Then he put his hands gently upon her cheeks. “Now you are more beautiful than beautiful. Promise that you will never hide it again.”
“Oh, Con, I never believed. I love you so.… so,” she cried.
He held her hard but tenderly against him.
They did not make love the first night because there was no reason to make love. They lay on the floor of her cottage and drank wine and played music by the firelight and he told her of the Hills and she told him of Vienna and other things, and they lay there very close and had the feeling that physical love was not necessary, feeling that somehow they had as much and something else besides.
And the second day it was not necessary but more necessary than the first. And the third day it was necessary and they rode in the Hills and they did not make love because they knew it was necessary and proved that it was not, so that the fourth day they rode out and very high up on a lone hill and drank red wine and ate of a cold leg of lamb, and the sun came through the trees where they were on the saddle blanket, and they knew the time had come, and he went away to get a bottle of wine he was chilling in a spring on the side of the hill, and returned, and he knew he would never forget how she looked with her body revealed to the wind and the trees and the sky, and the sun glow on her body, and the quiet all quiet of the woods, and the whispering wind in the trees, and the half-closed joy of her eyes, and the smell of the earth, and the feel of earth under his hands, and the sudden knowing all knowing of world’s without end.
CHAPTER XXI
Danny was permitted visitors. The Turners, Nickie and her Subaltern, and a few others of the refugee set came. The suite became their daily gathering place. The crowd increased with the days and the refugees as refugees everywhere partook of violent political arguments which Danny enjoyed immensely.
Piece by piece Con got the drift of the refugee story. The initial movement of Hitlerism. The escape of the Jews and non-believers. First to Paris and the French Colonies of North Africa. Then to Cairo, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Finally to Durban and Capetown in South Africa, and India. It was much the same story over and over. But Con saw for the first time the effect of power politics as related to the individual. To him it gave the war additional meaning.
Refugees, he found out quickly, were extremely shrewd. They were shrewd by the mere fact that they had accomplished refuge and were wise in the ways of money, the pay-off, and whom and whom not to trust. It meant their very existence. They had a holy loyalty to each other. Their differences always seemed to end up distantly behind their common cause. And contrary to all Con had been taught, refugees did not look to America as the golden pot at the end of the rainbow but rather to their own native lands free from political tyranny. Still they had their martyrs. Plenty. But what surprised Con was that the true martyrs were not the European Jews but rather Russian royalists, aristocrats, generals, and scholars who had moved to every large city of the world after the Bolshevik Revolution, and who now controlled the stock in three of the four resort hotels in the town including the Princess where they stayed.
They flocked in to a maximum of twentyfive or thirty an afternoon. There were reasons aside from Danny’s illness. The word of his connections had spread and refugees needed connections. M. J. and Esther Turner had led the parade and M.J. was G.M. in the Far East and in a position to make a lot of people a lot of money. Finally, plain intrigue had driven some to the suite. They wanted to meet the Ah-merican that had cracked the shell of the impervious Carla, their Carla, who had been passed at, at one time or other, by every male member of the set and about one third of the female members.
Con enjoyed it all. He had read novels of the French age of Court when people gathered in the afternoon to discuss events and eat and drink. It was much the same thing. Too, he loved to listen to Carla argue her politics. She knew her subject-matter thoroughly. She was quick, acid, could rouse and arouse. Then; master of repartee. She would laugh earthily. Or, himself, converse with the Russian Rosenberg whose first cousin had started the German’s Worker Party from whose ranks had come Hitler and who, personally, knew Hitler in the old Vienna days.
