"This business is in its infancy," smiled Fitzgerald.
"Twenty-four bombers. Suppose there'd been a thousand, with much heavier payloads?
And at that, they did get the gasworks." "Yes, sir. They got the gasworks." "How do you think it's going to go?" General Anderson said brusquely to Henry.
"Sir, I think sooner or later a couple of million men will have to land in France and fight the German army."
With an unpleasant grunt, Train Anderson touched his left shoulder.
"Land in France, hey? I landed in France in 1918. I got a German bullet through my shoulder in the Argonne. I don't know what that accomplished. Do you?"
Victor Henry did not answer.
"Okay." Train Anderson rose. "Let's be on our way, gentlemen.
Our British cousins await us." "I'll be right along," Benton said.
When the army men were gone he slapped Victor Henry's shoulder.
"Well done. These Limeys are holding the fort for us. We've got to help 'em. But Jesus God, they're not bashful in their requestsi The big crunch comes when they run out of dollars.
They can't even pay for this list of stuff, without selling their last holdings in America. What comes next? It beats me. The boss man will have to figure a way to give 'em stuff. He's a slippery customer and I guess he will.
Say, that reminds me-" He reached into a breast pocket and brought out a letter. Victor Henry, in his wife's small handwriting, was the only address on the envelope, which was much thicker than usual.
"Thank you, Admiral."
The admiral was fumbling in his pockets. 'No, there's something else. Damn, I couldn't have-no, here we are. Whew! That's a relief."
It was a White House envelope. Pug slipped both letters into his pocket.
"Say, Pug, for a gunnery officer you've painted yourself into a peculiar corner. That screwball socialist in the White House thinks a lot of you, which may or may not be a good thing. I'd better mosey along. Rhoda sounded fine when I talked to her, only a little sad."
Benton sighed and stood. "They have to put up with a lot, the gals.
Good thing she didn't know about that bomber ride. Now that you're back I sort of envy you.
But me, I'm absurdly fond of my ass, Pug. I'm not getting it shot off except in the line of duty. I commend that thought to you hereafter."
Blinker Vance took off big black-rimmed glasses and stepped out from behind his desk to throw an arm around Pug. "Say, I want to hear all about that joyride one of these days, i How did it go with the big brass?"
"All right."
"Good. There's a dispatch here for you from Bupers." He peeled a tissue off a clipboard hung on the wall, and handed it to Pug.
VICTOR HENRY DETACHED TEMPOPARY DUTY LONDON X RETURN BERLIN UNIIL RELIEVED ON OR ABOUT I NOVEMBER X THEREUPON DETACHED TO PROCEED WASMNGTON HIGHEST AIR pRioRrry X REPORT BUPERS FOR FURTHER REASSIGNMENT X Vance said, "Glad you'll be getting out of Berlin?"
"Overjoyed."
"Mought you'd be. Transportation tells me they've got a priority to Lisbon available on the fourteenth."
"Grab it." "Right." With a knowing little smile, Vance added, "Say, maybe you and that nice little Tudsbury girl can have a farewell dinner with me and Lady Maude tomorrow night." Several times Blinker had asked Victor Henry to join them for dinner.
Pug knew and liked Blinker's wife and their six children.
Avoiding a censorious tone, he had declined the invitations.
Victor Henry knew how commonplace these things were-"Wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion'-but he had not felt like endorsing Blinker's shack-up. Vance now was renewing the bid, and his smile was reminding Pug that on telephoning the flat, he had found Pamela there.
"I'll let you know, Blinker. I'll call you later."
"Fine!" Vance's grin broadened at not being turned down. "Lady Maude will be channed, and my God, Pug, she has a fabulous wine cellar."
Victor Henry returned to the bench in Grosvenor Square. The sun still shone, the flag still waved. But it was just a sticky London evening like any other. The strange brightness was out of the air.
The President's hasty pencilled scrawl was on a yellow legal sheet this time.
PugYour bracing reports have been a grand tonic that I needed.
The war news has been so bad, and now the Republicans have gone and put up a fine candidate in Wendel! Willkie! Come November, you just might be working for a new boss. Then you can slip the chain and get out to sea!
Ha hal Thank you especially for alerting us on their advanced radar. The British are sending over a scientific mission in September, with all dieit "wizard war' stuff, as Churchill calls it. Well be very sure to follow that up! There's something heartwarming about Churchill's interest in landing craft, isn't there? Actually he's right, and I've asked for a report from C.N.O. Get as much of their material as you can.
FDR Pug stuffed the vigorous scrawl in his pocket like any other note, and opened his wife's letter. It was a strange one.
She had just turned on the radio, she wrote, heard an old record of "Three O'Clock in the Morning," and burst out crying. She reminisced about their honeymoon, when they had danced so often to that song; about his long absence in 1918; about their good times in Manila and in Panama. With Palmer Kirby, who now kept a small office in New York, she had just driven up to New London to visit Byron-a glorious two-day trip through the early autumn foliage of Connecticut. Red Tully had told her that Byron was lazy in his written work, but very good in the simulator and in submarine drills. She had asked Byron about the Jewish girl.
