by Earle Looker
Did she think men who had burrowed like moles, lived underground, fought in foul ditches, closer to earth than man had been for a thousand years, could shake off that beast by coming into a warm civilized room?
He wondered how much Alan had warned her of the world in which she now lived. Had he ever told her what the destruction meant? Had he written her of the places where only dust remained of what had been men’s monuments to himself? Had he described tortured nature with streams even, diverted from their channels, the mouths of pleasant harbors fouled with wreckage, floating death loosed in the seas to destroy the innocent and helpless, ancient forests shattered, splintered, burned, pounded to desolation, great areas so churned by shell and filled with metal they had become slag heaps never again to be cultivated?
Had Alan ever suggested what followed this destruction? Had he written her of how just as wounded men struggled up out of the black depths of unconsciousness and willed themselves to live and lived, so was nature striving at this moment to replace what had been destroyed by war? Did she know there were places where struggle was so intense even Spring had jumped the gun, and spurts of sap ran in copses in the Argonne, and twigs began to bud whose leaves had not fallen but been shot away?
Had Alan ever written her of seeing this phenomenon and marveling and feeling the sap running in himself with thoughts of lust and felt sure that nature, rushing replacements to fill its shattered ranks, was also charging men to breed now more often?
“Of things that are painful,” David said, “this is the last.” And he held out Alan’s signet ring in the palm of his hand.
She made no move to take it. “Wouldn’t he have liked you to wear it?”
He slipped the ring slowly upon his own finger. Curiously, he thought, it fit perfectly.
“So you carried it in your pocket – rather than wear it – until I suggested!”
“Yes, you’re observant.”
“I’ve noticed you’ve said nothing about yourself,” she said. “How did you manage to get to Paris so quickly?”
“I went absent without leave,” David replied.
“Absent without leave?”
David thought, ‘Absent without leave! Here was almost to laugh,’ he thought, ‘in it is more futility. Major Atwood, in command of Atwood’s Battalion, absent from his command and from the field? God no! How could I?’
“There was no other way to come here so quickly.” He suddenly seemed weary. “It’s been done before, you know. It’s a long history, too much, much too long to tell today. I’ve suddenly become very tired.”
“You actually mean to tell me you went absent without leave to come to Paris just to tell me about Alan?”
David said slowly, “Well, I thought you were engaged to Alan, though he never said so. But he gave me your address about two months ago. He started to tell me something, but we were interrupted. We never came back to the subject. I was pleased for him. But apparently I was misled, I guess, by what I took to be his avoidance of the subject. Men like Alan can’t talk about the women they love. So, I thought if you were engaged to him, then the least I could do would be to break it to you as well as – or as ineptly as – I have. I meant to beat the official notification of his death to you. A letter from me would have been as much of a blow. And then your questions …”
“There’s nothing I can ever do to thank you enough! Absent without leave to do this for me means you’ve risked all sorts of trouble. You’ll have to pay for this kindness to me. You did this because …”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” David said quickly. “I came to Paris too. Don’t forget that. I came to Paris to …”
Her lips were quick, David saw, though the words seemed only a breath, “David, you have friends in Paris?”
“No, not really.”
She still looked questioningly.
“I came to Paris,” David said, “as a – well – call it a revolt against reality.”
Revolt against reality! How well she understood. It was what Alan might have said, what he might first have thought to do this strange day after the war had ended. David surely could not know what she understood, and had not meant to say it; she had forced it from him. Revolt against reality! Did he think himself the only one who so craved revolt? Did he think this was something new? Did he not know how even the convalescents must be guarded against themselves and their revolt; how, if not watched, these men would escape into Paris to fling their strength away beginning in some low establishment of ill-repute? How could David be less than human? David, thus beginning, where would he end tonight? She knew. All women who had seen this war and its effect on men, on life indeed, knew they sought forgetfulness in some random woman’s arms. David’s revolt against reality – against weeks and months of fear and cold and sweat, mud and muck, blood and filth and unspeakable sights and sounds – against the reality of Alan’s death.
Revolt against reality! A phrase he thought meant nothing to her. He knew one side of reality, terrible as it well might be, but still without the full horror of the result of fighting. Which was worse?
‘If,’ she thought, ‘he had told me what he’d seen and felt and I told him, what a picture that would be! Certainly, he had seen enough of death – swift and straight as an arrow.’ He had been wounded twice, she knew, but neither wound had sent him back to base. Her own revolt as an Army nurse would be against the kind of long-fought death. Had he never seen wounds that stank and sickened beyond description, pain and nausea of the dressings, the anguished cries of – and worse – the quiet and stillness of hopelessness – the unending line of the wounded – empty cots quickly refilled?’
