The Young Lions (49 page)

Mincey sighed. "Send them that lady accordionist," Mincey said, "what's her name, with the blue hair."

"They want a comedian."

"Tell them we only have accordionists." Mincey sniffed, pushing a tube full of medicine up his nose.

"Yes, Sir," said Michael. "Miss Roberta Finch cannot continue up into Scotland. She had a nervous breakdown in Salisbury. She keeps taking her clothes off in the enlisted men's mess and tries to commit suicide."

"Send that crooner to Scotland," Mincey sighed, "and make out a full report on Finch and send it back to Headquarters in New York, so we'll be covered."

"The MacLean troupe is in Liverpool Harbour," Michael said, "but their ship is quarantined. A seaman came down with meningitis and they can't come ashore for ten days."

"I can't bear it," said Captain Mincey.

"There is a confidential report," Michael said, "from the… nd Heavy Bombardment Group. Larry Crosett's band played there last Saturday and got into a poker game Sunday night. They took eleven thousand dollars from the Group and Colonel Coker says he has evidence they used marked cards. He wants the money back or he is going to prefer charges."

Mincey sighed weakly, poking the glass tube into his other nostril. He had run a night club in Cincinnati before the war and he often wished he was back in Ohio among the comedians and speciality dancers. "Tell Colonel Coker I am investigating the entire matter," he said.

"A Chaplain at the Troop Carrier Command," Michael said, "objects to the profanity used in our production of 'Folly of Youth'. He says the leading man says damn seven times and the ingenue calls one of the characters a son of a bitch in the second act."

Mincey shook his head. "I told that ham to cut out all profanity in this theatre of operations," Mincey said. "And he swore he would. Actors!" He moaned. "Tell the Chaplain I absolutely agree and the offending individuals will be disciplined."

"That's all for now, Captain," Michael said.

Mincey sighed and put his medicine in his pocket. Michael started out of the room.

"Wait a minute, Whitacre," Mincey said.

Michael turned round. Mincey regarded him sourly, his asthma-oppressed eyes and nose red and watery. "For Christ's sake, Whitacre," Mincey said, "you look awful."

Michael looked down without surprise at his rumpled, overlarge tunic and his baggy trousers. "Yes, Captain," Michael said.

"I don't give a damn for myself," Mincey said. "For all I care you could come in here in blackface and a grass skirt. But when officers come in from other outfits, they get a bad impression."

"Yes, Sir," said Michael.

"An outfit like this," Mincey said, "has to look more military than the paratroopers. We have to shine. We have to glisten. You look like a KP in the Bulgarian Army."

"Yes, Sir," said Michael.

"Can't you get yourself another tunic?"

"I've asked for one for two months, now," Michael said.

"The Supply Sergeant won't talk to me any more."

"At least," Mincey said, "polish your buttons. That's not much to ask, is it?"

"No, Sir," said Michael.

"How do we know," Mincey said, "General Lee won't show up here some day?"

"Yes, Sir," said Michael.

"Also," Mincey said, "you always have too many papers on your desk. It gives a bad impression. Put them in the drawers. Only have one paper on your desk at any one time."

"Yes, Sir."

"One more thing," Mincey said damply. "I wonder if you have some cash on you. I got caught with the bill at Les Ambassadeurs last night, and I don't collect my per them till Monday."

"Will a pound do?"

"That all you got?"

"Yes, Sir," said Michael.

"O.K." Mincey took the pound. "Thanks. I'm glad you're with us, Whitacre. This office was a mess before you came. If you'd only look more like a soldier."

"Yes, Sir," said Michael.

"Send in Sergeant Moscowitz," Mincey said. "That son of a bitch is loaded with dough."

"Yes, Sir," said Michael. He went into the other office and sent Sergeant Moscowitz in to see the Captain.

That was how the days passed in London, in the winter of 1944.

"O, my offence is rank," the King said, when Polonius had gone, "it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murder!"

