An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  “Oui, oui.” “Perhaps!” “What else do you suggest?”

  “Perhaps one of you will give me his name and address. Then I can consult with him. And if it seems agreeable to this street of – (‘what would Gaspard have said?’) – this street of the beautiful, clever, laughing girls …”

  “Virtuous! First Virtuous!”

  “This street of the virtuous, beautiful, clever …”

  “Bon! Bon! Bon-bon! Hah!” “That is true!” “Almost!” There seemed to be a loud dispute at the end of the street where David had entered.

  “If,” David cried, outshouting them, “If one of you will act as the secretaire de la rue, I should appreciate introductions later …”

  “Oh! Oh! Notre vertu!”

  “And I will ask all of you to come somewhere, in some garden …”

  “In the garden of that pension.”

  “To the garden of that pension, not only the virtuous, beautiful, clever, but …”

  “Then,” shouted the redhead, “I accept now and will come!”

  The people of the street wiped their eyes and laughed once more. The impression was strong upon David how they were catching at the smallest opportunity for amusement having seen enough of anguish and despair. “I’ll ask you,” David said, warming and expanding, “to come – not to an expensive party for I haven’t the means – but to a friendly fête of some sort. If you like, we will have music and dancing!”

  “We can come without food if we can have lights in colored lanterns?” a girl called. The request seemed full of poignancy, a desire as necessary of fulfillment as if it had come from the lips of some sick child and at the same time as sensible as if the whole quarter had discussed its civic necessity and decided upon it.

  “Vraiment! There will be lights in colored lanterns,” David promised.

  “But not too much light in the corners!”

  “Monsieur l’officier,” the old man in the blue smock said, “I, Emile Savatier, maker of sabots, at this address, number twelve bis, am at your service. Always I may be found here, for I am lame. I will act as secretaire of the Street of the Virtuous Laughing Girls. I would be honored.”

  “Monsieur Savatier, you’re commissioned, “David said. “In three or four days I’ll call upon you, and we will consider the arrangements.” David turned again to the Street, “Keep your virtue, I beg of you, at least until we meet …”

  The Street crackled with applause, like rifle fire in a narrow defile. David waved and turned out of the street, breathless, amazed at them and himself. This was Bruges-la-Morte with its ancient canals, monasteries and convents. He had thought of the humanity within it as old-eyed fish in a brackish pool. Now he saw how high it splashed against its ancient walls. How amused Celeste would have been.

  2

  Bruges, a unique and outstanding example of a medieval historic town, has maintained its historical character as it evolved over the centuries. Original constructions, buildings and bridges, form the town’s identity. Once one of the commercial and cultural capitals of Europe, Bruges was a commercial metropolis and established trade and cultural links to different parts of the world. This architecture strongly determines the character of the historic heart of the city, an example of an architectural ensemble illustrating significant stages in the commercial and cultural arenas of medieval Europe.

  The city reflects its considerable exchange of influences in the evolution of European art and architecture, particularly of brick Gothic, characteristic of northern Europe and the Baltic. Its 11th century city walls marked the boundaries of the old medieval city. Although the walls themselves are gone, their remains are clearly visible, emphasized by four surviving gates, ramparts and defense water towers. The ancient street pattern, with its main roads leading toward important public squares, has mostly been preserved, as well as the medieval network of canals, once so important for mercantile traffic and which played an important role in the city’s development.

  In the 15th century, Bruges was home to the Flemish Primitive Art movement and a center of patronage and painting for artists such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling. Many of their works were exported and influenced subsequent European painting styles, and exceptionally important art collections have remained in the city.

  Bruges has preserved the architectural and urban structures that document different phases of its development, including the central Market Place with its belfry, the Béguinage, as well as hospitals, religious and commercial complexes. Bruges is characterized by a continuity reflected in its relative harmony of changes. As part of this continuity, late 19th century renovation of facades introduced a Neo-Gothic style unique to Bruges. This style of construction and its restoration became a subject of much interest, study and inspiration.

