An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  “Brought me here,” David said, remembering he had struck the Priest, “Why?”

  “It seemed wiser.”

  David considered the idea. ‘Why wiser?’ He said; “I guess I’ll be getting back to my billet now.”

  “Your head swims? Vision clear?”

  “I can see, yes.”

  “Pain?”

  “None to speak of. Head – a little …”

  “Take a deep breath,” the Priest ordered.

  David felt as if crushed inside.

  “Guess I had too much to drink, too,” he admitted.

  “More canal water than anything.”

  “I’m all right. Now …”

  “Don’t argue, lad. There’s a nasty wound at the back of your head.”

  “There it is again! The back of my head!”

  “Yes, and another near the groin. No great damage, but this isn’t the time to test the surgery.”

  “Surgery? But look here …”

  “Doctor says you can’t move tonight. Today. Later. But not for another twenty-four hours at least.”

  “But I’ve got to get back to my billet.”

  The Priest smiled gravely.

  “Everybody knows my billet,” David said. “Why didn’t they take me back there?”

  The Priest was silent.

  “Priest!” David said suddenly. “It was your moral idea I suppose …”

  “Really, I could carry a message to – to Savatier’s for you. We’re the same street. It would be no problem at all for me. I should think …”

  “Let me do my own thinking …”

  “I was merely suggesting. I could report for you, you know.”

  “Doesn’t she know I was brought here?”

  “Probably not …”

  “Then,” David said with weakness and exasperation, “I’d thank you to go and report.” He closed his eyes, his head throbbing.

  2

  “You talked a good deal yesterday,” the Priest said.

  “Yesterday? I don’t remember.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t. Perhaps it was a better confession than many.”

  “Off my nut!”

  “Decidedly.”

  David, unaccountably relieved, felt the beginning of a laugh quivering in the muscle of his abdomen. But there was no pain. “Then it spilled over,” he said, “and wasn’t a confession.”

  “It went back quite a way.”

  “I thought when a man was out of his head he isn’t supposed to be told about it? That’s privileged stuff even in an army hospital.”

  “I stand reproved. The circumstances, however, are a bit on the unusual side. I’ve heard a good deal, in my time, from men who didn’t know what they were saying. I want you to understand, I forget it immediately if I can do nothing about it.”

  “I’ve been kidded by experts,” David said shortly. “No priest can be of any help to me.”

  The face above David smiled suddenly with white, even teeth. “You call me Priest,” he said slowly. “I’d rather you thought of me as a soldier. Of the regiment of Ignatius of Loyola. You’d call us the light cavalry, perhaps. Companion in arms to Francis Xavier.”

  “A Jesuit!”

  “Yes. But still man enough to feel I’d like to have served in your battalion.”

  “So I babble back as far as the battalion?”

  “Further than that. But when I said I’d really like to have served, I meant …”

  “That’s a good one!”

  “I know what you think,” the Priest said quickly. “You think I’m going about it in the way a Protestant thinks a Jesuit would?”

  “That’s right. And you’re not going to try any soul saving with me, as weak as I am.”

  “Then only a miracle, I suppose, will make you believe I’m sincere?”

  “Miracle?” David laughed. “Yes, only a miracle.”

  “Then watch me closely. Since it’s a miracle you demand, it’ll be a miracle you’ll get.”

  “I’m off my nut again,” David said. “I understood you to say something you couldn’t have said.”

  “But I did! I said if you watched me, then I’d show you a miracle.”

  “I’m watching, but it’ll have to be a damned good one.”

  Suddenly, shockingly, the Priest plucked out his right eye and rolled it across the coverlet to David’s paralyzed fingers.

  “Good God!” David cried.

  “Nice little trick, what?” the Priest said. “Hackneyed though. You should have seen I had a glass eye. Still, isn’t it rather beautifully matched?” He retrieved the eye, replaced it. “That was my blighty – with the Second Canadian Brigade, or I’d probably be lying now in the cemetery at Tyne Cot.” He laughed. David, to his amazement, joined him, finding it again the coarse laughter of field and billet, laughter that shocked and jolted him, laughter that seemed to heal.

