Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “Wot part of the Stytes are you from, Miss?”

  “California.”

  “I’m from Bermondsey. Dje know where that is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I don’t know where California is.”

  The others laughed at this. There was a slight edge to these jibes. They hadn’t quite accepted her yet. She hadn’t been where they had. They didn’t trust anybody who hadn’t been in the trenches. You couldn’t talk to people. They just wanted to make encouraging speeches to urge you to go back. The generals, the newspapers, the Red Cross girls, all of them.

  You could tell this from the song they were singing at the other end of the room, in a mock-sentimental tone, to the tune of When You Wore a Tulip.

  “I wore a tunic,

  A dirty khaki tunic,

  And you wore civilian clothes.

  We fought and fled at Loos

  While you were on the booze

  The booze that no one here knows.

  Oh, you were with the wenches

  While we were in the trenches

  Facing the German foe.

  Oh, you were a-slacking

  While we were attacking

  Down the Menin road.”

  Herma pushed her way through the crowd to the piano. The Anzac piano player was doing his best. Somebody had stuck one of Herma’s Caporals in his mouth and lighted it. He had to play everything in C natural where there weren’t too many black notes, and even then he got lost in the more complex harmonies. They made room at the piano for Herma and she leaned on it too, drawing on her cigarette.

  “Wash Me In the Water,” called somebody.

  He groped into it as best he could, while the others sang raucously.

  “Wash me in the water

  That you washed your dirty daughter

  And I shall be whiter

  Than the whitewash on the wall.”

  “That’s not a very nice one to sing while the Miss is ’ere,” said someone over the din.

  “It’s all right.”

  The Anzac finished Wash Me In the Water, after his fashion, and then he stopped and turned to her.

  “Can you play this thing?”

  She shook her head.

  He gave her another look, more searching.

  “I’ll bet you can sing though.”

  Herma smiled. Setting her cigarette in a tin pan on the piano, she tried There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. But this was far too fast for the Anzac. He gave up and threw up his hands. Someone encouraged him, “Come on, Alfie.” Several others punched him. But it was beyond his powers.

  “How about Tipperary?” she asked.

  “No, we’re fed up to here with Tipperary. No one’s Irish anyhow.”

  “Who the bloody hell wants to go to Tipperary? It’s me old Croydon girl I want to see.”

  “How about this then.”

  After a conference with the Anzac, she sang the one in soldier-French that they all knew.

  “Après la guerre finie,

  Soldat anglais parti;

  Mam’selle Fransay boko pleuray

  Après la guerre finie.”

  Most of them sang this along with her, although one of them substituted “Mam’selle Fransay can go to hell” for the third line. Perhaps it was the one who wanted his old Croydon girl. There was some applause at the end.

  She told them, “Here’s one I’ll bet you know.”

  In a mock-pathetic voice, as though she didn’t have a friend in the world and wished someone to take pity on her, she began to the tune of Since I Lost You:

  “I’ve lost my rifle and bayonet,

  I’ve lost my pull-through too,

  I’ve lost my disk and my puttees,

  I’ve lost my four-by-two.

  I’ve lost my sew-kit and my gas-mask,

  I’ve lost my bedroll too;

  I’ve lost my rations and my greatcoat …”

  (The last line in a tone of plaintive lament)

  “Oh Sergeant, what shall I do?”

  This was greeted with laughter, and more applause. Most of the men in the room had stopped what they were doing now and turned around toward the piano. The Anzac had gained confidence with I’ve Lost My Rifle, which was a slow tune without too many complexities and one he could keep up with fairly capably.

  He looked up at her and put down his cigarette too. He was a man about her own age with an odd complexion, the lower part of his face raw and red and the forehead white. He had evidently been wounded in the head because there was still an oval dressing the size of an egg pasted to the side of his temple.

  “Dje know this then. It’s a Yank song.”

  He played a few bars and stopped.

