Once an Eagle (93 page)

“For your information—”

“Which is it?”

The room was almost completely still. The Englishman's eyes flickered nervously about. Ben had released him a few seconds before, and he twisted his neck inside his collar. “Gentlemen and officers,” he breathed, “do not make scenes of this sort …”

“This one does,” Ben answered lightly; and Damon, watching his eyes, his suddenly relaxed stance, knew that Ben had realized the other man would not fight.

“Ronnie,” the major said in pleading tones, “wouldn't it be a whole lot better if—”

“Be still!” The Englishman turned to Ben again. “We were sitting with these ladies, Colonel, and I'll thank you to—”

“Then why don't we let the ladies choose?” Ben pursued; smiling again he made the same funny little bow. “How about it, girls?” he asked them. “Two Limeys or two Yanks? Roughly equal in rank, in age, in girth—but the heart, ladies: the
heart!
What do you say?”

Damon saw the nurse give a soft, radiant little smile, the girl in the blue dress run her tongue along the edge of her teeth in a merry, malicious grin, while the whole room, utterly quiet now, watched and waited. Then all at once the Australian girl, looking at the British colonel from under her brows, still smiling, burst into song, slapping her hand against the table top in rhythm.

 

“Fellas of Austryl-yeh,

Cobbers, chaps, and mites,

Hear the bloody enemy

Kickin' at the gites …”

 

The room swelled into singing, raucous and bellicose. The Englishman tried to speak to the girl but she only sang louder, laughing; he turned to Ben, but the singing drowned his words. His companion pulled at his blouse; they glanced at each other and then left quickly through the press, to roars of laughter.

 

“Blow the bloody bugle,

Beat the bloody drum,

—Uppercut and out the cow

To Kingdom-bloody-Come! …”

 

The refrain was followed by a cheer, and a chorus of approval and commendation from the Diggers in the room (“That's showing them the way, Yank!” “I heard 'im slang you, I did—the dirty little dingo … ”). There were handshakes, introductions, and drinks all around. Damon brought over their glasses and they sat down with the girls.

“What a bonzer cove you are,” Hallie said to Ben. “Did you hear them barrack you? You're the dinkum oil.”

Ben threw open his hands. “Whatever
that
is, that's me … ”

“Sorry about all that,” Damon said to the nurse. “Ben's the impetuous type.”

“Thank heaven someone shut him up. It was disgusting. Are there a lot of Englishmen like that?”

“Let's hope there are only a few—for Eisenhower's sake.”

“It's always the nasty ones who have the connections. He's a friend of General Blamey, did you hear him?”

Damon nodded. “Not worried about repercussions, are you?”

“Oh, no,” she laughed. “They can't put us in the stockade—they need us all too badly!”

They had another drink there, and then went on to what Hallie Burns referred to as a sly grog shop, obviously some kind of speakeasy where the gin was even more escharotic and a three-piece band—fiddle, accordion and clarinet—wheezed along brightly, and the tiny dance floor shook to the thump and slide of boots. Hallie seemed to know everybody. She worked for the war office, but as a civilian secretary. “I will not put on a uniform,” she informed them. “My pa said it's the beginning of servitude and the end of the private dream.”

“But suppose everybody felt like you.”

“If everybody felt like me, Benjy,” she retorted, her violet eyes glowing, “it'd be a lot wilder world. When my pot-and-pan put on his uniform I told him: ‘All well and good, chum, but you'll never get out of it again.' And do you know, it was true as your eyes. He never did.”

“Why do you call him a pot-and-pan?” Ben wanted to know.

“I don't know.” Hallie shrugged happily. “Rhymes with old man, do you see? Instead of a wife you have a trouble-and-strife. Instead of head you say lump-of-lead.”

“Hey, I like that. Can we make up our own?”

“Can't see why not.”

“Where's your pot-and-pan serving now?”

“He's not, love. He's dead and gone. Stopped one at Tobruk.” They all expressed condolences, but she was having none of it. “What's over is over. No sad songs. That's what war's for, isn't it? to kill people. Anyway, it's all chance. Like dice in a hopper.”

“Do you really see life that way?” Joyce asked her.

“Of course. What else is there? We're all just leaves floating down a river: the wind blows this way, the current pulls another, kids poke some with sticks, some come to rest on the riverbanks, some fill with water and sink to the bottom. But the stream keeps rolling along anyway.”

This inaugurated a long, earnest, rambling discussion about free will versus necessity. Ben declared that we had oceans of choice. “When I make up my mind to do something, that's it.”

“God stone the crows,” Hallie said, and rolled her eyes. “You're just a piece of taffy in a taffy machine: you stretch any way they pull you.”

“Oh, the Army, sure—but what about just now? I went over and laid into that insufferable Limey, didn't I? I decided to shut him up and I did.”

“Taradiddle.” She blinked at him impudently. “What you saw were two fine and tricksy Sheilas and over you came. He could have been talking in Maori.”

Ben grinned at her. “Maybe so. But then why did I lay into
him?
”

“That's easy. He stands for what you've always hated.”

Ben stared at her. “You could see that?”

“It could have been painted on a hoarding, love …”

Their argument ran on, amicable and aimless. Damon turned to Joyce. “What do you think?”

“I've changed my mind. I used to think we had all kinds of free will—now I'm not sure we have much at all. I think we're pushed along by a thousand things we don't even recognize, we don't even know are working on us.”

“Slaves to passion?”

She smiled faintly, and nodded. “Yes—sort of. Passion and obligation.”

“How about marriage?” he asked impulsively. “Do we choose, or are we chosen?”

“Don't ask me that.” She laughed softly but her eyes were grave. “It was the mistake of my life.”

“Your pot-and-pan?”

“Ex-pot.” He was a physics instructor; she had met him at a party at Berkeley where she was a pre-med student. “I told myself I was making a noble choice—renouncing an illustrious career for the man I loved. It wasn't true at all. I was scared to death I was going to flunk out—I would have, too, I know it—I can see now I was looking for a way out all along; and Brad was the answer.” Her hands were large and capable, the fingers long and nicely tapered; her large, clear eyes were shadowed with a humorous ruefulness; her voice was deep for a woman's, and a little husky. “It's funny—he seemed so much older than I, so much more wise and disciplined and reliable. It took me three years to discover that he would never grow up, that he didn't want to. And I did. Badly … I've got a theory about people.”

“What's that?”

“We all stop at a certain age. Really stop. And everything after that is just a repetition of all the earlier attitudes, going through the motions. We freeze, sort of. At a crucial place.”

“Traumatic catalyst?”

“Not necessarily. It can also be a time of your life when everything was most vivid, and you want that time to continue. Or when you became aware of things being terribly different from what you thought they were. For instance my sister Georgia stopped at fourteen. She's thirty-two now, but she's really still the willful little adolescent resentful of the adult world that betrayed her when Dad left home. There's no
reason
she should cling to that moment, but she does, somehow.”

“How about you?”

“I stopped at twenty-two, I think. When Mother died of cancer. We'd never been very close but I was seized with a sense of obligation—that I must sacrifice myself for the good of mankind: medicine, social work—and now I'm out here. Not a very interesting syndrome, I'm afraid.”

“How about me?” he felt constrained to ask. “Where did I stop?”

“… I don't know you well enough.” She smiled again: it was a lovely smile, a surprising smile—it transformed her broad-cheeked, placid, almost plain face into a younger, more attractive woman's. That sense of solace, of resilience and trust in her large, brown eyes reached out to him; he was all at once conscious of the heavy male voices and the clump of boots above and around him, and time's racing.

“Tell me more,” he heard himself saying eagerly, gliding on the gin, the hard pressure—aware that he was guilty of a kind of dereliction and not caring, not caring at all. His hand held this glass which was cool and moist, his heart beat densely, this girl sat here beside him looking wistful and vulnerable and composed. Life. Warm flesh, animate flesh …

“—This Aussie patois is tremendous,” Ben broke in on him. “It's full of surprises. You know what they say for money? Bees.”

