The Young Lions Part 21

The men watched silently, the same look of fascination and horror on all the faces.

Only Hardenburg didn't look like that. His lips were curled, his teeth showing, his breath came in rather hurried, uneven gasps, his eyes were half-closed. Christian tried to remember where he had seen that look before ... abandoned, lost in plea.s.sure. Then he remembered. Gretchen. When he had made love to her ... They must be cousins, Christian thought, they really look tremendously alike ...

The guns went on and on, the even, chattering noise by now almost like the everyday sound of a factory in the next block. Two of the men on the ridge took out cigarettes and lit them, very matter-of-factly, already a little bored with the monotony of the scene.

The life of the soldier, Christian thought, looking at the twitching bodies below. If they had stayed home in England it wouldn't have happened to them. Tomorrow it might be himself lying on the sand and some c.o.c.kney from the East Side of London putting a pound of lead into him. He felt a sudden wave of superiority. You felt superior to the Poles and the Czechs and the Russians and the Italians, but most of all you felt superior to the dead. He remembered the handsome, languid young Englishmen who used to come to Austria for the skiing, talking in the cafes in that flat, loud tone that drowned out all other speech in self-a.s.sured clamor. He hoped that those young lords were represented today among the officers lying face down in the b.l.o.o.d.y sand with belly torn and b.u.t.tocks showing.

Hardenburg waved his hand. "Cease firing," he said.

The guns stopped. The gunner nearest Christian was sweating. He sighed loudly and wiped his face and leaned wearily on the barrel in the quiet.

"Diestl," said Hardenburg.

"Yes, Sir."

"I want five men. And you." Hardenburg started down, sliding a little in the heavy sand, toward the still field below.

Christian motioned to the five men nearest him and they followed the Lieutenant.

Hardenburg walked deliberately, as though he were going to address a parade, toward the trucks. His pistol was in its holster and his hands swung in stiff little arcs at his side. Christian and the others followed just behind him. They came to the Englishman who had foolishly run toward them, holding onto his belt. The Englishman had been hit several times in the chest. His ribs were shattered and sticking in white and red splinters among the blood-soaked rags of his jacket, but he was still alive. He looked up quietly from the sand. Hardenburg took out his pistol, pulled the bolt to load it, and casually shot twice, without taking careful aim, at the Englishman's head. The Englishman's face disappeared. He grunted once. Hardenburg put the pistol back in his holster and strolled on.

Next there was a group of six men. They all seemed to be dead, but Hardenburg said, "Make sure," and Christian fired some shots into them mechanically. He felt nothing.

They reached the line of breakfast fires. Christian observed the careful way in which the tins had been punched with holes to get the best possible results out of the makeshift stoves. G.o.d knows how many gallons of tea had been brewed there. There was a heavy smell of tea, and the smell of burned wool and burning rubber, and the smell of roasted flesh from the trucks, where several men had been caught in the fire. One man had jumped out of a truck, all ablaze. He was lying on one elbow, with his blackened and burnt head up in an alert, searching pose. The mortars had hit around here, too, and there were a pair of naked legs torn off at the hips and exploded out of their trousers, mixed with tea and canned corned beef and spilt sugar.

One man had had his head almost severed from his body and he was sitting against a wheel. Christian stared at the lolling head. The face was one of a working man, with strong muscular jaws and that expression of sly stubbornness and surface servility that was so common on British faces. The man had had an upper plate and it was half-hanging out of his mouth, giving a mocking twist to his lips. He was clean-shaven, the jaws red and sc.r.a.ped under the graying hair of his temples. One of the shavers, Christian thought. The neat soldier. One like that in all squads. He needn't have bothered this morning.

Here and there an arm moved, or a groan could be heard. The detail spread out, and the shots came from all over the area. Hardenburg went to the lead car, which had obviously been used by the officer in command of the convoy, and rummaged around inside for papers. He took some maps and some typewritten orders and a photograph of a blonde woman with two children that was tucked in the mapcase. Then he set fire to the car.

