by Irwin Shaw
“Look,” Brandt said. He stopped and pointed.
Christian stopped too, and looked where Brandt was pointing. It was a stone church wall, angled against the moonlight, and written on it in large, chalk figures was the number 1918. Christian blinked and shook his head. He knew that there was a significance chalked there on the wall, but for a moment he could not make out what it was.
“1918,” Brandt said. “They know. The French know.”
Christian looked at the wall. He felt sad and suddenly tired, because he had been up since four o’clock in the morning and it had been an exhausting day. He walked heavily over to the wall and lifted his arm. With his sleeve, slowly and methodically he began to erase the large, chalked numbers.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE RADIO dominated everything. Even though it was sunny outside and the Pennsylvania hills were green and crisp in the fair June weather, and even though they kept saying the same thing over and over again in the little static-tortured machine, Michael found himself sitting indoors all day in the wallpapered living room with its spindly Colonial furniture. There were newspapers all around his chair. From time to time Laura came in and sighed in loud martyrdom as she bent and ostentatiously picked them up and arranged them in a neat pile. But Michael hardly paid any attention to her. He sat hunched over the machine, twisting the dial, hearing the variety of voices, mellow and ingratiating and theatrical, saying over and over again, “Buy Lifebuoy to avoid unpleasant body odors,” and “Two teaspoonfuls in a glass before breakfast will keep you regular,” and “It is rumored that Paris will not be defended. The German High Command is maintaining silence about the position of its spearheading columns against crumbling French resistance.”
“We promised Tony,” Laura was standing at the door, speaking in a patient voice, “that we’d have some badminton this afternoon.”
Michael continued to sit silently hunched up, close to the radio.
“Michael!” Laura said loudly.
“Yes?” He didn’t look around.
“Badminton,” Laura said. “Tony.”
“What about it?” Michael asked, his forehead wrinkled with the effort of trying to listen to her and the radio announcer at the same time.
“The net isn’t up.”
“I’ll put it up later.”
“How much later?”
“For God’s sake, Laura!” Michael shouted, “I said I’d do it later.”
“I’m getting tired,” Laura said coldly, tears coming to her eyes, “of your doing everything later.”
“Will you stop that?”
“Stop shouting at me.” The tears started to roll down her cheeks and Michael felt sorry for her. They had planned this time in the country as a vacation during which, without telling each other, they had hoped to recapture some of the old friendship and affection they had lost in the disordered years since their marriage. Laura’s contract had run out in Hollywood, and they hadn’t taken up her option and, inexplicably, she couldn’t get another job. She had been quite good about it, gay and uncomplaining, but Michael knew how defeated she felt, and he had resolved to be tender with her in the month in the country in the house that a friend had loaned them. They’d been there a week, but it had been a terrible week. Michael had sat listening to the radio all day and hadn’t been able to sleep at night. He had paced the floor downstairs and sat up reading and had gloomily stalked around, red-eyed and weary, neglecting to shave, neglecting to help Laura with the work in keeping the pretty little house in order.
“Forgive me, darling,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her. She smiled, although she was still crying.
“I hate to be a pest,” Laura said, “but some things have to be done, you know.”
“Of course,” Michael said.
Laura laughed. “Now you’re being noble. I love it when you’re noble.”
Michael laughed too, but he couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed.
“Now you’ve got to pay up,” Laura said, under his chin, “for being nice to me.”
“What now?” Michael asked.
“Don’t sound resigned,” Laura said, “I hate it when you sound resigned.”
Michael controlled himself purposefully and listened to his own voice being polite and pleasant as he spoke. “What do you want me to do?”
“First,” Laura said, “turn off that damned radio.”
Michael started to protest, but thought better of it. The announcer was saying, “The situation is still confused, but the British seem to have evacuated the greater portion of their Army safely, and it is expected that Weygand’s counter-offensive will soon develop …”
“Michael, darling,” Laura said warningly.
Michael turned the radio off.
“There,” he said, “anything for you.”
“Thanks,” said Laura. Her eyes were dry and bright and smiling now. “Now, one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Shave.”
Michael sighed and ran his hand over the little stubble on his jaw.
“Do I really need it?” he asked.
“You look as though you just came out of a Third Avenue flophouse.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Michael said.
“You’ll feel better, too,” Laura said, picking up the newspapers around Michael’s chair.
“Sure,” said Michael. Almost automatically, he sidled over toward the radio and put his hand down to the dials.
“Not for an hour,” Laura pleaded, holding her hand over the dials. “One hour. It’s driving me crazy. The same thing over and over.”
“Laura, darling,” Michael said, “it’s the most important week of our lives.”
“Still,” she said, with crisp logic, “it doesn’t help to drive ourselves out of our minds. That won’t help the French, will it? And when you come down, darling, put up the badminton net.”
