Which means she believes he is about fifteen years older,’ his uncle said. Which means he is probably about twenty-five older.’
Twenty-five?’ he said. ‘That would put him right back where he used to he.’
‘Had he ever left it?’ his uncle said. His uncle held the door open. Well? What are you waiting for?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Then good night too,’ his uncle said. ‘You go home too. This kindergarten is closed for the day.’
III.
So that was that. He went upstairs to his room. He went to bed too, taking off the uniform, ‘shedding the brown’ as the Corps called it. Because this was Thursday, and the battalion always drilled on Thursday. And he was not only cadet lieutenant colonel this year, but nobody ever missed drill because, although the Academy was only a prep school, it had one of the highest R.O.T.C. ratings in the country; at the last review, the inspector-general himself told them that when war came, every one of them who could prove he was eighteen years old would be almost automatically eligible for officer-candidate school.
Which included him too, since he was already so near eighteen that you could put the difference in your eye. Except that it wouldn’t matter now whether he was eighteen or eight or eighty; he would be too late even if he were going to wake up eighteen tomorrow morning. It would be over and people would already have begun to he able to start forgetting about it before he could even reach officers’ school, let alone finish the course.
It was already over even now as far as the United States was concerned: the British, the handful of boys, some no older than he and some probably not even as old, who flew the Royal Air Force’s fighter command, had stopped them on the west and so now there was nothing left for that whole irresistible tide of victory and destruction to do but vanish away into the plumbless depths of Russia like the mop-thrust push of dirty water across a kitchen floor: so that each time during the fifteen months since that fall of 1940 that he took the uniform down or hung it back up in the closet — the khaki serge true enough such as real officers wore but without even the honest stripes of N.C.O.’s but instead, the light-blue tabs and facings of R.O.T.C. like the lapel badges of fraternity pledges, and the innocent pastless metal lozenges such as you might see on the shoulders of a swank hotel doorman or the leader of a circus band, to divorce it still further from the realm of valor and risk, the heart’s thirst for glory and renown; — each time he looked at it, in the eyes of that heart’s thirst (if that’s what it was), certainly in the irremediable regret which had been his these last months after he realised that it was too late, that he had procrastinated, deferred too long, lacking not only the courage but even the will and the desire and the thirst, the khaki altered transmogrified dissolved like the moving-picture shot, to the blue of Britain and the hooked wings of a diving falcon and the modest braid of rank: but above all the blue, the color the shade which the handful of Anglo Saxon young men had established and decreed as such visual synonym of glory that only last spring an association of American haberdashers or gents’ outfitters had adopted it as a trade slogan, so that every lucky male resident of the United States who had the price could walk into church that Easter morning in the authentic aura of valor yet at the same time safe from the badges of responsibility and the candy-stripes of risk.
Yet he had made a little something resembling an attempt (and he thought a little better of it for the very fact that remembering he had done so gave him no comfort). There was Captain Warren, a farmer a few miles from town, who had been a flight commander in the old Royal Flying Corps before it became the RAF; he had gone to see him that day going on two years ago now when he was only just past sixteen.
‘If I could get to England some way, they would take me, wouldn’t they?’ he said.
‘Sixteen’s a little young. And getting to England’s a little hard to do too now.’
‘But they would take me if I could get there, wouldn’t they?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Captain Warren said. Then Captain Warren said, ‘Look. There’s plenty of time. There’ll be plenty and more for all of us before it’s over. Why not wait?’
So he did. He waited too long. He could tell himself that he had done that at the advice of a hero, which at least did this much for the heart’s thirst: having accepted and followed it from a hero would forever prevent his forgetting that, no matter how deficient he might be in courage, at least he wasn’t in shame.
Because it was too late now. In fact, as far as the United States was concerned, it had never begun at all and so all it would cost the United States was just money: which, his uncle said, was the cheapest thing you could spend or lose: which was why civilization invented it: to be the one substance man could shop with and have a bargain in whatever he bought.
So apparently the whole purpose of the draft had been merely to establish a means for his uncle to identify Max Harriss, and since the identification of Max Harriss had accomplished no more than the interruption of a chess-game and a sixty-cent telephone toll to Memphis, even that was not worth its cost.
So he went to bed and to sleep; tomorrow was Friday so he would not have to put on the pseudo khaki in order to shed the brown and, for another week, the heart’s thirst, if that’s what it was. And he ate breakfast; his uncle had already eaten and gone, and he stopped at his uncle’s office on the way to school to pick up the notebook he had left yesterday, and Max Harriss wasn’t in Memphis; the wire came from Mr. Markey while he was still in the office:
Missing prince missing here too now what and he was still there while his uncle told the boy to wait and wrote the answer:
No what just thanks and so that was that too; he thought that was all; when he came back at noon to where his uncle waited on the corner to walk home to dinner, he didn’t even think to ask; it was his uncle who voluntarily told him how Mr. Markey had even telephoned and said how Harriss seemed to be well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters in the Greenbury, but to all the liquor stores and taxi-drivers in that part of town too, and that he, Mr. Markey, had even tried the other hotels just on the impossible supposition that there was one Mississippian who had heard there were others in Memphis.
So he said, like Mr. Markey: ‘Now what?’
‘I don’t know,’ his uncle said. ‘I would like to believe that he had dusted the whole lot of them from his feet and was a good five hundred miles away by now, and still travelling, except that I wouldn’t asperse him either behind his back with an accusation of judgment.’
‘Maybe he has,’ he said.
His uncle stopped walking.
‘What?’ his uncle said.
‘You just said last night that people nineteen years old are capable of anything.’
‘Oh,’ his uncle said. ‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Of course,’ his uncle said, walking on again. ‘Maybe he has.’
And that was all: eating his dinner: walking back with his uncle as far as the office corner: in school that afternoon, through the history class which Miss Melissa Hogganbeck now called World Affairs with capitals on both, which, coming twice a week, should have been worse for the heart’s thirst than the inevitable next Thursdays when he would have to tote the brown again — the sabre and the pastless shoulder-pips — and posture through the spurious the straightfaced the make-believe of command, but which was not at all: the tireless cultured educated ‘lady’s’ voice talking with a kind of frantic fanaticism of peace and security: of how we were safe because the old worn-out nations of Europe had learned their lesson too well in 1918; they not only did not dare outrage us, they couldn’t even afford to, until the world’s whole staggering and savage mass was reduced to that weightless interminable murmuring not even echoed within the isolate insulate dusty walls of a prep-school classroom and having a hundred times less connection with any reality than even the sword and the pips.
Because at least the sabre and pips were a make-believe of what they parodied, while to Miss Hogganbeck the whole establishment of national R.O. T.C. was an inescapable inexplicable phenomenon of the edifice of education, like the necessity for having children in the junior courses.
And it was still all even when he had seen the horse. It was in a muddy horse-van standing in an alley behind the square when he passed after school, with a half dozen men standing around looking at the van from a definitely respectful distance, and only afterward did he