Rosenberg was massive. Six foot seven with enormous shoulders. He was bald, had a quick charming smile that never reached his eyes. His eyes were dark, pensive, wise. He drank vast quantities of vodka. “The secret,” Rosenberg had said, “was to eat a small slab of butter or drink a teaspoon of olive oil an hour before drinking time.” They had become fast friends. He was an enthusiastic horseman and offered Con the use of his stables. He was brilliant. He studied, mainly, Revolution: “Fascism was born of the declassed of the classes,” he had said. “The declassed of the upper class sought the people but found the rabble instead. Neither knew the other for what they really were. They found common cause in their exclusion. That is the way of all revolution, Con. The declassed of the classes. I’ve studied it. Once the cause, they need only a demagogue to lead. The German army was not constructed for conquest. But out of fear. Hitler himself was a mistake. To the party a miracle. A man charged with inferiorities but supercharged with strength. As a human a pathetic figure. But he had a voice. That was his strength. The voice had power, will, it was the cry of inanimate nature. Politically he was a genius. It was the contradiction of the man that captivated. It is always the contradiction of the man. In all revolution. Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander. Russia’s own Stalin. Beware of Russia,” he had said, “for there is the visible parallel.”
Always there were arguments in progress. The conversation was pretty open-faced except in relation to England in front of Danny. Con learned from Carla that outside of the tyrants that dominated their homelands the refugees feared England most. America they believed to be the international sucker. But Carla threw away the wraps and rubbed Danny incessantly about the Lion to both their delight.
On the third day of the open house at Danny’s Doc Travis called Con aside. He told him that Danny was getting progressively more depressed in the evenings after the guests had left. The once lucid cortex of the brain, was now dull from the drugs, insensitive from the severe shock, stunned by the high fever. So Carla and Con began to take their evening meal at Danny’s and stay and visit until his bedtime around nine.
It was their third evening meal together that a still groggy Danny was first able to discern the change that had come over Con. After a momentary lapse in the conversation a solemn Con had turned to Doc Travis.
“You probably won’t like me for this, Doc,” Con had said. “But I put in a request for you a few days ago and it’s come through. You’ve been assigned to our outfit as of today. Specifically, to me. I’ll tell you frankly that I never put it up to you because I didn’t consider your personal considerations in the matter. You’re needed. I presume that’s why you’re in uniform. I felt that even if you didn’t like the idea you’ll do your best. I realize you have four children in the States. That only makes me feel we need you more. It’s children, in a way, that you’ll be doctoring.” He had said it, Danny remembered, so objectively, so deliberately forcefully that everyone at the table had become momentarily stunned. Then the realization, to all but the Doctor, spread out like groping tentacles. Carla knew she might just have heard a death sentence passed.
But the Doctor was flattered. He did not know the death that was alone and lonely. Violent, useless death. The death of idiot man returned to the forest. Man, possessor of the brain that made not the God-man but the Beast-man; killer, destroyer, crippler on a scale the inferior animals would never know. The Doctor was flattered. He was at war finally. The tradition of the Travis family had been preserved. They had given at least one man to every war since the American Revolution.
In the evenings after Con and Carla left the suite they would go to one of the cafés or to the Casino and play roulette, then return late to the cottage where they would play records. For Con it was an education in fine music. Her favorite was Schubert. The peasant’s composer, she would laugh. She told him how on Sundays in the
spring when she was around eleven or twelve she would go with her favorite uncle, a prominent Viennese surgeon, out to the suburbs and the house where Schubert was born and how her uncle would lift her so that she could see into the small courtyard where the master played as a boy. Then how they would walk to the school where Schubert taught reading and writing, then past the house of his first love, the daughter of a Viennese manufacturer, then take the long walk to the large house in the Kettenbrueckengasse where he died. Everything, she explained, was exactly as it was in the days that Schubert lived. Even the taverns where he drank were still in operation. That was why the Viennese had never been able to accept Schubert as a historical figure, she said, but rather as a living, breathing entity that roamed the streets of Vienna to this day.
Then she told him how on the succeeding Sunday it would be Uncle’s day; the day of Haydn. He really didn’t like Haydn, she said, but Uncle claimed a relationship to the Esterhazy princes who had first brought Haydn from Eisenstadt as conductor for that royal family. Haydn had lived in the Esterhazy house on the Street of Nobles wearing the uniform of house servant to the Prince. The Esterhazy house was only a short walk from St. Stephen’s Cathedral where both Haydn and Schubert had sung in the choir as boys. The same cathedral, the very same organ from the time Hoffheymer played for Maximilian to this very day. Next to Schubert her favorite was Brahms because, she said, his was the true music of Hungary.
