The Wild Dark Flowers (23 page)

“How can’t I listen to it, you bastard?” he’d replied. The man just smiled. A wistful drawing back of his lips over his teeth. A kind of subdued smile, at least, or what served for a smile out here.

“Listen to something you remember. In your own head. Inside. Listen to a woman talking. Or a car along a road.” Harrison had tried to think of what he remembered while the inhuman roaring went on. He remembered—well, what? Polishing shoes. Very good leather shoes that belonged to Lord Cavendish. He remembered the shine. He remembered—who was this? Jenny on the stone stairs to the kitchen. Starched white collars of serving maids. Starched white collars. . . . “Well, what are you thinking of?” the man had asked.

Crump, crump, crump. Soil flying through the air. Something screaming: animal, human? Hard to tell. He tried to listen to Jenny, walking down the stairs. “Women’s shoes,” he said.

“Go on thinking of them,” the man told him.

The second-to-last time that he had seen that man, they were still together, this time dug in along something called La Quinque Rue. It meant “five streets,” or “fifth street,” the major said. Quinque Rue. Canker-roo.

It soon became “Kangaroo” to Harrison. Big, thumping, blinding and deafening Kangaroo. It sat in his soul with its big thundering feet. He let the ridiculous image wander about in his mind while he marched and ran and dug and fixed bayonet and waited, waited, waited in the dark. It joined all the other odd, disjointed thoughts roaming about in his head: a wailing army of ghosts, of gruesome circus acts. Wheeling fireworks, tumbling water. Hoots and klaxons and horns: the clown cars of the big top, circling in sawdust and murderous dreams. A circus called Festubert.

Sometimes he heard himself speaking, and, more often than not, laughing. They said he had a good sense of skewed humor. If he ever had a silent moment—true silence, the guns extinguished, the men praying or asleep or drugged with the aftereffects of ferocity, of barbaric acts, in times like that, Harrison laughed quietly to himself. It may have seemed peculiar, but at least it made him feel better. The men around him never told him to shut up anymore. He’d become a kind of mascot, as if stopping him laughing would end them all, put out their own lives, turn them all into the greenish mud they slimed through.

And the last time he saw that man along the Kangaroo, they had been sitting in a hole they’d scraped out with their entrenching tools and had to crouch in it as if they were stuffed into a hip bath together, their feet outside while shrapnel whirred on either side. They couldn’t move; the sniper had their measure. The evening had come in—thank God for the dark—and they tried filling sandbags with more earth from their tiny scoop of soil. They filled two, and shoved them on the side that faced the enemy.

Somewhere out to their right was an adventurous artillerist; one man acting freelance with a mule and an Indian mountain gun. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of small arms, and from time to time he would shower the Germans with projectiles, and then scuttle away, vanishing in the murk. Then he began to shower
them
. They cursed him for his momentary inaccuracy and the withering fire in reply from the enemy.

A gun of a much larger caliber four hundred yards away was searching out the artilleryman in the shadows, like a great snuffling dog nosing about. One reply tore out what remained of the old trench just ahead of them: they sat immobile, feeling dead already because the sound of the shell was known all too well to them. Both of them waited for it to land with a few seconds of utmost clarity that their lives were at an end.

And in that moment, Harrison thought of Jenny’s starched collar and her soft, self-effacing voice with something amounting to passion, a sudden surge of poignant love. Why had he never said a kind word to her? He had felt cut off from kindness all his life, given or received; he had been isolated in his mind, cold in the way he spoke. He couldn’t fathom where that came from, and now it was too late. Now he was here, at the edge of all life, looking back the way he had come, feeling a strange and hollow loss in his soul. Then, in that same terrible instant, the blast came, humping the ground underneath them, sending up a wall of earth. But after it was all over, they found themselves in the same hellish place, in the same hellish hole, untouched.

During that night, there was no sign of anyone ordering them back; no sign at all, in fact, of other men. They were, they decided, well and truly stranded. When the dawn had come up, they had got back to their own lines by scraping along the surface in a flat panic; slumping in the British trench, gasping out that they’d dispatched the Boche but no one had come to back them up—ah, the major’s face, red as a beetroot, blaring about orders, losing his nerve—ah, the snide grins of the others and the disguised thumbs-up signals. “What was it like?” a boy said, staring at him, come up from the reserve trenches. Green as you like with fear and shaking like a leaf. “Like a Chinese execution,” Harrison replied. “Death by a thousand cuts.”

