Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Martine!” he called; and she turned. But the soldier with her turned, too, and Roland saw that he wore the uniform of the American Army with the fortress insignia of the Engineers.

  “The lady’s busy, Captain,” the soldier said.

  “I didn’t ask you,” Roland said flatly. “Martine, in the name of—”

  “Run along, Reb,” the soldier said in the nasal twang of a New Englander. “Go on—blow; get lost.”

  “You bastard,” Roland said, and bored in.

  “Stand back, Johnny Reb,” the soldier grinned; “that war’s over. Take it easy, chum.”

  “I’m no chum of yours,” Roland spat, and came on in, swinging.

  The soldier dropped Martine’s arm, feinted with his left, pivoting on the ball of his foot, leaning with the beautifully-timed, perfectly-executed right cross, and the sky fell on Roland Benton’s head.

  When Roland came out of it they had already moved off, fifteen yards down the sidewalk. He got up, doggedly shaking his head, and started after them. The soldier turned again and faced him, saying patiently:

  “Go home, Captain. Get some sleep. I haven’t a damned thing against you personally. Just leave us alone. But keep this up and you’re going to get hurt.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Roland whispered, and swung.

  The soldier stepped inside his swing and put a left jab into his stomach, doubling him up, drawing his right back to finish it, when the coloured soldier stepped in between them.

  “Leave him be, Cap’n Ross,” the coloured soldier said; “I know him. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “You sure have some damned peculiar friends,” Captain Ross said. “Okay, Buck, just keep him quiet. Take him wherever he’s going. Don’t see how you coloured boys ever stood it—can’t teach them a damned thing—not even in Paris. Come on, bébé——”

  “You’re strong,” Martine laughed, “so very strong! I like for a man to be strong, eh, mon cher?”

  “You can say that again, bébé,” the red-haired captain said.

  Buck stood there supporting Roland, while he held his middle and threw up in the gutter.

  “Take it easy, Mister Roland,” he said. “Oughtn’t to go picking fights with strange cap’ns. That one there is the light-heavyweight champeen of the whole division—been fighting in the ring since he was fourteen years old. You did fine, considering . . .”

  Roland looked at him. His belly felt like it had been sawed in half.

  “That girl,” he grated; “she—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about Martine,” Buck said calmly. “Everybody knows about her. She ain’t nothing but a whore.”

  “Jesus!” Roland breathed.

  “Look, Mister Roland, take it easy. Ain’t no call to git yourself upset over nothing. You just got to change your way of thinking, leas’wise while you’re over here. As Cap’n Ross said, this here is Paris, not Louisiana. You ain’t exactly top dog over here, if you’ll ‘scuse me for saying it. So play it cool—it’s just for the duration. When it’s over you can go back to Benton’s Row and be Mister Big, sit on the front porch with your feet on the banisters, and whip yourself a nigger every morning for breakfast.”

  Roland looked at Buck.

  “And you?” he growled.

  “Oh, me?” Buck said. “I ain’t never going back, Mister Roland. You see, over here—I been free—”

  They moved along the trottoir towards the quai, Buck holding Roland up. It was a long way to the Rue Raynouard, and there weren’t any taxis; but Buck hailed a horse-drawn delivery wagon, and after a long discussion, and the payment of two hundred francs (Roland’s, not Buck’s), they moved off along the quai, going finally across the Pont d’Iena into the Trocadero, and out by the Boulevard Delessert into Raynouard.

  Roland slept peacefully all the way. When Buck roused him, he climbed down by himself. The ex-prize-fighter had rendered him a service by making him rid himself of the cognac and the food which his weakened stomach would never have been able to handle. He felt light-headed and weak: but other than that, he was all right—until he tried to walk. Then he staggered so dizzily that Buck put an arm around his shoulders again.

  The bell rang a long time. Then the light of the hall came on, and a slim figure in a nightgown and robe opened the door. Too slim and too young to be his Aunt Stormy.

  “It’s okay, soldier, I will take care of him now,” Athene du Bousquier said.

