by Earle Looker
“Daveed! My Daveed!”
“Back to you,” he quoted shamelessly, “across a thousand trenches. Even a sea would be nothing between us. I could not have lived unless I knew you were waiting.”
“Nothing else you could have said! You have changed not! But you should not look so tired?”
“Finally,” David said, “Papa G, he’s given his consent!”
“I knew he would,” Celeste laughed. “I have known for a long time …”
“You’ve known?”
“Oui, but must we stand in this hall?”
“No, but I don’t care who sees. You’ve known?”
“How could I fail to see? His silences. My father is so afraid.”
David stiffened. “Afraid?” he heard himself ask what he least intended. “Afraid of what?”
“So you do not understand my father, after all? You cannot read his character though you have been together so much? How can I make you into a journalist?”
David thought, ‘Can she be telling me she knows about herself! If she did, she’d never let me go through with this! Her heart’s not beating so fast? Talk, talk, say anything to calm her.’
He said, “Afraid? He’s a lion for courage. Or, call him the old sanglier of the Ardennes.”
“Ha! Oh, never a pig!”
He thought, ‘Gently – gently – More talk before I dare take her in my arms again. This is going to be more difficult and dangerous every moment. Talk.’
He said, “When I try to get a clear picture of your father, I remember something one of your Frenchmen said – a fellow named Briffault, I think. He said there are Victorians among us; Tudorians; ghosts from the Middle Ages – multitudes who belong to earlier times.” (‘She’s listening quietly’ she’s interested; keep going …’) “Maybe your father does not belong to this century, which stands for – a certain – evolution. Maybe he really belongs to an earlier time. So, this fellow had the idea there are more people living today who really belong to past centuries than to the present.”
Celeste applauded. “Interesting! I see now my love and my question will make a journalist of you yet! That is very good. If you will remember it you could write about living men, putting them in their right centuries and then, Daveed, would you not have something? But you do not begin to understand my father. He is ahead of this time, but he knows it and pretends to be behind it, fooling you.”
“But, no defeat in him,” David repeated.
“Daveed, cannot you see?”
“Just a moment. One thing you must know at once. There’s one condition to this consent.”
“One little moment also. I love you enough to agree to it, whatever it is.”
“The condition is that I am to take you with me home to Virginia – within the year, Celeste.”
She threw her head up in the gesture reminiscent of when Gaspard laughed to the stars. “There!” she cried. “What I thought! And it would be!”
“Be what?”
She laughed again. “It would be – less expensive than later!”
“I don’t understand at all!”
“Later – Daveed – I had dreamed I would have to have a cord tied to him to keep him from – falling into the Atlantique.”
“To keep me from falling overboard?”
“So big and so stupid! Is it not a responsibility taking a small child across the ocean?”
“Oh!”
“Have you forgotten that Sonnet, my Daveed?”
“Celeste! No.”
“Is not everything we think, now, the property of the other?”
“Then tell me quickly what you mean about your father.”
“He wishes me out of France, and you. Do you not see?”
“That’s true, though I don’t see the reason for it. He seemed to be afraid I would settle permanently here. I should have thought he’d want that, to have you near him.”
“Daveed, you wrote that account of the armistice, of what the Americans felt and yourself and how, suddenly, you saw everything differently. Have you never thought that my father, also, saw everything differently aussi? Did you not ever try to imagine what he thought? You had been fighting but a year, had you not? – and my father, four? What do you think he thought?”
“Compassion for his prisoners,” David said. “That’s what he told me, anyway. That’s what he was talking about.”
“Ah, but had my father been a Prussian, would he have been content to be defeated?”
“Content? As soon as he got home, he would have started collecting scrap iron to make munitions for revenge. He would be drilling secret drafts in the Fôret de Boult. He would be studying mistakes of strategy to make better plans for next time.”
“Exactement! That is correct, Daveed. And the more crushingly he seemed to be defeated, the more steadfast would be his determination to have his revenge.”
“Yes, I see that. But you said fear?”
“Daveed! The victory. What my father knows will come from the victory. What he has said to me in his silences – his fear of the enemy because the enemy has been so defeated. There will be vengeance surely from these Germans one day. So, cannot you see why he wants me out of France and you and our family if we are given one?”
“Sure of the next war and afraid of it for us?!” David said suddenly.
“But, yes!”
“Has he never talked this fear to you?”
“Non. I told you I understood his silence. He does not talk of the things of which he is afraid. He would weaken himself for the next defense. But because he has been fighting all his life should he not see as clearly as yourself at that armistice? The more fighting, I should think, the more clearly? If ever he should be able to understand anything, should he not be able to understand how useless is the fighting?”
David remembered he had thought, ‘Another generation to be begotten as quickly as possible to try once more to outnumber the sons of the enemy.’
