Authors: Elswyth Thane
This Was Tomorrow (24 page)
“There’s a letter from Bracken which probably has sailing orders for me, if that cheers you up any,” he suggested.
“Well, it doesn’t,” Stephen said perversely. “What’s he say?”
“I haven’t looked yet. I’m kind of afraid to.”
“Well, come on, let’s know the worst,” said Stephen.
“I forgot Midge’s sponge cake,” Sylvia said, and went to the kitchenette to get the crumb which constituted Midge’s tea-time treat. She picked up the letter on the way, and carried it with her, kept it in her hand while she bent over the cage, and then tossed it to Jeff. “It’s like a time-bomb,” she said. “Might as well explode it.”
Jeff’s long, deliberate fingers were a little clumsy, opening the letter. He unfolded it carefully and they could see that it was several pages, closely typed. For a minute his eyes ran down the lines without comment, until Sylvia said, “Oh, read it, darling, out loud, I mean. We’ve got to know now.”
“Well,” said Jeff unwillingly. “There’s quite a lot of it. And it just shows you how out of touch you can get. All kinds of things coming up.
“Dear Kids (he read, without expression),
“Merry Christmas and Happy Anti-Comintern Pact. Excuse it, please, but anything for a laugh these days. I tried that one on Dinah and she said it was definitely beneath me, but she laughed first.
“It’s a crying shame, isn’t it, that Stevie’s show is such a success that he hasn’t got the face to close it before Christmas so you could all go to Williamsburg or even come back here for the holidays. Too bad about him. Well, anyway, we’re going to miss you. We almost made it over to New York to join you, but Dinah hates the winter passage and Virginia is always blue at this time of year because it brings back Archie’s death, so I gave up coming and we shall go to Farthingale as usual. Johnny and Camilla have arrived from Berlin with hair-raising stories of increasing German Press censorship and the expulsion of various too outspoken correspondents.
“Something’s up, Jeff. I have just done a deal with an American radio network for a weekly broadcast from here, on the general state of the world, as far as I can make out what they want. I am arranging for a hook-up with Johnny as a sort of roving reporter on the Continent, and when you get back I think we shall send you out on the same kind of job. It’s a not impossible idea, in our fifteen allotted minutes of air time, to share the broadcast between me in London, Johnny in, shall we say, Berlin or Vienna, and you in, shall we say, Paris or Madrid or Geneva. Geneva, he says, and the League deader than mutton since this Abyssinian fiasco. There will have to be something to take its place, and that will be one of the big stories of 1938. Or if nothing does take its place, that too is pretty sure to be a story—probably not a funny one. The mechanics of making a sort of weekly news round-up by air will take a lot of engineering, but they tell me it is possible by using prearranged signals, etc.,
and it’s
going to be quite a thing to work out. How do you like the idea? As one of our roving reporters, you will be more or less on your own, subject to orders from my London headquarters, gathering and arranging your own material where you find it, and talking it, not a typewriter, over the network. I happen to have a good radio pitch to my voice, and yours isn’t much different, so I don’t think you will have anything to worry about.
“Radio is going to play an increasing part, with very dramatic possibilities, in reporting the world scene from now on. We have already had some Spanish war coverage of that kind, and the BBC’s handling of the Geneva proceedings on Abyssinia points the way pretty plainly—people will
hear
what is happening
while
it is happening, instead of reading about it afterwards. (Suppose there had been a microphone in the Salle des Glaces at Versailles in 1919!) And of course the Nazis have learned to prostitute radio to their propaganda with deadly effectiveness. We are way behind the dictatorships in recognizing the value of broadcasting in the presentation of doctrine, news, facts,
truth
—or, in their case, lies—to the mass of people who can’t or won’t read and think for themselves. And if we get a general European war, there is of course no limit to what radio can do. It may require a change in our copy-writing, calling for some experimentation—copy to be
spoken,
not printed. You would do well to give some thought to this.
