The Darts of Cupid: Stories (2 page)

Two days after the new Major’s arrival, we were moved from our little room, where we had sat side by side on old benches wedged against old school desks, into the empty ballroom where we used to gather for the Colonel’s talks. We were provided with metal tables and metal chairs painted pike gray, loose-hinged for folding and stacking up. "The Major doesn’t want to stew in his office all on his little lone," Sergeant Parsons told us. "He wants to move in here with you ladies. He is pining for company."

"And what are these in aid of?" I asked, pointing to an incalculable number of stacked chairs, rising close to the walls like skeletal towers. "Is he going to sit every five minutes on a different chair, or what?"

"You’d better ask him yourself, ma’am," said the Sergeant.

On the following day, I had the answer to my query. Regimented in rows and lanes, like the beds in a nursery garden, were not only our crowd, as promised, but three more departments of sorters and checkers and filing clerks, all of whom we knew by sight only. With each group were their sergeants, like undergardeners. The Major, being head gardener, had his desk close to the first window as one came in through the door, thus having a full view of all his flowers. It was a master stroke. It was also a blow to us. Henceforward, there would be no more raids from the Big Bad Wolves, no more giggling over funny medical histories passed from hand to hand, no more poring over fashions, and no more savory tidbits read out from the newspapers. And it had been achieved without a single word of chiding.

When I returned from luncheon that day, I followed Claudia to her seat and sat aslant the corner of her table and talked. The Major came in and sat down at his desk.

"I say, Prescott-Clark, he’s looking at us," whispered Claudia.

"Let him, Carter," I said.

"I say, Prescott-Clark, you’d better skedaddle back to your place."

"In a minute, Claudia," I said. "I’m not a maidservant who picks up the broom and the duster as soon as the master shows up."

"Come here, Miss P.," called the Major.

"What did I tell you? Now you’re in for it," said Claudia. "And he knows your name, too—that’s bad."

I went up to the Major.

"I wanted to consult you on an important question, Miss P.," he said.

"Yes, Major," I said in my most dutiful voice.

"As you know, I’m now privileged to be in charge of you ladies. My greatest worry, of course, is to know if you are happy with your work. But in your own particular case, how am I to put it? If I asked you, ‘Are you happy with your work?’ it would be a joke, wouldn’t it? So I’ll just ask you if you are happy." And he laughed loudly. I could still hear his laughter as I walked back to my place.

During the tea break, Claudia said, "How on earth did you do it? All merry laughter. And I could have sworn he’d put you on the carpet."

"He didn’t. Because there is no carpet," I said.

Later on in the afternoon, I got up, gathered two pencils, and strolled at a leisurely pace to the far end of the room, where I devoted a good deal of time to sharpening them in the machine. I had barely returned to my table when the Major called, "Come here, Miss P." For a while, he looked at me in silence, smiling. He had excellent white teeth, too small and dainty for that square-jawed face, and they gave him an air of youthful eagerness and of guilelessness.

"Efficiency above all," he said.

"Yes, Major."

"Now, I’m afraid you are falling down in efficiency. If I were in your place, I’d take one pencil to be sharpened first, then go back, pick up the other, and do the second walk. Get the idea? Bear it in mind, will you?"

"I will. Thank you," I said.

He left the office soon after this, and I worked steadily during his long absence. When he returned, I saw him glance questioningly at me, with a smile. Furious, and intent on emphasizing my state of not being a maidservant, I got up and with deliberate speed did the round of several tables, searching for a refill for my stapler, which I could have got straightaway by asking the Sergeant for it.

"Come here, Miss P.," called the Major. "You are looking distressed," he said. "I hope nothing went wrong during your search."

"Nothing," I said.

"I thought maybe you are lamenting the late departed Colonel?"

"Certainly," I said.

"And will you lament me, too, when I’m gone?"

"Certainly not," I said.

"How’s that?" he asked.

"Because you are just a slave driver," I said.

"Sure."

"And that wouldn’t be so bad," I continued, "but on top of it, you enjoy it."

"Sure," he said. "Now I got you. You don’t like watching me having fun, is that it?"

I nodded. "You are uniting the useful with the beautiful, as Goethe would have put it," I said.

"I knew you’d be worthwhile to talk to," he remarked. "But what the hell. I must get some pleasure out of this damned office. I’m a surgeon. Damned office job."