“He would seem very strange,” Celeste was saying, “Explaining that to the other generals, oui? Yet when it comes to me, and to you, he can act upon his fears for the time when my – our – sons are grown. So cannot you see how he might wish to be sure we are safe in America with the whole Atlantique between us and revenge? It is the founding of a family – it is safety. Do you think this is only a woman’s idea?”
“I think it is something more than intuition,” David said slowly.
It went back, that idea. Not only back to the beginning when that crack of calm had settled over the battlefield – a moment when Gaspard, quicker thinking David knew than himself, had seen the fighting was coming to a close. Gaspard, the old campaigner, the realist, brooding alone in his command post. He had seen plenty of fighting even before these last ghastly four years. He had ample opportunity to come to conclusions about the fighting. As to his own misreading of Gaspard’s character, he wondered why he had not noticed the silences upon the horror of their experience when Gaspard’s service had contained ten times more of it than his own, and his own held enough.
But Gaspard was not insensitive. Gaspard, the throwback, the woodcut, the outward personification of all fighting qualities. No man could naturally have exhibited these traits in such fullness that they made him a caricature of all the French fighting man was expected to be. Gaspard must have cultivated his military mannerisms to cover his conclusions. Otherwise, his reaction after the armistice would have reduced him, certainly among friends, to the benignity of the colonels, a class of men, David realized now, distinctly retired. Not so with Gaspard. He had kept his fire. And he could have kept it burning only by stoking because David, though so much younger, knew the will to fight had gone out of him at the eleventh hour.
Celeste was right. David knew he had never tried to actually picture what Gaspard had thought at the armistice and if any wisdom had
come out of it. The fighting was done. The war was over! This was rebirth into a world more surely theirs than to any of the generations before. No, there was the difference. That was not what Gaspard had thought, Gaspard the realist, the cynic, the product of the old world. Gaspard had felt no such rebirth. Yet he intuitively understood the world had not changed. It was merely going on as before. As before! As before, with victory conceiving revenge, and revenge in turn begetting another victory, thus continuing the vicious, bloody trail of gruesome history upon ground littered with debris of the past.
Yet, this hopeless realization would not deter Gaspard from planning. Rather, it would inspire him to greater effort, for he must plan as he must breathe, this man – who had said it? – of imagination, resource, determination, decision, plan for himself? No! He could only continue as an actor in a play in which he labored all his life for an established part, continuing its study, developing small strategies for advancement. Whatever real planning, it could center now only upon Celeste and her future. “Think back,” Allenby had said. “The father has great affection for his child. He does everything – to throw you together at the first possible moment – just as soon, in fact, as the fighting is over – the very day. His plan – involving the first upstanding, marriageable man he could find – yourself!”
David thought, ‘The first marriageable American!’ Why? Because Gaspard knew no other place. It was far across the sea in a new world determined now more than ever to keep aloof from the old, where Celeste would be safe – away from the field, widened now by air bombers to the whole of Europe, which Gaspard expected would be fought over again and again, if not the next time within his own lifetime, then surely within Celeste’s. That, without doubt, had been Gaspard’s understanding of his world of realities, his logic, his clarity, his decision even before fighting had ceased. ‘Did he leave much to chance? No! Not from the moment he had insanely appeared at the headquarters hut, demanding those poignards. Celeste was right. She had understood her father’s silences, properly estimated his character, saw that the condition of his consent proved it.’
It meant, then, that all of Allenby’s theory, the heart premise, was entirely wrong. It meant, then, there was no physical reason. It meant, then, that this was not the end but the beginning. For a time, David could think of nothing.
2
“Daveed, I can see deeper into your eyes than ever before. Little figures moving, leaping about, something shines – happily, but not entirely? Is it memories of bayonets? Forget them. Cannot I make you forget them? Cannot you think of this – of us?”
“This moment. That’s all I’m really thinking about. ‘Her lips were very red, like coral for redness. Her hair was like to silk for softness.’”
“That strange ancient English again. What other girls have you told that to? But now you are truly mine.”
“I remember,” David said, “you once said sometimes you thought being a woman in France was like being a woman in a savage tribe – you weren’t going to breed more soldiers to be killed if you could help it. Now how about these sons of ours?”
“But now I will be an American, and so they shall be!”
“Safe, you mean?”
“Of course. And now I can tell you again I saw my sons when first I saw you. Eyes like my father’s, sometimes. Yes, I have waited to feel the weight of your head there where now it is. Since the Bois, in that Pavillon, there could be no other for me. Did I not say I was an abandoned woman, and you saved me?”
“Hussy!”
“Comment?”
“Coquine!”
“My wicked Daveed; you know the words; perhaps others.”
“Hush!”