  “I always stay here with your Aunt Stormy when I get my permissions,” Athene said, as she knelt beside the bed, bathing his swollen face. “You see, I have not any longer any relatives in Paris. The last of my cousins left with the shelling of the city by the long-range gun they call la grosse Berthe; and now—”

  The sound rode in upon them, shrill, demented, terrible.

  Roland sat up, staring at her.

  “It is only the alerte, mon coeur,” she said. “It means that the Gothas have come again. I knew they would; always do when there is a moon. But now we must put out the light.”

  “Stay,” Roland said thickly.

  “Yes,” Athene said; “I shall stay. I will come to you, for I have seen the way that you will die. And you must not die without having been mine—without my having also been yours. This is just and no longer grave; for le bon Dieu has taken from us the long years of life. But He cannot take everything from us, can He, Roland?”

  “No, Athene,” Roland Benton said.

  But later, in the darkness, she heard him crying, his voice choked, saying:

  “Those Goddamned Fokkers. Hank, I tried. Bertie’s dead, too—Bertie’s dead, Hank, because only the Boche know how to build aircraft, and these murderous crates they give us— Hank, I tried. You know I tried, Hank. Only a Nieuport isn’t good enough. Nothing we’ve got is good enough, and then Mono wouldn’t let me shoot you and stop you from suffering like that, Hank-boy. He wouldn’t let me, so you died and Bertie died and Tom Cartwright died, and I who killed all three of you stay alive with my half gut and my Benton pride—dear God!”

  First in the morning, Stormy Benton Rafflin opened the door of the guest-room, and found them there, locked in each other’s arms, their faces in sleep soft and peaceful and innocent, like the faces of children. She stood there looking at him. Then she went out again, and closed the door very quietly behind her. Old as she was, Stormy had not forgotten her youth.

  “I was born in Stuttgart,” Hugo Meyers said heavily. “This war has made me sad—that Belgian business, the submarines, the bombings—and this thing you tell me about machine-gunning the parachutists.”

  Roland looked at him.

  “Both sides did ugly things, Hugo,” he said. “Evil or good is not the exclusive possession of any one nation. I’m sitting here now because of one decent German, a Bavarian chap named Otto von Beltcher. After I got back from the leave in Paris they made me take, because I was cracking up, I found they’d finally given us Spads. On a Spad you had a chance, because it was a good, sound aircraft. So I managed to live until the cease-fire, mostly by running like hell. I wasn’t scared, that is, not any more scared than I’d been all the time; but I’d promised Athene I’d come back to her. I had an obligation to keep my word. She’d suffered enough. And now that I knew she loved me . . .”

  “I quite understand,” Doctor Meyers said.

  “Anyhow, I met Otto von Beltcher on the morning of November tenth, Hugo—one day before the Armistice was to be signed. I was flying alone at twenty thousand feet, when he came walking up on me in a spanking new Siemens-Schuckert D-4, all white except for the wing-tips and the tail, which were painted blue. And I had had it. I knew better than to try to run, because those D-4s could almost literally fly rings around a Spad. That’s what we were up against during most of the war, Hugo, that immense technical superiority of German engineering. So I fought him. He was as good a flyer as I was, and his machine was so damned much better. We started that combat at twenty thousand and finished it at tree-top level, with him sitting
there on my tail with me lined up perfectly in his sights. I remember yelling: ‘Shoot, you Hun bastard, and get it over with!’ ”

  “And then?”

  “I looked back, and he wasn’t there any more. I looked around for him, and there he was just off my left wing-tip, with not five metres separating our wings. I could see his face clearly. He was the beefy type, with a red face, and he had pushed up his goggles and was sitting there grinning at me. Then he saluted me, and pulled that little hornet up in a corkscrew spiral that would have pulled the wings off even a Spad. I just sat there watching him go. He was out of sight in three minutes, heading towards his own lines.”

  Hugo Meyers rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them.

  “Thanks, Roland,” he said.

