The Young Lions Part 18

"It's nothing, Sir."

The Lieutenant peered at Christian, a little shyly, Christian thought. "Did she uh ... look well?" he asked.

"She looked very fit, Sir," Christian said gravely.

"Ah, good. Good." The Lieutenant wheeled nervously in what was almost a pirouette, in front of the map of Africa that had supplanted the map of Russia on the wall. "Delighted. She has a tendency to work too hard, overdo things. Delighted," he said vaguely and spiritedly. "Lucky thing," he said, "lucky thing you took your leave when you did."

Christian didn't say anything. He was in no mood to engage in a long, social conversation with Lieutenant Hardenburg. He hadn't seen Corinne yet and he was impatient to get her and tell her to get in touch with her brother-in-law.

"Yes," Lieutenant Hardenburg said, "very lucky." He grinned inexplicably. "Come over here, Sergeant," he said mysteriously. He went to the barred grimy window and stared out. Christian followed him and stood next to him.

"I want you to understand," Hardenburg whispered, "that all this is extremely confidential. Secret. I really shouldn't be telling you this, but we've been together a long time and I feel I can trust you ..."

"Yes, Sir," Christian said cautiously.

Hardenburg looked around him carefully, then leaned a little closer to Christian. "Finally," he said, the jubilance plain in his voice, "finally, it's happened. We're moving." He turned his head sharply and looked over his shoulder. The clerk, who was the only other person in the room, was thirty feet away. "Africa," Hardenburg whispered, so low that Christian barely heard him. "The Africa Corps." He grinned widely. "In two weeks. Isn't it marvelous?"

"Yes, Sir," Christian said, flatly, after awhile.

"I know you'd be pleased," said Hardenburg.

"Yes, Sir."

"There'll be a lot to do in the next two weeks. You're going to be a busy man. The Captain wanted to cancel your leave, but I felt it would do you good, and you could make up for the time you'd lost ..."

"Thank you very much, Sir," said Christian.

"Finally," said Hardenburg triumphantly, rubbing his hands. "Finally." He stared unseeingly through the window, his eyes on the dust clouds rising from the armored tread on the roads of Libya, his ears hearing the noise of cannon on the Mediterranean coast. "I was beginning to be afraid," Hardenburg said softly, "that I would never get to see a battle." He shook his head, raising himself from his delicious reverie. "All right, Sergeant," he said, in his usual, clipped voice. "I'll want you back here in an hour."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian. He started to go, then turned. "Lieutenant," he said.

"Yes?"

"I wish to submit the name of a man in the 147th Pioneers for disciplinary action."

"Give it to the clerk," said the Lieutenant. "I'll send it through the proper channels."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian and went over to the clerk and watched him write down the name of Private Hans Reuter, unsoldierly appearance and conduct, complaint brought by Sergeant Christian Diestl.

"He's in trouble," the clerk said professionally. "He'll get restricted for a month."

"Probably," said Christian and went outside. He stood in front of the barracks door for a moment, then started for Corinne's house. Halfway there, he halted. Ridiculous, he thought. What's the sense in seeing her now?

He walked slowly back along the street. He stopped in front of a jeweler's shop, with a high small window. In the window there were some small diamond rings and a gold pendant with a large topaz on the end of it. Christian looked at the topaz, thinking: Gretchen would like that. I wonder how much it costs.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

THERE WERE BOYS and young men all over the halls, lounging, smoking, spitting, talking loudly in the concrete accents of the New York streets, saying, in the grimy cold corridor that smelled of sweat and public use, "Uncle Sam, here's Vincent Kelly," and "There I was lissenin' to the foolball game and this bastidd breaks in and he says, the j.a.ps went and hit Hickam Field. And I got so excited I didn't lissen no more and then I said to my wife, I said, 'Where the h.e.l.l is Hickam Field?' and that's the first words I said in the war."

