by Earle Looker
Gaspard grunted and jerked at his moustache again.
“If,” David said, feeling Gaspard’s blue glance extremely disconcerting, “if you’ve no personal objections so far – knowing me, and I guess the worst about me – I’m anxious to get to a practical understanding between us.”
Gaspard sat like a statue. David could not read his eyes. Finally, he said, “I feel there are certain most important differences between Celeste and yourself. In the first place she is French, you are American. There is a difference in outlook, and …”
“One complementing the other,” David interrupted. “And you didn’t talk that way a short time ago. You said the only difference was a matter of expression. This isn’t important. An ordinary man in love becomes almost as expressive as a Frenchman. You’re not offering that objection very seriously. It hardly needs to be answered seriously, and you know it. Aren’t we getting away from practicalities?”
“Tiens! Tiens! Should I not be asking you what you have to offer?”
“No,” David said firmly. “It’s the other way around. I should be asking you. In fact, I do …”
“I will not say I take offense, but it affords me considerable surprise! For you to suggest …”
“Customs of your country,” David said quickly. “Were you about to say something practical?”
Gaspard spread his hands, “I would do the best I could.”
“The amount?” David asked and hated himself.
“Specifically? Ah!” Gaspard said slowly, “Thirty thousand francs.”
What, David wondered, had Gaspard just said? The amount? It made no difference. He felt the beating of his pulse in his throat. Gaspard was definitely supplying the evidence, and now to clinch it, David said, “That’s pretty disappointing, Gaspard. Hardly enough, I think, to ensure …”
“In that case,” Gaspard said without hesitation, “and I am inclined to agree with you – I will sell the only remaining piece of family property, which should make the total certainly no less than fifty-five thousand.”
David felt nausea slowly overcoming him. The room became a dull crimson and then black as if he had looked too long at the sun. ‘It’s true – it’s true – true.’ His heart seemed to beat against his brain. Slowly Gaspard’s face emerged from the darkness, and David saw his eyes. There seemed nothing but pain and sadness in them, a disturbance so deep that had David not felt sure of the cause he would have been resentful.
“While I am extremely serious,” Gaspard said, “with the emotions of a father, I am really very glad. Do not I know le proper des oiseaux est de voler? Is it not the nature of birds to fly? Give me a moment to shake the dirt from my shoulder. My whole life is in this child.”
“You’ve no idea how I love her,” David said, admitting as much to himself as to Gaspard.
“It is different,” Gaspard compromised. “Life and death!”
David felt all the past, all circumstance and knowledge and fear impelling him to speak, “Why do you say that?”
Gaspard’s head went up. “It is a kind of swearing, hein? No two words are more important. You and I, mon vieux, know that. I have often thought I would rather see death for her than life without happiness – and, to have it, a certain security – Enfin. I would trust her to you, Daveed, but upon one condition.” His silence seemed to come, David thought, from a great weariness, as if he had expended a tremendous amount of energy in speech.
“One condition?” David asked.
“Yes, mon vieux, the negotiation is not yet complete. To finish it, I ask is it not the American idea that the husband should be in command?”
“Yes, I guess so, that’s the custom.”
“Then you would take her, almost immediately, to America? There to resume your profession?”
“No. I’m going to ask your influence to get me discharged from the army here, in France, so I can get on the ‘Daily Mail’ or at least work as an assistant to one of the American correspondents.”
“Which suggests, if you were successful here, you might find yourself permanently here?”
“Perhaps, yes.”
“I do not approve that. I am sure you would be more successful among your own people.”
“But Gaspard …”
“That is my condition. Not that. I wish you return to America when the American troops return. But the stipulation – you are not to remain in France for more than a year from date of marriage, if it should take place. A written promise, Daveed, which is to be a part of the settlement.”
“Strangest thing I ever heard!”
“I know what I am about. I insist.”
“Why?”
“The reason I have given is sufficient.”
That was proof of something, but David knew not what. Perhaps Gaspard was so steeped in deception from force of habit he must add some such detail for verisimilitude. And David now realized, after the first tilt on the subject, Gaspard had neglected to raise the question of the suitor’s financial status. Gaspard had his eye on the main chance – confirmation enough of what David so feared. But David realized – like an answer finally wrung from wrestling down a shape-shifting beast – that what was most important was his flexibility, versatility and adaptability.
“Anything else?” David asked.
“Non. But do you agree to this my stipulation?”
“Yes,” David said dully.
“Then it is to be arrange,” Gaspard said almost roughly. “You have my permission. You may ask her to marry you. As to the date of this marriage, I will leave it to both of you to decide. Doubtless you will not be in command there. Also our marriage laws, compared to what I have heard of the lack of them in America, are complicated. The shortest possible time for which our law may be complied with is perhaps a fortnight. As to the official army permission you will have to secure, that may be hastened, doubtless by a little word spoken by myself into the right ear.”
David thought: ‘This is – horrible …’ but said aloud, “Gaspard, you’ve made your decision. I’ve made mine. Under no circumstances will I ever regret it. I hope the same for you.”
