The Honeyed Peace (13 page)

I was exceedingly noble about this. I told Jim Russell and Owen James, one night in my room, that they were ludicrous; probably Otto had a girl too, and why not, war was long and life was not guaranteed here to stay; poor Shorty had had a tough time and if she wanted a little pleasure, she had a right to it. They howled me down. Now that Shorty had displeased them, I was again the apple of their eyes, by default, due to the lack of competition. I could afford to be noble. Besides, in a general way, I found this free use of the Scarlet Letter tiresome and dishonest. Gradually I became Shorty's champion, and her friend. That is to say, I was as much her friend as I could be. Our pasts and presents and futures were too different; my follies were not hers; I have always thought there is a secret basis of pity in the friendship of most women, and that is a crumbling rock to build on. Shorty pitied me, I think, because I was so pompously determined to do my job like a real newspaperman (an idiot job of watching other people do theirs). I pitied her because apparently she could not learn by experience and was unable to form and enunciate the word 'No'. So we were friends.

The Russian pulled out, with predictable speed. I imagine Shorty adored a man into the ground. Shorty looked bewildered for a while, like a puppy who has licked your hand and been slapped for its pains. She stayed in her room, waiting in the classical manner for the telephone which does not ring. Then her native jollity reappeared and she was back at Chicote's bar and in the hotel lobbies and the cluttered dirty bedrooms we called home; and a Frenchman, convalescing from a leg wound, replaced the Russian. The Frenchman returned to his Brigade and a Canadian, who was working for the Quakers, took over.

By now, Shorty was classed as one of what Jim Russell named the whores de combat. These few ladies were distinguished from the large professional body because they did not receive money for their services. As I grew to know Shorty, I realized that she loved all these passing men and continued to love Otto. This operation was possible due to a cloudy, romantic German turn of mind which was very boring to listen to, and very pathetic.

We were out of Madrid a good deal, driving to the various fronts in whatever transport we could buy or borrow or talk away from its rightful owner. The men had become casual about Shorty, saying simply, Hello, kid, whenever they saw her, and acting as if she weren't there. She was doing no work for the war, so she had nothing to say that would interest them; and the taboo, established for Otto's sake, prevailed. Shorty lived in another hotel but she visited us, occasionally, to beg. There were few enough gifts to give: extra cigarettes, an envelope full of sugar, a partially used cake of soap. The men gave Shorty what she asked for, if they had it, with affable contempt. And when any of us happened to stop at Otto's Brigade Headquarters, and he wanted news of Shorty, the men were vague. She's doing okay, they'd say, seems in okay health, looks okay. It was amazing, in such a small war, where everyone appeared to know everyone else, that Otto hadn't heard.

The spring that year was more beautiful than it had ever been anywhere before, probably because of the long ugly winter that preceded it. We loved Spain, we the voluntarily uprooted, and we took a personal pride in the spring and in the grace it laid upon this land which we felt to be ours. We had watched many brave people pull Spain through the winter, and though we had done nothing but accomplish an act of presence, still we owned the country too," in a small but devoted way. The spring healed us. Quarrels had grown up during the winter, based on propinquity, dirt, lack of food and heat, the harassing daily German artillery fire, and the fact that no one, notably our editors, was interested in what we wrote and apparently no one believed us. Now, in this new sun and this new greenness, we became friends again; and, due to the weather, we decided the Republic was going to win the war.

The spring did something for Shorty too. She had become haggard and pale under the orange rouge she used, and her blue eyes, no longer full of gaiety, looked stupid and hurt and alarmed and wary. Suddenly she put on her dungarees and left for the front, near Teruel as I remember, to be a nurse. In that war anyone could do anything, what with the widespread lack of specialized training and the labour shortage. The men were friendly to her just before she left. She seemed to be the original Shorty again, her face washed, her hair ragged and uncurled, going forth like a good girl to do her part. It was there, wherever she was, that Shorty met the Spanish Colonel whom we called Juanito.