He and Christian stood watching the car burn.

"We were lucky," Hardenburg said. "They stopped in just the right place." He grinned, Christian grinned too. This wasn't like the half-farcical approach to Paris. This wasn't the black-marketing and police-work of Rennes. This was what they were here for, this is what the war was like, these dead around him were measurable, substantial, valuable. The Americans were not going to help these Englishmen very much.

"All right," Hardenburg called to the others. "Any you've missed can walk home. Back up the hill."

He and Christian started back. The men on the ridge were outlined against the sky, standing there, watching them. How vulnerable they looked, Christian thought anxiously, how lonely, how much he needed them ...

They pa.s.sed the officer lying with his naked b.u.t.tocks sticking up into the air. The flesh was slender and pale and had a look of surprised aristocracy.

Hardenburg grinned. "Do you remember," Hardenburg asked, "what he looked like, squatting there, worrying about being constipated, when he heard the first shot? And how he looked when he tried to run? Trying to wave and hold up his pants at the same time ... A Captain in His Majesty's Forces ... I'll bet they never taught him how to handle a situation like that at Sandhurst!"

Hardenburg laughed. As he laughed, the humor of the recollection struck him more and more forcibly. Finally he had to stop walking and stood still, bent over, his hands on his knees, gasping weakly, his laughter rolling wildly out into the wind.

Christian started to laugh, too, although at first he didn't want to. But then the laughter caught him in its tide, and he rocked helplessly as it swept him. The others, seeing their Lieutenant and Sergeant overcome by laughter, began to laugh, too. First they giggled, then the infection became too strong, and finally all of them, the five men with Christian and Hardenburg, and the men standing next to the guns on the ridge, were roaring together, the sound sweeping over the torn ground, the quiet bodies, the subsiding breakfast fires, the scattered guns, the comic shovels, the burning trucks, the dead man sitting propped up against the wheel, with his head almost off at the ear and the false upper plate dangling from his twisted lips.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE TRAIN RATTLED slowly along between the drifts and the white hills of Vermont. Noah sat at the frosted window, with his overcoat on, shivering because the heating system of the car had broken down. He stared out at the slowly changing, forbidding scenery, gray in the cloudy wastes of Christmas dawn. He had not been able to get a berth because the train was crowded, and he felt grimy and stiff. The water had frozen in the men's room and he hadn't been able to shave. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek and knew that it was black and ugly and that his eyes were rimmed with bloodshot red and that there were smoke smudges on his collar. This is a h.e.l.l of a way, he thought, to present myself to her family.

With each mile he felt more and more uncertain. At one station, where they had stopped for fifteen minutes, there had been another train en route back to New York, and he had had a wild impulse to jump out and climb aboard and rush back to the city. With the discomfort of the journey, the cold and the snoring pa.s.sengers and the sight of the grim hills breaking out of the cloudy night, more and more of his confidence had left him. Never, he was saying to himself, this will never work.

Hope had gone on ahead to prepare the way. She had been up here for two days now, and by this time she must have told her father that she was going to get married, and that she was going to marry a Jew. It must have gone off all right, Noah thought, forcing himself to be optimistic in the dusty car, otherwise she would have sent me a telegram. She's let me come up here, so it must be all right, it must be ...

After the Army had rejected him, Noah had, as reasonably as he could, decided to rearrange his life in as rational and useful a way as possible. He had begun to spend three or four evenings a week in the library, reading blueprints for marine-construction work. Ships, they cried in the newspapers and on the radio, ships and more ships. Well, if he couldn't fight, he could at least build. He had never studied a blueprint in his life, and he had only the vaguest notion of what the processes of welding and riveting were, and, according to all authorities, it took months of intensive training for a man to become proficient at any of those things, but he studied with cold fury, memorizing, reciting to himself, making himself draw plans from memory again and again. He was at home with books and he learned quickly. In another month, he felt, he could go into a shipyard and bluff his way onto the scaffolding and earn his keep.

