Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  The President, whom expediency had for once left with no expedient, when he entered looked almost as shattered as Miss Ranken, and his habit of blinking frequently was more pronounced than usual. War was declared unanimously and in haste, only Miss Ranken persisting to differ.

  One has to admire her, in a way.

  Tuesday, the mounting of anti-aircraft and machine-guns on top of the Senate and House office buildings continued. It was a bad day. The District of Columbia has the highest rate of liquor consumption in America. Even in Nevada, the heaviest drinking state, they only swill down half as much. Consumption now went up, and several thoughtful and provident families, foreseeing shortages, phoned their dealers and got in a year’s supply. There was even one woman who went to the length of buying a small house and lining it with whisky. Whatever happened, she meant to have her Cutty Sark.

  The President, in a speech to Congress and the nation, minimized the disaster. That was considerate of him, but by the end of the week the first newsreels were in the movie-houses, so that all over the country people could watch foreign planes over an American city for the first time ever, though only in black and white, for that was several years before colour came into general use, with its superior advantages of realism and trueness to life. However, the audiences, few of whom had seen any of those fifty films Dies and Nye complained of, but most of whom had lapped up the other 1,050, found that buildings burst, men died, children ran screaming, and ships keeled over just as well in black and white, hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it, and some of them even left before the main feature came on.

  It was a war. The garment district lobbies were already in Washington. It is the early worm that gets the uniform. There would be contracts for everyone. Rationing was announced. Canny housewives began to line the cellar shelves with coffee, sugar, flour, tinned food, and jams. Women whose only chance so far to wear a uniform had been in the British War Relief, slipped into that of the Red Cross, and their daughters surged into such military auxiliaries as the Waves, which had had a uniform designed by Mainbocher, against such an emergency as this, with quite a natty hat, and into the Waacs, which hadn’t. The movie industry, for of course the investigation had collapsed at once, was so grateful to Tom that he was asked to speak at the next Academy Award dinner, and turned to the making of simple heart-warming soldier comedies, epics of Nazi brutality, and to their own research departments, to discover just which of their male stars could be retained for reasons of health (usually a morals charge, so you never knew, sometimes all those years of studio kickbacks to the Los Angeles police paid off in a big way), and which, considering their box-office rating, it would be better to allow to be drafted.

  It wasn’t all like that, of course. But a hell of a lot cf it was. California was terrified of invasion. People from Los Angeles were fleeing into Nevada, some of them begging on their knees to be sold a safe retreat in the mountains by a local farmer. Gas-masks were given out. All the Nisei were driven into concentration camps, for no reason except that California demanded it. All that accomplished was to ruin the local truck garden industry, so that you couldn’t get a decent lettuce for years afterwards, and never did get a lettuce as good as the Nisei had grown. So people whose families had lived in those peaceful valleys for a hundred years were carted off in army trucks to sit behind barbed wire. Since they had to sell their property at once, there was a neat profit in that transaction somewhere.

  Miss Perkins, whose view of the Mall had been obstructed by some temporary buildings built over it in Wilson’s time, which she had tried for eight years to have torn down, was put to the inconvenience of seeing more being put up. There was a scandal about the Office of Civilian Defence. It was necessary to reorganize it and to get rid of the co-ordinators of mubble peg and table tennis, though they had put in hard work and had no desire to go.

  But war has its casualties. They went.

  American production, of course, would win the war. There was no doubt of that. Of course we would win. But at the moment it did really look very much as though we were losing.

  A group of reporters in Kuibyshev, with the Russian Government there, had the idea of asking Tom abroad to see the war for himself and then report back to the President. Such a trip would prove that the Free World still controlled at least the air. It would also get rid of him for a while.

  Tom, though he meant well, was a nuisance. Recently, in a debate over Wartime Expenditure, he had suggested that instead of mortgaging the future with debts, it would be possible to pay for at least most of the war, by cutting down on the standard of living.

  That would never do. It would cause endless trouble, and the President was having trouble enough with Congress as it was. That was touching something sacred. War or no war, win or lose, no American was going to agree to having his standard of living lowered, and that was that.

  He was delighted to arrange a passport. He even saw Tom in his office. Get him out of the country.

  So on 26th August 1942, Tom took off from Mitchell Field, on that trip which was later to be called One World, in a converted U.S. Army C-87 bomber, which would look puny now, but was then our grandest and a majestic ship. Perhaps by accident, perhaps by some top secret confabulation so serious that no word of it was ever to leak out, the plane was called The Gulliver. He, too, had been a Pioneer.

  The plane rose, circled the field, turned south, and Tom had left Brobdingnag (attached like a polyp to North America. Swift was so prescient), headed towards Lilliput, Blefuscu, Laputa, Lagado, Maldonada, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdribb, Luggnagg, and that obscure island inhabited by the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, to see if there were any Struldbrugs left.

  Or any Houyhnhnms.