In the little shadow boxes on each side of the stage, put there for that purpose, the sign "Air Raid Alert" was flashed, and a moment later came the sound of sirens, and immediately after, in the distance, towards the coast, the rumble of gunfire.

"Pray can I not," the King went on, "Though inclination be as sharp as will: My strongest guilt defeats my strong intent…"

The sound of gunfire came rapidly nearer as the planes swept across the suburbs. Michael looked around him. It was an opening night, and a fashionable one, with a new Hamlet, and the audience was decked out in its wartime best. There were many elderly ladies who looked as though they had seen every opening of Hamlet since Sir Henry Irving. In the rich glow from the stage there was an answering glow from the audience of piled white hair and black net. The old ladies, and everyone else, sat quiet and motionless as the King strode, torn and troubled, back and forth across the dark room at Elsinore.

"Forgive me my foul murder?" the King was saying loudly.

"That cannot be since I am still possess'd Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen."

It was the King's big scene and he obviously had worked very hard on it. He had the stage all to himself and a long, eloquent soliloquy to get his teeth into. He was doing very well, too, disturbed, intelligent, cursed, with Hamlet in the wings making up his mind whether to stab him or not.

The sound of guns marched across London towards the theatre, and there was the uneven roar of the German engines approaching over the gilt dome. Louder and louder spoke the King, speaking across the three hundred years of English rhetoric, challenging the bombs, the engines, the guns. No one in the audience moved. They listened, as intent and curious as though they had been sitting at the Globe on the afternoon of the first performance of Mr Shakespeare's new tragedy.

"In the corrupted currents of this world," the King shouted, "Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above; There is no shuffling…"

A battery of guns opened up just behind the back wall of the theatre, and there was a double explosion of bombs not far off. The theatre shivered gently "… there the action lies in his true nature," said the King loudly, not forgetting any of his business, moving his hands with tragic grace, speaking slowly, trying to space his words between the staccato explosions of the guns.

"… and we ourselves compell'd," the King said, in a momentary lull while the men outside were reloading, "Even to the teeth and forehead…" Then rocket guns opened up outside in their horrible, whistling speech that always sounded like approaching bombs, and the King paced silently back and forth, waiting till the next lull. The howling and thunder diminished for a moment to a savage grumbling. "What then?" the King said hastily, "what rests?

Try what repentance can: what can it not?"

Then he was overwhelmed once more and the theatre shook and trembled in the whirling chorus of the guns.

Poor man, Michael thought, remembering all the opening nights he had ever been through, poor man, his big moment, after all these years. How he must hate the Germans!

"… O wretched state!" swam dimly out of the trembling and crashing. "O bosom black as death!"

The planes stuttered on overhead. The battery behind the theatre sent a last revengeful salvo curling into the noisy sky. The rumble of guns was taken up, further away, by the batteries in north London. Against their diminishing background, like military drums being played at a general's funeral in another street, the King went on, slow, composed, royal as only an actor can be royal, "O limed soul, that struggling to be free Art more engaged! Help, angels!" he said in the blessed quiet, "make assay; Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.

All may be well."

He knelt at the altar and Hamlet appeared, graceful and dark in his long black tights. Michael looked around him. Every face was calmly and interestedly watching the stage; the old ladies and the uniforms did not stir.

I love you, Michael wanted to say, I love you all. You are the best and strongest and most foolish people on earth and I will gladly lay down my life for you.

He felt the tears, complex and dubious, sliding down his cheeks as he turned to watch Hamlet, torn by doubt, put up his sword rather than take his uncle at his prayers.

Far off a single gun spoke into the subsiding sky. Probably, thought Michael, it is one of the women's batteries, coming, like women, a little late for the raid, but showing their intentions are of the best.