  Finally, David said, “Soldier, I apologize. I got you wrong from the beginning. I can’t say how sorry I am.”

  “Forget it,” the Priest said. “It was only natural. But I repeat I’d like to have served with your battalion – from the unconscious remark you made about it and from my own, not entirely inexperienced conclusions, as to its commander.”

  “Chaplain,” David said, “I’m dirt. But I’m deeply appreciative of …”

  “Now that we understand each other,” the Priest interrupted, “I offer you my services for whatever they may be worth.”

  David said suddenly, “Padre, was it you who pulled me out of the canal?”

  “Well, Atwood, I was afraid for you, after we talked. Perhaps you don’t remember; you’d come out of a house …”

  “I remember. Those two girls there. They were – all right?”

  “Yes. Nothing on the crime sheet there.”

  “We talked and I hit you, or tried to …”

  “That was natural, too, I think. You resented my suspicion. Then I followed you. I found a boat and …”

  “You must have followed me into Savatier’s house; the only way I knew to get to the boat was through that house.”

  “Right.”

  “You pulled me out …”

  The Priest grinned. “Your weight, I’d judge, isn’t much under thirteen stone, plus all that canal water …”

  “I can never thank you …”

  “Part of my job, Major Atwood. Priests have been pulling people out of these canals for a good many hundred years. As a matter of fact, just now, we have a sort of patrol. My study, here, looks out on my sector – keeping an eye on it during certain hours and all that. After a war, you know, but that’s another story …”

  “I knew someone was helping me. I felt him grab. I thought it was Alan …”

  “Yes, you’ve told me something about him too.”

  Shouting, David remembered vaguely, shouting for God to come up out of the dugout, the crypt. If the Padre had heard, and of course he had, what a chance for him to say, ‘God heard you. He came out of his cathedral.’

  David said, “Look here, Padre, I do need help and by God – sorry sir! – I do need advice.”

  “I’d like to enlist this General Gaspard,” the Padre said, “to carry out operations of my own. It’s obvious he’s a man of imagination, courage, resource and decision by no means to be despised. We must dig out his motives if we can. Money doesn’t seem to me to be a motive, Atwood, despite your conversation about it. Really, don’t you think he’d be able to do better for his daughter – I mean if he looked upon her as a commodity?”

  David admitted that seemed true.

  “Then there’s a moral reason?” the Padre asked.

  “If you mean as far as I’m concerned,” David said, “– no. He suggested I make love to her before there could have been
a moral reason.”

  “Yes. And then, Atwood, after your meeting in the Bois, was there still no moral reason?”

  “No – but there was implied – a promise.”

  “No more than that? I don’t mean to be indelicate, Atwood, but …”

  “You mean no physical reason, Father?”

  “My family name is Allenby,” the Priest said. “Most of the men call me that. Yes, I mean physical reason?”

  “No, Allenby, definitely not.”

  “Then we have to go back further. You’re sure the father had a real affection for his daughter?”

  “No doubt about it. Only I didn’t understand his advice about acquiring more experience.”

  “There, Atwood, is French sophistication. I can understand what might have been his point of view, but without agreeing with it. You see, before I took orders I was in Harley Street. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No, Allenby.”

  “A physician in London – a fashionable doctor.”

  “You, a doctor! You patched me up?”

  Allenby laughed. “A little illegal surgery to keep my hand in. Yes, a physician for a little of everything, including all forms of mental ills. The reason I say I think I understand General Gaspard’s idea; we had a god called experience. It may be Gaspard’s too. The cult has grown enormously. There’s just enough in it. The idea is popular, naturally. You must experience evil to know how to handle it and that sort of thing. It’s better to sow your wild oats than to regret you haven’t, in a nastier and nastier way, all the rest of your life. A fashionable cult with a fashionable god, telling people what they want to do is the best thing for them, with additional fees, practically guaranteed, to patch up the result.”