And other voice said, "Nuts, they'll grab you later on, anyway. My motto is get in on the ground floor. My old man was in on the Marines the last time and he said, 'The ratings'll all go to the first guys that show up.' That's the way it was in the last one, he said, you didn't have to be smart, you just had to be early."

And they said, "I wouldn't mind seeing those Islands. One thing I can't stand is Noo Yawk in the winter. Summertime they'd have to come and get me, but I got a outside job, anyway, with the Gas Company, and no army could be worse than that."

And they said, "Have a drink. This war is great. The dame I was with said, 'My aching back, they're killing American boys' an' I said, 'I'm joinin' up in the mawning to fight for democracy, Clara,' and she cried and I laid her, right there in her own bedroom, with her husband's picture watchin' in a sailor suit. I been tryin' to lay that broad for three weeks and I was thrown out at first base every time I got up to the plate. But last night she was like a cage full of overflowin' tigers, and she nearly bust the springs loose from the bed with patriotism."

And they said, "The h.e.l.l with the Navy. I want to be some place where I can dig a hole."

Noah stood among the patriots, waiting his turn to be interviewed by the recruiting officer. He had taken Hope home late and it had been a bad time when he told her what he was going to do, and he had slept poorly, with one of his old dreams about being put up against a wall and machine-gunned, and he had risen in the dark to go down to Whitehall Street to enlist, hoping to be early enough to avoid getting caught in the crowd he was sure would be besieging the place. As he looked around at the others he wondered how the draft had missed them all, but that was almost the limit of speculation his weary mind could manage at the moment. In the days before the attack he had tried not to think it out, but, remorselessly, his conscience had made the decision for him. If the war began, he could not hesitate. As an honorable citizen, as a believer in the war, as an enemy of Fascism, as a Jew ... He shook his head. There it was again. That should have nothing to do with it. Most of these men were not Jews, and yet here they were at six-thirty of a winter's morning, the second day of the war, ready to die. And they were better, he knew, than they sounded. The rough jokes, the cynical estimates, were all on the surface, embarra.s.sed attempts to hide the true depths of the feeling that had brought them to this place. As an American, then. He refused to put himself at this moment into any special category. Perhaps, he thought, I will ask to be sent to the Pacific. Not against Germany. That would prove to them that it wasn't because he was a Jew ... Nonsense, nonsense, he thought, I'll go where they send me.

A door opened and a fat sergeant with a beery face came out and shouted irritably, "All right, all right, you guys. Stop spittin' on the floor, this is government property. And stop shovin'. n.o.body's goin' to be left behind. The Army's got plenty of room for everybody. Come in, one by one, through this door, when I give you the word. And leave your bottles outside. This is a United States Army installation."

It took all day. He was shipped to Governor's Island in an Army ferry that had a General's name on it. He stood on the crowded deck, his nose running with the cold, watching the harbor traffic on the slate waters. He wondered what obscure act of heroism or flattery the General had done in his day to deserve this minute honor. The Island was busy and thronged with soldiers who were grimly carrying guns, as though they expected to have to repel a landing party of j.a.panese marines at any moment.

Noah had told Hope he would try to call her at her office some time during the day, but he didn't want to lose his place in the slow line that went past the bored, short-tempered doctors.

"Christ," the man next to Noah said, looking down the long line of naked, scrawny, flabby aspirants for glory, "is this what's going to defend the country? Christ, we've lost the war."

Noah grinned a little self-consciously, and threw his shoulders back, measuring himself secretly in his nakedness against the others. There were three or four powerful young men, who looked as though they had played football, and one enormous man with a clipper in full sail tattooed on his chest, but Noah was pleased to see that he compared favorably with most of the rest. He had become acutely conscious of his body in the last few months. The Army, he thought as he waited to get his chest x-rayed, will probably build me up considerably. Hope will be pleased. Then he grinned. It was an elaborate, roundabout way to put yourself in condition, to have your country go to war against the Empire of j.a.pan.