  Part III

  Puerto Rico

  Of the two journeys, he liked this one the better. It was a handy gazeteer to all countries. It was a quick view. In America, he had seen the names on the land. Here, around the world, he saw only so much of the land as he was allowed to see. Yet it was better than nothing. It showed him where he was. Snapshots in themselves mean nothing, but when we look at them they bring back the trip. They evoke the world we saw. And so he liked this one better.

  On the campaign train, he had had his own parlour car and a staff so big he never even met most of it. Here he had the crew, two newspaper friends, and representatives of the Army and Navy. That was enough.

  The plane flew down the coast of the Carolinas and over Florida, our oldest settled place, where the fountain of youth was once thought to be, and might still be, to judge by the way things looked when they stopped to refuel at Palm Beach. It was where people went in the summers to get away from where they went in the winters. Like migratory birds, outstripped and late, the well-to-do spent most of their time in flight, and changed nothing at either end but their plumage. Is that what Edna and I have become?

  Then a lift over the cays and Cuba, across the Antilles, and down on San Juan, where he had the chance to see Philip, who had joined the Navy and, as a lieutenant, junior grade, looked trim and crisp, as though the life agreed with him.

  No doubt it did. It was the excitement of their lives, this war. Unless they had some life of their own to live, it was this life they would always look back upon, this highest life they had ever known. In 1917, no doubt, he had felt much the same way. But he did not feel so now. So it did Philip no good to look so trim in his white dress uniform.

  That bond between the generations snaps like a stalk of celery, so crisp, so young, you only wonder why it cannot be whole again. No, this wasn’t Philip. He was speaking to a stranger, excited by something he could no longer understand.

  He does not need me any more. We will not be together again until I am old, and he is getting on. If then. And yet I love him. I do not like him very much this way, but yes, I do love him. I suppose that’s why I feel so sad. I wanted a message before I went on. And it isn’t there.

  Still, when he had to leave, Tom felt at a loss. It had never ocurred to
him before—for there will always be killing, it is an essential act, so it seems, like bowel movements, and can be faced, Yahoos can’t get along without it—what cannot be faced is that men die. Some of them before their time. Some of them our sons, when it is too late and we are too old to build another one. When that happens, it can be lived with, but it cannot be lived down, for then we, too, begin to die.

  That was nonsense. Philip would be all right.

  But it was nonsense which suddenly made the war much more real than even he had until that moment thought it. They said good-bye to each other on the dock. When he turned around Philip had already crossed the gangplank and gone into his cabin, and the deck, so hot, so white, was a shimmering, overexposed, empty granulated emulsion. Tom blinked. It was the glare no doubt. The water slapped at the hull. There were green trees beyond. It looked peaceful. But then so had Hawaii.

  Write. Please write. Your mother worries about you, you know.

  Brazil

  A stop-over to refuel at Belem, a tired place.

  “We are the last bastion of democracy left in the world,” said America. What would Brazil say to that, which had been a democracy for sixty years, and before that, had been just as democratic as an empire, under Dom Pedro II. But then, Brazil had had four hundred years in which to grow accustomed to the naïve ostentations of the North, and could contemplate that uniqueness with considerable equanimity. “Our great cousins to the North,” they said. But you know what cousins are.

  Natal

  An ancient place, so they said. There was a demonstration there. Brazil, for reasons best known to itself, but not unallied to euchring its bets, was eager to enter the war on the Allied side. There had been all those ore shipments to Germany, for instance, illegal, but they had been made. There were a lot of Germans in Argentina, Brazil did not care for Argentina, which wanted part of Chile, and so on the whole it would be better if the Germans lost. Far better, anyway, than to have them in Paraguay, which was just next door, or Montevideo. Besides, Tom was a famous man, so they said, and not many such came to Natal.

  A demonstration did no harm. On the contrary, it channelled energies which otherwise might have done much, had they not been diverted so harmlessly from their course. Save the country and send him on his way.

  Ascension

  A lonely little island in the Atlantic, half-way between St. Helena and the Romanche Gap, where the water went 21,450 feet down. There was something disquieting about so small a rock, in the midst of so large and so empty an ocean. Thirty-four square miles. It was a secret stop-over, for the Americans had a military outpost there.

  The enlisted men knew who he was, of course. They remembered him from the last election. But they weren’t particularly interested in where he was going or why. They crowded round him, to ask about the latest baseball scores. How did he think the Redsox were doing? What had happened to the Dodgers? And why couldn’t they have more and fresher movies.

  One could not blame them. Ascension was a lonely place and British. There wasn’t much for an American to do there. It had nothing to recommend it except, perhaps, a certain severe beauty, and a heavy surf that would still beat against it as it did now, long after they were gone, and would long after we were all gone.

  Earth abides.

