Table of Contents
Title Page
The Darts of Cupid
Irresistibly
The Dress Rehearsal
Equality Cake
I
II
A Coffeehouse Acquaintance
The Blue Hour
Nymph & Faun
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
The Darts of Cupid
Sometimes I wondered whether he had not chosen the Merry Widow because she had crinkly red hair, freckles, a bony face, and small dark eyes, the same as he—just as people choose dogs whose masks resemble their own features. But I knew this was an idle conceit of mine. He had obviously wanted a mature, well-bred, and decorous woman for the job, and he could not have taken anyone else from our crowd, because the Merry Widow was the only one of us who, owing to a perverse whim during one phase of her life, had learned to be competent in shorthand and typing. The Merry Widow was also known as the Secretary, because she was the Brigadier General’s secretary, and the Brigadier was the only one in the Office of the Chief Surgeon, U.S. Forces, who had a personal secretary to himself. According to the law of irony, which states one thing while implying its opposite, the Merry Widow was neither merry nor a widow; she was married and grieved for her absent husband, who was doing service overseas, and in this she was the exception in our crowd, who were none of us single and had all a history of ill-starred marriage behind us.
It was fortunate for all of us women who worked in the U.S. War Office in Bathdale in those days of the war that Claudia Carter and the Merry Widow were both "old girls" of the Bathdale Ladies’ College, and had been in the same house at school. Thus, through Claudia, we were guaranteed our supply of the very best quality gossip, fresh and untainted by later distortions. The Merry Widow, sitting in the anteroom of the Brigadier General’s office, was not easily accessible; she did not take her tea break, nor was she given to dawdling in the ladies’ rest room. Yet there were certain occasions when she could be drawn into talk, because it was she who dished out the remedies for hangovers, coughs, and headaches. With the cough mixture—a sinister-hued, muddy green liquid of early Victorian vintage—she had the greatest success, because she never failed to comment, "Only a teaspoonful, mind you. It’s got real dope in it—it’s dangerous, you know. It beats me how they allow it to be sold across the counter."
In the beginning, I had made attempts to draw out the Merry Widow—like, "I say, Gwendolyn threw a frightful tantrum and weeping fit in the ladies’ rest room again. Is it true that the General took the Osborne woman to a party?" And she would reply, "Never you fear, Prescott-Clark; he’s merely widening his field of operations." This was quite witty, because he was, like most of the officers in the department, a doctor, and he was a Regular Army man, too, but it was an unsatisfactory reply, and I resigned myself, like the others in our crowd, to leaving it to Claudia, whose claims to intimate gossip were further strengthened by the fact that both she and the Merry Widow were natives of Bathdale and had remained in that town. We, the others who were employed as civilian labor in the U.S. War Office, had merely happened to be living there at the outset of the war, owing to various circumstances in our lives.
While the Merry Widow dealt with such unspectacular complaints as coughs and headaches, it was Sergeant Parsons who was called in on those dramatic occasions when it was imperative to remove grit from under the eyelid or a splinter embedded in the hand. He was the only man who was allowed to enter the ladies’ rest room, where, on an electric hot plate, he boiled his surgical implements in a tin that had once contained condensed milk. He had "golden hands" and a way of saying, "Don’t worry, ma’am. I won’t do anything yet. I’m only going to have a look-see," while adding, a few seconds later, "Here, that’s what’s been bothering you, isn’t it?" To shrieks of "It’s not possible. I never felt a thing," he would reply, "Do you want me to put it back again, to convince you?"