The doctors paid little attention to him. His vision was normal, he did not have piles, flat feet, hernia, or gonorrhea. He did not have syphilis or epilepsy, and in a minute and a half interview a psychiatrist decided he was sane enough for the purposes of modern warfare. His joints articulated well enough to please the Surgeon General and his teeth met in an efficient enough manner to insure his being able to chew Army food and there were no scars or lesions evident anywhere on his skin.

He dressed, glad to get his clothes on once again, thinking, tomorrow it will be a uniform, and went up, in the slow-moving line, to the sallow, hara.s.sed-looking medical officer who sat at a yellow desk, stamping 1A, Limited Service, or Rejected, on the medical records.

I wonder, Noah was thinking, as the doctor bent over his record, I wonder if I'll be sent to some camp near New York so I can see Hope on pa.s.ses ...

The doctor picked up one of the stamps and tapped it several times on a pad. Then he hit Noah's record and pushed it toward him. Noah looked down at it. REJECTED was smeared across it in blurred purple letters. Noah shook his head and blinked. It still said REJECTED.

"What ...?" he began.

The doctor looked up at him, not unkindly. "Your lungs, son," he said. "The x-ray show scar tissue on both of them. When did you have t.b.?"

"I never had t.b."

The doctor shrugged. "Sorry, son," he said. "Next."

Noah walked slowly out of the building. It was evening now, and the wind was cruel and full of December as it swept off the harbor across the old fort and the barracks and parade ground that stood over the sea approaches to the city. The city itself was a clot of a million lights across the dark stretch of water. New levees of draftees and volunteers came pouring off the ferries, shuffling off to the waiting doctors and the final purple stamps.

Noah shivered and put his collar up, clutching the sheet of paper with his record on it, pulling at his hand in the wind. He felt numb and purposeless, like a schoolboy deserted among the dormitories on Christmas Eve, with all his friends off to celebrations in their homes. He put his hand inside his coat and inside his shirt. He touched the skin of his chest and felt the firm skeleton of his ribs. It felt solid and reliable, even with tips of cold wind whipping at it through his opened clothing. Tentatively,' he coughed. He felt strong and whole.

He moved slowly to the ferry slip and stepped aboard past the MP with the winter hat with the earm.u.f.fs and the rifle. The ferry was almost empty. Everybody, he thought dully, as the ferry with the dead General's name painted on it slid across the narrow black stretch of water toward the looming city, everybody is going the other way.

Hope wasn't home when he got there. The uncle who read the Bible was sitting up in his underwear in the kitchen, reading, and he peered ill-naturedly at Noah, whom he did not like, and said, "You here? I thought you'd be a Colonel by now."

"Is it all right," Noah asked wearily, "if I stay here and wait for her?"

"Suit yourself," the uncle said, scratching himself under the arm, above the Book, open to the gospel according to Luke on the table before him. "I don't guarantee when she'll be home. She's a girl who's developed some mighty fast habits, as I write her parents in Vermont, and the hours of the night don't seem to make much impression on her." He grinned nastily at Noah. "And now her fellah's goin' in the Army, or leastwise, she thinks he is, she's probably out scoutin' out some new ground, wouldn't you say?"

There was some coffee heating on the stove, and a half-filled cup before him, and the smell was tantalizing to Noah, who hadn't eaten since noon. But the uncle made no offer and Noah wouldn't ask for it.

Noah went into the living room and sat down in the velour easy chair with the cheap lace antimaca.s.sars on it. It had been a long day and his face smarted from the cold and wind, and he slept, sitting up, not hearing the uncle shuffling loudly about the kitchen, banging cups and occasionally reading aloud in his nasal, scratching voice.

The noise of the outside gate being opened, one of the deep familiar noises of his world, woke him from his sleep. He blinked his eyes and stood up just as Hope came into the room. She was walking slowly and heavily. She stopped short when she saw him standing there in the middle of the living room.