  Herma nodded and began it, in a soft half-voice at first, to the absolutely silent room. She sang slowly, pausing between the phrases so that her voice lingered in the smoky air.

  “Nights …

  are long …

  since you went away …”

  The Anzac followed her easily, not taking his eyes from her face. His fingers planted in the keys moved from chord to slow chord. Every eye in the room was fixed on her. Her silver-edged soprano, still restrained and soft, moved through the lines of the banal and sentimental popular waltz.

  “I think …

  about you …

  all through the day,

  my Buddy …

  my Buddy …

  nobody quite so true …”

  He was playing it in the wrong key, and she had to start on a high G and slide up to an A on “no-body” in the last line. But this was nothing; she had an octave above that she could use if she wanted. In the second stanza she opened into a slightly stronger timbre, but still with a music-hall fragility, a thin tone of sentiment, rather than the full power of the opera voice.

  “Miss …

  your voice …

  the touch of your hand …

  just long …

  to know …

  that you understand …

  my Buddy …

  my Buddy …”

  She went up to the A again and held it for an instant in a clinging tremolo on the last “Buddy …”

  “your Buddy …

  misses you.”

  When she finished on the C there was silence for a moment, and then the applause broke out. But it was a different sort of applause from the clapping and laughter she had evoked with the comic songs. No one was smiling now and every face in the room was turned to her. One young soldier, thin and pale, couldn’t clap because his arm was in a cast and only nodded, as though he wanted somehow to communicate to her. She caught his eye for an instant. When the applause finally died out the Anzac looked at her. Nobody in the room was playing cards or reading Punch anymore. They were waiting—for something—something that she had to give. They didn’t know what it was but they knew there was more and they were waiting for it. There was a clumsy and unspoken appeal, a pull of desire or longing, in the faces turned toward her. The boy with his arm in a cast was staring at her fixedly, biting his lip.

  “What next?”

  The Anzac said, “Sing one that you like, Miss.”

  She conferred with him, setting her own fingers on the opening chord on the piano.

  He nodded. “We all know that, Miss.”

  She began slowly, lingering over each note with precision, pitching her voice as carefully and clearly as though she were singing Verdi before the cream of Paris society at the Opéra. All her years of craft and skill went into the voice, the long hours of practice, the rehearsals hammered out line by line in empty theaters, the pure timbre, the professional tricks and precision. It was an opera voice, the voice of an international prima donna, a Melba or a Tetrazzini; but the flattened and slightly pathetic tone, the lingering glide from one note to the next, was that of the sentimental music-hall tradition they knew from their half-forgotten civilian past, from their London leaves.

  “There’s a long, long trail a-windingr />
  Into the land of my dreams;

  Where the nightingales are singing

  And a white moon beams …”

  The Anzac had a little trouble getting from the D seventh chord to the G seventh at the end of the stanza. But it didn’t matter, no one was paying any attention to him.

  “There’s a long, long night of waiting,

  Until my dreams all … come true …”

  Slow tempo, she told herself. Keep it slow. She moved on through the second stanza with a lingering clarity, as though the voice were reluctant, almost, to move from note to note. And for them, the listeners, each note was in fact something they did not wish her to leave; they hung on it, savoring every last particle of the emotion it evoked, as if by magic, as she transformed and exalted the banal campfire song that all of them knew. Into this last stanza—she knew it was to be the last—she put all the skill and wisdom of her whole young lifetime from the moment when, sitting on Mama’s lap, she had felt the talent in her and chimed in with the Baptist choir. The voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it was a whisper with a timbre that penetrated to every corner of the room and suffused with its flowerlike clarity even the odor of cigarette smoke and stale beer that clung in the air—a voice that spoke to each man intimately as though the others in the crowded room were not there. The listeners were as silent and expectant as the expensively dressed audience of the Opéra on the brink of Violetta’s death scene. The notes clung in the air, shimmered, and followed one after the other.

  “Till the day …

  When I’ll be go-ing …

  Down that lo-ong … lo-ong … trail with you.”