And in the meantime, there was Hope. He felt a little guilty about planning his private happiness at a time when all his friends were going down into the horrors of war, but his abstinence would not bring Hitler to defeat any sooner, nor would the Emperor of j.a.pan surrender any earlier if he, Noah, remained single-and Hope had been insistent.

But she was very fond of her father. He was a devout churchgoer, a hardbitten Presbyterian elder, rooted stubbornly all his life in this harsh section of the world, and she would not marry without his consent. Oh, G.o.d, Noah thought, staring across the aisle at a Marine Corporal who was sleeping, sprawled there, with his mouth open and his feet up in the air, Oh, G.o.d, why is the world so complicated?

There was a brickyard along the tracks, and a glimpse of one of those tightly-put-together, unpromising white streets with steeples rising at both ends. Then there was Hope, standing on the platform, searching the sliding, frosted windows for his face.

He jumped down from the train before it stopped. He skidded a little on a patch of frozen snow, and nearly dropped the battered imitation-leather bag he was carrying as he fought to hold his balance. An old man who was pushing a trunk said to him testily, "That's ice, young man. Ice. You can't toe-dance on it."

Then Hope hurried up to him. Her face was wan and disturbed. She didn't kiss him. She stopped three feet away from him. "Oh, my, Noah," she said, "you need a shave."

"The water," he said, feeling irritated, "was frozen."

They stood there uncertainly facing each other. Noah looked hastily around to see if she was alone. Two or three other people had got off at the station, but it was early and no one had come to greet them and they were already hurrying off. Aside from the old man with the trunk, Noah and Hope had the station to themselves as the train started to pull out.

It's no good, Noah thought, they've sent her down by herself to break the news.

"Did you have a good trip?" Hope said artificially.

"Very nice," Noah answered. She seemed strange and cold, bundled up in an old mackinaw and a scarf drawn tight over her hair. The northern wind cut across from the frozen hills, slicing through his overcoat as though it were the thinnest cotton.

"Well," Noah said, "do we spend Christmas here?"

"Noah ..." Hope said softly, her voice trembling with the effort to keep it steady. "Noah, I didn't tell them."

"What?" Noah asked stupidly.

"I didn't tell them. Not anything. Not that you were coming. Not that I wanted to marry you. Not that you're Jewish. Not that you're alive."

Noah swallowed. What a silly, aimless way to spend Christmas, he thought foolishly, looking at the uncelebrating hills.

"That's all right," he said. He didn't know what that meant, but Hope looked so forlorn standing there in her tightly drawn scarf, with her face pinched by the morning cold, that he felt he had to comfort her some way. "That's perfectly all right," he said, in the tone of a host telling a clumsy guest who has dropped a water gla.s.s that no great harm has been done. "Don't worry about it."

"I meant to," Hope said. She spoke so low that he had difficulty understanding her, with the wind s.n.a.t.c.hing at her words. "I tried to. Last night, I was on the point ..." She shook her head. "We came home from church and I thought I would be able to sit down in the kitchen with my father. But my brother came in, he's over from Rutland with his wife and their children, for the holidays. They started to talk about the war, and my brother, he's an idiot anyway, my brother began to say that there were no Jews fighting in the war and they were making all the money, and my father just sat there nodding. I don't know whether he was agreeing or just getting sleepy the way he does at nine o'clock every night, and I just couldn't bring myself ..."

"That's all right," Noah kept saying stupidly, "that's perfectly all right." He moved his hands vaguely in their gloves because they were getting numb. I must get breakfast soon, he thought, I need some coffee.

"I can't stay here with you," Hope said. "I've got to get back. Everybody was asleep when I left the house, but they'll probably be up by now, and they'll wonder where I am. I've got to go to church with them, and I'll try to get my father alone after church."

"Of course," Noah said, with lunatic briskness. "Exactly the thing to do."

"There's a hotel across the street." Hope pointed to a three-story frame building fifty yards away. "You can go in there and get something to eat and freshen up. I'll come and get you around eleven o'clock. Is that all right?" she asked anxiously.