  3

  David wrote, ‘My Dearest Celeste:

  ‘I love you in all its conjugations, but I am lonelier than ever. Nothing is of any consequence unless it happens with you, however welcome it otherwise might be. I am grateful for Papa G’s understanding of my need for this leave and his irresistible diplomacy in securing it for me. But his success convinces me more than ever I have been right in not telling him outright the conclusion you and I have reached. It is enough he must have seen what has happened to my heart.

  ‘You have no real idea, I think, how formidable an antagonist your father can be. Saying this does not mean I am preparing to be unfriendly to him. I will always think of him as a grand comrade. We have seen each other in action and in many ways mutually approve. But I am bracing myself for a strong difference of opinion with regard to how you shall dispose of the rest of your life. If I were in his place, I might have other plans for you and use all my strength and ingenuity to ambush and enfilade “le jeune Americain.” I will hardly blame him whatever he does – for it will be done with the best of intentions for you.

  ‘I am now settled in my leave billet. The situation is altogether strange. I am in command of myself for the first time I can remember. No one can order me to do anything, and I have no duties whatsoever. So, in revolt against usually having to have all the information about a place as quickly as possible, I shall not even look about until tomorrow, and then only if the impulse moves me strongly.

  ‘I am out of action and out of this world, in a fourteenth century town crisscrossed by dark canals, in a tangle of narrow streets under the carved timbers of over-hanging house fronts, a moated, battlemented stronghold that was – with the moats still filled with water and swans upon them, the city gates still standing and, against the sky, towers that sounded deep, pealed solemn bells a few moments ago. Centuries hover about this place. Long ago, when a hundred and fifty ships entered the port in a single day, my forebears from across the Channel may have been here selling wool to the Flemish looms, and yours, perhaps, were among the knights of Philippe of Valois, who raided the wealth as it accumulated. From what I have seen so far, Bruges looks like the setting for roistering blades and wenches, though you need not fear that as far as I am concerned. I feel I am wearing your glove in my helmet: ‘L’absence diminue les mediocres passions et augmente les grandee …’ I am not sure of the rest of the quotation, but I think La Rochefoucauld wrote, “comme le vent eteint les bougies at allume le feu.” Will you not actually send me a glove? I should like one of those you wore when we rode in the Bois.

  ‘I love you. I am lonelier than ever now, here alone without you.

  ‘You asked me if I grow cold when I write you details, and you chide me for love letters when you want factual information. I must say, do not let my sight become blurred if I am to do good newspaper work. Well, then, the walls of this old house are of stone and so thick you could scream if you did not like or did like very much my lovemaking, and no one would ever hear you. I have a coal fire upon my hearth. Which piece is my heart and which yours? I cannot tell. The warmth of it would fill the room. The window casement opens
upon a courtyard garden. Tomorrow, we should lean over the sill together and see the little pool in the center of it, the trees in tubs and the graveled walks. We would drink in the fresh air of early morning and shiver with the fire dead upon the hearth, but we would quickly warm again, safe under our sheets.

  ‘There are other guests here, all civilians, but they would not bother us. They are English, and we would surely embarrass them rather than they us. We would forget them and say before them whatever happened to be in our hearts. Two of them, I think, must be ‘clerks in the City’. They are like warehouse walls with shuttered windows, without cornice or character except moldy drabness, middle-aged bodies with faces that do not clearly photograph. The third is a parson, in my language, but not exactly a priest in yours – a parson or a vicar of the Church of England with established opinion, a ruddy, athletic, handsome man with grey at the temples, but somehow lacking. But he could marry us just the same if he could take his pipe out of his mouth long enough. All of them are as steady as rocks that have not felt the flood of blood about them. I am angry because they have not mentioned the war, though thankfully I came here to forget it. But you – they would look at you and be shaken; they would think you too beautiful to be good, and I should enjoy thrashing them for it and all their assumptions.