Con had missed something, he knew, and devoured the music and the history of the music avidly. They lay on the floor with the record player on the floor and she would tell him the history behind each record and point out the influence of the different people on the Viennese composers: the Slavs to the north. To the south; the Alpine roads to Italy. To the east where the Danube flows; Hungary, Turkey, the Orient. And to the west; Europe. They all exercised their influence. That was what made the music the music of all, she said, for it truly came from the roots and foundations of all. Austrian soldiers returned from Italy humming tunes from these operas, and it was a matter of public record that Wagner listened to and admired an Austrian military band that played Italian music. The influence of Hungary and the Orient was visible by the cymbals, the very gypsyness of some of Mozart’s work. Beethoven wrote Turkish marches and buried in Schubert was the minor harmony of the Slavs; his grandfather had migrated from Silesia. Vienna was the real crossroads, she said, it was not coincidence that made it the musical city.
They planned how they would do it all together after the war. She would draw diagrams of the city, even to the sidewalk cafés where they would stop to rest and have a drink, and watch the people walk by. They would take her daughter, too. They would explain patiently to her, and make her happy with colored ices in the confectionery store. In the evenings they would go to the opera and to the theatre. Then as the years passed on they would return occasionally from America for a visit.
Suddenly, there on the floor by the record player, it would be late. The fire would die and the cottage grow chill. They would go to bed. Early in the morning they rode and sometimes made love in the woods where they preferred making love above all places.
On the fourth evening after dining with Danny they met Nickie with her subaltern in a casino. Nickie was quite drunk and had lost all the money Gus had given her before he left town. Carla told her that she would give her money if Nickie would accept the use of her ski lodge in Kashmir for a week. Carla had paid the rent and wasn’t going to use it, she explained. Nickie accepted but Carla was too shrewd to write her a check at the moment but made her come by for it next morning. After Nickie and her subaltern had left for Kashmir Carla wrote Gus a letter explaining the action she had taken. It was an arrangement, she told Con, that she had had with Gus for some time. Con offered his financial assistance but she refused saying that Gus handled her account and would deduct the amount she had advanced; probably more than the amount, if she knew Gus, because Carla had saved him a considerable sum by getting Nickie several hundred miles from the nearest Casino. After Carla had finished writing the letter she had turned to Con and made a remark that had momentarily disconcerted, and since puzzled him: “You know, dear,” she had said. “In a lot of ways Nickie and I are very much alike.”
The evening of the day that Nickie and her subaltern departed they were having dinner with Danny at the suite when Niven burst into the room:
“Hi, boss,” he said. “Where’s the head?”
Con had no idea he had been pulled out. He grinned, pointed to the toilet, then nonchalantly, paying Niven no more attention, resumed eating. When Niven had left the room he explained to Doc Travis and Carla who he was and when he returned introduced him. He had a dispatch case chained to his right wrist and was visibly a little drunk.
“I’m in the jungle for eight months and they handcuff me the moment I get out,” he said holding up the case. “This is for you, Con. You have to sign for it in triplicate. Don’t worry about the outfit, the priest is in charge and they’re in a safe place and the Colonel wants you and Danny to study these papers so they pulled me out for my leave and had me bring them and the Colonel thought maybe you’d like to be briefed by me about what’s been going on,” he said in one sudden burst, wound tighter than a Christmas toy.
“Hey, Danny, you don’t look so hot. What’s wrong with you? On leave and in your PJ’s by eight? I thought your girl’s name was Margaret, Con. What we drinking? A doctor. A real, live doctor. Let me touch. Doc, you gotta help me. I got the shits.… oooops, the dysentery. Hey, this is some layout.”