  There was a moment of churchlike silence. It was as though they were rapt; no one moved. Then one man clapped, and another, and the hut was filled with a deafening roar of applause that went on for a long time. The pale boy with the cast still had his eyes fixed on her. The applause continued as though it would never stop. Here and there was a face with moisture-filled eyes, and she saw an old soldier furtively lift his arm and dab at his cheek with his shirt cuff. Tonight you have made Modjeska get out her handkerchief, she remembered, and that is not easy to do. It was that little lingering catch in the voice on lo-ong in the last line, she knew—as though a tear in the voice was being suppressed only with difficulty. She had learned that from Caruso—“the sexiest sound in the world.” It was technique. That was technique. But there was feeling in it too; the moisture had welled in her own eyes. When there was feeling, and when there was technique, and they joined together like two lovers embraced, that was Art.

  At last the clapping died out. She took her musette bag from the piano and started for the door. Most of them lads will never see ’ome again, said Tiffin. “Good luck, boys,” she called over her shoulder. No one moved. Just as she reached the door, the old soldier who had touched his eye with his shirt cuff got up and came after her. She caught a glimpse of the badge and chevrons; he was a sergeant of the Royal Fusiliers. He followed her outside and came up to her in the darkness, and she turned.

  He seemed uncertain what to say.

  “God bless you, Miss.”

  She smiled. Then she turned and went out, through the compound and past the fence, and turned onto the road. It was dark and there were ragged clouds overhead; only a little starlight showed through the rifts. With the musette over her shoulder she went down the hard stone road, guiding herself by the line of leafless poplars on the right. She had never been happier. An exultation sprang up in her and filled her breast, as though it would burst out in a flood of luminous brilliance. For the last time she looked up at the stars with her girl’s eyes. She was at peace with herself, and with the dark sky and the world. “J’ai vécu!” she thought. “I have lived! I have lived!” A great warmth and bliss spread through her; she was one with the dark earth, the stars, and the vast void of empty space beyond them. Like a gentle thunder, a promise of rain, she heard the rumble of distant gunfire from the trenches forty kilometers to the east.

  18.

  “It’s time, sir.”

  Fred opened his eyes to see Tiffin with a lighted candle, bending over him with his hand on his arm. Lufbery was already up, pulling on the hunting boots he wore over his Foreign Legion trousers.

  “What time is it?”

  “Four o’clock, sir.”

  “The weather?”

  “Good weather, sir. Broken clouds.”

  He got out of bed and dressed rapidly, then went to the W.C. off the hall. When he came out Lufbery and the others were already gathered around the table in the main room, where there were brioches and a pot of steaming coffee. The room was lighted with a single kerosene lamp. It was still pitch dark outside. The phonograph glittered in the gloom at the end of the room. Fred poured himself some coffee, then took the sugar dispenser and tasted a little on his finger to be sure it was really sugar. Thénault noticed him and smiled in his quiet way.

  The coffee was pretty bad. It was neither French coffee nor American coffee and after a while Fred realized it was English coffee: Tiffin had made it. Everybody was drinking it. It was part of the suffering of war.

  “Everybody finished?” Thénault glanced at his watch. “I want everybody at the field by four-thirty.”

  “Okay, General,” said Thaw, still sitting with his feet on the table. Roy Willkie, hatless, saluted him gravely.

  It was cold outside in the dark street. The fur-lined combinations were kept at the field and they were wearing their usual odd-lot costumes, some of them summer uniforms. They stamped their feet on the pavement to warm them. Only Prince in his fur coat looked comfortable. There were about eighteen of them when they were loaded into the transport. For some reason Fred, privileged again, rode in the Packard touring car with Prince, Thaw, and Lufbery. The others came on behind in two Fiat trucks with canvas tops and a double row of benches in the rear. The Fiat trucks blatted and backfired down the narrow street out of town.