‘He must think,’ she continued, ‘because I had merely told him I had lived here in Paris throughout the war – that I had no idea of what Paris meant to a soldier. Paris and his “revolt against reality”, indeed! Fresh from the field, of course he had no idea of what a woman knew of these fighting men come to Paris. Rarely swaggering or over-bold, more often walking alone with their own black thoughts, yet suddenly the shops, the streets, the Métro, the cafés; their glance would touch and burn. You looked away and it was finished. If you looked again, you were finished. Yet this was clean consuming fire you saw compared to the other sort, the smolder in the eyes of flint-faced older men who rode in the Bois on those days when I rode to get the stench of gangrene out of my nostrils and mind. They looked at me, these Parisian officers, as these galloping pouliche exhibiting myself to the old étalons. Damn, curse them, but they’ve taught me the difference in the look.’
‘Is that why David looks away from me?’ she thought. ‘He seems younger than I remember, perhaps not a year older than myself despite his weariness and his grey glance. Where the light of the lamp falls upon his round head it is burnished as if covered with copper wire clipped to the closest stubble. He seems extremely long sitting there in my chair, long from head to spur-chains scratching the fender. The droop to his shoulders reveals their angularity to the point of supporting his tunic like a coat upon a hanger – wrinkled slightly above the breast pocket and his ribbons, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre with palm. Impressive! My hospital experience has made me see that here was a frame like the runners of the army – lean, muscular, tough, but it needed food and rest.
‘So strong this gentle David, so anxious for me not to see the compulsions crowding down upon him now, using that phrase “revolt against reality” – so obviously unconscious of my own part in this horrible reality.
‘Alan, killed the morning of the armistice. Incredible! Terrible! But not new, this incredulity, this synchronicity, irony. More than once have I seen such news received. How well I know this shock and how long it would take to feel the weight of sorrow in all the little recollections piled slowly, one upon the other.’
She knew how she must have looked to David as he told her, like Alan’s own description: ‘With barr
en face but burning in the heart.’ Alan, so keen, so alive, was gone – forever! In an instant, his image had changed. Already that unstable, loving, funny, creative writer side of him, a man of such promise, grew more and more hazy in her mind. Had it not been for David being here, trying to be steady – to steady her – she might have forgotten Alan’s vagaries, how they had determined her initial resistance to his offbeat charm and now, she thought, perhaps his genius.
‘Was I too selfish?’ Anne thought. ‘Too much logic, too much reason? Too little heart?
‘Alan gone! Now David here. Alan with all his creative projects for when he returned home to Virginia, now only another little puff of smoke, the smell of cordite, another cross. David here, reporting to me. David who, in so many other ways, seemed now to merge with Alan while, haltingly as he may have thought it, he told of Alan with such clear insight that it made it a panegyric more moving than I have ever heard.’
2
David had no idea, of course, how well she already knew him. Alan had described him in his letters, mentioning him so often she had come to know more of him than any man who had been fighting except Alan himself. How she knew what their joint writing plans had been. What David’s other officers thought of him. What the men thought, important now since her own wounded patients had shown her how quickly and well they could assay the worth in men. And now he was sitting here, this lovely man, not only confirming all of it but disclosing his emotions by his determination to conceal them.
‘And what will David think of me,’ she thought, ‘when I come to reveal to him my little secret – my inconvenient cross to eventually bear?’
What could he have thought when she told him she actually did not “belong” to Alan? What could that fact have really meant to him, and what might it mean now within the hour? Why was it he asked none of these questions, she thought. Alan had described David’s habit – searching, continuous, unrelenting, irrepressible? Most men asked her too many questions – and too quickly. Could it be he asked her none because he felt desire too strong in her presence?
She looked toward him again and saw with inclusion that it must be that. The knuckles of his left hand, covered by the hand that now bore Alan’s ring, were white from clenching. It must be that. The tightness of his lips was another confirming sign.
Revolt! She felt herself almost as deeply stirred by her alarm for him as she had now begun to feel the full impact of Alan’s death. Little tremors now ran through her as if she had been caressed against her will. Might she not respond herself in this revolt against reality and was not the question, itself, a response?
‘If Alan had come to me instead,’ she wondered, ‘would reason have dissolved, and would I not have been persuaded? Imagination, of course, but now it seems as if there was a flow from him to me, from Alan to David, but as sure as if someone who had loved me for so long had now returned. Enough of this now,’ she thought.
“Coffee?” she heard herself’ say in a voice that seemed all too steady. “I’ll make some coffee now.”
“Coffee! And in a cup! Let me help?”
“You sit right there. My coffee’s best made alone.”