  “That’s not the whole story,” Roland said. “I knew where he came from, because of the blue wing-tips and tail on his machine. Those were the colours of Udet’s Staffel, the Bavarian Blues. So when the shooting stopped at eleven o’clock that next morning, I flew across the lines and landed on their ‘drome. Otto and I, and all those boys I had been trying my damnedest to kill a few days before, got drunker than coots together. Fine fellow, Otto. He was an engineer before the war. Reminded me a lot of Mono, though they didn’t look alike.”

  Doctor Meyers stood up. “I’ll walk you home,” he said. “I’ve got the picture now—I think. You blame yourself for the death of Hank and Bertie. But I’ll be blessed if I see why.”

  Roland laid the opened shotgun across the crook of his arm.

  “When I was put to the test, Hugo,” he said, “I failed. There are many kinds of courage. We Bentons have always had plenty of the wrong kind. I shot down in all probability damned near as many aircraft as Richthofen or René Fonck— I truly don’t know how many, because I’d formed this complete mental block against counting them. But it isn’t a thing I’m proud of. But when it came to the right kind of guts—the kind which allows a man even to run away with honour, if need be, I failed.”

  “Maybe I’m thick; but still—”

  “Those parachutists were dead, Hugo. There wasn’t a damned thing that any of us could do for them. But I acted with childish anger, instead of with the sober judgment of a man. I took four murderous crates, of a type which had been known to come apart in the air while flying straight and level at cruising speed, down against a crack outfit mounted on some of the most wickedly efficient fighter aircraft ever designed, into an action which could have been avoided, and under the circumstances should have been.

  “Men die in war. Sometimes they die badly, and sometimes well. Those balloonists’ deaths were an act of murder—all right. But men always die with complete impersonality. For me to make a personal issue of it was the act of a child. And, having done it, to involve the rest of my flight in it was an act of idiotic criminality. I should have gone down alone—or hunted up that Fokker group when I had enough men behind me to tangle with them on something like even terms. As a result, Bertie and Hank were killed—by my hand, as surely as if I had held a pistol to their heads.”

  “Tell me one other thing, Roland,” Hugo Meyers said: “when did this business of—impotence start? Athene says you weren’t always like that.”

  “After we were married. We went up to the hospital at Neuilly to see Mono—he’d got the hell shot out of him by a flight of Fokker D-8 monoplanes, a week before the Armistice, largely because he was so busy admiring the sight of full-cantilever, tapered monoplane wings, unsupported by either struts or wires, which nevertheless stayed on, that he didn’t fire a shot. And we ran into my old colonel from M.S. 156, Colonel d’Avoville. He was there visiting a wounded pilot. He invited me to come to le Bourget to see the new machines that we would have gotten if the war had lasted long enough. So we had lunch with him and went.”

  “And?”

  “And a test pilot pulled the wings off a Nieuport monoplane right before our eyes, fought it down with half a wing left, and crashed fifteen yards from where we were standing. He burned to death. Like Hank. That did it.”

  “I see,” Doctor Meyers said. He was turning it all over in his mind. And when he had it, he said it. He turned upon Roland, his round face working.

  “You damned arrogant son of a Benton!” he roared. “This is what’s eating you? This is why you’ve deprived that poor child of the right of being a wife? Mister Roland Benton God. Judge, jury and executioner. If I were young enough and strong enough to lick you, I’d kick your behind so hard your tail-bone would break your back teeth!”

  Roland stood there, staring at him.

  “Did you design those bloody machines? I ask you, did you?”

  “No,” Roland said, “but—”

  “Did you order anybody to fly them? No, by God! All you did was to take them down into a fight where you were outnumbered more than two to one. You fought in the air for two years. Tell me, you arrogant bastard, didn’t you ever fight against greater odds—you yourself, alone?”

  Roland frowned.

  “Why, yes—several times. A week before we were transferred, I dropped into a flight of Pfaltzes—eighteen of them, shot down the leader and got clean away. But I was flying a Morane Saulnier, which was so tiny that they couldn’t see me, and was faster than anything the Germans had. And besides, it was my neck . . .”