"Couldn't be better," Noah said. "I'll shave." He smiled brightly, as though he had just thought of some brilliantly clever notion.

"Oh, Noah, darling ..." She came closer to him, and put her hands in clumsy anguish to his face. "I'm so sorry. I've failed you, I've failed you."

"Nonsense," he said softly, "nonsense." But in his heart he knew she was right. She had failed him. He was surprised more than anything else. She had always been so dependable, she had so much courage, she had always been so frank and candid in everything she did with him. But mixed with the disappointment and the hurt at being damaged this way on this cold Christmas morning, he was a little glad that for once she had failed. He was certain that he had failed her again and again and would, from time to time, fail her in the future. There was a juster balance between them now, and there would be something for which he could always forgive her.

"Don't worry, darling." He smiled at her, grimed and weary. "I'm sure it will all be fine. I'll wait for you over there." He gestured toward the hotel. "Go to church. And ..." he grinned sadly, "pray a couple of prayers for me."

She smiled, near tears, then wheeled and strode away, in her crisp walk that even the heavy overshoes and the uncertain footing underneath could not mar. He watched her disappear around a corner on her way back to the waking house in which her doubtful father and her talkative brother were even now waiting for her. He picked up his bag and made his way across the icy street to the hotel. As he opened the door of the hotel he stopped. Oh, G.o.d, he thought, I forgot to wish her Merry Christmas.

It was twelve-thirty before there was a knock on the door of the gray little room with the flaking, painted iron bed and the cracked washstand that Noah had rented for two and a half dollars. That left him three dollars and seventy-five cents to celebrate the holiday with. He had his ticket back to the city though. He had not counted on having to pay for a room. Still, it was not so bad. Meals, he had discovered, were cheap in Vermont. Breakfast had been only thirty-five cents, with two eggs. He had groaned as he had gone wearily over his finances. Aside from war and love and the savage division between Jew and Gentile which had existed for almost 2000 years now until this stony Christmas morning, and the ordinary reluctance of a father to deliver his daughter over to a stranger, there was the weary arithmetic of living through the holiday with less than five dollars in your pocket.

Noah opened the door, composing his face into what he thought was a quiet smile, with which to greet Hope. But it wasn't Hope. It was a wrinkled, red-faced old man who worked for the hotel.

"Lady and gentleman," the man said briefly, "down in the lobby." He turned and sauntered off.

Noah looked anxiously at his face in the mirror, combed his short hair back in three jerky movements, straightened his tie, and left the room. Why, he asked himself as he went uneasily down the creaking stairs that smelled of wax and bacon fat, why would a man in his right mind say yes to me? Three dollars to my name, with an alien religion, and a body that had been discarded as worthless by the government of the republic, and no profession, no real ambition except to live with and love his daughter. No family, no accomplishments, no friends, with a face that must seem harsh and foreign to this man, and a voice that nearly stuttered and was stained with the common accents of bad schools and low company from one end of America to the other. Noah had been in towns like this before and he knew what sort of men grew from them. Proud, private to themselves and their own kind, hard, with family histories that went back as far as the stones and planks of the towns themselves, looking with fear and scorn at the rootless foreign hordes which filled the cities. Noah had never felt more of a stranger anywhere on the long face of the continent than he did at the moment when he stepped down into the hotel lobby from the stairway and saw the man and the girl sitting on the wooden rockers, looking out through the small plategla.s.s window at the frozen street.

The two people stood up when they heard Noah come into the lobby. She's pale, Noah's mind registered, with a sense of catastrophe, very pale. He walked slowly toward the father and daughter. Mr. Plowman was a tall, stooped man, who looked as though he had worked with stone and iron all his life and had risen no later than five in the morning for the last sixty years. He had an angular, reserved face, and weary eyes behind silver-rimmed gla.s.ses, and he gave no sign either of welcome or hostility, as Hope said, "Father, this is Noah."