  ‘I love you. I am lonelier than ever still.

  ‘I hope you are as restless as I am, for then we shall both make up for the waiting. The intervals between your letters are like years, but I would rather not have you write at all if only out of duty. I know there is nothing as necessary to living as a sense of duty, but I have found also there is nothing that kills love quicker.’

  David paused his writing; what might perhaps be spoken could not always be written. He read the last part and thought, ‘it might imply experience to Celeste. She would demand a certain experience, but where was the lie? And Gaspard had said, “You must meet their expectations”.’

  David read the letter back from the beginning – twice – and found, “. . . for it will be done, with the best of intentions for you …” He thought, ‘That might well be Gaspard’s attitude. Might it not also explain his immediate motives? It was obvious Gaspard would be considering, solely, Celeste. Why had he put such emphasis upon his comment, “I should feel better satisfied if it were possible for you to acquire … more experience?” Why had he advised a mistress? Was it not all of one piece? Was Gaspard forcing leave upon him because he was confident the advice would be taken?’ David felt suspicion. ‘Was Gaspard trying to maneuver him into a position where he could say, not without justice, “You are not fit for Celeste.” Then why had I been so explicit in his advice notwithstanding Celeste? Maybe I should not hold to his theory. Then, Gaspard must be striving for some other, an opposite, result? That was more inconceivable still, if carried to its logical conclusion. Yet Gaspard’s logic was always like that – sharp and realistic but with the exception, perhaps, of that mad moment when he decided to fight the Oberst. Gaspard had seen the inevitable. He must have seen what had happened in my heart, and in the extremity of his realism cleverly planned for Celeste’s expectations to be met?

  ‘Was it a sophisticated idea,’ he continued in thought, ‘like others of Gaspard’s that love was an art, to be practiced and honed if it were not to fall short of expectations? Perhaps my own shortcomings might be on the side of idealism and Gaspard’s from too cynical a side of subjective realism. But it was shocking to all delicacy if Gaspard was thinking, as he had indicated, only of the physical part of it. Yet it was part, all the more because of Celeste’s quick sensibilities and fire, her understanding, her selective mind with soaring emotions. And why had he included in his admonition “to acquire, with some quickness, more experience …?” What was this urgency?’

  David knew he had thought himself into an entanglement as effectually as if he had run full blindly into a six-stake barbed wire and must take it slowly and carefully to get free. He crossed out the whole last paragraph and took a new sheet to copy what was necessary.

  4

  A note from Gaspard, received on the fourth day of David’s furlough in Bruges, was addressed to the Pension Redlich-Knight. Gaspard’s heavy hand sprawled across the envelope as if written by a farrier with a horse-shoe nail. The correct address told David a story by itself: Gaspard must have ascertained from Division Headquarters that the leave order had been issued for Bruges; he must have then telegraphed the Provost Martial for the street address. David ripped open the envelope and read:

  ‘Cher David: I am confident you have already forgiven me for my stratagem. By this time, you have realized how sound is my advice. I hope you will understand it is necessary to relax the body detendre l’esprit. Today I am struck by examples of failure to do this among the English, men who have not been able to fully recover their faculties after so many bombardements. Of course there are some cowards among them, but the trouble with most of these men is they are too sensitive while also too serieux.

  ‘Having been detached from troops as you know, I have been to Paris again, and I am now engaged upon a mission of rapport with our allies, visiting headquarters and hospitals. This morning, I had the great pleasure of decorating nurses at the hospital center at Etaples, or what is left of it after it was so cruelly bombed from the air. Their citations show during that episode they were as gallant as they are wise, and they are wise. Also several of them are not without an English sort of beauty, and you may be sure I did not forget the ceremonial embrace. One of them, to my surprise, was not lacking in humor either, though English, for afterwards she told me she has been kissed a number of times but never by a goat, a poodle and a bear all at the same time and that without doubt I was the embodiment of all three.

