An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  He cried out to Allenby: “What am I to do? Good God! Why did you have to tell me this?!”

  “Part of your punishment,” Allenby said, seeming suddenly to become the priest, “for being irreligious, scoffing, profane, blasphemous.” His face crimsoned as if he had just heard a stranger speak and was angrily ashamed. “Oh God!” he cried, “God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth; the Son, Redeemer of the world; the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful – have mercy!” Allenby put his great head in his hand, and David saw little beads of sweat at the edge of his hair, “And you, Atwood, I pray you’ll forgive me! I lost proportion. I condemned you, forgetting that when I heard you shouting, your mind was released from restraint by drunkenness. Forgetting when I heard you that I knew you were making suggestions quite as valuable to me as all these books you see on my shelves here, books attacking religion and the church, books I use to inspire me to create comment to further the faith. Forgetting that, I went into the field as a chaplain hoping men might open their hearts to me, going through all but death – and I say it humbly – to find out what men really thought – finding they distrusted me the moment they saw the black pips on my tunic, just as clerical garb affects civilians. Then you are sent to me. And I condemn you as if I were a fanatic. Before another instant passes let me say, ego te absolve.

  “Let me say,” Allenby continued, “I understand how among thinking men there seems no proof of the existence of God, nothing really cogent – that spiritual truth is apprehended by direct intuition and that, while I speak for the one Holy Catholic Church, I know there is something true and divinely revealed in every religion. I know at this moment, and perhaps right here close to us, new religions are coming out of shadows and imagination into truth.” He smiled again, “I didn’t mean to speak of religion or of God to you just yet. I didn’t wish you to think I was dragging Him in where He didn’t belong, though I think He belongs everywhere. Then you’d have been annoyed with me. I shouldn’t have minded that, but it might have spoiled my usefulness to you. But I must have been enjoying my arrogance, thinking I was the instrument of God. I study to be that, but not to punish for Him. My spirit, Atwood, is still unfit for this service. My sin against you is a sin against Him. I can’t soften what I’ve said or undo the effect. I saw you were suffering. I knew I was about to strike you a blow yet I didn’t stay it. I don’t mean the stroke of speaking of punishment. I mean the whole blow – my idea of the motive. I fear there’s still something of the medical mountebank left in me. Perhaps I wished to impress you with my superior experience, that I’ve known all classes and conditions of men and women, that I’d been a factor in many situations – that I had actual case histories to back me. I hope you’ll find it in your heart, someday, to forgive me.”

  David interrupted: “Forgive you? Allenby, what’s to forgive? Of course, I forgive you with all my heart. You’ve done me a very great service. By striking me now, you’ve prepared me to stand a much greater blow later.”

  “Believe me grateful, Atwood – deeply grateful. I shall have more to say about that, if you’ll allow it. But now, while we’re on a subject that’ll be most difficult to resume later, let me say – you understand you’ve a decision to make. I suggest you make it without delay and while you’re here on leave. Yesterday you opened your mind to me about the girl at your billet. Rose? On the face of it, it might seem an illicit affair, which I could neither countenance nor condone. On the other hand, the motives there – her motives – should be considered. It’s evident she’s a person of fine qualities who deserves and ought to receive some measure of happiness. Well, you see?”

  David said slowly, “Did she want to come here? You know she’s an army nurse?”

  “Yes of course, but I persuaded her not to come. I said I thought it would be less embarrassing to you if she didn’t, but if there was any need for her I’d call upon her.”

  “Thank you. But just why did you do that?”

  “Your decision, it seemed to me, would be hard enough as it was …”

  “Allenby,” David said, feeling weakness, drowsiness and dimness coming over him, “You answer me one question?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Well, then, what do you think would make a woman most happy?”

  Allenby’s eyes closed, but a smile played about his lips, not unlike Alan’s repression at almost the point of speech. He put his head in his hands again and said, “I think … if not proof, then the feeling definite and conclusive, beyond anything she had ever known, that you have gone a great length for her. You discarded all that was small or selfish, brushed aside all advice and counsel and human opinion other than that within your own heart, made yourself a new man for her.”

  David felt his weariness dragging him away from the sound of Allenby’s voice and his awareness of the external. Then, between one minute and the next, he found himself in that limbo of almost pure thought without irrelevant detail, between consciousness and unconsciousness where problems are resolved simply and easily. ‘Make yourself a new man,’ he thought, ‘– perhaps an additional motive of Gaspard’s? I have already become so, made so by circumstances brought about by others – with the power passed, now, out of their control. Now I am at the bottom of all things about me. I’m the cause that makes the effect. I’m the one to decide what shall happen. I’m stronger now than Gaspard, the god. I’m as good a god as any.’

  PART 4

  THE GRATITUDE OF LABOR

  “All wars end; even this war will someday end,

  and the ruins will be rebuilt, and the field full of death will grow food,

  and all this frontier of trouble will be forgotten …

  In a few years’ time, when this war is a romance in memory,

  the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone.