“Everything here seems a bit too preoccupied with the news from Asia to suit me. No matter what happens out there, which is plenty, it doesn’t do to take your eye off Berlin. Johnny says the French diplomatic there are betting on another Nazi attempt on Austria within a matter of weeks. And this time Mussolini will sit on his hands.
“Just in case Hitler blows another gasket this coming March, I would like you to count on being here well before it’s due, so that we can get ourselves planted on this new broadcasting stunt. Somebody will have to go and perch in Vienna if it looks like blowing up, and somebody else will
have to snoop round Berlin, though it will probably be impossible to broadcast from either place in a crisis. That would mean flying to Paris or London to get a microphone, and then there will always be the problem of getting back into a Fascist country if you’ve said something they don’t like. And they won’t like.
“Before you can start you will have to make some voice tests and trial readings, and see how your usual sort of copy sounds over the air. I have tried for years to teach you simplicity—one word instead of three, a short one instead of a long one, and plenty of periods. When you come to speak your own stuff you will see what I mean. I didn’t know the half of it till I dealt my own self a couple of tongue-twisters.
“The
Queen
sails from there the first week in February and I would like you to catch her, even if the others must be a few weeks behind you, and I can see your three long, reproachful faces from where I sit. But things can’t go on for ever the way they are over here now. It’s too quiet. Dictators can’t afford a
status
quo.
Something is due in the spring. It might be Austria, it might be the Sudetens in Czechoslovakia, it might be something more to do with Spain. There’s no League any more, it has gone the way of the Disarmament Conference, Locarno, Versailles, and the scrap of paper. We’re on our own, kids. And it won’t be long now.
“England has come out of the holiday spirit brought on by the coronation, and is beginning to take notice of what the bombing of Spanish towns means to civilians. It could happen here. Britons are beginning to face facts. And the facts aren’t pleasant. If Hitler starts a war, this whole island will be in the firing line. There won’t be any non-combatants in the next war. The enemy invades by air now. Napoloen stood on the shore at Boulogne and gazed across the Channel at inviolate England. He must be envying Hitler’s advantages today.
“A thing called
constructive
vacifism
has been invented here
for the further confusion of woolly thinkers, and while there’s too much of it and it’s far too vocal, it doesn’t really mean anything. The very same young men who now publicly shudder at the idea of killing and being killed will be flying British bombers within a few weeks of a declaration of war—and doing it efficiently and without any fuss. England will fight, if any one of several things happens. I wish Hitler was as sure of that as I am. Ribbentrop saw all the wrong people here, and got a lot of wrong impressions—partly because they were the impressions he wanted to have and that he knew Hitler wanted to hear.
“And what, will you ask now, about Evadne? She is still barking up the wrong tree, wearing herself to the bone with her meetings and committees, and even making brave, nonsensical little speeches of her own. I know what they are because I thought it my duty to go and hear her, little as I wanted to. In the old days when Virginia and Dinah were girls, Evadne would have been sent on a cruise to the Mediterranean or banished to the Riviera to distract her mind, and nine times out often she would have had a little flirtation or two and come home cured. The world was larger then. And simpler. Nowadays, short of shipping her right out to America I don’t see any way of separating her from all the unfortunate influences which surround her in London, but even that is not a practical idea because (a) she wouldn’t budge, (b) she would find the same kind of people there too, and (c) you’re all headed this way in a short time, we hope. I think for her sake the sooner the better if Stephen means to go on trying. Evadne is in a rut. And I think too if a war does start, she will regard it as her own personal failure and go almost out of her mind. It’s not just Victor now, it’s Ribbentrop as well, and even Hitler, whom she has met and talked with in one of his more lucid periods at a party in Berlin, and who, she is convinced, is merely misguided and misinformed. As her pal Ribbentrop is his chief source of information on England, I don’t know quite how she reconciles her tolerance of him with the other idea, but doubtless
she is guiding and informing Ribbentrop too, with Victor as a sort of Greek chorus.