We knew Juanito too and had decided he was very likely the second finest man in Spain. I had always found Otto handsome, but this was a question of taste. Otto had a lean brilliant face, with bony nose and lively eyes; he was not very tall, stooped, swarthy and he had beautiful hands. I liked his mouth particularly, and his voice. Perhaps he wasn't handsome. But there could be no argument about Juanito: he was a beauty. And he was much more, he was a man who had never heard of defeat, any kind of defeat. Otto was brave in a way which does not show and also never ends; Juanito was brave in the superb, heart-lifting way which ends you up dead.

Shorty fell in love with Juanito and since she did not understand Spanish very well she must have interpreted Juanito's conversation eagerly, to suit herself. I am certain Juanito would not make a woman believe that he loved her with a true undying passion and wished to have her as his wife, if he had no such idea. I do not think Juanito loved anything truly and undyingly except Spain, and I think he was far too busy with the war to want a woman except for whatever brief delight she could offer. Shorty wrote two letters, from the shelled farm-house where she was working. One was to me and the other was to Otto. I know about Otto's because she told me. She said that at last she had found the one love of her life, there was no turning back, she had explained to Otto and though she would always love him too in a different way, she could no longer be his wife and
et cetera
, and
et cetera
. I showed my letter to the men since we all saw Otto from time to time and we had to know how to treat him. Jim Russell opined that it would have been a good thing if the shell that landed down the hall from Shorty, last winter, had landed in her room. Shorty, they agreed, was on Franco's side, distracting Juanito from his work and destroying Otto.

Destroy Otto she did, as far as anyone can tell about anyone else simply by looking. His Brigade was making an attack in the North and Owen James and Jim Russell and I had to go up there to write about it, and we could not avoid Otto. Otto must have been thirty-three or four, that spring, but he was not a young man any more. The brilliance had left his face and his skin was stone-coloured and heavy; his eyes seemed to hurt him and the fine thing that had always been in them, wisdom and compassion and mockery, was gone. He did not speak of Shorty or of anything else. He ordered us out of the terrible two rooms where he was working, with the wounded spread on the floor like a stinking human quilt; he said he had too much to do to bother with journalists; why didn't we pick up guns and be useful? even writers ought to be able to see the attack was going badly.

Ten days later, when we were back in Madrid, Otto was killed. Someone reported he had been working in the trenches; it was a direct mortar hit. We checked; he was dead. Jim Russell and Owen James got drunk that night, in a sombre untalking way and suddenly Jim Russell said that if he ever ran into Shorty he would break her neck; even, if he had time, he would look her up for this purpose. Not that Shorty had anything to do with the mortar shell, no one was dumb enough to think that, people got killed or they didn't, that was how it was; but you didn't have to kill them twice, not if they were Otto.

I do not know how Juanito disembarrassed himself of Shorty. It isn't anything I want to imagine. But he did it, and the Canadian who worked for the Quakers came to Madrid in the early summer and said he'd seen Shorty in Barcelona. 'What is she doing?' I said. 'What does she always do?' he said. We did not see Shorty again. She was crossed off as a war casualty, and forgotten.

We got out of Spain all right, at the end. We had passports and money. But that defeat was ours; we carried it with us in our minds, in our hearts, where it mattered. I dare say we all became more competent Press tourists because of it, since we never again cared so much. You can only love one war; afterwards, I suppose you do your duty, use up your life in your own way, think as elevated thoughts as you can manage. Our little group split up, taking all those aeroplanes which go to all those places. We had, it seemed, picked a fine trade and could be busily employed from then on.

I was in Paris in the summer of 1939, returning from China. The idea was to hang around and be handy for the oncoming European war. Some French colleague, who was hard up for copy, interviewed me: I said a few inspiring things about the gallant Chinese who in fact seemed to me as unlucky, badly led, and doomed as anyone then extant, and the colleague, in that droll French way, wrote not only my dreary remarks but a description of my clothes and my allegedly flower-filled room at the Plaza Athénée. The next morning Shorty telephoned me. An hour later she arrived.

I had unthinkingly decided Shorty was dead. This is a bad habit you acquire from attending wars; so many people actually are dead that if anyone disappears for a while you jump to conclusions. Shorty was wonderfully, unrecognizably, adorably alive.