  At the field the three vehicles stopped on the grass by the hangar and they all got out. Then it was hurry up and wait, as it always is in a war. The mechanics were loading the Vickers guns and checking them. One Nieuport had a gun that had jammed the day before and they wanted to test it. A half dozen of them got around to the rear, picked up the skid, and pointed the aeroplane north toward the foothills of the Vosges. Then a mechanic got in, armed the gun, and pushed the button on the stick. There was an ear-splitting clatter as eight or ten rounds went out. The gun smoked and there was a smell of hot oil. The rounds went out over the Luxeuil-Ormoiche road, but with the skid on the ground the rounds went high and fell into the unpopulated hills a kilometer or two away. The mechanic pulled out the belt and loaded it with a fresh one. It was Thaw’s Nieuport. “ça marche, mon lieutenant,” the mechanic told him.

  They pulled on the combinations and collected their helmets and goggles. The heavy fur-lined garment warmed Fred up a little; it had been very cold standing in the street. Luxeuil was almost in the mountains and it was colder than it was in Paris. Then they sat around at tables in the hangar, smoking cigarettes and talking about the girls in Luxeuil or the last leave in Paris when they had bought the lion and taken it around to bars in taxis and the barman at the Chatham had mistaken it for a dog at first, until Thaw told him it was a chien-lion. After that the barman went into the back room and refused to come out and they had to mix their own drinks. Apparently they had spent most of the three-day leave at the Chatham or at Harry’s just a few doors away in rue Daunou. For some reason Lufbery had gone to Chartres and got into a fight with a railway employee because his papers weren’t in order, and spent the night in jail.

  “I just went to Chartres to see my marraine,” he explained to Fred. A marraine was a godmother. Women, some of them young and pretty and some old trouts, would agree to adopt a soldier or a flyer and write him letters and send him knitted scarves and cognac and so on. You always went to see your marraine when you went on leave. “It was worth it,” Lufbery said. “I knocke
d out one of the railway guy’s teeth.” He didn’t say what happened with the marraine.

  There was another pot of coffee but no one drank very much of it. It wasn’t a good idea to drink too much liquid, because a couple of hours later you had to get rid of it, especially if you were keyed-up and tense, and that was hard to do when you were flying a Nieuport. Norman Prince kept going to the office to use the telephone. The third or fourth time he came out walking quickly but not running, carrying his helmet by the strap. He said “Albatrosses have crossed the Rhine at Mulhouse.”

  They got up and went out, putting on their helmets and fastening them as they went. It was almost light now. The mechanics were already running down the line of Nieuports. Fred was struck with the hurrying of the mechanics and the apparent leisure of the pilots. But this was because they knew it took the mechanics thirty seconds or so to get to the Nieuports and pull the canvases off the engines, and there was no point wearing yourself out running down the line when you had to wait anyhow. At Fred’s side was Lufbery, the muscle tightening rhythmically in his cheek. “These broken clouds at about three thousand are good,” he said quietly. “You stay above them and you can spot the Albatrosses through the holes. They can’t fly that high with bombs.”

  Lufbery’s Nieuport and Fred’s were the first two in the line. Fred climbed in and settled into the cockpit, and the mechanic was turning over the prop almost before he had his harness buckled. Three or four engines started almost at once. To his right he saw Lufbery’s Nieuport moving out, throwing up dust and leaves. He opened the throttle and kicked the rudder around to the right to follow him.

  They bumped down along the taxi strip at the side. Lufbery and Fred were halfway down the field before the others began to move out of the line. When Lufbery swung around at the end to take off, Fred turned a little short of him so that the two aeroplanes were parallel and a few yards apart. Lufbery was off almost immediately. He accelerated down the field, his skid came up, the Nieuport skimmed along with one wheel on the grass for a second or two and then lifted. Fred waited impatiently for a few seconds until the rev counter steadied, then he followed him, rushing down the grass and feeling the sense of exhilaration as the skid came up and then the wheels left the ground and the bumping turned into an even soft lifting, and the hangars and the field and the other Nieuports taxiing fell away behind.