Then she ran to him and he held her close to him.

"You're here," she said.

Her uncle loudly slammed the door between the kitchen and the living room. Neither of them paid any attention to the noise.

Noah rubbed his cheek in her hair.

"I was in your room," Hope said. "All this time. Looking at all your things. You didn't call. All day. What's happened?"

"They won't take me," Noah said. "I have scars on my lungs. Tuberculosis."

"Oh, my G.o.d," Hope said.

CHAPTER NINE.

THE CLASHING SOUND of a lawnmower awoke Michael. He lay for a moment in the strange bed, remembering where he was, remembering what had happened yesterday, smelling the clipped fragrance of the California gra.s.s. "Probably," the movie writer on the edge of the swimming pool at Palm Springs had said yesterday afternoon, "probably ten guys are home writing it now. The butler comes into the garden with the tea and he says, 'Lemon or cream?' and the little nine-year-old girl comes in, carrying her doll, and says, 'Daddy, please fix the radio. I can't get the funnies. The man keeps talking about Pearl Harbor. Daddy, is Pearl Harbor near where Grandma lives?' And she bends the doll over and it says, 'Mamma'."

It was silly, Michael thought, but more true than not. Large events seemed to announce themselves in cliches. The arrival of universal disaster in the ordinary traffic of life always seemed to come in a rather ba.n.a.l, overworked way. And on Sunday, too, as people were resting after the large Sabbath dinner, after coming out of the churches where they had mumbled dutifully to G.o.d for peace. The enemy seemed to take a sardonic delight in picking Sunday for his most savage forays, as though he wanted to show what an ironic joke could be played over and over again on the Christian world. After the Sat.u.r.day night drunkenness and fornication and the holy morning prayer and bicarbonate of soda.

Michael, himself, had been playing tennis in the blazing desert sun with two soldiers who were stationed at March Field. When the woman had come out of the clubhouse, saying, "You'd better come in and listen to the radio. There's an awful lot of static, but I think I heard that the j.a.panese have attacked us," the two soldiers had looked at each other and had put their racquets away and had gone in and packed their bags and had started right back for March Field. The ball before the battle of Waterloo. The gallant young officers waltzing, kissing the bare-shouldered ladies good-bye, then off to the guns on the foaming horses, with a rattle of hoofs and scabbards and a swirling of capes in the Flanders night more than a century ago. An old chestnut, then, probably, but Byron had done it big just the same. How would Byron have handled the morning in Honolulu and this next morning at Beverly Hills?

Michael had meant to stay in Palm Springs another three days, but after the tennis game he had paid his bill and rushed back to town. No capes, no horses, just a rented Ford with a convertible top that went down when you pushed a b.u.t.ton. And no battle waiting, just the hired-by-the-week ground-floor apartment overlooking the swimming pool.

The noise of the mower came right up to the French windows that opened on the small lawn. Michael turned and looked at the machine and the gardener. The gardener was a small fifty-year-old j.a.panese, bent and thin with his years of tending other people's gra.s.s and flower beds. He plodded after the machine mechanically, his thin, wiry arms straining against the handle.

Michael couldn't help grinning. A h.e.l.l of a thing to wake up to the day after the j.a.panese Navy dropped the bombs on the American fleet ... a fifty-year-old j.a.p advancing on you with a lawnmower. Michael looked more closely and stopped smiling. The gardener had a set, gloomy expression on his face, as though he were bearing a chronic illness. Michael remembered him from the week before, when he had gone about his ch.o.r.es with a cheery, agreeable smile, and had even hummed from time to time, tunelessly, as he had pruned the oleander bush outside the window.

Michael got out of bed and went to the window, b.u.t.toning his pajama top. It was a clear, golden morning, with the tiny crispness that is Southern California's luxurious subst.i.tute for winter. The green of the lawn looked very green and the small red and yellow dahlias along the border shone like gleaming bright b.u.t.tons against it. The gardener kept everything in sharp definite lines out of some precise sense of Oriental design, and made the garden look like colored cups laid out on a billiard table.