He was a short, narrow-chested man with graying hair, rather older than the other soldiers, with deep-set eyes of the same muddy greenish color as the cough mixture. He came from somewhere in the South—Arkansas or Texas, I think. He had a small, thin mouth, and when pondering important decisions he would compress his lips, making them still thinner. His other features were small and thin, too, as though his Creator had applied the mold in a hurried, slapdash way, intending to finish the job more thoroughly at a later date. It was not only in applying first aid that he was remarkable. In emotional upheavals, too, he was excellent— better than women friends, who found nothing better to say than, "Pull yourself together, Gwendolyn—the General is too old for you anyway," or, "Don’t be silly; no man ever is worth it," or, in an affected stage accent, "Men are deceivahs evah." Whereas the Sergeant would remark, "You women are so stupid. When will you understand that because a man prefers another girl to you it doesn’t mean that the other girl is prettier or wittier or smarter. It doesn’t mean anything at all." I thought how this was exactly the right kind of comfort for Gwendolyn, because in her case it was not a matter of sensuous desire but of vanity and ambition.
Gwendolyn was a young girl and not a part of our crowd, and the Sergeant dealt with her for soothing purposes only. He had to deal with us all the time, because he was responsible for our work and responsible to the Colonel, who was the chief of our department. He was efficient in this, too, probably because in civilian life, before the war, he had been a schoolteacher, and his manner of treating us certainly was flavored by his peacetime calling. When trouble arose, he never interfered straightaway. He approached the offending person about an hour later, for a quiet talk: "Now, ma’am, I thought you’d like to know, I used to know a little girl called Claudia—isn’t it strange? Claudia, just like you—and little Claudia never could be bothered to check over her work and always relied on other people to pull out her mistakes, although her father and mother . . . ," and thus he continued, relentlessly, toward the final catastrophe of fire or drowning, till Claudia grew suitably remorseful and promised not to be slapdash in future.
It was Sergeant Parsons, too, who improved my manner of dress: "A nice girl who works in an office, now, she doesn’t slop about in odd skirts and woollies and cardigans. She shows her respect for her work by wearing a coat and skirt and a blouse, and the blouse is always freshly laundered, and she presses her skirt every night. And a very nice girl wears shoes that match her purse, but being English she’ll call it ‘handbag.’ I thought you’d like to know."
"And how does the nice girl manage with the clothes rationing?" I asked.
The Sergeant said, "She doesn’t get herself evening dresses for parties, because that would look bad in these days of austerity, and she spends all her coupons on good tailormades and doesn’t worry, because the war will be over before her suits wear out."
He did not drink and he did not smoke. He had no favorites among us and seemed to have no friends among the army personnel, either. When we received visits from the Big Bad Wolves, he tolerated their presence without joining in the horseplay. Sergeants Kelly and Danielevski, the Big Bad Wolves, were greatly liked by us. They were a couple of highly intelligent young men who, in guarded isolation, in rooms situated at the end of a separate passage, serviced the mechanical tabulators and the coding machines, which transformed long medical histories into rows of ciphers for the records. The Wolves came to pay homage to us, to offer the incense of flattery, to bear gifts, and to spread the spirit of peace and goodwill among men. Each of them had a permanent joke, like a leitmotiv in an opera. When Kelly entered our room, he did the rounds, saying, "Do you still love me, Buttercup? Give your daddy a kiss." Danielevski displayed his "tidiness."
"Allow me, ma’am," he would say as he approached the woman nearest the door. "I perceive you have a speck of fluff on the front of your dress. May I dust it off?" and he fluttered his hand against her breast. "There, ma’am." Then, approaching the next one, "Now, you, ma’am. I perceive that you, too, happen to have a tiny speck . . . ," and by the time he had "dusted off" each of us, the office resounded with shrieks and giggles. Then the two distributed cigarettes and spilled onto our tables those flat round American sweets that look like the coins of an exotic country, and Kelly would remark, "No girl nowadays needs to go hungry, because there is always a wolf at the door." It was mainly from them I learned American army slang, like "wolf," which meant seducer of women, or "goldbricking," which meant avoiding work, or "polishing the apple," which meant currying favor.