  “Think, boy. Your only mistake consisted of acting upon a very normal human impulse, one of the nobler ones at that—a sense of outraged justice. If you want to accept the responsibility of that mistake, all right. But as for your friends getting killed, you have to at least share that guilt with that poor bastard of an engineer who didn’t know how to design an aircraft whose wings would stay on, that wouldn’t keep from catching fire in the air, and so on—and I feel sorry for him because the ghosts of the boys he killed by his helpless ignorance must haunt him. I say helpless because there didn’t exist then, and only half-way exists now, a true science of aeronautics. It’s like medicine—God, the numbers we murdered before we half learned what we’re doing!”

  “Well,” Roland murmured, “maybe—”

  “Maybe, hell! You have to share it with him, and even more with the—what did you call him? Oh yes! With the glory-hungry swivel-chair pilot who accepted for American boys aircraft which the French, who at least knew a little something about aeroplanes, had condemned. You haven’t even mentioned that other poor boy who was killed—Tom something or other—because he died in a more routine fashion. But damn it to hell, Roland, no man’s death is routine to him and to those who love him. Any man who joins the army in war-time accepts at least in principle his own death. But I cannot accept your right to arrogate what are after all the privileges of fate, destiny, God. The unbelievable cheek it takes to decide that you, you, Roland Benton, caused anybody’s death—even in the final analysis those of the German pilots you killed. You were just an instrument; and they, I insist, damn it, were dead the minute Austria handed that ultimatum to Serbia, just as Hank, Bertie Nichols, and that other boy were dead the instant that Congress declared war.

  “You bloody Bentons have always ruined yourselves by your pride. And you’re the worst of the lot. Come off of it Roland! Start living, boy. If you have to do something to appease your over-developed conscience, why don’t you take a job with an aircraft company, and give them the benefit of your experience, so that the next generation of fighter pilots won’t be killed by their own machines? That’s constructive thinking. The past is finished. All you’ve got is the future. Use it.”

  Roland stood there, looking at him, and his eyes were very clear and very peaceful.

  “Thanks, Hugo,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me,” Doctor Meyers snorted. “Thank God!”

  5

  BY the time they got back to the house, Athene was sitting by the fire-place, listening to Sarah’s endless re-telling of the history of the Bentons:

  “I was the most mixed-up young woman you ever did see, child. Tom’s poison-meanness had got me real disgusted
with him; but, I realise now I was still in love with him. And there Randy was—a-looking at me with those big, sad eyes of his’n. . . .”

  The door opened, and Roland and Doctor Meyers came in. Athene looked up, seeing Roland’s face with the firelight flickering over it. She started to kiss him, and it was then that she saw his eyes.

  “Roland!” she breathed. “Oh, my love . . .”

  “You’ll excuse us, Grandmère—Docteur?” she said. “I wish to have a little word with my husband.”

  “Of course, child,” Sarah said.

  Hugo Meyers didn’t say anything. He just sat there, staring into the fire and smiling.

  Outside in the hall Athene caught both Roland’s hands. She went up to tiptoe, peering into his face.

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “yes, love—I’m cured.”

  “Oh!” she breathed, and kissed him. She stepped back, staring at him. Then she laughed gaily—like a child.

  “Come!” she said. “Oh, Roland, come!”

  “But it’s day-time,” Roland protested mildly.

  “That makes nothing!” she laughed. “It will be night and again day-time and again night before I turn you loose! A week, perhaps! Ah, but what a tired old cabbage you’re going to be, mon Roland—come!”

  Then she was off down the hall, laughing, holding on to his hand, dragging him along behind her.

  “Now what on earth has got into those children?” Sarah said.

  “Youth,” Hugo said. “Leave them be, Mrs. Sarah.”

  But it was the very next afternoon that Quentin Longwood came.

  He got down from the truck that the beefy, red-faced man in the ill-fitting clothes was driving, and came hopping towards the veranda on two canes, looking for all the world like some curious, elongated species of bird. Roland stood up at the sight of him, and Athene too; neither of them recognising him at first—and everybody there, Sarah, Grace Dupré, and Harvey Nelson, to whom Grace was now openly engaged, jumped at Roland’s deep-voiced roar: