The Pledge (6 page)

“Oh, fuck the whole thing, Colonel. What are you going to do to me? God be praised, I'm a civilian.”

Very stiffly, the colonel said, “I'd suggest you wear government issue, and a little politeness might not be amiss.” He opened the door of the office and instructed the sergeant to escort Mr. Bacon to Major Hillton's office. Then he slammed his door emphatically, and the sergeant said, “Colonel's angry. Sorry. No business of mine. You want a Coke? There's a machine right down the hallway here.”

“I'd love a Coke,” Bruce agreed. His mother-purchased shirt was wet with sweat, even though a sort of air conditioning was struggling with the interior heat. “This is lousy,” the sergeant said, commenting on the atmosphere. “Fans are better. I could hear Pinhead calling you out.” He dropped two nickels into the machine. “The Cokes are on me. What paper are you with?”

“
New York Tribune.
”

“Great. I'm from Baltimore. I was a stringer for the
Sun.
Well, not exactly. I was a copy boy, and when I was called up, I became their stringer at the training camp. I sent them letters. They printed three of them. Do you know, I knew Mencken. I mean I shook hands with him. He used to call me Brutus. My name's Harvey, but he always called me Brutus. I don't know why.”

They finished the Cokes and went on down the hallway. It opened up into polished railings, people in uniform sitting at typewriters, spinning mimeographs, files, fans, officers in a tight knot, discussing things in low key, all very official. A good-looking young woman in uniform, one who had mastered the art of not sweating, sat guard at Major Hillton's door. She was expecting Mr. Bacon.

“Good luck,” the sergeant whispered.

Major Hillton was a small, tight-muscled man, burned brown as a berry, needle features, curling British-colonial mustache, and small, pale blue eyes. He shook hands without energy, and then he motioned for Bruce to be seated.

“You're here on a voluntary basis,” the major said, clearing the legal ground first. “I suggested that you come here. You came.”

“That's right.”

“Any notion why?”

“Because you suggested it,” Bruce said tiredly. “I'm not clever enough to know much about Intelligence, as you call it.”

“You don't take things very seriously, do you, Mr. Bacon?”

“Serious things I take seriously.”

“All right. Let's not beat around the bush. I know you work for the
New York Tribune
, and I know you have a damn good reputation. That's why I want to talk to you off the record.”

“Thank you.” Bruce nodded.

Hillton picked up a clip of three sheets of paper. “This is a verbatim report of your interview with General Felix Shorham, commander of the British Bengal Sector. I won't read all of it, but just what is to the point.”

“You don't have to read it,” Bruce said. “I remember the interview. I have my own notes.”

“I prefer to read it, if you will spare me the time.”

“I'm in no hurry,” Bruce said.

“Very well. I'll skip the first part of the interview, although General Shorham says some very important things about the Anglo-American alliance being more than an alliance between two nations, but a blood brotherhood —”

“Please spare me that,” Bruce interjected. “General Shorham's rhetoric gives me a pain in the ass.”

Major Hillton regarded Bruce coldly and said he would overlook the remark. Bruce shrugged. Hillton stared at Bruce in silence for a moment or two; then, abruptly, he began to read:

“Bacon: ‘I've spoken to two of the largest rice dealers, and their response is that this is not Russia, that the market makes the price, and since they pay so much and so much for the rice, they must either sell it at a profit or go bankrupt, and then there will be rice for no one. Not their exact words, but the substance.'

“Shorham: ‘Understandable.'

“Bacon: ‘Perhaps in ordinary circumstances. These are not ordinary circumstances.'

“Shorham: ‘How long have you been in Calcutta, Mr. Bacon?'

“Bacon: ‘About a month.'

“Shorham: ‘I'm making the point that there have been famines here before and there will be again. We cannot control these matters.'

“Bacon: ‘But there were and still are enormous supplies of rice here in Calcutta. You could have confiscated the rice, paid the dealer a reasonable sum, and either distributed or sold the rice to the people. I'm not saying you could have averted all that happened, but thousands of lives could have been saved.'

“Shorham: ‘You forget. We have no authority to do anything of the kind. This is not Russia. We respect property.'

“Bacon: ‘In March, when Indians raided one of the rice warehouses, you gave your troops orders to shoot to kill. Eleven people died.'

“Shorham: ‘A mob action which we had to deal with. A mob is a mob. There's no bloody difference.'

“Bacon: ‘General Shorham, I am pressing my questions because I have been told by a number of people, in Europe as well as here, that this famine was the result of a British decision, in the face of a then threatening Japanese advance into India, to break the will of the people in Assam as well as eastern Bengal so that they could not welcome the Japanese as liberators and join them against the British. I am not offering any evidence for this. I have no evidence in writing, but I do have the word of people who claim to have absolute knowledge of this.'

“Shorham: ‘Who the hell do you think you are, Bacon? You dare to come here with some bloody slander worthy of Julius Streicher — to accuse His Majesty's Government here in India of a slaughter so great that it deserves to stand beside the worst that the Nazis have done? Are you out of your fucken mind? How dare you!'

“Bacon: ‘I have only repeated what I have heard, and all I desire from you, General, is a denial.'

“Shorham: ‘I will not dignify it with a denial.'”

Major Hillton finished reading from the interview and dropped the papers on his desk. He maintained his silence long enough, as he saw it, for Bruce to become thoroughly uncomfortable. From Bruce's point of view, it was not discomfort but irritation at being subjected to a lecture by a fool.

“You do know,” Hillton went on, “that we and the British are allies, and that the alliance is signed with the blood of thousands of British and American young men.”

“Major Hillton,” Bruce said softly, “I am not some eighteen-year-old GI, standing in front of you with his eyes on the ground. I have been a part of this war for more than three years.”

“And the war goes on. We still face the Japanese, Mr. Bacon, and in the face of that fact, you come here to a country that you don't know — not one damn thing, with problems you have never faced, which we must face —”

Enamored with the word
face
, Bruce thought.

“— and then you throw this goddamn crazy accusation at the British High Command. Do you realize what you have done?”

“I've done my work. I'm a journalist.”

“And the war? As an American are you beyond any responsibility for that?”

“Major, there are two million American troops in this country, and no Japanese have yet set foot on Indian soil nor is there the slightest likelihood that they ever will. If they're here for anything, they're here to stop the Indians from rising, and if that is what I believe, I am going to damn well write it.”

“Mr. Bacon, you have created more difficulties between us and the British than you can possibly imagine. We have labored for months to make our alliance work. You've thrown a bomb into the heart of it.”

“What the devil gives with you, Major? You're in a city where for months the streets have been littered with the bodies of men and women and children who have died of starvation, and you know damn well that Limey general was lying. This famine could have been broken, and it's one of the biggest stories out of this war, and I'm going to write it.”

“Your orders will be cut tomorrow. You are not wanted in this theater. Don't think for a moment that your dealings with Ashoka Majumdar and Professor Chandra Chatterjee have gone unnoticed. Professor Chatterjee is a local subversive with a long record, and as for Majumdar, he is a communist organizer with a prison record. You have behaved and spoken witlessly, and now you're paying the price.”

“Major,” Bruce said softly, “have you ever stopped to reflect on the fact that on this great subcontinent, four hundred million people are being held in subjugation by the British, with nationality set against nationality and religion against religion?”

“On that point, Mr. Bacon, let me just note that they are niggers without any talent to govern themselves. They should thank God for the British.”

“I have nothing else to say to you!” Bruce snapped, getting to his feet, turning on his heel, and leaving the room.