If Sergeant Parsons tolerated these uproars, the Colonel pretended to ignore them, though he could hear them, working as he did in an office opposite ours, across the passage. I think he ignored them partly from weakness and partly from laziness and partly out of solidarity—because two of our crowd, June and Betty, were united in ties of close friendship with two officers, both doctors like himself. Claudia’s lover, whom she hoped to marry after the war, was an officer in our department, too, though, not being a doctor, he belonged to Medical Administration. He was said to be rich, and managed to look it, despite being in uniform. The Colonel contented himself to show his zeal by making us assemble from time to time with the entire staff of the department in a vast, unused ballroom, where we had to listen to talks that sounded like a course in idiomatic English for the benefit of advanced students; we were urged to pull up our socks, pull our weight, toe the line, pep up our work, show our mettle, show the stuff we were made of, and, once having seen daylight, consider this a feather in our cap.
Usually after such a talk, the Big Bad Wolves entered our office with a look of worry and preoccupation. "Ladies," one of them would announce, "the Colonel wants you to know there is just one obscure but vital point he did not touch upon . . . No, not what you think. Quiet, please . . . It has now been put down in this memorandum, which you will please read and sign and return to us." We never showed Sergeant Parsons the yellow paper slips they distributed. One, to give a sample, read, "This young lady got out of bed in the morning, put her robe and slippers on, pulled the curtains, took the cover from the parrot’s cage, and put the coffee on the boil. Then the telephone rang and a voice said, ‘Honey, I’ll be over in ten minutes.’ So the young lady takes the coffee off, draws the curtains, puts the cloth on the parrot’s cage, takes her robe and slippers off, and just as she gets back into bed she hears the parrot mutter, ‘Christ, that was a short day.’ "
When the Colonel was posted away and the new Major arrived to take his place, we all took pains to assure him how fond we had been of the Colonel and how we regretted his departure. This was untrue. It was because malice, even senseless malice, is the luxury of underlings, and we thought this an easy opportunity to distress the new Major. We were not easy to deal with. We were women, and we reveled in the knowledge that it is embarrassing for a man to be the head of a female staff. And though this was also the case with the other civilians in the Office of the Chief Surgeon, we were a choice collection of troublemakers, more unpredictable and harder to control than those in the other offices—docile young girls who would have gone into employment in any case, war or no war, and who did not feel they were doing anyone a favor by going to work. Whereas we in the medical coding department had never had to earn our living. We all had that expensive education which, being useless for monetary gain, is meant to be, like virtue, its own reward, and we had been chosen for our familiarity with medical terms. We were doctors’ wives, doctors’ widows, doctors’ divorcées. In my own case, though I was married to a nonmedical husband, I had been recruited because I had studied medicine for two years. I was by far the youngest of our crowd—twenty-four as against their forties. Yet I was accepted as a full member because I could say with the best of them, "Aren’t husbands ghastly?" and "It doesn’t matter whom you are married to—after a year, you feel like kicking him down the back stairs." I could also remark pleasantly upon the Merry Widow’s plaint of not having seen her husband for the last two years, "That won’t keep you warm in bed."
One month after I joined the U.S. War Office, my husband had been posted for service abroad. Thus we would have been apart in any case, but I had made it clear that this was a final separation, and I had given up our flat, sold the furniture, and taken up lodgings with my friend Beryl, a woman twice divorced, in a house owned and still occupied by her former lady’s maid, where we allowed ourselves to be pampered shamelessly. Apart from this comfort, there was Beryl herself, who exhorted me to keep my resolve and to be a "stiff upper lipper." She said, "Marriage is a bloody institution, and some get stuck in it, being miserable worms, and put up with it forever. The decent women have the guts to stick up for their rights and clear out."
"Yes," I said, "but clearing out doesn’t put an end to it. At night, when I can’t sleep, I go over and over all those rows and scenes we’ve had. It’s like having a mill in my brain grinding away, and I can’t find the switch to turn it off."
"I know it," said Beryl. "We all go through it. It will stop after a year."
"Do you think it’s a form of bad conscience?" I asked.
