by Frank Yerby
“Fat chance you’ve got of getting away, mon ange,” Roland said fondly. “And speaking of kids, how many would you like to have?”
“About twelve, I think,” Athene said seriously. “For then, if there is another war, it would be very difficult to kill them all.”
It was the noise of Harvey Nelson’s big Buick roaring into the yard that woke Sarah up. She sat there blinking a little, squinting her grey eyes against the light.
Harvey bounced out of the roadster and came forward at a run.
“Roland,” he roared. “You old son of a gun! Heard tell you were back. Been itching to get a chance to talk to you, boy; a fellow doesn’t get a chance to talk to the greatest living ace, next to Rickenbacker, this country produced, every day in the week. Tell me, boy, just how many Germans did you shoot down? Know you were credited with fifteen or so; but I read that newspaper story where it said your score was probably more than fifty, ‘cause you wouldn’t report ‘em. Said all your victories were reported by the other fellows in your squadron.”
“Not all,” Roland said. “I reported the first eight.”
“But you did get more, didn’t you, boy? Be a sport, tell me, how many was it?”
Roland stared at him, seeing the little blue eyes behind the thick lens of his glasses, the mouth slack and greedy, waiting for this thing which would enable him to bask for an hour in reflected glory tonight, or tomorrow, at Tim’s, saying: “Got it straight from old Roland himself—him and me are like this, you know—twicet as many as Rickenbacker, more’n Lufbery and Frank Luke put together—yes, sir, home-town boy, I tell you.. .“
“I don’t know,” Roland said; “I didn’t count them.”
“Why, Roland?” Harvey gasped. “Name of God, why? You could of had every doggoned medal in the books.”
Roland looked at him, his eyes steady, unwavering, so dead still, ice-hard, that Harvey reddened to the roots of his hair.
“Oh, well,” he blustered, “reckon you had your reasons.”
“Yes,” Roland said, “I had my reasons.”
“I see,” Harvey said; but his tone was completely baffled. “I’d better warn you about something, Roland. The Mayor and a committee will probably come out here some time next week to ask you to be the principal speaker at the opening of the airport. They’re naming it Dupré Field—after Hank.”
“Oh, my God!” Roland Benton said.
4
THAT next day, for the very first time in her long life, Sarah tasted veal cutlets in a white wine sauce, with mushrooms, which it took Athene four full hours to prepare, stirring constantly over the lowest possible flame; and with that a Quiche Lorraine and side dishes of vegetables cooked in butter at very low temperatures, and very quickly, so that for the first time in ninety-six years Sarah found out what some of the things she had been eating all her life actually tasted like; tiny, golden-brown potato puffs, and afterwards, for the sweet, an assortment of pastries as light, delicate and flaky as Athene’s imaginative skill could make them.
Sarah tasted it all tentatively, then ate a good deal more than any woman her age had any business to.
“Grace,” she said to Hank’s young widow, “fix a couple of plates—a little of everything here for Cora and June. I want those niggers to taste this. Yes, right now.”
She sat there, tapping her cane on the floor. Athene watched her in puzzled dismay.
“Bring it out to the kitchen, Grace,” Sarah said.
Athene sat there, staring at Roland, after they had gone. “I am desolate!” she wailed. “I thought she was going to like it!’’
Roland caught her arm.
“Wait,” he said; “listen—now——”
“Eat it!” Sarah’s voice crackled from the kitchen. “Eat every blamed scrap of it! I want you stupid black wenches to learn what cooking—real honest-to-God good cooking—tastes like! And the next time Miz Athene tells you how to fix something—dad-blame it, you fix it thataway, or I’ll have your hides! Do you hear me?”
“Yes’m, Miz Sarah,” Cora and June chorused.
Athene jumped up from her chair and ran round behind Roland’s. She leaned forward, hugging him joyfully.
Later she took Roland’s arm, and said to him:
“Come walk with me, mon cher, down by the bayou. I have a great envy to see the moon come up.”
“All right,” Roland said.