There was no jeep waiting to take him home, now that the sun was well up and beginning to bake the street. In this climate, it was quite proper to hold that “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” After ten steps, his shirt was moist and sticking to his body. He walked along the streetcar tracks, the shortest way to the palace, staring morosely at the lines of old, rotting buildings that lined the street, the stucco peeling off their stained fronts. Rickshaw drivers came trotting by, trying to entice his patronage, but he hated to ride in a rickshaw, finding the sensation both degrading and humiliating, a small, lean trotting man become an animal and pulling him in his little carriage, as a trotting horse would. Hal Legerman had argued with him on this point. “They have to live,” Legerman insisted. “We pay them five times what the Limeys do — at least, that's how I tip them.” Still, he could not be at ease riding in a rickshaw. Like Legerman, he kept a pocketful of pice. He had calculated that in Calcutta, there was a beggar or a street family every fifty feet — in what the British called “the glorious city of palaces.” One night he had lain under his mosquito netting weeping; and told himself sourly, the following morning, that such empathy came out of the guilts conditioned by washing machines, Ford cars, and packaged cereals. Yet in all this filth, there was a frantic effort by the population to be clean, washing themselves endlessly in dirty, polluted water. Why did his thoughts always come back to this? The moment he set foot in America, this world would cease to exist, and, as he vaguely hoped, it would no longer trouble him. Why not? It didn't trouble his American colleagues; and his British colleagues, and the British officers who hung out at the press club for the cheap American drinks and who upheld the gentility of their clan by proving to Bruce that one could use the word
fuck
at least five times in the average sentence — well, they felt Calcutta to be one of the prime glories of the Empire, an absolutely
pukka
place to be stationed.

At the palace, Bruce showered and changed his shirt — for another nongovernment issue that his mother had provided — and then, hearing a voice shout his name, went downstairs to answer a telephone call. It was Legerman calling, and he said he wanted to talk to Bruce, very important, but he didn't want to come to the palace. Would Bruce meet him at the old Cricket Club in the Maidan, the park. Did Bruce know where it was?

“I think I know where the Cricket Club is.”

“Outside, there are some benches, shaded. I'll meet you there in an hour.”

The thing that had stayed with Bruce after a stroll in the Maidan was that the fine green lawns were cut and kept smooth as carpeting, not with machines of any sort, not even with hand-pushed lawn mowers, but by natives who, on hands and knees, cut the grass with clippers. Why not? If the cost of a lawn mower could pay the wages of a bearer for a full year, why bother to purchase the lawn mower? Like all other things in India, it made sense in a weird, senseless way.

When Bruce reached the Cricket Club, Legerman was sprawled on a bench, in the shade of a great live oak, straw in mouth, sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.

“Got one for you,” he told Bruce, reaching down next to the bench and coming up with another bottle of Coca-Cola, straw already inserted. When things were needed, Legerman produced them at the proper moment.

“Legerman,” Bruce said, staring gratefully at the Coca-Cola, “don't you have anything that pins you down? You are a sergeant in an army run by the sergeants, so you must have duties, responsibilities?”

“I arrange time to do my own thing. You know, I was a p.r. man around Broadway, and you're a newspaperman, and one day, God willing, this lunacy will be over — and well, one hand washes the other. You're in trouble.”

“How do you know? God damn it,” Bruce went on, “how the hell do you know everything that goes on around here?”

“I keep my ears open. Also, I occasionally date that cute little Wac who guards shithead Hillton's door. Would you believe it, Major Hillton got his job in Intelligence out of being a clerk at police headquarters in Cleveland — not even a real cop, but a clerk. Officers are no bargain, but those cookies who got their jobs by appointment out of civilian life — they're the worst.”

“OK,” Bruce said, “I'm in trouble. Forgive me. I had a lousy morning.”

“They cutting orders for your departure?”

“So they tell me.”

“And of course you're not going. You're going to stand on your rights as a journalist accredited to this theater and remain right here in Calcutta, and get your newspaper into it and maybe make a real case out of it.”

“I had something of that sort in mind,” Bruce agreed.

“Sure. Why not?” Legerman nodded. “Your thinking is high class. That's because you're an American. Me too. We're both full of motherhood and apple pie, even after Hitler, even after the gas ovens, even after what we both seen in this lousy town, because we're pure. You know what happens, you fight this thing?”