  “Just a minute, Allenby. I appreciate your care of me and all …”

  Again the Priest waved the thanks away. “We were discussing this Frenchmen’s motives, and I was looking at it from my old professional standpoint. Now don’t misinterpret me, Atwood. I’m asking as a physician; you had this girl in your arms?”

  “Yes.”

  “You felt nothing unusual, nothing strange, fluctuating, arhythmical, in the beating of her heart? An echo of a beat, a double beat?”

  “No, but I shouldn’t think – to hear anything like that …”

  “Quite. I asked too much. Even then your ear would have to be trained. You’d have to be too shockingly cool to be human …”

  “Allenby, what do you mean?”

  “I mean … Steady! I’m simply trying to reason this out. I mean – think back. The father has, you’re sure, a great affection for his child. He does everything, it seems to me, to throw you together at the first possible moment he can manage it. Just as soon, in fact, as the fighting is over – on the very next day. Isn’t that an extraordinary thing? Perhaps, of course, it was chance – only the result of both of you rushing to Paris to save yourself from court-martial. Perhaps, but in the past, as you knew this Gaspard, did he leave much to chance? No, I think not; I think he’s pretty coldly calculating. You said yesterday, in fact you repeated over and over again the idea that it must be a definite plan from the beginning. So, let’s work on that assumption. General Gaspard seems to have been urged on by a strange haste to have you meet his daughter. Why? The reason, the additional reason, he gave for wishing to get to Paris was that his daughter might be persuaded to enter a convent. True – perhaps, but is that sufficient reason for his actions? And wasn’t it an inconceivable lack of chaperonage, from the French point of view, to allow, much less suggest, the two of you go alone into the Bois? See here, Atwood, looking at it in that way, again from the French point of view, doesn’t it seem that this man of the world almost arranged for a …? Really, I’d much rather you asked the question yourself.”

  “You mean …? I know what you mean. You mean; didn’t he seem to arrange for a – a seduction?”

  “Yes, I meant that.”

  “But I can’t think that!”

  “But didn’t he?”

  “No – with Celeste – never! If you saw her you’d see no one would even dare, whatever he might feel. And there has to be weakness for that, giving in.”

  “Wasn’t there something of the sort?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean to be indelicate, Atwood, but my understanding was there was a strong mutual feeling.”

  “There was.”

  “Didn’t her father say she was ready to be swept off her feet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her father had been talking about how especially strong the emotions were, because of the times?”

  “Yes.”

  “We must dig out his motives,” Allenby said again. “What was his plan? Was it to involve the first upstanding, marriageable man he could find – yourself? He’s very much the realist. What does he see we haven’t seen already? What does he know we don’t? You’re an American. You may be oblivious to factors in the background. For example, you don’t know the black swan that attacked you was a descendant of …”

  “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “Just a moment. It’s the kind of information you may need to fully understand.”

  “Well, then …”

  “The black swan that attacked you is a descendant of those placed upon the canals by Maximilian the First, the Hapsburg who married Mary of Burgundy in the last quarter of the Thirteenth Century, acquiring with her territory, which is now a part of Belgium. The swans were a grim gesture to remind his subjects of an unsuccessful uprising against him and the beheading of his Treasurer, Lang Hals – Long Neck – by the rebels. Lang Hals’ armorial device was a black swan. So first by law, and then by tradition, the swans have remained. The local legend is that some of the oldest are really Maximilian’s own and actually fed from his jeweled hand. They’re dangerous, cursed dangerous – as you discovered – but can they be destroyed? No. We go on and on with them from force of habit and tradition. Now Europe is like that. Not so America. You belong to a new people. Europe is old and now poor and sick and in many ways stupid compared to you. You root things up if they’re found to be wrong. We don’t. We continue to live with them. Two-thirds of England and four-fifths of Europe are still living in the fifteenth century.”