They went down the path together like children, that same path that Tom Benton had so often followed many years before, in pursuit of Lolette, coming out on the bayou’s edge near where Louis Dupré’s shack had stood on the pilings, gone now, vanished, the last of its crumbling ruins blown away in the hurricane of 1912, the same storm that had also demolished the old Henderson house that had been the scene of so much of the long, tragic history of Bentons and Duprés—and stood there, watching the moon come up out of the bayou, filling half the sky, haunting the night birds into their wild, formless crying, pushing the dark back, illuminating the sky.
She stood there beside him, and her slim fingers on his arm quivered like violin strings; her voice, speaking, had the sound of flutes, trilling against his ear.
“Oh, Roland, mon coeur, mon adore, l’amour de ma vie, do you not see that this is insupportable—that truly I die?”
“All right,” he said harshly, “let’s go back to the house.”
“No!” she whispered, “no—not the house. Here, herewith the moonlight on us—here where it is so lovely—Roland, please.”
He drew her into his arms, feeling her mouth trembling upon his, hot and wet and sweet.
But it was no good. His body would not respond to hers, not even to the incredibly lovely sight of her slim form silvered all over with moonlight, luminous and glowing; or, perhaps, even because of that: the perfection of line itself, the soft lift of breast, the singing litheness of hip and thigh, the hollow inverted curve of her waist, becoming under that wash of moonlight a thing too ethereal, too lacking in the fleshly aspects of nakedness; that, and more, the thing that lived with him in the darkness, that came unbidden when he closed his eyes: the image of the Nieuport standing up on its nose on the tarmac, its wings crumpled around it, and the flames roaring straight up, shredding, skeletonising that fuselage, while in the midst of them that figure writhed, crying.
It was this that defeated him: that the damnable memory came always at the moment before the creation of life, as though, perversely, to block conception itself with this hideous combination of guilt and terror; but this time, happily for him, she understood how powerless he was to dominate his weakness; that the thing that lay between them was not the scar of his old encounter with Martine: nor even any diminution of his love for her, Athene; but something else again, a sickness of the spirit, a cancer devouring the very fabric of his soul.
He had tried; and he had failed. So she lay there in his arms like a moon fairy, like a small, silver Diana breathed miraculously into life by some playful god, and comforted him.
“It is nothing, you comprehend, my dear,” she whispered; “it is a kind of sickness of heart, and that can be cured. It is too bad I have not led a life of wickedness like that sale Martine so that I would know now all the secret arts and curious practices by which a woman tempts a man. Tell me, man Roland, has the good Docteur Meyers the diplôme in sychologie also?”
“Good God!” Roland said; “you think I’m nuts?”
“But yes—of course you are crazy, my love. But you are also nice. So now we must cure the craziness and keep the niceness. Does he?”
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “Good Lord, Athene—you don’t mean you’re going to him?”
“If you had the leg broken I would go to him, would I not? This is much more grave. I have a natural envy to become to you what I was the night of the Gothas. Perhaps you should divorce me.”
“Divorce you?” Roland growled.
“Yes, my poor old one. Then you could take me as a mistress. The night of the Gothas we were not
yet married, and you were absolutely formidable. So if I must be ta petite maltresse, and make enfants illegitimes of all our babies, I will do that. Is it not perhaps that you have no desire towards a mere wife?”
“You little idiot,” Roland said fondly. “All right. Damn it all to hell, Athene, if Hugo Meyers can do me any good, I’ll go to him.”
“No,” she said seriously; “let me go first. Perhaps he will give me something to make me beautiful. Or perhaps he will make for me a rendezvous with an old sorceress of the swamps who will give me a love philtre.”
“Athene, for God’s sake!”
“But I must make jokes, mon coeur. That is better than crying, is it not so?”
“Yes,” Roland said, “it is better than crying.”
She went the next morning, driving the little Chevrolet roadster that Sarah had bought them. She knew how to drive, for, among other things, she had had to drive ambulances before the end of the war. It was while she was in Doctor Meyers’s office that the Mayor’s committee came.
Roland was on horseback, with Buck riding along with him, a precaution that Sarah insisted upon, since Roland had occasional spells of dizziness—when the two cars came into the yard.