The way he changed the subject, I think maybe all that is over.
He got a peculiar look on his face, but said nary a word.
Wouldn't that be a relief 1
YOU know that Janice is pregnant, don't you? You must have heard from them. Those kids didn't waste much time, hey? Like father like son, is all I can say! But the thought of being a GRANDMOTHERIII In a way I'm happy, but in another way it seems like the end of the world!
It would have helped a lot if you'd been here when I first got the news. It sure threw me into a spin. I'm not sure I've pulled out of it yet, but I'm trying.
Let me give you a piece of advice. The sooner you can come home, the better. I'm all right, but at the moment I could really use a HUSIBAND around.
He walked to his flat and telephoned Pamela.
"Oh, my dear," she said, "I'm so glad you called. In another quarter of an hour I'd have been gone. I talked to Uxbridge. They're being very broad-minded, If I come back tonight, all is forgiven.
They're shorthanded and they expect heavy raids. I must, I really must go back right away." "Of course you must. You're lucky you're not getting shot for desertion," Pug said, as lightly as he could. "I'm not the first offender at Uxbridge," she laughed. "A W.A.A.F has a certain emotional rope to use up, you know. But this time I've really done
He said, 'I'm ever so grateful to you."
"You're grateful?" she said. "
"Oh, God, don't you know that you've Pulled me through a very bad time? I shall get another special pass in a week, at most. Can we see each other then?" "Pam, I'm leaving day after tomorrow. Going back to Berlin for about a month or six weeks, and then home.... Hello? Pamela?"
"I'm still here. You're going day after tomorrow?"
"My orders were waiting at the embassy."
After a long pause, in which he heard her breathing, she said, "You wouldn't want me to desert for two more days and take what comes.
Would you? I'll do it."
"It's no way to win a war, Pam."
"No, it isn't, Captain. Well. This is an unexpected good-bye, then.
But good-bye it is." 'Our paths will cross again."
'Oh, no doubt. But I firmly believe that Ted's alive and is coming back. I may well be a wife next time we meet. And that will be far more proper and easy all around. All the same, today was one of the happiest of my life, and that's unchangeable now."
&
nbsp; Victor Henry was finding it difficult to go on talking. The sad, kind tones of this young voice he loved were choking his throat; and there were no words available to his rusty tongue to tell Pamela what he felt. "I'll never forget, Pamela," he said awkwardly, clearing his throat. "I'll never forget one minute of it." 'Won't you? Good.
Neither will I. Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime, don't they?
I think they do. Well! Good-bye, Captain Henry, and safe journeyings.
I hope you find all well at home."
"Good-bye, Pam. I hope Ted makes it." Her voice broke a little.
'Somebody's coming for me. Good-bye."
Fatigued but tensely awake, Victor Henry changed to civilian clothes and drifted to Fred Fearing's noisy airless hot apartment. A bomb bursting close by earlier in the week had blown in all the windows, which were blocked now with brown plywood. Fearins broadcast, describing his feelings under a shower of glass, had been a great success.
"Where's la Tudsbury?" said Fearing, handing Victor Henry a cupful of punch made of gin and some purple canned juice.
"Fighting Germans." 'Good show!" The broadcaster did a vaudeville burlesque of the British accent.
Pug sat in a corner of a dusty plush sofa under a plywood panel, watching the drinking and dancing, and wondering why he had come here.
He saw a tall young girl in a tailored red suit, with long black hair combed behind her ears, give him one glance, then another. With an uncertain smile, at once bold and wistful, the girl approached.
"HeHo there.
Would you like more punch? You look important and lonesome." "I couldn't be less important. I'd like company more than punch.
Please join me." The girl promptly sat and crossed magnificent silk-shod legs. She was prettier than Pamela, and no more than twenty.
'Let me guess. You're a general. Air Corps. They tend to be younger." "I'm just a Navy captain, a long, long way from home." "I'm Lucy Somerville. My mother would spank me for speaking first to a strange man. But everything's different in the war, isn't it?"
"I'm Captain Victor Henry."
"Captain Victor Henry. Sounds so American." She looked at him with impudent eyes. "I like Americans."
"I guess you're meeting quite a few."
"Oh, heaps. One nicer than the other." She laughed. "The bombing's perfectly horrible, but it is exciting, isn't it? Life's never been so exciting.
One never knows whether one will be able to get home at night. It makes things interesting. I know girls who take their makeup and pajamas along when they go out in the evening. And dear old Mums can't say a word!"
The girl's roguish, inviting glance told him that here probably was a random Hare of passion for the taking. Wartime London was the place, he thought; "nothing else holds fashion. But this girl was Madeline's age, and meant nothing to him; and he had just said a stodgy, cold, miserable good-bye to Pamela Tudsbury- He avoided her dancing eyes, and said something dull about the evening news. In a minute or so a strapping Army lieutenant approached and offered Lucy Somerville a drink, and she jumped up and was gone. Soon after, Pug left.