“She has been abroad a great deal of the time during the past year as you have doubtless gathered. Hermione goes everywhere with her, like the Old Man of the Sea. When all’s said and done on that, it does preserve the proprieties in what sometimes would seem rather doubtful circumstances otherwise, travelling on the Continent, etc. After all, Hermione does prefer to live in England and intends to see that Evadne comes back from these European jaunts, which must be to the good. Virginia says she would rather have Hermione than no watch-dog at all.
“For the rest, we are as well and cheerful as can be expected—Going On Nicely, as the bulletins on Notable Invalids put it—and hope you are the same. I realize that this is no kind of letter to write at Christmas-time. I was Santa Claus last year, remember?
“Love to you all, from all of us,
B
RACKEN
.”
There was a long silence in the hotel room when Jeff finished reading the letter, and no one moved till Stephen rose casually and went to set down his cup on the table. They watched him wordlessly, and he looked at each one of them in turn. Jeff’s fate was sealed and dated. Sylvia’s—possibly Evadne’s too—waited on him.
“Well, I guess the notice goes up for March 1st,” he said quietly. “I’ve never done it in my life before, but we’re going to close to good business and take the show to London. It’ll be a matter of six to eight weeks for you two to wait. What the hell, I’ve been waiting a year already. And there’s no guarantee when I get there that she’ll listen to me. Maybe if I rolled my
r
’s and clicked my heels and kissed her hand—” He did so, graphically, where he stood. “—and leered a bit—” He leered at Sylvia, who did not laugh. “Or maybe—” He pulled down a forelock, made a double chin, fixed a fanatical glare on the
middle distance, extended his right arm stiffly at half-mast, and snarled, “
Heil
Hitler!
”
And even on the words the pose crumbled, the hair was brushed back, he gave a rueful grunt of laughter, and walked round the table aimlessly. “Don’t mind me,” he said apologetically. “Where do we eat?”
“Let’s have it sent up.” Sylvia reached for the telephone.
“Like me to push off?” Stephen offered gravely.
“
No!
”
they both said at once, and Jeff laid violent hands on him so that Stephen folded up in the nearest chair with a sheepish grin. “We’ve had just about enough of your tact, or whatever it is,” Jeff went on, and “Room service,” said Sylvia at the telephone. “We’re all in this together,” Jeff continued. “We’ve got no secrets from you. I’ve never tried to conceal from you that I’m in love with Sylvia, that still goes, we don’t need all this privacy. Stick around, cheer us up, cry on our shoulders, whatever you like, but let us in on it, for God’s sake!”
“Language,” said Stephen, pleased. “Tomato soup, club sandwich, and a glass of milk,” he added to Sylvia.
“Steak,” said Jeff, who didn’t have to dance. “And ice-cream.”
Sylvia gave the orders with her own and hung up the telephone and sat looking at them with a gleam in her eye.
“Let’s hear Jeff say his lines,” she suggested, and assumed a genteel detachment before an imaginary microphone. “‘This is Jefferson Day, speaking from you-know-where and here is the latest news about you-know-who.’”
“It’s a funny thing about mike-fright,” Stephen took up the cue solemnly. “I wouldn’t know, myself, I’m just lucky that way, but I’ve listened to people who had it, and according to them it’s got stage-fright licked to a frazzle. It comes on all of a sudden, without any warning, they tell me, like a kind of paralysis—a
creeping
paralysis—” He began to build it up, with gestures and mugging. “You can’t move your feet, they seem to be made of putty, and your hands go stiff and wet with perspiration, and then your tongue begins to turn cold and to swell, and your Adam’s apple comes up into your tonsils and
gets stuck there till you can’t breathe, and you start to choke—
and
choke
—” He appeared to strangle and die.
Jeff was clearing the parcels off the table and putting away the tea-things in the kitchenette and pretended Stephen wasn’t there at all.
“Wait till the fan mail starts coming in,” said Sylvia. “He’ll have to hire a secretary, and have some pictures taken, won’t he—for mailing out.”
“The left side of his face is better, don’t you think?” Stephen surveyed Jeff critically from various angles. “Be sure they don’t ever photograph you from the right, Jeff, you don’t want to scare people.”