Gaspard looked away. He unhooked the catch at his throat to make breathing easier. David did not wonder why. Now Gaspard was unbuttoning his tunic. He turned back the row of buttons that fastened it. His fingers rumbled with the steel rings that, instead of thread, attached them to the reverse side of the cloth. He removed two buttons, seemed to weigh them in the palm of his hand. He crooked his finger to someone across the room. David regarded the proceeding with confused amazement.
A steward came to Gaspard. “Mon general?” he asked.
“As you know,” Gaspard said in almost his old field manner, “each of this gold buttons weigh more, at present quotation, than five hundred francs. Take them and see that I am credited with something more than a thousand francs. I give them to you because of the new rule members must pay on the spot for what they consume, and I do not have the ready cash in my pocket.” He shook his head violently to David who was reaching into his pocket. “You will see, however, that these buttons are not disposed of. I shall buy them back within a day or two, certainly well before the usual thirty-day period. Oui? D’accord?”
Again, it must have been the Alan in him, David thought, who looked upon Gaspard as a musketeer breaking off golden links from a chain about his neck to meet some sudden emergency like a Portheus of the King’s Guard, plunking down a satchel of coins and demanding, “A beer, a steak, a bath, a woman, and some oats for my horse!” all with one satchel of coins.
David remembered Gaspard’s anger, now understood it, when so long ago aboard that special train he had discovered the loss of that little button to fasten the flap of his breast pocket. He must have dropped at least two hundred francs. ‘Just a button!’
“Steward,” Gaspard said, “you will provide champagne for everyone
in the room, including the orderlies and everyone who comes in while we are drinking it. Bon! See that the glasses are of the sort that can be the most cheaply broken …”
“Mon general!”
“Hurry! Vite!”
Gaspard stood to his full height, and caught David up by the belt. “Comrades!” he shouted. “À votre santé! To health! To your health! Come with us to drink it! This comrade here, of whom I have spoken to some of you, a soldier I know well and love, one of us, wishes to become my son-in-law and, by God! We have just completed the arrangements.”
“Henri! Your daughter?”
“That Celeste Gaspard …”
“But an American?”
“Such girl would not be allowed out of France; there should be a law.”
Everyone seemed anxious to quote a toast.
“Milit omnis amans!” 7
“Scholar! Then, Omnia vincit amor!” 8
“See him blush, this American! L’innocence a rougir n’est point accoutume!” 9
“Le mariage est comme une fortresse assiegee; ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer et ceux qui sont dedans en sortir!” 10
“To the end and to the bottom!” Gaspard cried in English, draining his glass, the next instant flinging it across the room into the empty fireplace. David followed suit, and immediately the place resounded with congratulatory shouts and shattering glass against brick.
CHAPTER 17
Blue Mountains
“The dream is the small hidden door
in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul,
which opens to that primeval cosmic night
that was soul long before there was conscious ego
and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”
~ Carl Jung
Greenwood and western Albemarle County from Rockfish Gap,
Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia (Arthur H. Mitchell)
The more serious authorities tell us, in almost incomprehensibly technical terms, that when a boy begins to settle degrees of personal companionship, he is making his first grading of the elements of importance in his world. Certainly, he is first most closely semiconscious of somehow being connected to everybody and everything else. Many mysteries of the living world open to him. Sometimes, however, his gestures to this same world seem to be, to say the least, darn peculiar.
David and Alan had been close friends since childhood. In the fall, they enjoyed climbing up Afton Mountain with their fox hounds and his golden retriever, “Champ”, to hunt rabbits. Sometimes they would find arrowheads. At more than 2,500 feet, the view south from Beagle Gap, below Calf Mountain, was of the broad western Albemarle valley of neat homes, rolling fields and forests, backed by a long blue line of distant mountains. Down below, he had caught glimpse of silvery light shimmering off of Moorman River. In the cool moist mountain air, fall leaves presented a riot of color; when covered with a light frost, all was like a magical wonder land.
An ancient trail over the Blue Ridge Mountains had been used by the Monacans for hunting and trading and ran from their village, Orapax, near present-day Richmond, to the Shenandoah Valley through Rockfish Gap. In the 1740’s, that trail had been widened, improved and became, in part, Three Chop’t Road, connecting Richmond with Staunton and the fertile western Valley, thus providing improved travel, with comfortable inns and taverns spaced about ten miles apart. Later, the Greenwood railroad tunnel, built by one Claudius Crozet in the 1850’s for the Blue Ridge Railroad, was built under Rockfish Gap.
David recalled his happy schoolboy days when he and Alan had first attended the village school in Greenwood, then AMA in Fort Defiance near Staunton and later the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. As upperclassmen, both had rooms on the “Lawn” near the Rotunda, designed by Thomas Jefferson, and close to where Edgar Allen Poe had earlier and briefly also lived as a student. They were alike in many ways, and both were most keen on their studies of history and journalism as well as attending fall football games, drinking heavily on the weekends and chasing town girls, although Alan’s charm proved to be more successful with the latter.