  Centre Way, Peel Trench, Munster Alley,

  and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn,

  and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner”

  ~ John Masefield, The Old Front Line (1917)

  CHAPTER 16

  Wrestling with Proteus

  “I can add colors to the chameleon,

  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

  And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

  Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

  Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.”

  ~ William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, Act III, Scene ii

  Aristaeus and Proteus, Versailles, France

  The connection had been as poor as he had expected after its long, confused and tiresome preliminaries. Finally, her voice had come to him like a reproduction of it upon a warped gramophone record, accompanied by scratchings, buzzings and clickings, fading and rising crescendos as if a dozen stations on the line from Lille to Paris were taking turns pouring in power from such crude appliances as Leyden jars. Though the result might otherwise have seemed exasperating, David still felt the vibrations of her voice in his heart. Despite the distortions, here once again were the throaty pitches, overflowing ideas beginning in French and then changing to English to surmount his difficulties of understanding, a language of intonations becoming more and more beautiful as he listened. The joyousness of her laughter alone, he thought, would have been enough, needing no translation, indeed no words. And so, for a long time, he could think of little else.

  Eventually, in that semi–stupefaction induced not only by pounding of the rails, the rumble of trucks and succession of images flashing by the windows of his compartment, he came to the realization how over and over again he had exaggerated the trivial emotion at the end of little episodes, likened the after-pauses to little armistices, imagined they contained more important significance. Even the actual armistice, that breathless instant at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, seemed now to have been external, of events outside himself, while this was indee
d the eleventh hour of and within himself, he thought. Already it contained feelings close to torture. His regret already seemed more poignant and more self-accusative than ever his acceptance of responsibility for the sad and unnecessary death of Anne. His sorrow, in premonition, seemed sharper even than at Alan’s death. The strength of David’s determination seemed now to him to be very like that vicious, conscienceless force that had so mercilessly struck down Alan.

  If such a decision, reached by imperceptible stages during those last days at Bruges, but now firm and final and as irrevocable as action already finished, could be called a conscious conclusion, then this decision was, he felt, already setting him apart from the rest of men. Yet also, with what he thought must be the private reflection of a criminal prepared to surpass any of his past crimes, he felt exultation more ready to shout aloud than at the successful climax of an attack. He was going, now, right or wrong, beyond anything he had ever dared.

  Thus, arriving in Paris at last, swinging off the train, rushing through the station barriers, waving aside a protesting military policeman and walking into and then out of the turmoil of the Gare Montparnasse without a glance behind him, was a matter of little consequence. If the man had been dumfounded by an officer’s disregard of regulations with regard to inspection and stamping orders at the gate then, David thought, that was his problem. If he followed, David decided with a spurt of fine loathing for the military police, then he could be forced into a taxicab at the point of a pistol and knocked out – with the rest to just take care of itself.

  Showers were now sweeping the streets, of that rain peculiar to Paris, falling every twenty-four hours like clockwork as if by a dispensation of nature to wash the face of the most beautiful and bawdy of cities – a place, David felt, the more gay for its somber grey vistas ready to spring into life when the sun filtered through the wet green freshness of the chestnuts along the boulevards, to glance and sparkle like laughter through tears.

  He halted and looked back. Good. The military policeman had no mind to follow.

  “Across the city,” David said to the taxi driver, “to the Cercle Militaire, quarante-neuf, Avenue de l’Opera.”

  These were the showers, he thought, as he passed the halted sidewalk life, which could be counted on to send men and women scurrying to shelter, creating smiles and laughter and comment natural to strangers, turning doorways and swinged café spaces suddenly into intimate rooms where the gregarious animal looked, more frankly in Paris than perhaps elsewhere, for any opportunity to complicate his or her pattern by chance meeting and passionate glance.

  “Hey!” David shouted to the taxi driver. “You think I don’t know Paris? You think you’re going to turn left past the Cimetiere Monparnasse? No you don’t! I’m not paying to pass cemeteries!”

  ‘Death again!’ he thought. ‘Reminders of it in the most civilized and ugliest forms – huge crosses, cold angels, immortelles, urns, beaded wreaths – the bulging Parisian cemeteries. Passing it perhaps to see some tawdry and bedraggled pompe funebre demanded by custom, just as Gaspard would demand. Oh God! How was it possible not to constantly think of the outcome?’

  “Want a crack over the head? Then keep right on down the Avenue du Maine. Keep going until you get to the Lion of Belfort at the Place Denfert. Then, you turn left and come back north again, along the Boulevard Raspail. You hear me? OK? And when you cross the river, you make it by the Pont de la Concorde.”

  “Mais, monsieur …”

  “Bull shit! Want me to turn you over to the next agent de police? No? Then put up your flag on your meter. I’ll begin paying again when we cross the Boulevard de Montparnasse, only a couple of blocks from where we started.”