“
May
I have your autograph, Mr. Day?” pleaded Sylvia with clasped, ecstatic hands.
It wasn’t Noël Coward wit, but it tided them over a bad quarter of an hour, and dinner was quite silly.
“
T
HIS IS
J
EFFERSON
D
AY
in Paris,” said the earphones Bracken wore in the little studio room at the BBC, and he leaned forward with a glance at Dinah who sat close beside him. The broadcast was on—the news period beamed at America which could not be heard in England except through Bracken’s earphones, but which would carry his voice, and Jeff’s, and Johnny’s, to the network in New York, gauged to split-second timing, a masterpiece of engineering and enterprise.
“I have just arrived here from Vienna, via Berlin and Amsterdam,” the quiet, unhurried voice went on conversationally, as though Jeff sat in the next room. “I was not allowed to broadcast from Vienna after the Reichswehr marched in. The Ravag Building in Johannesgasse, from where I expected to
speak, has been taken over by men in field-grey uniforms with bayonets. The programme director, who is a friend of mine, is a prisoner. It was obvious that, from now on, Nazi censorship would prevent me from saying anything I wanted to.
“The outgoing planes were supposed to be all booked up for days ahead, but I went to Aspern airport early Saturday morning to see what could be done. Already the field was full of German war planes, and the Gestapo was in charge. They finally cleared the London plane. Its passengers were mostly Jews who would not have sold their places for any coin ever minted, and quite rightly. For many of them this was the last chance. I stood on the field and watched them go—just a handful of them, safe, by the grace of God. The plane to Berlin was not so popular, and I was able to get a seat in that. At Berlin, while I waited for the Dutch plane which would take me to Amsterdam, I bought newspapers, and read in banner headlines that Austria had been rescued from Communist chaos, fighting in the streets, a helpless and demoralized Government. Yet I had seen Vienna quiet and tragically composed, until Nazi hoodlums took charge and began breaking the windows of Jewish shops and molesting in the streets anyone they chose to label Jew. It will be recalled that in 1934 the Munich radio announced the death of Chancellor Dollfuss twenty-four hours
before
he was murdered—a murder attributed by Germany at the time to Communist chaos in Vienna. But the men who killed Dollfuss, we know now, were Nazis wearing Austrian uniforms. The Nazi lies get larger and more careless as the Nazi machine grinds on.
“When I left Vienna Saturday morning nearly every house was already flying the swastika flag—produced somehow out of the air. All night hysterical crowds had surged through the Karlsplatz shouting
Sieg
Heil!
and
Hang
Schuschnigg!
while indulgent police looked on, wearing swastika armbands. The Austrian police have gone Nazi. Chancellor Schuschnigg himself is said to be under arrest and torture. His friends urged him to escape in a special plane provided for him, but he would not leave his country.
“This is Jefferson Day, speaking from Paris. I return you now to Bracken Murray in London.”
And Bracken, smoothly resuming his own microphone, with Dinah beside him wiping her eyes on his handkerchief, wanted very much to cry too, and at the same time to shout and pound people on the back. They had done it London to Berlin to Paris and back to London, in fifteen minutes without a hitch. Johnny had come through first, revealing among other things that the population of Berlin had seemed to take the Anschluss with something like apathy—and Jeff in Paris sounded steady as a rock. It
worked.
The hours of effort which had gone into the intricate checking and rechecking of wavelengths, transmitters, and time-cues, the countless telephone calls and cables to Berlin and Paris and New York—it all worked. Hereafter it would be feasible for foreign correspondents to use the air for a sort of newsreel round-up, instead of waiting on cables and telephones. Censorship was still a problem, of course, but a new technique in worldwide reporting had been established. And Jeff would grow up in it, make it his own medium. His voice was right, his timing was instinctive, he had dignity and pace and colour. Hallelujah!
The broadcast had taken place at midnight Sunday, London time. Stephen and Sylvia had been in England only two days, and Stephen had not caught up with Sylvia yet, and all the exhausting minutiae of the London opening were ahead of him. Nobody had come to meet them at Southampton this time, because of Austria, and if war began they might not open at all.