"Good morning," Michael said. He didn't know the man's name. He didn't know any j.a.panese names. Yes-one. Sessue Hayakawa, the old movie star. What was good old Sessue Hayakawa doing this morning?

The gardener stopped the lawnmower and came slowly up from his somber dream to stare at Michael.

"Yes, Sir," he said. His voice was flat and high, and there was no welcome in it. His little dark eyes, set among the brown wrinkles, looked, Michael thought, lost and pleading. Michael wanted to say something comforting and civilized to this aging, laboring exile who had overnight found himself in a land of enemies, charged with the guilt of a vile attack three thousand miles away.

"It's too bad," Michael said, "isn't it?"

The gardener looked blankly at him, as though he had not understood at all.

"I mean," said Michael, "about the war."

The man shrugged. "Not too bad," he said. "Everybody say, 'naughty j.a.pan, G.o.dd.a.m.n j.a.pan.' But not too bad. Before, England wants, she take. America wants, she take. Now j.a.pan wants." He stared coldly at Michael, direct and challenging. "She take."

He turned and turned the mower with him and started across the lawn slowly, with the cut gra.s.s flying in a fragrant green spray around his ankles. Michael watched him for a moment, the bent humble back, the surprisingly powerful legs, bare up to the knee in torn denim pants, the creased, sun-worn neck rising out of the colorless sweaty shirt.

Michael shrugged. Perhaps a good citizen, in time of war, should report utterances like this to the proper authorities. Perhaps this aged gardener in his ragged clothes was really a full commander in the j.a.panese Navy, cleverly awaiting the arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro Harbor before showing his hand. Michael grinned. The movies, he thought, there is no escape for the modern mind from their onslaught.

He closed the French windows and went in and shaved. While he was shaving, he tried to plan what he would do from now on. He had come to California with Thomas Cahoon, who was trying to cast a play. They were conferring about revisions with the author, too, Milton Sleeper, who could only work at night on the play, because he worked during the day for Warner Brothers as a scenario writer. "Art," Cahoon had said, acidly, "is in great shape in the twentieth century. Goethe worked all day on a play, and Chekhov and Ibsen, but Milton Sleeper can only give it his evenings."

Somehow, Michael thought, as he sc.r.a.ped at his face, when your country goes to war, you should be galvanized into some vast and furious action. You should pick up a gun, board a naval vessel, climb into a bomber for a five-thousand-mile flight, parachute into the enemy's capital ...

But Cahoon needed him to put the play on. And, there was no escaping this fact, Michael needed the money. If he went into the Army now, his mother and father would probably starve, and there was Laura's alimony ... Cahoon was giving him a percentage of the play this time, too. It was a small percentage, but if it was a hit it would mean that money would be coming in for a year or two. Perhaps the war would be short and the money would last it out. And if it was a tremendous smash, say, like Abie's Irish Rose or Tobacco Road, the war could stretch on indefinitely. It was a dreadful thing to think of, though-a war that ran as long as Tobacco Road.

Too bad he didn't have the money now, though. It would have been so satisfactory to go to the nearest Army post after hearing the news on the radio and enlist. It would have been a solid, unequivocal gesture which you could look back at with pride all your life. But there were only six hundred dollars in the bank, and the income-tax people were bothering him about his return for 1939, and Laura had been unpredictably greedy about the divorce settlement. He had to give her eighty dollars a week for her whole life, unless she got married, and she had taken all the cash he had in his account in New York. He wondered what happened to alimony when you joined the Army. Probably an MP taps you on the shoulder as you lie crouched in a trench on the mainland of Asia, and says, "Come on, Soldier, we've been looking for you." He remembered the story a British friend of his told him about the last war. The friend had been at the Somme, and on the third day of the battle, with nearly no one left in his company, and no sign anywhere of any respite of relief, he had received a letter from home. With trembling hands, near tears, he had opened it. It was from the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Department, saying, "We have written you again and again with regard to your non-payment of thirteen pounds seven in tax for the year 1914. We regret to tell you that this is absolutely the last warning. If we do not hear from you we shall have to inst.i.tute legal steps." The friend, muddy, hollow-eyed, ragged, survivor of the death of all the men around him, deafened with the continuing roar of the guns, had gravely written on the face of the letter, "Come and get it. The War Office will be pleased to give you my address." He had given it to the Company Clerk to mail and had turned to the Germans in front of him.