They all laughed. Con got up and pulled over a chair and pushed Niven into it, then handed him a drink. His hand shook when he lifted the glass and he was embarrassed by it, Carla could see. He was so young, so pale and emaciated, so scholarly with his gold rimmed glasses that she couldn’t perceive how Con had chosen him as his own replacement.
Niven belted his drink and poured another. “You’re beautiful,” he said to Carla. “Jus beautiful,” he said staring at her his eyes exaggeratingly round under the thick glasses.
She lowered her eyes demurely. She knew if she hadn’t lowered her eyes she might have disillusioned or even frightened him.
Con noted her action and loved her deep in his chest for it.
Niven turned to Con. “I got thirty days in Calcutta. They’re speeding everything up. It’s all in the brief. I like it here. Do you think I can stay here? At least till you go. You go soon,” he threw in the knife. Oblivious. “I’m the only one out. I don’t want to spend my leave with no garrison jerks. The Filipino and Indian come out next week. Hey, Con, they didn’t make you shave. How come? They made me shave,” he said running his hand over the smooth baby skin that had grown all of a half inch of peach fuzz in the last year.
“Nautaung said Danny was sick. I don’t know where he gets that stuff. But you know Nautaung. You been sick, Danny? You don’t look too good. The cab driver said they got gamblin here. And lots women. And night clubs. On the level? Give me the poop. What’s you first name, Doc? We might as well dispense with formalities,” Sergeant Niven said to Captain Travis, of the Civil War General Travises, of the Mexican War Travises.
They let him go free-wheeling for a moment, then Con told him to get his gear up to his room and wash-up while the biggest steak in the house was being charcoaled for him.
“How do you want it?”
“Burnt on the outside and rare on the in,” he said and left.
“Well, Doc,” Con said, “You’re interested in psychiatry. How’s that for an anxiety case for a starter.”
“Con. Don’t you dare talk like that,” Carla scolded. “You’ll not turn him over to any doctor. Give him to me. I could mother and mother him forever.”
“If he brings that out in you,” Danny said, “he ought to do jolly well up here.”
“You hurt her feelings,” Con said.
“Like hell he did,” Carla laughed earthily. “I’ve got Danny’s number. I bother him because I’ve seen him at hi
s worst. No man likes that.”
“Englishmen are too conceited for that,” Danny grinned.
“Carla’s psychologically correct,” Grey Travis said. “Patients often hate their doctors for having seen them in a subservient condition. That’s why doctors often have trouble collecting their bills. But that Niven is amazing. He led four hundred men in guerilla battle,” the Doctor said incredulously not noticing Carla’s observing eyes.
The Doctor, she was thinking, personified her idea of young Americans. He had a way of letting foreign things enter him; rather obliquely and deviously, then once digested to have them come forward with that American exuberance. With his crewcut and youngish face and aristocratic nose he could have posed for one of those poster-ads of American soldiers she had seen. But he hardly looked a European’s preconception of what a doctor should appear. Or a family man, for that matter.
“The other day you said you were like Nickie,” Con said to Carla. “Well if we are like someone I suppose I’m somewhat like Niven … without his money and influence of course.”
“It’s too bad Nickie left,” Danny said. “I’d like to see Niven’s reaction to her Big Welcome. I think he’d rather run for cover.”
“I damn near did myself,” Con grinned. “But Niven’s funny that way,” he said seriously. “He’s embarrassed by a lot of things he does. Self-conscious, I guess, but he manages to do what has to be done anyhow. And that’s the important thing. I think only once during an ambush, have I seen him as frightened as he was tonight. But he managed to do what he thought to be the correct thing in both cases.”
“I agree there,” Danny said. “And who’s to say he isn’t right in being more afraid of civilization than he is the jungle. After all this is where these bloody wars start.”
“Remember that, Doc,” Con winked at Danny.
“Yes, Doc,” Danny said. “Before you readjust him it seems you’d better adjust the half on this side of the fence,” Danny said seriously, poker-faced, but kidding.
Never So Few Page 34