Alone in the flat, he listened to a Churchill speech and went to bed.
The last thing he did before turning out the light was to reread Rhoda's nostalgic, sentimental, and troubled letter. Something shadowy and unpleasant was there between the lines. He guessed she might be having difficulties with Madeline, though the letter did not mention the daughter's name. There was no point in dwelling on it, he thought.
He would be home in a couple of months. He fell asleep.
Rhoda had slept with Dr. Kirby on the trip to Connecticut. That was the shadowy and unpleasant thing Pug half discerned. Proverbially the cuckold is the last to know his disgrace; no suspicion crossed his mind, though Rhoda's words were incautious and revealing.
War not only forces intense new relationships; it puts old ones to the breaking stress. On the very day this paragon of faithfulness-as his Navy friends regarded him-had received his wife's letter, he had not made love to Pamela Tudsbury, mainly because the girl had decided not to bring him to it. Rhoda had fallen on the way back from New London. It had been unplanned and unforeseen. She would have recoiled from a cold blooded copulation. The back windows of the little tourist house, where she and Kirby had stopped for tea, looked out on a charming pond where swans moved among pink lily pads in a gray drizzle.
Except for the old lady who served them, they were alone in this quiet relaxing place. The visit to Byron had gone well and the countryside was beautiful. They intended to halt for an hour, then drive on to New York. They talked of their first lunch outside Berlin, of the farewell at Tempelhof Airport, of their mutual delight at seeing each other in the Waldorf. The time flowed by, their tone grew more intimate. Then Palmer Kirby said, "How wonderfully cosy this place isle Too bad we can't stay here."
And Rhoda Henry murmured, hardly believing that she was releasing the words from her mouth, "Maybe we could." Maybe we could! Three words, and a life pattern and a character dissolved. The old lady gave them a bedroom, asking no questions. Everything followed: undressing with a stranger, casting aside with her underclothes her modesty and her much-treasured rectitude, yielding to a torrent of novel sensations. To be taken by this large demanding man left her throbbing with animal pleasure. All her thoughts since then went back to that point in time, and there halted. Like a declaration of war, it drew a line across the past and started another era. The oddest aspect of this new life was that it was so much like the old one. Rhoda felt she had not really changed. She even still loved Pug. She was trying to digest all this puzzlement when she wrote to her husband. She did have twinges of silence, but she was surprised to find how bearable these were.
In New York, Rhoda and Kirby heard in bright afternoon sunshine the Churchill broadcast which Pug had listened to late at night. Rhoda had chosen well the apartment for Madeline and herself. It faced south, across low brownstones. Sunshine poured in all day through white-draped windows, into a broad living room furnished and decorated in white, peach, and apple green. Photographs of Victor Henry and the boys stood in green frames on a white piano. Few visitors failed to comment on the genteel cheerfulness of the place.
"He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame, until the vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe.... OP Puffing at his pipe, Kirby slouched in an armchair and stared at the radio. "Marvellous phrasemaker, that man."
"Do you think they'll actually hold off the Germans, Palmer?"
"What does Pug say?"
'He wrote a pessimistic letter when be first arrived there. He hasn't written again."
'Odd. He's been there a while."
"Well, I tell myself if anything had happened to him I'd have heard.
I do worry."
"Naturally."
The speech ended. She saw him glance at the watch on his hairy wrist. "When does your plane go?"
"Oh, not for a couple of hours." He turned off the radio, strolled to the windows, and looked Out- "This is not a bad view.
Radio City, the Empire State Building. Pity that apartment house blocks out the river."
"I know what you'd like right now," She said.
"What?"
"Some tea. It's that time.- Answ,ring his sudden coarse grin with a half-coy, half-brazen smile, she hurriedly added, "I really mean tea, Mr.
Palmer Kirby."
"MY favorite drink, tea. Lately, anyway."
"Don't be horrible, you! Well? Shall I make some?"
"Of course. I'd love tea."
"I suppose I should swear off it, since it was my downfall. Of all things." She walked toward the kitchen with a sexy sway. "If only I could plead baying been drunk, but I was sober as a minister's wife."
He came to the kitchen and watched her Prepare the tea. Palmer Kirby liked to watch her move around, and his eyes on her made Rhoda feel young and fetching as They sat at a low table in the sunshine and she decorously poure
d tea and passed him buttered bread. The picture could not have been more placid and respectable.
"Almost as good as the tea at Mrs. Murchison's guesthouse," Kirby said. "Almost."
"Now never mind! How long will you be in Denver?"
"Only overnight Then I have to come to Washington. Our board's going to meet with some British scientists. From the advance papers, they've got some remarkable stuff. "I'm sure they're surprising the Germans."
"So! You'll be in Washington next."
"Yes. Got a good reason to go to Washington?"
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 62