But there was no war. Hitler entered Vienna in triumph, and made a speech from the balcony of the Hofburg. Within a week Austria was completely Nazified, gripped by sadism, Jew-baiting, arrests and disappearances, servile betrayal, and terror. The thing was done. No shooting, no fireworks, no resistance. Only suicides. Austria was dead.
Chamberlain, speaking in the House of Commons, pointed out that nothing could have prevented the Anschluss unless Britain and France had been prepared to use force. What he did not say was that, instead, they had yielded more ground—quite literally—and lost face—just as important—and now it was too late. Now Czechoslovakia was doomed. Sylvia knew it would be Czechoslovakia next because Bracken was sending Johnny on to Prague to arrange for a hook-up there with Geneva, as broadcasts at present had to come out over a telephone line which ran through Germany.
Evadne took the
coup
in Austria very hard, for she could not see why Victor, for one, had not seen it coming. It was said that the news that German troops had crossed the Austrian border came through while Ribbentrop was lunching with the Prime Minister in London; and took even him by surprise—or so he wished it to appear. All the satisfaction she could get from Victor during the next few days was a hurried telephone conversation now and then, excuses, postponements, half-truths, until it looked as though he was deliberately avoiding her, which she resented, for she wanted to upbraid somebody for causing this increased tension and hostility just when things were going a little better, and she wanted to hear the unaccountable move explained and justified.
In the meantime Jeff had returned to London, sobered and saddened by what he had seen, and even the delight of his reunion with Sylvia was overhung with darkening European skies. She found him preoccupied and remote at times, and wondered what there was that he had still not told her, wondered if she should encourage him to talk it all out or try to help him forget it. Dinah, out of her own experience, said the best thing was to keep as normal as possible oneself, avoiding both an appearance of indifference and of gruesome curiosity—an adjustment to the finer points of connubial diplomacy which could only come with practice. Just be there when wanted, Dinah said, ready to listen or ready to divert. He’d let you know which. And finally it would sort of wear off, till the next time.
Stephen’s new show opened early in April, with the usual resounding success. His few meetings with Evadne before that occasion were all casual ones, surrounded by the family, on the basis laid down in her final message before he left England a year ago—they were to start all over again, and she would not be holding him to anything that had already been said between them. At the same time, she had been disappointed, as the year went on, that he had taken her so literally. She had asked him not to write to her, and she had received no letters from him. She had said, in effect, that he was not to presume on the past if they met again, and beyond his first hearty greeting he had not kissed her—there had not been, it was true, much opportunity, and with the first night bearing down on him he had not even tried to make an opportunity. Evadne assured herself that this was exactly what she wanted, and continued fervently to immerse herself in her religious associations, in which she was becoming an outstanding figure both for her personal beauty and her single-minded devotion to the Cause.
She was present with the rest of the family at the first-night party after the show. She danced with Stephen—once—and mentioned that she and Hermione must leave early because of getting some sleep before catching a train in the morning.
“
Train?
”
he repeated, horrified. “Where?”
“To Scotland. We’re going up to a Conference. It’s very exciting, we shall be away a week or two, organizing.”
“What’s up now?”
“There’s to be a big crusade meeting in London the end of May with speeches by important people, to launch a new campaign for international peace. It’s a very large-scale programme now, to go beyond the personal, face-to-face basis and reach labour and capital and government groups and leaders—to make
all
the classes everywhere realize that civilization rests on individual responsibility—on each human being’s sense of truth and justice and moral standards.”
Stephen’s arm tightened in the dance, and his breath was on her cheek as he laughed indulgently.
“I’m glad I don’t have to say anything in the show like
your
lines!” he remarked. “I’d dry up every night!”
“Don’t you ever take anything seriously, Stephen?”
“I sure do.” He was instantly grave. “Once I even thought I’d give this quiet time idea of yours a try—but all I thought about in my quiet times was you. It’s always that way if I let my mind off the leash, and I don’t get anywhere with my sins that way, because the more I think about you—” He spun her till her full skirts wrapped his own nimble legs, and he met the end of the music with a long smooth glide, and his arms were slow to release her.