  “Oui, Monsieur! As you say …”

  David leaned back in the seat. This was Paris, most civilized and therefore most treacherous of cities, and its people the most accomplished actors strutting across the most sophisticated stage of the western world. Gaspard, the Parisian, the clever one. To prepare for Gaspard, rest the mind. Look about, was this the Boulevard Raspail? Where, David wondered, had Anne lived? In that apartment building? Was it? It was almost Teutonic in its brutal massiveness, with the weight of its projecting balconies of ornate iron upheld by two great sculpted caryatids – freshly white from the chisel in comparison to the grimed stone of inferior adjacent buildings. Their great torsos and straining thighs in their folds of drapery were alike – like the bodies of all women? Their stone faces were evident portraits, an unpleasant detail since it discovered to David his acceptance of the idea, which would have seemed so foreign a short time ago, that they might very likely be the faces of the sculptor’s mistresses.

  The rain glistened along the black pavements. Its crevices seemed to exude a fetidness David could not place until he remembered the smell of bone dust across lawns in the rain. Or, he thought, it was an association of ideas from too assiduous a study of the guidebooks. This he knew was the Faubourg St. Germain, and they had just passed through the Place Denfert-Rochereau. There, he remembered, was the main entrance into the Paris Catacombs. Directly under these streets in that old Roman quarry must lie what the centuries had left of nearly six million souls, a vast charnel house of eternal anonymity. Perhaps no greater host in any single grave, unless at Rome. The blood soaked battlefields were nothing compared to this carnage, not even Verdun.

  Death again and everywhere! Might Allenby be more than wrong about Celeste? And it was late to wonder if it were true the Jesuits believed the means were justified by the end? But what end?

  2

  David looked across the room, seeing Gaspard again not without shock, yet finding him much as expected – as roughly bristling as an old boar, still dominating, grunting.

  “A qui a faire? Whose deal is it?” Gaspard was asking the players at the card table. “What have we got out of this bombardement?” he asked his partner. “A brace of rabbits?”

  David came up to stand beside his shoulder and said, “Gaspard, it’s my deal now!”

  “You!” Gaspard cried, starting up. “Pour l’amour de Dieu! S’adosser contre un mur! To lean up against a wall!”

  “We’re all up against it now,” David said.

  “I am amazed! I am overjoyed! But how did you ever find me here?”

  “Telephoned Celeste – from Lille.”

  “From –? But how did you get permission to Paris?”

  “Didn’t. I trust you to get me out of it and back.”

  “Nom de Dieu.” Gaspard began. David caught him by the arm, led him to an alcove overlooking the traffic of the Place de l’Opera.

  Gaspard pulled on his moustache. “You have something upon what you are pleased to call your mind?”

  “Yes, a great deal.”

  Gaspard looked long at David. Finally, he said, “Whether entirely pleasant or not, this leave has been successful – oui?”

  “Without intending to take your – advice,” David said, not without bitterness, “Yes, I seem to have followed it.”

  “Then,” Gaspard said slowly, “you have a better basis for comparison, hein?”

  “Talk’s cheap,” David said sharply and took a deep breath. “I’ve been living with an English girl in Bruges.”

  Gaspard’s head went up, but he didn’t laugh. “Though you express yourself with typical American crudeness,” he said, “I offer you a certain congratulation.”

  “Here,” David said curtly, “is a copy, properly witnessed and stamped, of a physical examination …”

  Gaspard’s brows went up. He murmured, “This is a shocking idea; you do not look the worse for wear.”

  “Take it in your fist,” David said, his voice beginning to break, “and tell me what you understand from it.”

  Gaspard finally read, after making two false starts. “It would seem that, together with verification soon to come from certain additional tests, you are in perfect
physical condition with the exception of an old wound which is descripted and which now is but nothing and a new scratch which is clean. Well?”

  “Celeste,” David said steadily, “you know I love her.”

  Gaspard allowed himself a slight shrug and looked out of the window into the traffic. “I would be a fool,” he said, “if I did not already know that.”

  “Back home,” David said, “we wouldn’t bother to talk to the father; we’d just go ahead.”

  Gaspard remained calm. The imperturbability of his expression was eloquent to David of the command Gaspard must have over himself.

  “But this is France,” David added, “and there are certain formalities. Let’s get down to them.”

  “Is it,” Gaspard asked with no light irony, “you have become civilized, conforming to the custom of my country?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nevertheless,” Gaspard countered, “you think this formality senseless?”

  “I do not.”

  Gaspard fingered the buttons of his tunic and remained expressionless.

  David thought, ‘There is that real Gallic calm!’ Now they had come down to the moment, he knew, when he must finish what he had come to do, prove Gaspard’s attitude, get a wedge into him to confirm his motives. David felt not only breathless from the awkwardness but also from fear – and humiliation, despite its correctness according to continental ideas, that he was about to make a point of the practical, the money side of it. Yet Gaspard’s behavior with regard to that would be evidence more definite, David felt sure, than any other. “You’re more practical in France,” David forced himself to say. “I think it’s wise.”