The boy hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “Like him?”

And it was his nighttime companion, the man who’d told him to think of something else when they were first on Kangaroo. He’d caught a shrapnel blast that Harrison had never even heard as he launched himself back into the British trench; his face was sliced quite neatly in a horizontal fashion. There were red tramlines across his forehead, the bridge of his nose, and the tips of his ears. He was being hauled backwards as they tried to get him to a dressing station. He had looked at Harrison nevertheless and smiled as best he could.

That afternoon, Harrison was allowed back, too.

He lay on his back a mile behind the lines, staring at the sky. He had an injury to his hand—never felt it, just like he’d never heard the shrapnel blast—and someone had given him a smoke. He lay on the stretcher and watched far-distant clouds.

A medico came up to him. He had an upper-class accent, the faintest line of a moustache, and a crisply turned-out uniform. “How are you bearing up?” Harrison was asked.

“Just fine and dandy, sir.”

“Sit up for me.”

He did as he was told. The man had sat down beside him and the tone of his voice was the kind one might use if you spoke to a child. “Can you tell me what day it is?”

“No sir. Why does it matter?”

“Your unit?”

He couldn’t think. Watched the clouds still visible over the officer’s shoulder. “The British Army,” he said, and sniggered at his own joke.

“Bothered by the bombardment?”

This was such a stupid question that he ignored it. The clouds were dancing a little. He wondered how badly he was shaking and if that was the reason for the officer’s concern.

The officer hunched forward. “It wouldn’t be surprising,” he said, in a confidential tone. “In sixty hours, we have expended a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.”

Harrison looked at him. “A hundred thousand,” he repeated. “And they say we’ve got no shells, sir.”

“They do say that. It’s been raised in Parliament just this week.”

Harrison ground out his cigarette in the mud. As far as he was concerned, the conversation was at an end. He hated these boy-officers from the universities who tried to be matey. He wanted to punch the man in the face. He wasn’t his mate. He was a trench rat, a thing that crawled through the soaked gullies, and hid behind shattered hedges and makeshift sandbags.

“Well,” he said softly. And he got to his feet. He shuffled about a bit to disguise his tremors. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have to get back. There’s a war on.”

*   *   *

O
n board the
Lusitania
, the early dense fog had cleared, and it was a beautiful day.

John Gould leaned on the rail and looked out over the sea. It was a silent sheet of indigo; the sun reflected from it so that he had to shade his eyes. People passed him arm in arm; many of them smiled and nodded at him. He pondered that there was a definite shift of mood aboard the ship; they were nearing Ireland—they would soon be able to see the Old Head of Kinsale on the southernmost coast—and the passengers were visibly relaxing. They would soon be in Liverpool; all the talk of submarines would be over.

Still, he noticed that more than one person, like him, was scanning the water. He wondered what a periscope looked like. Would, in fact, a submarine surface at all, or, if they were fired upon, would one only see the trail of the torpedo? He didn’t even know if a torpedo could be seen in the water. Perhaps, if one struck, it would be so far down underneath the ship that it would never be noticed coming at them. He shuddered involuntarily. No need for all this, he told himself. They were almost there. They were not going to be hit.

A couple came alongside him. He recognized Elbert Hubbard, the man who had written an article in
The Philistine
that had gone on to be reprinted forty million times. John had noticed him many times on the voyage, but those figures—forty million, an inconceivable amount—had kept him from introducing himself. He didn’t want to say, “I’m a journalist, a writer,” to someone whose work had forty million readers. It made him feel shy, like a schoolboy. Added to that, Hubbard was a big figure of a man with a piercing gaze, a kind of force of nature. The forty-million article was all about getting a job done, stiffening the vertebrae and concentrating the energies. John was terribly afraid that Hubbard would take one look at him and decide that his vertebrae were of a decidedly unstiffened kind.

Hubbard caught his look now, though. He stopped in his tracks. “Watching for U-boats?” he asked.

