel purchased the railroad tickets after the wedding and arranged for a reservation at the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Thirty-fourth Street in New York. She had always wanted to go to the Waldorf. He had never realized what a capacity for leadership Muriel had developed until they took that wedding trip. Frankly, the old Waldorf was a big jump from the barracks and he was only a kid, still self-conscious in his officer’s uniform. Everything around him was new, including his clothing roll and bedding roll and foot locker, but you’d have thought Muriel had been to the Waldorf a hundred times. Somehow she knew all the finer points about porters and taxicabs. Perhaps girls developed more quickly than boys in some ways.
“Just follow the bellboys and me,” Muriel said, “and ask for our reservation when you get to the desk.”
All he had to do was to follow Muriel, eyes front, along a corridor with marble columns and to tell himself that he was an officer in the United States Army, legally married to the girl ahead of him, and that he could prove it by papers if necessary. He had to make a deliberate effort not to stand at attention when he asked the room clerk if there was a reservation for Lieutenant and Mrs. Goodwin. He was not sure whether he should refer to himself as “Lieutenant” or plain “Mister,” but “Lieutenant” sounded better, and, after all, the Waldorf was not a military installation. It was a shock to him when the clerk called him “sir,” and he finally signed the register as “Melville A. Goodwin, 2nd Lt., Inf., USA, and wife.”
He was still so dazed when they went up in the elevator that Muriel had to whisper to him to take off his garrison cap. For a moment he felt she was wrong until he realized that he was wearing no side arms.
“Give each of the boys a quarter,” Muriel whispered as they stood in the center of their room.
In all the years they had been married he never had asked Muriel how she had learned about tips and hats in elevators.
“Why did you sign your name ‘Melville A. Goodwin, 2nd Lt., Inf., USA, and wife’?” Muriel asked. “You should have signed it ‘2nd Lt. and Mrs. Goodwin, USA.’”
He had never asked her either how she knew that one.
“It’s all right, Mel,” she said, “you don’t have to go back to change it. What are you looking at now?”
“The room,” he said. “I should have asked how much it costs.”
The truth was you never thought much about money at the Point.
“It costs a lot,” Muriel said. “It costs eight dollars a day.”
“With food?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “without food. It’s all right, there’s the wedding-present money.”
It was true that Mr. Reece and Melville’s father had each given them a hundred dollars, but it would not last long at that rate.
“Just give me the money, Mel,” she said. “I’ll look after the expenses. It doesn’t have to last long. We’ll go back to Hallowell before it’s finished, and then you’re going overseas.”
“What’s in that room there?” he asked.
“It’s the bathroom,” Muriel said.
“What,” he said, “a private bath?”
He did not mind when Muriel began to laugh. He did not even mind feeling like a plebe again in front of Muriel.
“Look,” he said, “it’s got a tub.”
“Of course it has,” she said. “Don’t they have tubs at the Point?”
“We take showers,” he said. “There wouldn’t be time to let the water run into a tub.”
“Well, there’s time now,” Muriel said. “Why don’t you take a bath?”
“What,” he asked—“right now?”
“Oh, M
el,” she said, “don’t be so silly. Go in and turn on the water, and I’ll unpack our things.”
“Not my things,” he said.
“Mel,” she called, above the running of the water, “hand me out your breeches.”
His hearing was as good as his eyesight, but he had felt that there must be some mistake.
“Your trousers or whatever you call them,” Muriel said. “I want to count our money.”
He walked into the bedroom in his shirttails and handed her his breeches.
“Don’t,” he said, “don’t wrinkle them, Muriel. What’s so funny?”
“Just being married,” Muriel said, “and I guess it’s particularly funny being married to somebody from West Point.”
A long time later, when he was a captain, he and Muriel discovered that many incidents in their abbreviated New York honeymoon, including that bath at the Waldorf, made a story that would set a dinner party into roars of laughter. He never suspected until he began observing other youngsters reporting for duty that their experience was in many ways universal. Now that he thought of it, once when he had dined in London with the big boss himself, someone had suggested, how about his telling about him and Muriel at the Waldorf, and it went over very well. It made the big boss laugh, and it even amused an admiral and a field marshal. Muriel’s teaching him how to smoke a cigarette made a good story in itself. He had never heard of breakfast in bed and he never knew that Muriel smoked, either, until she asked him to get her purse and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of it. Muriel had told him it would be a good thing to learn to smoke if he were going to France, and as usual she was right. That was Muriel’s story, but he had one of his own, too, and it was pretty good, if he did say so.
The first night they were in New York, they had gone to a musical comedy. All you had to do was to pick up the telephone and order the seats at the Waldorf. Just as they were going to get in the taxi for the theater, he took his first salute. Two enlisted men went by and their hands snapped up when they saw him, and Muriel had to tell him that they were saluting him. The name of that musical comedy, he thought, was Going Up, all about aviation. Between the acts the street was full of officers, and an artillery major asked him for a match. Muriel was the one who supplied it out of her pocket-book, and she told him to light it for the major. Then the major saw his ring and thanked him very elaborately. The major’s collar insignia was “USR” not “US.” It was his first encounter with the wartime service and with its individuals from civil life. The officer had been drinking, and it hurt Melville to see that one of his pockets was unbuttoned. He almost thought of mentioning it but he refrained, because of age and rank. A regular had to take his orders, no matter what he thought.
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