Michael shrugged. “Okay,” he said. Laura kissed his cheek lightly and ran her fingers through his hair. He started upstairs.
While he was shaving he heard some of the guests arrive. The voices floated up from the garden, lost from time to time in the sound of the water running in the basin. They were women’s voices and they sounded musical and soft at this distance. Laura had invited two of the teachers from the nearby girls’ school to which she had gone when she was fourteen. They both were Frenchwomen who had taught her and been good to her. As Michael half-listened to the rising and falling voices, he couldn’t help feeling how much more pleasant Frenchwomen sounded than most of the American women he knew. There was something modest and artful in the tone of their voices and the spacing of the words that fell much more agreeably on the ear than the self-assured clangor of American female speech. That, he thought, grinning, is an observation I will not dare make aloud.
He cut himself and felt annoyed and jangled again as he saw the small, persistent crimson seeping under his jaw.
From the large tree at the end of the garden came the cawing of crows. A colony of them had set up their nests there, and from time to time they clacked away, drowning out the other and more gentle noises of the countryside.
He went downstairs and stole quietly into the living room and turned the radio on, low. In a moment it warmed up, but for once there was only music. A woman’s voice was singing “I got plenty of nuthin’ and nuthin’s plenty for me,” on one station. A military band was playing the overture from Tannäuser on the other station. It was a weak little radio and it was only possible to get two stations on it. Michael turned the radio off and went out into the garden to meet the guests.
Johnson was here, in a yellow tennis shirt with brown bars across it. He had brought along a tall, pretty girl, with a serious, intelligent face, and automatically, as Michael shook her hand, he wondered where Mrs. Johnson was this summer afternoon.
“Miss Margaret Freemantle …” Laura was conducting the introductions. Miss Freemantle smiled slowly, and Michael felt himself thinking bitterly
: How the hell does Johnson get a girl as pretty as that?
Michael shook hands with the two Frenchwomen. They were sisters, both of them frail, and dressed in black, quite smartly, in a style that you felt must have been very fashionable some years before, although you could not remember exactly when. They were both in their fifties, with upswept lacquered hair and soft, pale complexions and amazing legs, slender and finely shaped. They had delicate, perfect manners, and long years of teaching young girls had given them an air of remote patience with the world. They always seemed to Michael like exquisitely mannered visitors from the nineteenth century, polite, detached, but secretly disapproving of the time and the country in which they found themselves. Today, despite the disciplined evidences of preparation for the, afternoon, the clever rouging and eyeshadow, there was a wan, drawn look on their faces, and their attention seemed to wander, even in the middle of a conversation.
Michael looked at them obliquely, suddenly realizing what it must be like to be French today, with the Germans near Paris, and the city hushed listening for the approaching rumble of the guns, and the radio announcers breaking into the jazz programs and the domestic serials with bulletins from Europe, with the careful American pronunciation of names that were so familiar to them, Reims, Soissons, the Marne, Compiègne …
If only I was more delicate, Michael thought, if only I had more sense, if I wasn’t such a heavy, stupid ox, I would take them aside and talk to them and somehow say the right words that would comfort them. But he knew that if he tried he would be clumsy and would say the wrong thing and embarrass them all and make everything worse than it had been. It was something nobody ever thought to teach you. They taught you everything else but tact, humanity, the healing touch.
“… I don’t like to say this,” Johnson was saying in his fine, intelligent, reasonable voice, “but I think the whole thing is a gigantic fake.”
“What?” Michael asked stupidly. Johnson was sitting gracefully on the grass, his knees drawn up boyishly, smiling at Miss Freemantle, making an impression on her. Michael could feel himself being annoyed because Johnson seemed to be succeeding in making an impression.
“Conspiracy,” Johnson said. “You can’t tell me the two greatest armies of the world just collapsed all of a sudden, just like that. It’s been arranged.”
“Do you mean,” Michael asked, “they’re handing over Paris to the Germans deliberately?”
“Of course,” said Johnson.
“Have you heard anything recent?” the younger Frenchwoman, Miss Boullard, asked softly. “About Paris?”
“No,” said Michael, as gently as he could manage. “No news yet.”
The two ladies nodded and smiled at him as though he had just presented them with bouquets.
“It’ll fall,” Johnson said. “Take my word for it.”
Why the hell, Michael thought irritably, do we have this man here?
“The deal is on,” said Johnson. “This is camouflage for the sake of the people of England and France. The Germans’ll move into London in two weeks and a month later they’ll all attack the Soviet Union.” He said this triumphantly and angrily.
“I think you’re wrong,” Michael said doggedly. “I don’t think it’s going to happen. Somehow it’s going to work out differently.”