Anne thought, ‘Four cups? Now how much coffee is that? How much water? But I’ve made ten thousand cups! What’ll I say? How’ll I say it? Where’re the matches? Where’s my silver tray? Where’s anything?
‘Say it, soldier. Fashion way or woman’s way? Why doesn’t he say something? Say what? Looking out the window at the rain. Does he regret coming here? What do I do next? Why must I jiggle everything? He’ll see my hands are shaking. Stop trembling!’
“Forgive me,” she finally said, “but what can I think? Absent without leave – no friends – and who would hide you? No decent person! Who else? How can I say nothing, just see you go?”
‘This isn’t Alan; it’s David – no, it’s both! It’s only David, but I seem to know him better, I think, better perhaps than I did Alan …’
‘Might I say to him, “I know you better than you think. Il appela à lui tout son courage; he would nerve himself for what he had to do. That’s you, David, your whole record and how you came today. But now it’s done, David, don’t fly to pieces like all the rest!”’
‘Revolt against reality! How to halt you? How to stop you walking tight-lipped and looking straight ahead, right into Paris, burning like a torch! You’d not go far, not far at all; not even as far as Porte Maillot before some woman took your arm.
‘My knees have turned to water,’ she thought.
David twisted Alan’s ring and thought, ‘Damn chance and luck and fate. Damn all the things she thinks that are or aren’t. Damn all she’s heard and read and thought. Damn this honor! It calls into question our entire set of moral values. It’s the motivator of violence, useless when wounded; it’s only gained through death and is worthless. Honor is just a word, nothing but thin air, Quote, fool, quote:
“Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.” 3
‘No billet this behind the line,’ he thought. ‘Look at her books, her prints, her brass, the things that make her of our kind. No wench to catch behind a door and kiss and crush and then push away. Not just another woman, but still wheat and sea and sun and play when work is done. Here’s something to be faithful to and make a scheme of life. Damn Alan.’
She looked at him over the silver. How clumsy his hands were over the cup, the silver. How brown and clumsy his hands and strong despite their long nervous fingers, cared for only by being straight-cut; these hands could hurt you without knowing. ‘Damn, curse this day, this war and this revolt,’ she thought. ‘And how to halt you?’
‘But time moves so slowly now,’ Anne thought, musing on the wreckage of her life, so in need of some comfort and a confirmation of hope, a reason to go on with this burden. ‘Why doesn’t he just say something?’
“This is not my first experience with death, you know,” she said.
“I suppose not, I suppose not,” he said absently.
Then sharply and abruptly, “Anne, what do you mean?”
“I’ve been seeing the wounded die for the last four years – almost four.”
“The wounded? My God, you don’t mean that? Not literally?”
“Yes David. In my ward at the American Ambulance Hospital. Not far from here, three blocks away, in the Lycée Pasteur.”
She saw a quick eager light in his grey eyes, at once extinguished and followed by anger, for there seemed a sudden surge of blood beneath the brown of his face. These were the responses she might have expected, she reflected, had she remembered, before she spoke, the particular circumstances of this afternoon and the two V wound chevrons of gold on the cuff of his sleeve. That sudden gleam, she knew, had been upon his grasp of the fact she was a nurse with its inevitable corollary idea that therefore she be a woman of experience. His anger seemed far more important to her. It furnished proof, if there had not been enough already, of the thoughts he had striven so hard to conceal. His anger when she told him she was nursing was, she knew, because he had felt that fact place an impregnable defense about herself. Anger because obviously he subscribed to the chivalry of the veteran toward all women in the nursing service, a mark of the field soldier as clear as a wound chevron for, despite frailty and all the false lying tales, a nurse was safe with a fighting man under almost any circumstances.
“A nurse! I had no i
dea.”
“I’m a blue-skirt, David. As a student nurse, I can do more that’s really needed.”
“You mean you went into it for the duration? Not really a probationer but temporary as I’m a temporary officer?”
“That’s it.’
“That’s fine of you. But it’s hard to believe you’ve had the worst side of this war.”
‘There seems,’ she thought, ‘a shade of relief in his voice.’
“Then you have seen too much of pain and death.”
“Just about. Part of our reality, David.” There was a breathless pause she thought; she had not meant to say just that.
“You’ve faith,” he said, for the first time seeming to choose his words with hesitation. “You still have faith in something – still?”
Her heart, he thought, had missed a beat. How strange a question that would have seemed four years ago, when now it was more than flattery. You might have no faith yourself, but you hoped another had perhaps devised some makeshift.
“Yes, David, I have. It’s nothing new. It used to be called the Golden Rule. People trying to help each other and not to hurt.”