London was burning in a bright circle of fires when Michael left the theatre and started walking towards the Park. The sky flickered and here and there an orange glow was reflected off the clouds. Hamlet was dead now. "Now cracks a noble heart," Horatio had said. "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" Horatio had also said his final words on carnal, bloody and unnatural acts: of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, while the last Germans were crashing over Dover, and the last Englishmen were burning in their homes as the curtain slowly dropped and the ushers ran up the aisles with flowers for Ophelia and the rest of the cast.

In Piccadilly, the tarts strolled by in battalions, flashing electric torches on passing faces, giggling harshly, calling, "Hey, Yank, two pounds, Yank."

Michael walked slowly through the shuffling crowds of whores and MPs and soldiers, thinking of Hamlet saying of Fortinbras and his men, "Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an eggshell."

What mouths we make at the invisible event, Michael thought, grinning to himself, staring through the darkness at the soldiers bargaining with the women, what regretful, doubtful mouths! We expose all that is mortal and unsure, and for more than an eggshell, but how differently from Fortinbras and his twenty thousand offstage men at arms! Ah, probably Shakespeare was laying it on. Probably no army, not even that of good old Fortinbras, returned from the Polack wars, ever was quite as dashing and wholehearted as the dramatist made out. It supplied a good speech and conveniently fitted Hamlet's delicate situation, and Shakespeare had put it in, although he must have known he was lying. We never hear what a Private First Class in Fortinbras's infantry thought about his tender and delicate prince, and the divine ambition that puff'd him. That would make an interesting scene, too… Twenty thousand men, that for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, was it? There were graves waiting not so far off for more than twenty thousand of the men around him, Michael thought, and maybe for himself too, but perhaps in the three hundred years the fantasy and the trick had lost some of their power. And yet we go, we go. Not in the blank-verse, noble certainty so admired by the man in the black tights, but we go. In a kind of limping, painful prose, in legal language too dense for ordinary use or understanding, a judgment against us, more likely than not, by a civil court that is not quite our enemy and not quite our friend, a writ handed down by a nearly honest judge, backed by the decision of a jury of not-quite-our peers, sitting on a case that is not exactly within their jurisdiction. "Go," they say, "go die a little. We have our reasons." And not quite trusting them and not quite doubting them, we go. "Go," they say, "go die a little. Things will not be better when you finish, but perhaps they will not be much worse."

Michael walked slowly along by the Park, thinking of the swans, settling down now on the Serpentine, and the orators who would be out again on Sunday, and the gun crews brewing tea and relaxing now that the planes had fled England. He remembered what an Irish captain on leave in London, from a Dover battery which had knocked down forty planes, had said of the London anti-aircraft outfits. "They never hit anybody," he said in a contemptuous soft burr. "It's a wonder London isn't completely destroyed. They're so busy planting rhododendrons around the emplacements and shining the barrels so they'll look pretty when Miss Churchill happens to pass by, that it's b… all gunnery."

The moon was coming up now, over the old trees and the scarred buildings, and there was a tinkle of glass where some soldiers and their girls were walking over a window that had been blown out in the raid.

"B… all gunnery," Michael said softly to himself, turning into the Dorchester, past the doorman with the decorations from the last war on his uniform. "B… all gunnery," Michael repeated, delighted with the phrase.

There was dance-music swinging into the lobby, and the old ladies and their nephews solemnly drinking tea, and pretty girls floating through on the way to the American bar on the arms of American officers, and Michael had the feeling, looking at the scene, that he had read all about this before, about the last war, that the characters, the setting, the action, were exactly the same, the costumes so little different that the eye hardly noticed it. By a trick of time, he thought, we become the heroes in our youthful romances, but always too late to appear romantic in them.

He walked upstairs to the large room where the party was still in progress and where Louise had said she'd be waiting for him.

"Look," said a tall, dark-haired girl near the door, "a Private." She turned to a Colonel next to her. "I told you there was one in London." She turned back to Michael. "Will you come to dinner next Tuesday night?" she asked. "We'll lionize you. Backbone of the Army."