"But isn’t it interesting—for you, I mean?" I asked.

"It is interesting," he said, "but in the wrong way. For instance, we’d like the tabulators to throw up results like two hundred men sprained their ankles when getting out of landing barges. Then we’d know there’s something wrong with the design of the boats. Instead, we get saddled with statistics of how many troops in Africa got jaundice after the yellow-fever vaccine, but the hell of it is that it’s nearly all officers and no enlisted men. Now, why? And the Germans have exactly the same problem."

"Drink," I said.

"No," he said. "Among the fighting corps out there, there’s no difference with the booze. They all live the same way. It’s a mystery." And as I gazed at him silently he added, "That took your speech away, all right. I didn’t know it could be done."

I nodded.

"Now, tell me, since we are getting on so famously, that Colonel before me—light colonel, wasn’t he?"

"Yes," I said, "he was a lieutenant colonel."

"Where are the light colonels of yesteryear?" And he laughed loudly. "Now, tell me. What was so good about him, a quitter like that? No fight in him."

"There was some fight in him, but not enough," I said.

"Was he a choleric? Did he rave and rant at you when you went to sharpen your pencils?"

"He never did," I said. "He never interfered. But I know he would have liked to have power, too, only he couldn’t get it. But he’d never admit it, of course."

"Then what the hell—how do you know?" asked the Major.

"Once I had to go to his office with some papers," I said. "And you know the War Office rule—no door must ever be closed. He was standing with his back to me; he didn’t see me. He had a—it’s quite sickening—a fly, with a thread tied round its middle, and he let it fly away from him at arm’s length and then he’d pull it back by the string."

"And what did he say when you interrupted his idyll?" asked the Major.

"I didn’t," I said. "I never went in at all. I sent the Sergeant."

"Pity you didn’t go in, Miss P.," said the Major. "He might have tied a string around your waist."

"I’m not a flirt, you know," I said.

"I know you are not. But you are giving a very good imitation of one." And he laughed so loudly that when I left, Claudia said to me, "How do you do it, Prescott-Clark? You seem to be getting on with the Major like a house on fire."

"I don’t, Carter," I said. "Besides, one has to get used to his what-the-helling."

On the following day, the Major was absent during the morning and looked in at the office for some ten minutes in the late afternoon. On the next day, Sergeant Parsons said to me, "I thought you’d like to know, ma’am. The Major won’t come in today at all. But he’ll want me to report about the work. He said I should keep a special eye on you. Now, I wonder why."

"So do I," I said.

"I told him you’d been very, very good yesterday, which is true," said the Sergeant. "I told him you are like the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead. And do you know what he said? He said, ‘That suits me fine. And when she is horrid, I’ll be horrid, too.’ "

"Charmed, I’m sure. Much obliged," I said.

"I thought you’d like to know," said the Sergeant.

"That’s big of you," I said.

I continued "very, very good" during the Major’s absence. When I saw him entering the office the following morning, I decided that I was not going to expose myself to any more of his taunts. By working diligently during his absence I had proved myself to be the opposite of a maidservant. This praiseworthy state of mind did not last long, however, and I grew steadily more enraged at the sight of the Major, who was also playing the game of not being a servant and sat tilted back in his chair, reading the
Times.
I rose and left the office and went to the lavatory, where I dawdled for a while. On my way back, I met the Major in the passage, walking in the direction of the General’s office. I repeated my excursion once before and once after the morning coffee break. On that last occasion, I met the Major once again in the passage, this time coming up behind me. "Miss P.," he said. I stopped and turned around.

"How is it," he asked, "that every time I happen to pass by I meet you outside the office?"

"If you didn’t run around so much yourself, you wouldn’t meet me so much, Major," I said.

"May I inquire where you’ve been?" he said. "Was it a case of the lady glowworm who told her boyfriend glowworm, ‘If you’ve got to glow, you’ve got to glow’?"

"Vous tombez mal,” I said. "I went to get a drink of water."

"Oh, we speak French when we are on our dignity, do we?" he said. "But tell me, how did you manage to drink? Are there any glasses in the ladies’ room?"

"Oh, yes," I said, "there are some tumblers."

"And you drank it out of a tumbler?" he asked.

"I did," I said.