"Don’t talk rot," said Beryl. "You didn’t run away with another man. But that’s what husbands can never understand. They could understand it if you wanted to leave them because you’d fallen for someone else. What they can’t grasp is that you walk out simply because they themselves are the way they are."
I FIRST HAD a glimpse of the new Major through his half-closed door as I walked past his room. Seeing that large, square-jawed face and the strong shoulders, I would have expected him to belong to the breed of men who give a promise of impressive authority when seated and who turn out to be small, squat, and insignificant when they stand up. Then, later, I saw him walking away from me, with his back to me, down the passage, and I glanced up at the full height of the heavy-boned, magnificent physique of what the French call un homme de poids. And along with my surprise there passed through me a shudder of fear and admiration. There was no telling whether his weight would be used for protection or menace. Then there occurred to me yet a third possibility, the most likely and the least flattering of all— that he would pass by with indifference.
Two days after the new Major’s arrival, we were moved from our little room, where we had sat side by side on old benches wedged against old school desks, into the empty ballroom where we used to gather for the Colonel’s talks. We were provided with metal tables and metal chairs painted pike gray, loose-hinged for folding and stacking up. "The Major doesn’t want to stew in his office all on his little lone," Sergeant Parsons told us. "He wants to move in here with you ladies. He is pining for company."
"And what are these in aid of?" I asked, pointing to an incalculable number of stacked chairs, rising close to the walls like skeletal towers. "Is he going to sit every five minutes on a different chair, or what?"
"You’d better ask him yourself, ma’am," said the Sergeant.
On the following day, I had the answer to my query. Regimented in rows and lanes, like the beds in a nursery garden, were not only our crowd, as promised, but three more departments of sorters and checkers and filing clerks, all of whom we knew by sight only. With each group were their sergeants, like undergardeners. The Major, being head gardener, had his desk close to the first window as one came in through the door, thus having a full view of all his flowers. It was a master stroke. It was also a blow to us. Henceforward, there would be no more raids from the Big Bad Wolves, no more giggling over funny medical histories passed from hand to hand, no more poring over fashions, and no more savory tidbits read out from the newspapers. And it had been achieved without a single word of chiding.
When I returned from luncheon that day, I followed Claudia to her seat and sat
aslant the corner of her table and talked. The Major came in and sat down at his desk.
"I say, Prescott-Clark, he’s looking at us," whispered Claudia.
"Let him, Carter," I said.
"I say, Prescott-Clark, you’d better skedaddle back to your place."
"In a minute, Claudia," I said. "I’m not a maidservant who picks up the broom and the duster as soon as the master shows up."
"Come here, Miss P.," called the Major.
"What did I tell you? Now you’re in for it," said Claudia. "And he knows your name, too—that’s bad."
I went up to the Major.
"I wanted to consult you on an important question, Miss P.," he said.
"Yes, Major," I said in my most dutiful voice.
"As you know, I’m now privileged to be in charge of you ladies. My greatest worry, of course, is to know if you are happy with your work. But in your own particular case, how am I to put it? If I asked you, ‘Are you happy with your work?’ it would be a joke, wouldn’t it? So I’ll just ask you if you are happy." And he laughed loudly. I could still hear his laughter as I walked back to my place.
During the tea break, Claudia said, "How on earth did you do it? All merry laughter. And I could have sworn he’d put you on the carpet."
"He didn’t. Because there is no carpet," I said.
Later on in the afternoon, I got up, gathered two pencils, and strolled at a leisurely pace to the far end of the room, where I devoted a good deal of time to sharpening them in the machine. I had barely returned to my table when the Major called, "Come here, Miss P." For a while, he looked at me in silence, smiling. He had excellent white teeth, too small and dainty for that square-jawed face, and they gave him an air of youthful eagerness and of guilelessness.
"Efficiency above all," he said.
"Yes, Major."
"Now, I’m afraid you are falling down in efficiency. If I were in your place, I’d take one pencil to be sharpened first, then go back, pick up the other, and do the second walk. Get the idea? Bear it in mind, will you?"
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 1