He put his hand out, though. Noah shook it. The hand was tough and h.o.r.n.y. I'm not going to beg. Noah thought, no matter what. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to pretend I'm anything much. If he says yes, fine. If he says no ... Noah refused to think about that.

"Very glad," her father said, "to make your acquaintance."

They stood in an uneasy group, with the old man who served as clerk watching them with undisguised interest.

"Seems to me," Mr. Plowman said, "might not be a bad idea for myself and Mr. Ackerman to have a little talk."

"Yes," Hope whispered, and the tense, uncertain timbre of her voice made Noah feel that all was lost.

Mr. Plowman looked around the lobby consideringly. "This might not be the best place for it," he said, staring at the clerk, who stared back curiously. "Might take a little walk around town. Mr. Ackerman might like to see the town, anyway."

"Yes, Sir," Noah said.

"I'll wait here," said Hope. She sat down suddenly in the rocker. It creaked alarmingly in the still lobby. The clerk made a severe, disapproving grimace at the sound and Noah was sure that he was going to hear the complaining wooden noise in his bad moments for many years.

"We'll be back in a half hour or so, Daughter," Mr. Plowman said.

Noah winced a little at the "Daughter." It was like a bad play about life on the farm in 1900, and he had an unreal sense of melodrama and heavy contrivance as he held the door open and he and Mr. Plowman went out into the snowy street. He caught a glimpse of Hope sitting behind the window, staring anxiously at them, and then they were walking slowly and deliberately past the closed shop-fronts on the cleared sidewalks, in the harsh, windy cold.

They walked without speaking for almost two minutes, their shoes making a dry crunching on the sc.r.a.ps of snow that the shovels had left on the pavements. Then Mr. Plowman spoke. "How much," he asked, "do they charge you in the hotel?"

"Two-fifty," Noah said.

"For one day?" Mr. Plowman asked.

"Yes."

"Highway robbers," Mr. Plowman said. "All hotelkeepers."

Then he fell back into silence and they walked quietly once more. They walked past Marshall's Feed and Grain store, past the drugstore of F. Kinne, past J. Gifford's Men's Clothing shop, past the law offices of Virgil Swift, past John Harding's butcher shop and Mrs. Walton's Bakery, past the furniture and undertaking establishment of Oliver Robinson, and N. West's grocery store.

Mr. Plowman's face was set and rigid, and as Noah looked from his sharp, quiet features, noncommittally arranged under the oldfashioned Sunday hat, to the storefronts, the names went into his brain like so many spikes driven into a plank by a methodical, impartial carpenter. Each name was an attack. Each name was a wall, an announcement, an arrow, a reproof. Subtly, Noah felt, in an ingenious quiet way, the old man was showing Noah the close-knit, h.o.m.ogeneous world of plain English names from which his daughter sprang. Deviously, Noah felt, the old man was demanding, how will an Ackerman fit here, a name imported from the broil of Europe, a name lonely, careless, un-owned and dispossessed, a name without a father or a home, a name rootless and accidental.

It would have been better to have the brother here, Noah thought, talking, fulminating, with all the old, familiar, ugly, spoken arguments, rather than this shrewd, silent Yankee attack.

They pa.s.sed the business section, still in silence. A weathered red brick school building reared up across a lawn, covered with dead ivy.

"Went to school there," Mr. Plowman said, with a stiff gesture of his head. "Hope."

A new enemy, Noah thought, looking at the plain old building, crouched behind its oak trees, another antagonist lying in wait for twenty-five years. There was some motto carved into the weathered stone above the portal and Noah squinted to read it. "Ye shall know the truth," the faded letters proclaimed to the generations of Plowmans who had walked under it to learn how to read and write and how their forefathers had set foot on the rock of Plymouth in the bl.u.s.tery weather of the seventeenth century. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Noah could almost hear his own father reading the words, the dead voice ringing out of the tomb with rhetorical, flaring relish.