As Michael dressed he tried to think about other things. There was something inglorious about sitting, a little hung-over from last night's nervous drinking, in this over-fancy, pink-chiffon, rented bedroom, done in Hollywood wh.o.r.ehouse style, uneasily going over your finances on this morning of decision, like a bookkeeper who has lifted fifty dollars from the till and is worrying about how to get it back before the auditors arrive. The men at the guns in Honolulu were probably in even more severe financial shape, but he was sure they weren't worrying about it this morning. Still, it was impractical to go down and enlist immediately. It was ridiculous, but patriotism, like almost every other generous activity, was easier for the rich, too.

While he was dressing he heard the colored man who did the cleaning come in and rattle the bottles in the small cabinet in the dining alcove. War hasn't changed him, Michael thought, he's stealing the gin just the same.

Michael put on his tie and went out into the living room. The colored man was running a carpet sweeper. He was standing in the middle of the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and pushing the carpet sweeper about in long, vague gestures, in all directions. There was a powerful smell of gin in the air and the colored man wavered in a benign, pendulum-like movement as he worked.

"Good morning, Bruce," Michael said pleasantly. "How do you feel?"

"Morning, Mr. Whitacre," Bruce said dreamily. "Feel the same. Feel exactly the same."

"They going to get you in the Army?" Michael asked.

"Me, Mr. Whitacre?" Bruce stopped sweeping and shook his head. "Not old Bruce. The man says, 'Join up, Brother,' but old Bruce don't join. Too old, too full of clap and rheumatism. And even if I was as young as the leaping colt and strong as the roaring lion, you wouldn't catch me enlisting for this war. Mebbe the next, but not this one. No, Sir."

Michael pulled back a little because in his vehemence Bruce had swayed, close and gin-smelling, toward him. Michael looked at him puzzledly. He always felt a little embarra.s.sed with Negroes, and guilty. He never seemed to strike a candid, everyday, honest conversational tone with them.

"No, Sir," Bruce went on, swaying, "not this one at all. Not if they gave me a solid silver gun and spurs of shining gold. This is the war of the Unrighteous, as it is predicted in the Books of Prophecy, and I would not lift my hand in it to wound my fellowman."

"But," Michael said, trying to put it in simple terms to get through the gin cloud, somehow feeling that on a day like this a man should debate this question with his neighbor, "they're killing Americans, Bruce."

"Maybe they are. Haven't seen for myself yet. Don't know for certain. Only what I read in the white papers. Maybe they are killing Americans: Likely, they was provoked. Maybe they tried to get into a hotel and the white men said, no yellow men here, and the yellow men finally got mad and they schemed awhile and they said, 'White men don't let us in the hotel, let's take the hotel.' No, man ..." He ran the carpet sweeper briskly twice over the carpet, then stopped and leaned on it again. "This ain't the war for me. The next one is the one I'm waiting for."

"When will that be?" Michael asked.

"1956," Bruce said promptly. "Armageddon. The war of the races. The colored against the white." He looked drunkenly and religiously up at the ceiling. "First day of that war, I present myself at the recruiting office and I say to the colored general, 'General, make use of my strong right arm.'"

California, Michael thought crazily. You only meet people like this in California.