“It’s nice to dance with you again,” she said, rather formally.
“Well, thanks for saying it first!” he cried in pleased surprise. “I hope you remember everything else I taught you as well.”
“I have to go now,” said Evadne, and held out her hand, looking a little pink and breathless, while her dazzling, generous, warm-hearted smile enveloped him. “Good night, Stevie—I’m sure the show is a great success. Wish me luck with mine, won’t you!”
While he was still reeling she withdrew her hand again from his lingering clasp and was away to join Hermione for their other good nights.
She did not write to him from Scotland either, and she had left him no address, and her stay there extended itself to something over a month, while the show built up a tremendous business and Stephen was reclaimed by all the enthusiastic friends he had left behind a year ago. Despite the ominous rumblings in Czechoslovakia, he found his life in London very gay, very normal, very much to his taste. It was demonstrated to him daily that Evadne was not the only girl in the world, that he knew several others who were much more co-operative, in fact even just a bit
too
anxious, and none of them made speeches about moral standards. But always with something like a crinkle in his heart, as between whimper and laughter, he would acknowledge once more that it was Evadne he wanted, and no one else. Sometimes he wondered cynically if
her very elusiveness was part of her charm for him, the traditional virgin come-on in the face of male pursuit—and he knew in the same breath that he wronged her earnestness, her honesty, her maddening immature idealism. It was no game she played with him, for the fun of conquest. She had no conception of feminine caprice in her ardent, muddled little soul. She truly believed that she put him off because her mission as she saw it was more important to the world than her only partly realized love for him. And he knew that if all that radiant devotion and integrity could be captured from its visionary tangents and channelled into any such down-to-earth purpose as love and marriage and children it would be worth all the tact and endurance it would cost the man who was there when it happened. Some day Evadne was going to grow up. And that, Stephen told himself, he wanted to see.
A couple of days after her return with Hermione to the flat they still kept up together, he rang her up and was cordially invited to tea. Hermione never left the room while he was there. A few days after that Jeff rang up the flat and invited Evadne to have lunch with him at a little place in Soho—alone. “Just us,” said Jeff firmly. “Not Sylvia. Not Hermione.” And he added as she hesitated from sheer stupefaction, “Else it’s
off
.” Flattered and curious, with some idea of hearing momentous things about the European situation straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, she accepted. And five minutes after they were seated at a table in the corner with their backs to the wall, by obvious prearrangement Stephen walked in and Jeff rose at once to give him his chair. “Now you’re on your own,” he said with a fatherly smile, and departed.
Evadne was surprised, but not, Stephen noticed, angry.
“Well, you needn’t have gone to all this trouble,” she said mildly. “I’d have lunched with you without a decoy.”
“But not without witnesses,” he said, picking up the menu. “Ear-witnesses, I mean. I haven’t said one word to you since I got back that couldn’t be overheard even if I whispered.”
“Well, what are you going to whisper now?”
“Same old thing. Let’s order first.” He did so, and when the
waiter had gone he turned to her, his hands rather tense on the table in front of him. “Hullo,” he said gently.
“Hullo, Stephen.” Her eyes were steady and troubled. “You look tired. Is your foot still bothering you?”
“Who told you I had a foot?”
“Jeff or somebody, I suppose. Is it being a nuisance?”
“I forget about it most of the time,” he said untruthfully. “In fact, it’s the least of my worries.”
“I know. Isn’t the news terrible!”
“I don’t mean the news either. Honey, aren’t you ever going to stop trying to save the world single-handed? Couldn’t you agree to hang up your halo and come down off the pedestal and live your life at my level?”
“Victor says that our generation can’t afford to think of themselves.”
“And what does Victor think of instead?”
“Much bigger things,” she told him patiently. “We are in the midst of a world revolution. We have no right to consider our own mere personal happiness.”
“And can I infer from that that if you permitted yourself to do as I suggest—you could be happier?”