“I don’t make speeches,” he said coldly; “and the war is one thing I prefer to forget.”
“But, Roland,” they protested, “you and Hank was raised together. You flew in the same outfit and . . .”
Roland looked at them, his eyes steady, dead level, still.
“Good day, gentlemen,” he said, and rode away from there.
He and Buck cantered their mounts through the pine wood. “So you came back, after all,” he said to Buck. “Thought you said you were going to stay in Paris.”
“I tried to,” Buck said sadly; “but they wouldn’t let me.”
“Not even that nigger-loving son of a bitch of a captain you were so buddy-buddy with?” Roland mocked.
“Cap’n Ross? He would of, but it wasn’t in his hands. ‘Sides, Mister Roland, you shouldn’t hold hard feelings against him. After all, you jumped him. And he wasn’t doing you no harm. All he was aiming to do was to get what he paid for.”
“I,” Hugo Meyers said heavily, “didn’t study psychology or psychiatry, Mrs. Benton. It’s true I went to school in Vienna; but my knowledge of those subjects is rudimentary at best. Still, I’m going to have a whack at this. Amazing! A Benton—Lord God, that’s the last thing I would have ever believed. I don’t want to talk to Roland just yet. I want to interview Mrs. Sarah, without letting on to what I’m driving at. You, of course. And Grace Dupré. It’ll make a picture. I’ve a hunch that you’re entirely correct in your belief that this business is connected with Hank’s death. You say he won’t talk about it. But from all the psychiatry I picked up around Vienna, that’s precisely what we’ll have to make him do—talk it out of his system. I’ll do all I can, Mrs. Benton.”
“And I shall be eternally grateful to you if you do,” Athene said.
Hugo Meyers was a man of warm human sympathies and keen intelligence. The problem intrigued him, lifted him out of the humdrum routine of his usual practice. To be called upon to aid the beautiful princess in distress—and she’s pretty damned near a princess at that, he thought, a viscountess, 1 hear tell—the exceedingly astonishing nature of her distress, considering her indisputable attractiveness, and the fact that she was married to the last of that line whose amatory prowess was a local legend, all this excited him, gave new zest to his rather sad existence.
He worked at it as hard as he had ever worked at anything in his life. But by the end of the month he had come up hard against a blank wall, through which the only means of penetration rested in the co-operation of Roland Benton himself. That wall was whatever had happened on June 10, 1918.
He knew certain pertinent facts: On May 5, Roland Benton, Quentin Longwood, and Bertrand Nichols had been transferred from Escadrille M.S. 156 of the French Corps d’Aviation to the Ninety-fourth Pursuit Squadron of the United States Army Air Force—at their own request; Roland, at least, being influenced, Doctor Meyers was sure, by his knowledge that Hank Dupré was a pilot in that squadron. They had been able to perform this double miracle, considering how the military mind usually works, by reason of the fact that the story of their valour both as individuals and as a team, had preceded them; and also because of the extraordinary circumstance that the officer in charge of such transfers was a son of a Confederate officer who had fought in the same company as Randy McGregor in the Civil War, while he, the officer himself, had slogged through the heat and dust and insects and weariness of the campaign in Cuba side by side with a young sergeant named Nathan Forrest Benton. So their transfer went through in three months, which was probably a world’s record for getting this kind of action out of any army whatsoever.
On June 10, Bertie Nichols had been killed in action, shot down in flames above the lines. And on the completion of that same flight Hank Dupré had crashed in landing his shot-up machine, and died, because, being already badly wounded, he had been unable to get out of it before it burned.
Those were the bare facts. But what did they mean? What was the significance of them, as related to Roland Benton? That was where Hugo Meyers met his blank wall.
“I can’t talk about it,” Roland said. “I mean it—I really can’t.”
And nothing Doctor Meyers could say would budge him from that stand.