  Accra

  That part of Africa where Europe went shopping from the fifteenth century until the Abolitionists had their way, which made shopping harder, was divided into the Grain Coast, which accounted for Liberia, which no longer grew any; the Ivory Coast; the Gold Coast (but not of very good quality any more); and the Slave Coast (excellent). The best slaves had come down from the interior. Now they came down to the shore and demanded their freedom, though what they would do with it, the good God alone knew.

  Accra was out of things. Tom enjoyed the place. It was a welcome rest, after all those hours of watching the plane’s shadow dart like a water scooter on the discoloured surface of the Atlantic pond below. Accra was a rest from the world, which is what we all need, when we can get it, though who knows when the world will rest from us?

  Kano

  Inland, and not restful.

  They heard here that they might not get to Cairo at all, for it seemed likely that Rommel might get his Afrika Korps there first. Tom had been warned of that in America and was eager to press on. He liked races.

  Khartoum

  A hundred miles south of Meroë, capital of the old trading Empire of Kush, whose royalty, more astute than most, when the empire was defeated, had taken themselves off into the interior of Africa to tyrannize over the first people who could be intimidated into putting up with them.

  A dreary city, all the same. There they learned that Cairo was in a flap. Everybody was packing up to flee south. Parachutists had descended on the Nile valley, Nazis, so it was said, twirling sedately in the air. The British Army was getting ready to retire to Palestine and Kenya.

  No doubt. No doubt. But why not go and see for one’s self? Hence north.

  Cairo

  If you come right down to it, the only thing Swift left out of Gulliver’s Travels was the Banderlog, and Kipling took care of that. There were a lot of Banderlog at Cairo.

  A landing at Heliopolis. It had once been one of Egypt’s sacred cities, but now it was an airport. Appropriate enough. Every age needs its deus ex machina. Cairo sat between Heliopolis and the Sphinx, which was sandbagged up to its chin, an impressive work: the largest garden gnome in history.

  And then a call on Ambassador Kirk.

  Ambassador Kirk had a mania for the colour grey, by which he was always surrounded and in which he always dressed, and travelled with a slightly larger than life-size oil portrait of his mother, which had place of honour in any embassy in which he found himself, where it was banked with flowers, hydrangeas for choice. She had belonged to the period of Boldini. Kirk talked lightly, he was pessimistic, he was faintly mocking, but he was no fool, he knew everything that was going on, and behind the scenes he attached wires to puppets at strategic places, so that when they suddenly jerked up, you could not quite tell how it was done. He was not, among those who hired him, particularly popular.

  But Tom, with his foolish habit of thinking the world still run by people, rather than by the offices they temporarily occupied, set some store by Kirk. The man knew his job, which meant, as it always does in such cases, that he knew everybody else’s, too, otherwise he could not have kept his own. It was a pleasure to talk to him. The world was never the worse for a little guile.

  Kirk was less concerned about the German advance, though he had arranged for the usual ritual burning of papers in the embassy garden, than about the problem of getting his mother’s portrait out of Cairo. Tom understood that, too. The best way to survive any crisis is to worry about one thing in terms of another. Dolley Madison, when the British were coming in 1812, to sack Washington, lost her head, got on a step-ladder, cut her portrait out of its frame, wrapped it in the Constitution, felt much better, got into her carriage, and sedately left Washington behind her, driving at a brisk trot. There is a Brady daguerreotype of her, taken in old age, with a turban on her head, looking like a benevolent dumpling. It was not courage exactly, but it was determination and the right kind of vanity, and as a result, her portrait is back in the White House and the Constitution is at least still there to amend, as impossible a document as Magna Carta, really, but none the less, there.

  What on earth would anyone think to save, when Washington was sacked next time? The art of portraiture had decayed, and the Library of Congress, where the Constitution was now, was so hard to get in to.

  Between them, Dolley Madison and Kirk, though, might just pull us through. It was an inviting picture, Kirk and the portrait, wedged in a tilbury, proceeding at a brisk trot towards the Second Cataract.

  El Alamein

  Later to be the scene of the battle of.

  General Montgomery, a human jerboa, with a jerboa’s jump, a jerboa’s quickness, much more than a jer
boa’s intelligence, and a desert rat. Well, in America, that is a term of grudging praise, that’s what we call jerboas, as they hop with a sudden enormous extension of their range. They eat or else they die.

  Montgomery proposed to eat Rommel.

  Headquarters consisted of four American automobile trailers. Montgomery slept in one. Tom in another. The maps were in a third. In the morning Montgomery and Tom swam in the marvellous, blue-green sea, the only marvellous thing thereabouts.

  “Who’s Maxwell?” Montgomery wanted to know.

  “The American Commander.”

  The battle, Montgomery said, was already won. Looking out over that trackless waste, it was hard to see how. Things were easier in the eighteenth century, when you watched in comfort from a hill, and war was a branch of choreography. Though come to think of it, at the first Battle of Bull Run, which we lost, during the Civil War, those who had come out to watch it from a hill, had had to gallop straight back to Washington to save their lives. Had that been the beginning of modern times?