The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘You people could be a lot worse.’

  ‘We try. I know how dense we must seem to you sometimes. But we do try.’

  The Major’s whispered wrath boiled up again.

  ‘By God, you do! Look at the trouble you go to just to get us mail! How’s that for administration? And what’s the good of it, sir? What’s the good of it?’

  The exasperated exclamation was odd and revealing. The Major might well have asked what was the good of writing home when you were not allowed to say a word of what you were doing, and what you were seeing or how you lived. But to complain that he could still receive letters! Trouble at home, probably.

  Callender made an opening move.

  ‘What did you do in peace-time?’

  ‘Me? Cotton.’

  The Major’s brusque reply called up a picture of some hardheaded north-countryman for whom bales of cotton had taken the place of human faces. He offered no details of what he did with his cotton—possibly moved it from hither to yon with solid accuracy and by unexpected routes. Certainly the quicksilver dealings of merchants and brokers were not for him.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you if I—when I get back?’ the Brigadier asked, trying again.

  ‘Yes. Find out who writes letters marked OOA/117/42/K and have him dropped in the drink.’

  Callender recognised OOA as originating from the Pay Department. That the Major should be annoyed at some obtuseness in dealing with his pay and allowances was not surprising.

  ‘I’ll look into that, of course,’ he smiled. ‘But I meant—well, more private troubles. For example, if there’s anything which can only be handled by a—’ the Major’s cold eyes were embarrassing—‘by a personal friend, would it be any help if I were to ask him to lunch?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ said the Major bluntly.

  A devastating, almost cynical reply. But to the point. Nine-tenths of army misery were due to helpless inability to deal with the problems of wife and children. Still, there were enough other pitiable human complexities. The Major seemed to ignore them altogether.

  At blessed last it was night. The Major led his party over the ridge and down into the broad, cultivated valley beyond—very slowly, of course, but without any marked hesitation. The unseen pattern of fords and field paths ahead of them did not seem to share the mountain silence, but it was impossible to pin-point a definite sound.

  The second-in-command felt his way from the rear up the single file of unhurried, carefully stepping men.

  ‘I imagine they’ll be holding the Ktipito track in force, sir.’

  ‘I have no use for imagination,’ the Major snapped. ‘I like to know.’

  The boy was only a shadow on the night, but Callender could see from his cheerful bearing that he did not resent the snub. All of them were accustomed to the Teutonic lack of frivolity in their leader’s mind. In a way it was a guarantee for his understanding of the enemy.

  ‘I’m going on until I bump into them,’ the Major added.

  Callender’s staff training leaped to his lips in protest. But on second thoughts the Major was right. Reconnoitring was impossible. He could not separate his command or he’d never see half of them again. The fact was that the man had the ideal character for movement in the dark. Night manœuvres would not go wrong if the leader were so unimaginative that he never thought a tree-stump was a man, so stolid that he never hesitated as to which of two half-glimpsed tracks was right when he knew perfectly well in daylight which was right.

  At the crossing of the main road they did bump into the enemy—if you could call it a bump when you saw him first and merely waited interminably for him to go away. The Major did not even pay him the compliment of lying down. He sat primly with his back against a fig-tree. His whole familiar attitude suggested that if there had been light for writing he would have opened his brief-case. That his mind worked on the correspondence was certain.

  When movement was safe and road crossed, the ground began to rise and again there was stone underfoot. The enemy was not so silent, not so sure as they that darkness was an ally. The Major, leading, bumped in person. His commando knife—which Callender so disliked on indents for its air of flamboyant self-consciousness—was effective. So was the drill, even to the catching of the lieutenant’s body as he fell. He was elderly. He should not have turned out so conscientiously for this kind of duty. He should not have visited his posts alone.

  The Brigadier never knew what else they passed on the Ktipito track. He doubted if any of them did. But the point which mattered was that whatever existed outside the twenty-yard range of their exceptional night sight had been passed—and the Major, on any less familiar route, could never have been sure of that.

  At dawn they were among the high rocks where even Greeks did not try to scratch the pockets of soil and even the angriest of German commanders could perceive that search for them would be fruitless. A Greek guide and a mule were there already. The guide had laid out the rations and wine as if for a picnic. He had astonishingly provided a white table-cloth. It was his personal gesture of hospitality.

  ‘I’ll send you back with him after breakfast,’ the Major said to Callender. ‘We shall wait.’

  Waiting again? How could he endure it? And it wasn’t just for rest. The night march, though it included some tough climbing, had been welcome even to the middle-aged Callender after the interminable motionless hours. No, that Napoleonic Major had decided to wait a day or two just to find out what steps the enemy had in fact taken, just to avoid guesswork and impatience if ever they undertook a second operation in those valleys.

  After breakfast some slept, some smoked. The Major, of course, did not smoke. He took out his brief-case, scrubbed off as well as might be a dark stain on the leather and set to work.

  ‘I can take the mail,’ Callender offered.

  ‘It’s all ready for you at our headquarters.’

  ‘Nothing urgent—here?’

  ‘Urgent?’ the Major barked, the harshness of strain in his exasperated voice. ‘No, nothing urgent!’

  He hauled a pile of official correspondence from that precious brief-case and slammed it on the baked ground in front of Callender.

  The Brigadier noticed that the case was left empty. There was no bottle of tablets. Not even a photograph. Not even a letter in a woman’s handwriting.

  ‘That’s all?’ he asked, in spite of himself.

  ‘All? Good God, the bloody file’s an inch thick!’

  It was. Neatly pinned together and indexed were carbon copies of the Major’s pencilled letters to the Pay Department and their formal replies.

  ‘They owe me twenty-nine pounds, seventeen shillings,’ said the Major, ‘and I am going to get it.’

  The gist of the correspondence was clear at once to Callender’s practised eye. Twenty-nine pounds seventeen shillings had been knocked off the Major’s pay for the simple bureaucratic reason that he had spent the money and not accounted for it. Nobody, however, expected the details of expenditure from secret funds to be precisely entered. The Major had merely to write out a voucher, sign it and get it countersigned by his commanding officer.

  But that was not the Major’s style. He derided the Pay Department. He parodied their formalities and their references. His bitter incoherence was such that OOA/117/42/K had himself become affected, and caught the ungraciousness of his correspondent.

  ‘You see, sir! All my spare time taken up writing to those—’

  The Major let loose upon the Pay a string of oaths so sincere that they had the sting of ecclesiastical curses. Callender vaguely perceived that they were directed to the wrong address. The Pay was eminently cursable. It wasn’t much good to curse the enemy or the brutality of killing or the never-ending responsibility for the lives of sixteen men and a host of civilian helpers.

  OOA/117/42/K did partly deserve the fury which he had invoked. He had allowed himself to lose sight of the point, and the result was complicated verbiage. Callender, when h
e returned to his office, could straighten out the Major’s problem in three minutes on the telephone.

  He was about to say so, opened his mouth—and shut it. It would be cruelly unintelligent to deprive the Major of his grievance. If the drafting, the filing, the absurd indexing of this correspondence were ended, what recreation would be left, to support the tormented hours of waiting, for a man who took no pleasure in his fellows or himself, wouldn’t talk and didn’t read?

  ‘There is no way for me to interfere in a financial matter of this sort,’ he said gently. ‘But they’ll see sense in the end if you go on trying to settle it yourself by letter.’

  As Best He Can

  ‘WE are safe here, Dominique?’

  ‘Quite safe, mon commandant. The Boches never move outside their camp at night. Why should they? Our women are loyal. And there is nothing else to do in these sand dunes.’

  ‘All the same, you’re taking a risk with that light.’

  ‘It cannot be seen. We are down in a hollow, and my pickets are out all round us.’

  ‘And no Boches on the beach?’

  ‘They are forbidden to walk on the beach after dark. It might not be healthy.’

  ‘But the relations of your district with the camp are correct?’

  ‘Quite correct, mon commandant. If anything happens, we are careful that it should appear an accident. The Boches have altogether forgotten that we are Frenchmen.’

  ‘They find too many collaborators.’

  ‘Some. It’s inevitable. But all are harmless, except this prisoner with whom I wish the court to deal. He could betray us if he wished.’

  ‘It is a question of the death sentence?’

  ‘That is for the court to decide, mon commandant. Hitherto Dumetrier has refused to give any explanation of his behaviour.’

  ‘I see. Well, Dominique, my colleagues and I are ready if you will bring him before us. … But he’s a fine-looking type! … One would be sure of getting a decent bottle at his establishment. … Your name?’

  ‘Louis Alphonse Dumetrier. And yours?’

  ‘You may address me as the President of the Court.’

  ‘Very well, M. le président.’

  ‘Your occupation?’

  ‘Café proprietor.’

  ‘Have you any objection to the court?’

  ‘Not the slightest, M. le président—except that it is held in the middle of the night when a businessman like myself should be asleep.’

  ‘You can be put to sleep for a very long time, mon vieux.’

  ‘In that case may I request you to see that they do not make a mess of it as they did when poor Charles Yonne had an accident with his gun in passing through a hedge?’

  ‘You are well informed, Dumetrier.’

  ‘A café proprietor overhears much, M. le président.’

  ‘Therefore his loyalty must be beyond question.’

  ‘Agreed, M. le président. But when a man has a wife and children his loyalty should not be too obviously beyond question.’

  ‘Do you think then that we of the Resistance have not wives and children?’

  ‘There is no need for excitement. Each of us serves as best he can.’

  ‘Dumetrier, it is not service to rescue enemy soldiers from the sea. M. Dominique, whose position in the Resistance you unfortunately know, demands an investigation of your motives.’

  ‘I doubt if M. Dominique has closely regarded the circumstances, M. le président.’