But Hugo Meyers was a patient man—a man with great persistence. He came at last to the edge of the bayou on that frosty morning of February 6, 1920; which, too, became an important date in the history of the Bentons, perhaps the most important of all, for it was then that the balance was swung in favour of their continued existence among men. But before that, Doctor Meyers had collected from Sarah, Athene, Grace Dupré, even from Patricia by mail from New York, three little vignettes so astonishing that they troubled his scientific conscience; but so completely in agreement that in the end he had humbly recorded them.
Some time during the night of June io, 1918, Athene du Bousquier had awakened in her bare little room in the nurses’ quarters of the American Hospital at Neuilly. She was surprised to find that her face was wet with tears. She lay there in the darkness, crying, and she could not stop. It’s Roland, she thought; cher bon Dieu, please don’t let it be—it’s only a dream I’ve had, a nightmare, is it not so? Chère Sainte Vierge, help him; he’s all I have now—the bravest and the finest and the best.
She put up her hand and took down the rosary which hung above her bed. She began to tell the beads very rapidly, saying the Ave Marias first:
“Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women, blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death—Amen.”
And after that the paternosters. But it was no good. She lay there fingering the beads until the dawn came greying in from the east, over the sleeping roofs of Paris, and her eyes were so swollen from crying she could hardly open them.
At the same hour of the same night, half-way across the world, Grace Dupré heard a sound coming from Sarah’s room. She had been living at Broad Acres, at Hank’s request, ever since they had come back from their brief honeymoon. She had taken wonderfully good care of the old woman, and had learned to love her with the same devotion that all the Bentons and the Duprés did. So now, hearing the sound, she ran robeless and slipperless down the hall and pushed open the door.
Sarah was on the floor, kneeling beside her bed. She knelt there, praying.
“Save ‘em, Lord,” she said loudly, clearly, “save both my boys. Don’t ask me to make a choice between them. You wake me from my sleep and you tell me one of ‘em’s going to die—and then You leave me not knowing which one. It don’t matter, Lord. I love ‘em both. They’re both my boys.”
“Mother Sarah,” Grace got out, “what’s the matter? Dear Lord, you frightened me! Have you been dreaming?”
Sarah turned
her ancient, regal head.
“Amen. Lord,” she said; then: “Help me up, child.”
Grace’s voice was shrill now, edged with terror.
“What is it, Mother Sarah?” she said. “What did you dream?”
“Didn’t dream,” Sarah said flatly. “Was lying right here wide awake when I saw it—”
“But what did you see?” Grace whispered.
“An aeroplane—on fire and falling. Just like a shooting star. It was a little bit of an aeroplane and there wasn’t but one man in it. Couldn’t see who it was. But it was one of my boys—”
“Roland—or—Hank,” Grace said.
“Don’t know. Help me into bed like a good girl. That’s a dear. Now don’t go worrying your pretty head. Just an old woman’s bad nerves, I reckon. Besides, I’ve already took it up with the Lord.”
Grace Dupré went back to her room. But she didn’t sleep. She sat by the window, listening to the cry of the night birds. Then the dark began to run out of the sky, and the birds of dawn started twittering. Grace didn’t move. She sat there, staring down towards the river, where the mists had caught the sun.
Before the sun was up, Patricia Dupré came down the stairs of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva and walked along the Quai du Mont Blanc. Lac Leman was shrouded in haze, and the lake steamers tied up along the quai ready to receive the morning passengers for Lausanne were ghostly white in the mist.
It was still cold in Switzerland, so she pushed her hands deeper into her fur muff and walked faster. Jeb was still sleeping, poor dear. Being assistant director in charge of the financing of more than three hundred French orphans was a task, especially since O’Conner left nearly all the work for him to do. Still, it was a good task—one that needed to be done.
She wondered how she was going to like living in New York after the war was finally over. She hadn’t known very many Yankees, but Martin O’Conner, Jeb’s boss, was very nice. He and Jeb had got on famously from the beginning. But it was Jeb’s indisputable abilities, not his winning personality, that had made O’Conner offer him the position of Executive Vice-President of O’Conner Enterprises, Incorporated. Martin O’Conner liked Jeb, liked him—and that counted in business—but he was, after all, a hard-headed business man.