  “What’s that got to do …?”

  “A great deal. With the alternate physical reason touching this girl. And it would be an explanation, Major, from the beginning. Let me ask another question. Where was this girl born?”

  “Where was she born?” David echoed. “Why, I have no idea.”

  “Possibly at some French Army post?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. Yes, very possibly.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Born about twenty years ago, possibly at some French Army post, some caserne. Yes. Now how would you describe a French barracks, even the officers’ quarters? Ever been billeted in one? I mean, in an army building used by the army in peacetime?”

  “Yes, but why? Well, the only ones I’ve ever seen were old, built to last, stone, whitewashed, cheerless, damp, chill …”

  “That’s enough. Damp and chill, even the officers’ quarters. Was there any stiffness in her gait?”

  “What? No.”

  “No indication of inflamed joints?”

  “Well, there again …”

  “No mention of illness as a child?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing about a rheumatic fever? It’s a caserne disease.”

  “No.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of death from heart disease?”

  “Yes, Anne Janney. The shock – yes – her heart. But what do you mean now?”

  “I mean just this. Chill barrack quarters and the possibility of rheumatic fever as a child. This could cause damage to the
heart valves – endocarditis. It’s more prevalent in England and France than is generally known. Dark, dank old houses that’ve never seen the sun inside them. None of the central heating you have in America. Everything cold and chill and damp. One room is usually too warm, often unhealthily hot. If you were a general practitioner in either London or Paris you’d know of hundreds of persons affected at childhood – most not dangerously. Slight valvular lesions don’t mean much. But a serious lesion means the need for precautions, avoidance of any over-exertion.”

  Gaspard went grey, David recalled, when Celeste told him they had been jumping the hurdles in the Bois.

  “The brain, Atwood, and the heart are intimately connected. You know what fear does to your heart? A close one – and down you go into the mud with your heart thumping and vibrating like an engine. Men died of fright in the field. Their hearts couldn’t stand it. Brain impulses disturb the rhythm of the heart. Sudden anger, sudden sorrow, dismay, joy, fulfillment of hopes. Why, excitement even among civilians during the war was quite enough to aggravate a heart condition and make a comparatively simple infection most dangerous.”

  “But this can’t be …”

  “Her father’s action was unusual. Unusual action comes from unusual causes. There is no moral reason. Then there is physical reason why the father wishes you to make love to his daughter. And why does he wish to make sure you’ll not be inept? Why that, when normally marriage assures a long time in which to make adjustments? Why, you ask, the urgency of the father’s insistence upon experience? In a hurry? Does he fear the time may be short when you’ll be together?”

  David saw as if a flare had starkly illuminated events from the beginning. He saw how each detail fit Allenby’s theory. He saw how Gaspard’s plan could not be merely an erratic one to confound the Saint and at the same time to begin the worldly education of Celeste. He saw its design now, explaining why Gaspard had brought Celeste and himself together, smoldering with desire, to ignite. How Gaspard had reasoned with appalling and utterly realistic logic, right or wrong, with moral courage.

  David remembered, ‘Sudden joy – sudden fulfillment of hopes – excitement – enough to aggravate such a heart condition.’ Even the consummation of their love, he saw, met that description, made it seem adequate to either her shock of exquisite realization or, more unfortunately likely, her sudden dismay and disillusion after a month of desire and imagination stronger than in usual times. Yet, to let Celeste down, of which Gaspard had talked so glibly though perhaps never meaning a word of it, suddenly seemed a kind of murder of her expectations. But whichever he did, David abruptly understood, the result looked inevitably the same. He felt the full and terrifying power of his will even though it seemed free only to make a choice between two ways of accomplishing the same evil. It seemed like death again, as he had suspected. Death, once again actually and shockingly in his touch.