She felt sorry for the man, felt kindly towards him, pitying him. She stopped beside him. Yes, ma’am, he was all right. Yes, the other boys were all right
‘But then you wasn’t killed,’ she explained. ‘All soldiers wasn’t like Dewey: so brave — foolhardy, almost. . . . I always told him not to let that Green get him — get him—’
‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed, looking at her meticulous, bent neatness.
‘He was all right? He didn’t want for nothing?’
‘No, no, he was all right,’ he assured her. Sunset was almost come. Sparrows in a final delirium in the dusty elms, the last wagons going slowly countryward.
‘Men don’t know,’ she said bitterly. ‘You probably never done for him what you could. That Mr Green . . . I always misdoubted him.’
‘He is dead, too, you know,’ he reminded her.
(I won’t be unjust to him!) ‘You was a officer or something: seems like you’d have took better care of a boy you knowed.’
‘We did all we could for him,’ he told her patiently. The square, empty of wagons, was quiet. Women went slowly in the last of the sun, meeting husbands, going home to supper. She felt her rheumatism more, now that the air was getting cooler, and she became restive in her fretful black.
‘Well. You seen his grave, you say. . . . You are sure he was all right?’ So big and strong he was, so good to her.
‘Yes, yes. He was all right.’
Madden watched her bent, neat rotundity going down the street among shadows, beneath metallic awnings. The shadow of the courthouse had taken half the town like a silent victorious army, not firing a shot. The sparrows completed a final dusty delirium and went away, went away across evening into morning, retracing months: a year.
Someone on a fire-step had shouted Gas and the officer leaped among them striking, imploring. Then he saw the officer’s face in red and bitter relief as the man on the fire-step, sharp against the sorrowful dawn, turned screaming, You have got us killed, and shot him in the face at point-blank range.
6
San Francisco, Cal.
14 April 1919
Dear Margaret,
I got your letter and I intended to answering it sooner but I have been busy running around. Yes she was not a bad kid she has shown me a good time no she is not so good-looking but she takes a good photo she wants to go in the movies. And a director told her she photographs better than any girl he has seen. She has a car and she is a swell dancer but of course I just like to play around with her she is to young for me. To really care for. No I have not gone to work yet.
This girl goes to the U and she is talking about me going there next year. So I may go there next year. Well there is no news I have done a little flying but mostly dancing and running around. I have got to go out on a party now or I would write more. Next time more next time give my reguards to everybody I know.
Your sincere friend
Julian Lowe
7
Mahon liked music; so Mrs Worthington sent her car for them. Mrs Worthington lived in a large, beautiful old house which her husband, conveniently dead, had bequeathed, with a colourless male cousin who had false teeth and no occupation that anyone knew of, to her. The male cousin’s articulation was bad (he had been struck in the mouth with an axe in a dice game in Cuba during the Spanish-American War): perhaps this was why he did nothing.
Mrs Worthington ate too much and suffered from gout and a flouted will. So her church connexion was rather trying to the minister and his flock. But she had money — that panacea for all ills of the flesh and spirit. She believed in rights for women, as long as women would let her dictate what was right for them.
One usually ignored the male relation. But sometimes one pitied him.
But she sent her car for them and with Mrs Powers and Mahon in the rear, and Gilligan beside the Negro driver, they rolled smoothly beneath elms, seeing stars in a clear sky, smelling growing things, hearing a rhythmic thumping soon to become music.
8
This, the spring of 1919, was the day of the Boy, of him who had been too young for soldiering. For two years he had had a dry time of it. Of course, girls had used him during the scarcity of men, but always in such a detached impersonal manner. Like committing fornication with a beautiful woman who chews gum steadily all the while. O Uniform, O Vanity. They had used him but when a uniform showed up he got the air.
Up to that time uniforms could all walk: they were not only fashionable and romantic, but they were also quite keen on spending what money they had and they were also going too far away and too immediately to tell on you. Of course it was silly that some uniforms had to salute others, but it was nice, too. Especially, if the uniform you had caught happened to be a salutee. And heaven only knows how much damage among feminine hearts a set of pilot’s wings was capable of.
And the shows:
Beautiful, pure girls (American) in afternoon or evening gowns (doubtless under Brigade Orders) caught in deserted fire trenches by Prussian Hussars (on passes signed by Belasco) in parade uniform; courtesans in Paris frocks demoralizing Brigade staffs, having subalterns with arrow collar profiles and creased breech, whom the generals all think may be German spies, and handsome old generals, whom the subalterns all think may be German spies, glaring at each other across her languid body while corporal comedians entertain the beautiful-limbed and otherwise idle Red Cross nurses (American). The French women present are either marquises or whores or German spies, sometimes both, sometimes all three.
The marquises may be told immediately because they all wear sabots, having given their shoes with the rest of their clothing to the French army, retaining only a pair of forty carat diamond earrings.
Their sons are all aviators who have been out on a patrol since the previous Tuesday, causing the marquises to be a trifle distrait. The regular whores patronize them, while the German spies make love to the generals.
A courtesan (doubtless also under Brigade Orders) later saves the sector by sex appeal after gun-powder had failed, and the whole thing is wound up with a sort of garden party near a papiermâché dugout in which the army sits in sixty-pound packs, all three smoking cigarettes, while the Prussian Guard gnashes its teeth at them from an adjacent cardboard trench.
A chaplain appears who, to indicate that the soldiers love him because he is one of them, achieves innuendoes about home and mother and fornication. A large new flag is flown and the enemy fires at it vainly with .22 rifles. The men on our side cheer, led by the padre.
‘What,’ said a beautiful, painted girl, not listening, to James Dough who had been for two years a corporal-pilot in a French chasse escadrille, ’is the difference between an American Ace and a French or British aviator?’
‘About six reels,’ answered James Dough glumly (such a dull man! Where did Mrs Wardle get him?) who had shot down thirteen enemy craft and had himself been crashed twice, giving him eleven points without allowing for evaporation.
‘How nice. Is that so, really? You had movies in France, too, then?’
‘Yes. Gave us something to do in our spare time.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, offering him her oblivious profile. ‘You must have had an awfully good time while we poor women were slaving here rolling bandages and knitting things. I hope women can fight in the next war: I had much rather march and shoot guns than knit.
Do you think they will let women fight in the next war?’ she asked, watching a young man dancing, limber as a worm.
‘I expect they’ll have to.’ James Dough shifted his artificial leg, nursing his festering arm between the bones of which a tracer bullet had passed. ‘If they want to have another one.’
‘Yes.’ She yearned towards the agile, prancing youth. His body was young in years, his hair was glued smoothly to his skull. His face, under a layer of powder, was shaved and pallid, sophisticated, and he and his blonde and briefly-shirted partner slid and poised and drifted like a dream.
The Negro cornetist stayed his sweating crew and the assault arrested withdrew, leaving the walls of silence peopled by the unconquered defenders of talk. Boys of both sexes swayed arm in arm, taking sliding tripping steps, waiting for the music and the agile youth, lounging immaculately, said: ‘Have this dance?’
She said ‘Hel — lo,’ sweetly drawling. ‘Have you met Mr Dough? Mr Rivers, Mr Dough. Mr Dough is a visitor in town.
Mr Rivers patronized Mr Dough easily and repeated: ‘Dance the next?’ Mr Rivers had had a year at Princeton.
‘I’m sorry. Mr Dough doesn’t dance,’ answered Miss Cecily Saunders faultlessly. Mr Rivers, well-bred, with all the benefits of a year at a cultural centre, mooned his blank face at her.
‘Aw, come on. You aren’t going to sit out all evening, are you? What did