The pug-dog face shone, not with its usual or former mindless merriment, but with something so seldom seen that I could not at once place it. It turned out to be peace. They say women acquire a Madonna-like expression when they are pregnant, and I doubt the truth of this; there can be no universal biological rule. But Shorty had it. Shorty looked smoothed out, certain, serene, and happy in a way that made you think sentimentally of rivers, clouds, and wide fields quiet under the sun. She bulged in the accepted manner, and she announced in a voice of joy that she threw up all the time. Her baby was coming in two months. It would be a girl. Why? Because it must not be killed in a war. I did not argue this. She had forgotten the sexually impartial effectiveness of aerial and artillery bombardment. She was married. I did not point out this was still a stylish habit for women in her condition. Her husband was named Louis Lefèvre and he ran the luggage department at the Galeries Lafayette. She did not tell me where or how she had met him, or how she had left Spain. Her husband, she said proudly, had no political ideas at all and because of a weak heart was not even in the army. Good, said I. They lived in the suburbs in their own house, it was entirely paid for. She was going to get real papers, just like anyone else, real citizenship papers; she was going to have a passport. Splendid, I said.

Then I inquired if there was anything she needed, and Shorty was very grand about her husband's salary, their furniture, their house again, and her husband's father, who was retired and lived in another house which he also owned himself, near the Loire.

Did I think there was going to be a war? Shorty asked, suddenly anxious. She was easy to lie to; anyone happy has a way of staying happy as long as possible. She gave me her address. I must look her up the next time I was in Paris; she wanted me to meet her husband. She would have the baby ready to show me.

'It is all I ever wanted,' Shorty said, 'just one baby; if I could only get one that was all I wanted. But we never had time, you know, since 1933, and no place to live and no papers and war.'

'I'm glad you've got it,' I said.

'I would like to name her after you,' Shorty said, 'because you are my friend. I am sorry I cannot. But I have always known what I was going to call my baby and I have waited a long time so I have to do it.'

'What is it?' I said.

'Myrtle,' she said, pronouncing it as a French word, with a German accent.

Oh well, I thought, the child can probably invent some nickname for herself later.

I was busy writing a lot of nonsense about would-there-be-war-wouldn't-there-be-war and then it came, as it had to by then. I was sent to Poland and after that to Finland and though I meant to write Shorty, saying I hoped the baby was fine and that she and her husband were fine (as if anyone in Europe could be), I did not. But I got a rest at Christmas and came back to Paris with the notion that I had to see it once more before it was broken into rubble. Paris was as beautiful as you could hope, if you were looking at it for what you believed to be the last time. It was soft with snow, and quiet, and I walked around having a final heartsick love affair with the city. I decided that, these days, people would be well advised to love nothing; and this reminded me of Shorty and her baby and it was Christmas and a present was in order. I telephoned her. Her voice sounded the way she looked in the summer; it was fantastic for any voice, here and now, to sing and exult in this way. But I would not go to her house; I said I had too much work. I imagined her house must be a glorious place, from her voice, and I did not want to take my despair into it.

She came to see me, and the peace had not left her face. I could hardly believe how she looked. She seemed to have arranged in her mind that the war was not coming here, it would be fought neatly in the North along the Maginot Line where it belonged. No harm could strike this city; no evil could befall. She had Myrtle, and such happiness, given only by God, would obviously be protected by Him. She spoke of Myrtle as if she were already twice as beautiful as Helen of Troy; she spoke of the pink-and-white room she had fixed for Myrtle. I did not ask if she needed anything. The only thing she needed was a world forever at peace. Presently I went back to Finland, which was cold and certain to be defeated.

I could not get Shorty on the telephone the next time I was in Paris and I wasn't there long. I left, together with a good proportion of the citizenry. Shorty and Myrtle and the husband with the weak heart must have already gone to the retired father, to the house near the Loire that was still, and one passionately hoped would remain, safe. After that there was only the war, all the years of it, and Shorty in Occupied France where I could not have reached her had I thought about her, which I didn't.