"That’s bad," he said, with a pretense of being grieved. "I thought you’d be quicker on the uptake, after what I told you the other day." He paused. "Next time you’re thirsty, Miss P., drink with a spoon. One spoonful at a time. Go back, return—another spoonful. That should work out at fifteen journeys." And I walked away, followed by the sound of laughter.

That day, in the late afternoon, the Major came in carrying a sheaf of papers. He stopped in the door and informed us that it had been decided to spread the free days and to carry on with the work on Sundays. "Now, ladies, which of you would like to work on Sunday?"

The idea appealed to me greatly; it was nice to be free during the week, when the shops were open. "I’ll work," I said.

"You mean, you’ll be here, Miss P.?" said the Major.

In the week that followed, I worked steadily, irrespective of the Major’s presence or absence, and I was quieter, too, during the tea and coffee breaks, and somewhat morose during the lunchtime gatherings, which made Claudia remark, "You are losing your sparkle, Prescott-Clark. You aren’t going to run round as a reformed character, are you?" And June said, "How now, brown cow? Let’s have a real orgy today, shall we? He won’t be in all day. He’s gone to London, I hear." And I said, "But he’ll pick on me when he gets back, and I refuse to be his court jester and office clown, you know." When she said, "Shame on you, Prescott-Clark, to let yourself be got down by our beloved Major," I hinted that my dejection was due to a certain Captain’s having been posted abroad.

Beryl liked to declare that she was "sick and tired of men" and couldn’t be "bothered anymore with that rot," but I, on the contrary, felt willing to be bothered, and even if I admitted to the rot, I found it worthy of indulging in, because it was never quite the same kind of rot. Since entering the War Office, I had had two affairs with American officers, each lasting for several weeks. I finished the one by provoking a quarrel and withdrawing in a pretense of huffiness. In the second case, there had been no need for such subterfuge, because the officer had been posted away. In each case, I had been bored. And in each case I might have been willing to carry on for longer if it had not been for the attitude common to both men; they were both married, and they gave me to understand that they were fundamentally faithful. It boiled down to the joke of the wife in America writing to her husband-soldier overseas, "I hear you got yourself a mistress. What has she got that I haven’t got?" and his replying, "Nothing, except she’s got it right here." I could not stand this. I did not want to be second best. I wanted to be the one and only one, even if it was for a short span of time. Amazed and disgusted at the blockheadedness of the men who failed to perceive this, I was able to agree with renewed sincerity with Beryl’s utterances concerning the selfishness, the insensitivity, and the lack of curiosity of men when dealing with women.

AS I WATCHED the Major day by day, I found that he was double-faced; his countenance bore one character when seen full front and a different character when seen from the side. Talking to him, looking him full in the face, I noticed that his square forehead and square jaw made him seem straightforward and reliable, and the fair glossiness of his coloring, the smooth blond hair, the evenly pink skin, the gray eyes, and the well-shaped teeth, which gleamed whenever he parted his long lips, lent to his person an air of unspoiled youthful candor, an eagerness to please that seemed almost simpleminded. When I observed him from across a distance, the beguiling coloring was dimmed by gray shadows, and his profile stood out against the windowpane as if stamped out of a sheet of steel. There sat a charmless, blunt-featured man, looking older than his years—clever, stubborn, unkind though given to joviality, unsubtle and yet capable of deviousness.

I was at that time doing the most difficult of the medical coding work involving the Zone of Interior. In military parlance this name designated the United States of America, and my work dealt with the cases of soldiers whose condition was so serious that they had to be returned to the States for further treatment. Among the checkers, whose work was much easier and subordinate to mine, was a dentist’s widow, a Mrs. Dicks, with the face of a garden-statuary dwarf. She clearly came from a ruling-class background, of which she never spoke, and had lived long years in Ceylon, of which she spoke often. She had tried to be admitted to our crowd and had not made a success of it. Mrs. Dicks had already exasperated me on two previous occasions, when she had come to me with queries couched in such Edwardian terms as "fearful bloomers" and "someone came a cropper," and I had treated her with arrogance and bad temper, cutting her short with, "Go back to your knitting," and, "Get out of my sight." She had retreated, indignant, convinced that I was in the wrong, and that I was "afraid to face the music" or "afraid of losing face." Now, on the third occasion, perhaps because I was feeling more downcast than before, I did not cut her short, and we had a row. Sergeant Parsons came to visit me an hour later.