John wheeled around. “I suppose it’s tempting fate.”

Hubbard smiled. “Believe in such a thing?”

John considered. “Yes, I do.”

Hubbard came alongside him, leaning companionably on the rail. His wife put her head on one side, frankly assessing John, and smiling. “Ah, fate,” Hubbard said. He held out his hand to introduce himself. “Hubbard.”

“I know of you, sir.”

“And you?”

He told the great man his name.

“Working in England?”

John was about to say that yes, he was working, and that he would be going to France. But all at once he realized, looking into Hubbard’s face, that the whole history of his taking the commission to write about the war from an American perspective was just a smokescreen. He had told his father and mother of what he was doing; he had told other people on this ship. But now he abruptly realized that it was an elaborate and convenient lie. He was going to England for one purpose, and one purpose only. He always had been.

“I’m going to find the woman I fell in love with last year,” he said. “I find that I can’t live without her.”

Hubbard smiled. “You look determined.”

“I am sir, yes.”

“A message to Garcia, eh?” Hubbard said, and laughed a great booming laugh. He patted John’s shoulder, and walked away with his wife at his side.

A Message to Garcia
was the forty-million-copy article. John squared his shoulders and laughed to himself. Elbert Hubbard thought he was all right after all: he was a man with a mission, a man to accomplish anything.

And he was heading, straight as an arrow, to his mark.

*   *   *

H
e went in to luncheon, feeling so much better.

He wouldn’t gaze out at the sea anymore, he decided. He would just concentrate on what he was going to do once he got to Liverpool.

As far as he could recall, there was a regular train service across the Pennines, but perhaps it would be better to take an express to Manchester and then to Leeds. The cross-Pennine trains were sluggish at best, pausing at every little town and lamppost. He had no desire to look at the moors, no matter how beautiful they were.

And as he sat staring into space, a small smile on his face, a steward came into the dining room and made straight for him. He was carrying a telegram.

“Mr. Gould?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

John took the envelope and tore it open. For a moment, the words danced in an incomprehensible jumble in front of his eyes: he was so surprised to receive it. And then he saw her name.

Tell me when you get to Liverpool. Safe passage. Octavia.

Ten words. He counted them. Ten words.

A woman across the table leaned forward. “Not bad news, I hope?” she asked.

“Oh no,” he said, and felt the blood rushing to his face. “No. Rather the opposite, in fact.”

He folded the piece of paper, hands trembling.

All he could think of was,
After all this time.

He looked around himself as if he had landed suddenly in heaven. He noticed the elaborate flower arrangements, the silver, the knife-edge creases in the linen of the napkins. Each detail sprang out at him as if seeing everything for the first time. Somewhere in the bowels of this ship were people who had kept and arranged the flowers, who had served the food, who had pressed the cloths, who had shined the silver. He felt as if he wanted to rush below and shake each person’s hand. “Thank you,” he wanted to say. “Thank you for making it all perfect.” He started to laugh, and, seeing the surprised expressions on his fellow diners, stopped himself just in time, he felt, from making a complete ass of himself.

But it
was
fine.

It was all so very fine, and so very perfect.

*   *   *

A
fter luncheon, he took himself out to the deck.

He had a notion that he would walk for at least an hour; he had suddenly so much energy to burn away. He glanced again at the sea, and then up at the four tall funnels above him. He looked at his watch: it was just after two p.m. Then, looking ahead, he saw that there were lookouts scanning the ocean. Suddenly, he saw one of them raise an arm, and he followed the direction in which the man was pointing, up to the crow’s nest.

There, high above them, were two crew.

They too were pointing to something on the starboard side, his side. He heard raised voices, but could not make out what it was that they were calling.

He looked to starboard.

About a thousand yards away, what seemed like a large bubble was breaking and disintegrating, and just before it in the water could be seen two white streaks, as clearly defined as stripes of chalk on a blackboard. For a second, John recalled being on a motoring yacht off Cape Cod at sunset. He couldn’t remember the day or even the year, but he was seeing now, in his mind’s eye, that same kind of clear twin stripe in the sea caused by the wake of something moving very fast in a quiet ocean. He stared out, mesmerized.