"Cost twenty-three thousand dollars," Mr. Plowman said, "back in 1904. WPA wanted to tear it down and put up a new one in 1935. We stopped that. Waste of the taxpayers' money. Perfectly good school."

They continued walking. There was a church a hundred yards down the road, its steeple rising slender and austere into the morning sky. That's where it's going to happen, Noah thought despairingly. This is the shrewdest weapon coming up. There are probably six dozen Plowmans buried in that yard, and I'm going to be told in their presence.

The church was made of white wood and lay delicately and solidly on its sloping snowy lawns. It was balanced and reserved and did not cry out wildly to G.o.d, like the soaring cathedrals of the French and the Italians, but rather addressed Him in measured, plain terms, brief, dryly musical, and to the point.

"Well," said Mr. Plowman while the church was still fifty yards away, "we've probably gone far enough." He turned. "Like to go back?"

"Yes," Noah said. He was dazed and puzzled, and walked automatically, almost unseeingly, as they started back toward the hotel. The blow had not fallen yet, and there was no indication when it would fall. He glanced at the old man's face. There was a look of concentration and puzzlement there, among the granite lines, and Noah felt that he was searching painfully in his mind for the proper, cold, thoughtful words with which to dismiss his daughter's lover, words that would be fair but decisive, reasonable but final.

"You're doing an awful thing, young fellow," Mr. Plowman said, and Noah felt his jaw grow rigid as he prepared to fight. "You're putting an old man to the test of his principles. I won't deny it. I wish to G.o.d you would turn around and get on the train and go back to New York and never see Hope again. You won't do that, will you?" He peered shrewdly at Noah.

"No," said Noah. "I won't."

"Didn't think you would. Wouldn't've been up here in the first place if you would." The old man took a deep breath, stared at the cleared pavements before his feet, as he walked slowly at Noah's side. "Excuse me if I've given you a pretty glum walk through town," he said. "A man goes a good deal of his life living more or less automatically. But every once in a while, he has to make a real decision. He has to say to himself, now, what do I really believe, and is it good or is it bad? The last forty-five minutes you've had me doing that, and I'm not fond of you for it Don't know any Jews, never had any dealings with them. I had to look at you and try to decide whether I thought Jews were wild, howling heathen, or congenital felons, or whatever ... Hope thinks you're not too bad, but young girls've made plenty of mistakes before. All my life I thought I believed one man was born as good as another, but thank G.o.d I never had to act on it till this day. Anybody else show up in town asking to marry Hope, I'd say, 'Come out to the house. Virginia's got turkey for dinner ...'"

They were in front of the hotel now. Noah hadn't noticed it, listening to the old man's earnest voice, but the door of the hotel opened and Hope came quickly out. The old man stopped and wiped his mouth reflectively as his daughter stood there staring at him, her face worried and set-looking.

Noah felt as though he had been confined to a sickbed for weeks, and the list of names on the storefronts, the Kinnes and Wests and Swifts marshalled behind him, and the name on the tombstones in the churchyard, and the cold unrelenting church itself, and the deliberate voice of the. old man, suddenly, all together, with the pale, harrowed sight of Hope herself, became intolerable. He had a vision of his warm, tumbled room near the river, with the books and the old piano, and he longed for it with an aching intensity.

"Well?" Hope said.

"Well," her father said slowly. "I just been telling Mr. Ackerman, there's turkey for dinner."

Slowly, Hope's face broke into a smile. She leaned over and kissed her father. "What in Heaven took so long?" she asked, and, dazedly, Noah knew it was going to be all right, although at the moment he was too spent and weary to feel anything about it.

"Might as well take your things, young man," Mr. Plowman said. "No sense giving those robbers all your money."

"Yes," Noah said. "Yes, of course." He moved slowly and dreamily up the steps into the hotel. He opened the door and looked back. Hope was holding her father's arm. The old man was grinning. It was a little forced and a little painful, but it was a grin.

"Oh," said Noah, "I forgot. Merry Christmas."

Then he went in to get his bag.