“How?” Johnson asked.
“I don’t know how.” Michael felt he must seem silly in Miss Freemantle’s eyes and the thought annoyed him, but he persisted. “Somehow.”
“A mystic faith,” Johnson said derisively, “that Father will take care of everything. The bogey man won’t be allowed into the nursery.”
“Please,” said Laura, “do we have to talk about it? Don’t we want to play badminton? Miss Freemantle, do you play badminton?”
“Yes,” said Miss Freemantle. Her voice is low and husky, Michael thought, automatically.
“When are people going to wake up?” Johnson demanded. “When are they going to face the hard facts? There’s a deal on to deliver the world. Ethiopia, China, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland …”
Those names, Michael thought, those gray names. They had been used so often that almost all emotional significance had been drained from them.
“The ruling class of the world,” Johnson said, making Michael think of all the pamphlets he had ever seen, “is consolidating its power, and this is the way they decided to do it. A couple of guns fired off to fool the public, a few patriotic speeches by some old generals, and then the deal, signed, sealed and delivered.”
He’s probably right, Michael thought wearily, probably everything he says is more or less true, only a man couldn’t afford to believe it until he was willing to throw himself into the river. There was a certain minimum gullibility it was necessary to preserve if you wanted to continue living. And, even so, having Johnson say those things in his passionate, educated, indoor voice, the kind of voice you always heard at the theatre on opening nights and in good restaurants and smart parties, was somehow objectionable. Michael wondered where that Irishman was, that drunk, Parrish, at the New Year’s Eve party. He would probably say many of the same things that Johnson was saying. After all, it was more or less the Party line, but you could take it better from him. He was probably dead now, grinning in the ground some place near the Ebro River … Whatever happens, Michael thought maliciously, looking at Johnson in his chocolate-colored slacks and his bright yellow shirt, whatever happens you won’t be buried any place, that’s a cinch.
“Please,” Laura said. “I’m dying to play badminton. Darling …” She touched Michael’s arm. “The poles and the net and stuff are on the back porch.”
Michael sighed and pushed himself heavily up from the ground. Still, Laura was probably right; it would be better than talking this afternoon.
“I’ll help,” Miss Freemantle said, standing up and starting after Michael.
“Johnson …” Michael couldn’t resist a parting, defiant shot, “Johnson, has the possibility ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?”
“Of course,” Johnson said with dignity. “But I’m not wrong now.”
“Somewhere,” Michael said, “there’s got to be a little hope.”
Johnson laughed. “Where do you shop for your hope these days?” he asked. “Have you got any to spare?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
“What do you hope for?”
“I hope,” Michael said; “that America gets into the war and …” He saw the two Frenchwomen staring at him seriously.
“The racquets,” Laura said nervously, “are in that green wooden box, Michael …”
“You want Americans to get killed, too, in this swindle,” Johnson said derisively. “Is that it?”
“If necessary,” Michael said.
“That’s something new for you,” Johnson said. “Warmongering.”
“It’s the first time I thought of it,” said Michael, coldly, standing over Johnson. “This minute.”
“I get it,” said Johnson. “A reader of the New York Times. Crazy to save civilization as we know it, and all that.”
“Yop,” said Michael. “I’m crazy to save civilization as we know it and all that.”
“Come on, now,” Laura pleaded. “Don’t be ugly.”
“If you’re so eager,” Johnson said, “why don’t you just go over and join the British Army? Why wait?”
“Maybe I will,” said Michael, “maybe I will.”
“Oh, no.” Michael turned, surprised. It was Miss Freemantle who had said it, and she was standing now, with her hand over her mouth, as though the words had been surprised out of her.
“Did you want to say something?” Michael asked.
“I … I shouldn’t have,” the girl said. “I didn’t want to interfere, but …” She spoke very earnestly. “You mustn’t keep saying we should fight.” A female member of the Party, Michael thought heavily; that’s where Johnson picked her up. You’d never guess it, though, she was so pretty.
�
��I suppose,” Michael said, “if Russia got into it, you’d change your mind.”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Freemantle. “It doesn’t make any difference.” Wrong again, Michael thought, I’m going to stop making these brilliant one-second judgments.
“It doesn’t do any good,” the girl went on, hesitantly. “It never does. And all the young men go off and get killed. All my friends, my cousins … Maybe I’m selfish, but … I hate to hear people talking the way you do. I was in Europe, and that’s the way they were talking there. Now, probably, a lot of the boys I knew then, that I used to go dancing with and on skiing trips … They’re probably dead. What for? They just talked and talked, until finally they’d got themselves to a point where the only thing they could do was kill each other. Forgive me,” she said, very seriously. “I hadn’t meant to shoot my mouth off. It’s probably a silly female way of looking at the world.…”