“Why's that?”

“Bees-and-honey. Get it? A bastard is a swell guy, and a cow is a bum, but you can't say bum—”

“No you can't, Benjy,” Hallie sang.

“—and smooge means—what do you think smooge means?”

“To get soot all over you from cleaning the chimney flue.”

“No—it means to neck with a girl … I'm going to settle down here. When this late incommodiousness is over and they toss me on the slag pile I'm going to come out here. It's my kind of subcontinent.”

“And you're my style of Fitzroy Yank,” Hallie concurred.

“Great. Let's dance.”

“Beaut!”

The fun, the need—which was also the fun—was in talking. About all the things you could remember—the trivial things that swept back over you with the fine emerald clarity of time: the rich, faintly gritty taste of buckwheat cakes on a chill fall morning, with the pheasants moving hesitantly through the stubble, the cock like some exotic Eastern satrap; or May afternoons with the apple trees in blossom and the hummingbirds dancing at the bells of the lilies; or desert evenings with the sky swept in vast skeins of mauve and orange cloud and the smell of sage dusty and pungent, like wildly scattered spices. The evening swam away; they danced and drank and told one another all their lives' histories, sympathized and made predictions, compared tastes in food in different parts of the country, parts of the world. Frenchy Beaupré, just out of hospital, came by, looking like a fierce little rooster with his red hair, which grew perversely in two directions, making that curious ridge through the center of his scalp; and later Jimmy Hoyt with a Red Cross girl named Alma Mergenthaler, who giggled at everything anyone said and announced that she wanted to settle in Australia, too … It was curious how things repeated themselves, slid around again until you felt you'd been here long before. Damon thought of Devlin and Michele dancing to the tinny Gramophone in the narrow, high-ceilinged room overlooking the Marne, and later Denise sitting there so still, the tears staining her pretty little china-doll face. So long ago. Was it
déjà vu
he had? No, that was something else. It was certainly a different war, a very different war—and yet these moments, these images rose up so poignantly the same …

And then all at once it was late, very late. They went out into the cool night air and piled into the jeep Damon had promoted from command headquarters that morning. When they reached the place where Hallie lived Ben got out, too.

“Old indomitable commander.” He drew himself up solemnly and saluted. His face was pale, and slick with sweat. Damon thought of the open carriage, rolling east along La Croisette toward the rock-and-pine headland of Golfe Juan. Ben was still holding his salute rigidly. “Terrible he rode alone, With his yemen sword for aid,” he declaimed. “Ornament it carried none, But the notches on the blade.”

Damon grinned. “Take care now, Benbo. ‘For the fever gets in as the liquor dies out,' you know.”

“Kipling,” Ben answered contemptuously. “You're relieved. If you can't get your command across that pitiful little excuse for a creek I'm going to find me someone who can.”

“Hush,”
Hallie hissed at him. “Come along, now.”

“Victory follows me, and all things follow victory. Who said that?”

“Napoleon,” Damon answered.

“You're relieved. If you can't manage to get across—”

“Hush, Benjy!”

“Check.” They moved up the steps. At the door Ben turned once more, his arm raised. “This must be a peace of victors, not—” Hallie pulled him inside and the door bumped shut.

They drove slowly through the deserted streets, the soft, depthless glow of false dawn. Damon glanced at Joyce now and then; she was looking straight ahead, a little preoccupied. At the hospital entrance he let the jeep roll fifty feet and switched off the key, got out and walking around to her side helped her out.

“It was fun,” he said.

“Yes, it was, wasn't it?”

“Have you figured out yet where I stopped?”

“Stopped? Oh …” She shook her head, her teeth on her lower lip. She was so tall her eyes were almost on a level with his. “Maybe you haven't stopped yet.”

“Maybe people stop and then start up again.”

“Maybe.”

He picked at the skin at the edge of his thumb. Joyce was still standing there, her face attentive and serene, her eyes very large in the dark. Across the street the MP on duty was watching them with the callous avidity and suspicion common to all sentries on night duty.