At the Greenwood school, Alan was a fellow classroom prisoner, his wriggling movements mainly compressed, within the compass of his seat and desk, to the surreptitious passing of excruciating illegal notes across the aisle, right to left and back again, to back-scratching, neck-tickling, pen-sticking of the boy directly in front of him, and to receiving the same, in his own person, from the rear. Nor could uncompromising prison guards, forced by their system to do their duty conscientiously, have applied methods more effective for squeezing their souls thin, than the textbooks provided. Like any other healthy-minded boy, Alan would help up to the point where it seemed unreasonable. But authority, without apparent reason, galled him.
When Alan stood upon his head, or reclined in a chair with his feet comfortably resting where his head should normally be, when he hung suspended by the middle over a branch of the schoolyard magnolia tree and surveyed gardens and buildings, upside-down, it was to secure a more interesting experimental point of view, as well as to serve as a preparatory limbering-up exercise.
‘Thought, at our age’, David recalled, ‘had been a painful process for us and, when we were together, difficult to sustain. With us, thought was synonymous with action’. It had translated itself into concrete movement as naturally as a dog’s reaction when seeing a cat. Apart from the excitements and exercises of recess, it was an unusual event in school-life when the boys were allowed to act, or really think, for themselves.
And there were new aversions to many things and people – particularly to girls – that came gradually upon them. They discovered the latter were afraid of them; they seemed to be growing softer, and the boys more and more scornful. Alan once remarked he thought it unmanly to be seen talking to one of them – a conviction, which, doubtless, he kept from his older sisters. The separate boys’ and girls’ entrances to the elementary school had much to do with this cleavage. There was, at this time, nothing quite so pleasingly thrilling than for their group to form a wedge in the schoolyard, and, typically led by Alan, charge through the forbidden girls’ entrance and back into the school. Because it was against all rules, the most gallant time to run risk of official punishment was just as the girls’ lines were forming to return to the classrooms at the close of recess. As Alan had said, the girls “hung around, like a lot of fools waiting for the bell to ring, instead of leaving it until the latest minute, as we do! Still, it does give one a really fine sort of feeling, when they shriek and shriek, as we come busting through them …” When the gong of liberty finally rang through the dusty, foot worn corridors, they invariably shot out into the yard, with the explosive propulsion of a small bomb.
From the onset there developed a sort of war between the sexes. With frantic and enthusiastic zeal, pulling girls by their pigtails, breaking up games, herding them into corners, for no other purpose than just to keep them there, the boys made life generally miserable for them. But a realization of its unfairness dawned upon Alan one morning – suddenly. During the excitement of the first recess, a little girl had fallen in the mud, and although not hurt seriously, had been trampled upon. Alan’s indignation was particularly intense, because this girl was Sylvia Taliaferro, who brought her violin to school several times a week. Her playing was lovely. Many times they had been thrilled by the tones she brought out of her violin when asked to play.
“Happening to her, of all people!” Alan said, greatly perturbed. “This won’t do; we must put a stop to this immediately!”
The other boys looked dubious, almost antagonistic.
“Then,” Alan said, with finality, his body shaking with emotion, “I will be a girl myself, even if nobody else will.”
The boys looked upon him in appalled silence. Alan then walked directly into the middle of the girls’ section of the playg
round, his face scarlet with embarrassment, and addressing a group of girls briefly, announced his intention, to their most evident bewilderment and distrust, to join them.
This was too much for some of the boys. They rushed after him, and, in a few minutes, had organized a staff for the management of the girls’ campaign, led by Alan. But the effect of his desertion upon the other boys was demoralizing; the bulk remained loyal to their own sex. A series of violent personal encounters, marked by extreme animosity, resulted. Quite often, the combined strength of Alan and his supportive group was needed to effect rescues and prevent real beatings being handed out to individual members.
It was hardly to be wondered at that, the teaching of our grade reverted, as quickly as order could be restored, to the more usual and less dangerous methods of formal recitation. Once, a bored Alan, although outwardly calm, busied himself with making a spitball when our teacher, Miss Battle, was not in a position to observe him, but maintaining the stillest of jaws and the gravest of faces when her glance fell in his direction. Alan proceeded to put the spitball in a slingshot, made of a thick rubber band drawn across his fingers and waited for a suitable target. Just when Blanche Fairfax stood up to recite something, Alan aimed at the back of her head and let fly. But Alan’s aim was poor, or the crafted slingshot was faulty, for the sloppy missile went appallingly and dangerously on, catching Miss Battle full in the face.
Now, this good lady was white-haired; she had seen a thing or two. She rose from her desk, bore down directly on Alan, caught him by the ear, pulled him up out of his seat and marched him off to the cloakroom, where all punishments were secretly administered. On his way, he frowned and made sarcastic prayerful gestures with his hands to the delight of the class, especially young Blanche, the intended target. Somehow, he must have imagined there would be no punishment. But there was … in the cloakroom … yet he came back, neither effectively punished nor humiliated, but obviously very angry by the insult of it all.