“For you I should be eight feet tall. Cannot I stretch myself? Do you not like taller girls? Other girls, Daveed? I see it in your eyes!”
“Since I have known you.” He lied firmly, “not a chance! You and I going on, taking the place of Anne and Alan, making them count again and again, you with your own particular slant on things, your quick feelings, the fire in you, selecting those details most interesting to you to help me – the ideas I get from your eyes, new ideas and new designs no one could ever have had before. You phrasing facts differently than I would and so helping me to make them clearer. You and I looking at men and events from two sides and disputing about what we see. Deciding how we’re going to outwit the old men. Proving we can really illustrate the present through the past. Proving we can do all the by-line stuff. With you – think of how I can overcome anything, anybody.”
She laughed. “I can feel the muscle stiffen in your shoulders. I can feel you striding toward interviews, going places journalists have never been before, pulling lions by their beards, tigers – even old Clemenceau perhaps?”
“Clemenceau, that old devil. The oldest man of all the old men, even though he fought as if he carried a rifle and a pack upon his back.”
“Yes, Daveed, the fighting soul of France!”
“There you are; you see? There’s a start. That’s how we will work. Listen to this Clemenceau, that old man with a soul that loves France too well by hating the enemy too much. Clemenceau, that vial of implacable hatred, splashing his words into the faces of those willing to extend the helping hand of humanity to the defeated enemy. He doesn’t know, this civilian, the war is over. The Tiger – fierce stuff! He’s always been proud of that. He’s really a professional patriot rather than a statesman or a thinker representing – well – representing what?”
“Representing the fine intelligence and the generous spirit of France,” Celeste murmured sarcastically.
“Good! He does neither.”
“Never has, never will, this duelist – in grey gloves,” Celeste added.
“This denouncer of governments,” David said. “His limitations are great and wide.”
“No – profound.”
“OK. His limitations are as profound as is his false reputation – strong and narrow.”
“So strong,” Celeste supplied, “that its narrowness is now dangerous to the peace of the world.”
“Yes. It is supposed to be a world mind. He’s the merest novice in world affairs. He knows nothing of …”
Celeste interrupted and laughed, “That is too strong, Daveed. You could be as descriptive if you said that he knows little of whatever you then proceed to list?”
“All right! Then he knows little of geography, ethnology, psychology or the political history of peoples.”
“Expensive words,” Celeste commented. “They would buy a nice breakfast!”
“What does he know? He knows nothing but the ideals of his own – what are they called, Celeste?”
“Chauvinistes.”
“Of his own chauvinists, who are bent upon defending France by hurting and humiliating Germany more than France was hurt and humiliated in eighteen – seventy – one. Clemenceau was a man of thirty then. It was then he learned …?”
“He learned fierce hatreds and fears,” Celeste said.
“Right! He has learned nothing else. He has merely made more use of his hatreds and his fears than any man of his generation, this saber-toothed tiger. He doesn’t care that in breaking up Germany he breaks up the rest of the world . . .” 13
Celeste laughed again, with the throaty inflection, “Love can write!”
David said, “You see what a team we make? You see what we can do together? You must know what this means for us. Then after a while, I’ll take you up into my hills, my valley, my home.”
“And – a house made of wood?”
“Of course!”
“How expensive!”
“Cheaper.”
“Strange country! Do not whole cities burn up overnight? Can there be enough forests to go on building of wood?”
“Plenty. Well, I suppose eventually …”
“Do they not plant at least
one tree for every one they cut?”
“Perhaps we’ll come to that. There you go again. You’ll see things like that, a thousand of them. I wonder what you’ll see when I take you up Afton Mountain and you look down over my broad fertile valley of Albemarle.”
“Ab-m-rel – ah! Imprononcable!”
“Yes, my love, my valley of Albemarle with its fine homes, horses, cattle, rolling fields of corn and tobacco, great brown barns, cool green forests, all backed by a line of blue mountains. From there, I will take you to the other side, where you’ll see for yourself where a great river has cut new beds for itself, where it’s tried to push through a village by the white spire of a church under the elms.”
“Where there will always be peace!” Celeste said suddenly. “Only fighting for our own! But that! Daveed, I am so happy there is pain in my heart! I feel that mon ame s’eleve vers Dieu!”
David translated, “Your soul soars up to God!”
He had forgotten, even with his fingers laid against her throat, to count the pulse beat. (‘I asked too much. You’d have to be too shockingly cool to be human.’) Nothing could be more tangible than the beat of her heart, like the pulsing of the universe. There seemed to be no pause, no skip. But with its extreme rapidity, his fear redoubled. He looked down at her glowing head nestled in the crook of his arm. It might be well, he thought, never to know whether or not this vital heart were normal, better perhaps to fear, better if danger continued to create.
“Saying nothing, my Daveed. I do not have to know what you are thinking.”