  ‘There is a strange pleasure in exchanging confidence with a woman who so obviously prefers beardless men, if there is a true man without one, and to whom I cannot therefore make love. Which reminds me again to say: I hope you will understand how necessary it is for one who has gone through the fire, as you have, keeping all the while so admirable a sangfroid, now to – donner du soulagement to those impulses, whatever they may be, you have so long repressed. Otherwise I fear something may break in your head as it has with these I have just seen. That is all I shall say, since you have told me melez-vous de ce qui regarde! Quand nous reverrons-nous? ~ H.G.”

  David put the letter aside. His thoughts went back to the textbook he had been reading about this place by Gilliat-Smith. He wondered whether or not there was a cycle, these wars, generation upon generation. He turned the pages and found what he was looking for:

  “By the close of the summer of 1214, the French were at the gates of the city. Soon, tottering walls and smoldering embers were all that remained of its famous seaport called the Damme, and the vast wealth of merchandise stored there, and thousands of homes had been reduced to ashes. The fertile countryside round was white to harvest, and Philip” [of Burgundy] “had reaped it with sickles of flame. From Bruges to the seashore, all was one great field of black stubble.”

  He looked three stories down from his room, grey walls turning green with moss where they touched the canal water’s edge. The house rose out of the canal as though floating upon it. Steps disappeared into the water, probably from a postern. These canals had also been their streets where, in contrast to the cobbles, one could move silently. Against the steps, moored through a ring held in the mouth of a bronze lion’s head, a narrow, square-ended punt swung lazily.

  Suddenly, a bell pealed high in the tower, clear, sharp, penetrating, echoing among the tiled housetops, through the courtyards and from the water. It was the Angelus. He had been told it could be heard far out in the surrounding countryside, where devout peasants crossed themselves and paused in their toil in the fields.

  It was six o’clock. ‘Three times a day since the beginning and forever,’ he thought, ‘or as long as there were priests who found it, payed them to pull a rope to
ring a bell. No, he was wrong there: not since the beginning, but hell-and-gone back, since the end of the fifteenth century.’ He had looked it up.

  Annoyed by not knowing, yesterday he walked all the way to the English library and back, just for that. David thought, ‘A writer can’t live long away from reference books, but he couldn’t carry an encyclopedia all around Europe with his shirts either. Though who was it who is never without one? That bell! Nothing on earth could stop its ringing at six in the morning, then again at noon and six in the evening. Things like that, once started, never really ended. So many things like that had been started that no longer mattered; they went on because nobody had the strength to stop them. The past had filled up the present like a disease, paralyzing it. You couldn’t break out of the grip of the past. But why not? Because you only broke one hold to get yourself into another. Every damned thing went on, but less good than evil: “the evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred” and so on. It went even further than that here: black ideas had been given such nourishment in the darkness of this place, where they had originated, that they could break through the difference between thought and substance. Defy one of these ideas out loud in this ghostly city and the idea itself became enraged, took on physical shape, rose out of the night and the past and fought you with corporeal members. There damned well was such a thing as embodiment of thought. I have seen it – with wings. Never again will I be contemptuous of the continuing evil of the past, or in this place, with fifteenth century fungus under its bridges, and not in most of the ancient places, of this cursed old Europe.

  ‘No wonder some of my ancestors had wanted the right to worship as they chose and left this place for America. I think I have now my first understanding of them. No wonder they looked for clean, new, unused soil to live upon. Most of it here had been polluted. I had never seen it before, but these old cities were like archaeological layers, one upon the other. And deep down under every place where there were as few as a thousand people, was so vast an accumulation of the past that everything built over it had to be designed to stand on that kind of a foundation. It could never be firm and strong like the really new. It had to have piles driven down under it to hold it up even for a while above all that corruption beneath.