  ‘Very well. We know the difficulties of Frenchmen, and you will not find the court unsympathetic. Tell us a little of your life.’

  ‘What is there to tell? In the summer, before the war, I made what I could from holiday visitors. For the rest of the year, there were the regular clients—a few farmers, a few fishermen. And on fine Sundays in spring and autumn there would be parties for lunch.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Well, M. le président, as M. Dominique will have told you, I am on excellent terms with the Boches. And as I usually have a few delicacies from their army rations it makes life easier for us all.’

  ‘That is because you make a habit of trying to save them from drowning?’

  ‘Hardly a habit, M. le Président. There were only three. And a little effort impresses the Boches.’

  ‘Before the war you were commended for gallantry in saving life, I believe?’

  ‘There was no damned gallantry! It’s all a farce for a man who knows the beach as I do. Look, M. le président, our beach is safe for children who never venture out beyond the breakers, and safe for a strong swimmer who is not afraid of the current and knows how to ride his way in on top of the waves. But for young people who have been trained in swimming baths and think they know it all—there is the danger!’

  ‘There have been fatalities?’

  ‘Fewer than you would think. One is always on the watch. I am no channel swimmer, M. le président, but I know the breakers and, without exaggeration, I can do in the water what I wish.’

  ‘So the court understands. But what is incredible, Dumetrier, is that you should treat the enemy as if they were young Frenchmen on holiday. Listen to me! Do not shrug your shoulders! France is occupied, and it is no time for humanity.’

  ‘Humanity does not specially interest me, M. le président.’

  ‘What then? What then? Do you deny that on three separate occasions you have risked your life to rescue German soldiers? You do not think of your wife and children then, scum of a collaborator!’

  ‘No. When it is a question of Germans I do not think of my wife and children.’

  ‘But it is unbelievable! This animal prefers to his family some damned Boches who are in difficulties and have not the strength to get back to shore!’

  ‘I do not know whether they had the strength or not, M. le président. When strong swimmers are waiting for a wave to bring them in, it is very hard to see from the beach if they are really in trouble.’

  ‘But you were ready to assume they were!’

  ‘Oh, yes, I always assumed they were.’

  ‘And was it necessary to save them?’

  ‘I do not think it was always necessary.’

  ‘And yet you admit risking your life to bring them in!’

  ‘M. le président, I admit I brought them in. But they were none of them alive when we reached the shore.’

  Moment of Truth

  SHE begged me for it. You know how divinely exalted young women can become. Begged for a cyanide pill as though it were her right, as though I should be doing her out of a great spiritual experience if I hesitated. Men don’t behave like that at all. A man accepts the means of death without looking at it, hides it in his smallest pocket and examines it with loathing when he gets home or wherever is serving him as a home. No, martyrdom for us has no attraction—not, at any rate, for the more active type.

  You never dreamed she had that sort of past, did you? And I would not have told you, if you hadn’t made that unjust remark about her: bright and beautiful as the vicar’s daughter in a Victorian novel. Pah!

  There’s nothing artificial in her character. It’s not an attack of poise brought on by reading too many women’s magazines. Dina impresses everyone, even on first acquaintance, with her extraordinary inner happiness. It’s real, and only an unromantic mind like yours could have thought it was not. She adores her husband. Can’t see anything ordinary in him. And she is convinced that there were never such children as hers. Nothing exceptional in that, of course—except that she happens to be right. Dina is entirely without any sense of guilt; that unnecessary, unjustified sense of guilt which takes the spirit out of so many of our highly civilised women. She is in love with life and she can’t forget it.

  I suppose you know that Dina is of pure Polish blood and breeding. By 1944 there was nothing left, of all she believed in, but patriotism. War and politics had made her an orphan, and the little legacy which would have taken her through the university was reduced to nothing. So when she was abo
ut to become a charge on public funds she was shipped off from Warsaw as a foreign worker, and found herself in a factory at Dusseldorf making sights for guns. The Germans are a most extraordinary people. Can you imagine any other nation filling up their country with enemies in wartime? They couldn’t believe that Europe really disliked being conquered by nice, comfortable, honest Nazis.

  In Dina’s factory I was a very favoured person, working on special lenses. That’s a job which trains a man to infinite patience and readiness to accept disappointment. It married in with my real interest, which was to interfere in every way open to me—very minor ways—with the production of munitions. I was not suspected. The whole of my political past in Austria made me a very probable Nazi sympathiser. My reason for loathing Hitler and all that he stood for was simply good taste. That’s a motive quite outside the ken of policemen, and I didn’t go out of my way to explain it.

  Dina was reported to me as promising material. Among so many worn, shabby, still pretty girls she was inconspicuous, but she had the advantage that even in the rain and smoke of Dusseldorf you could always spot her, if you were looking for her, a long way off. I had her watched for six months before I employed her.

  I became fonder of her—in a fatherly way—than was strictly professional. She was so graceful and slight, with a corona of fair, fine curls and big brown eyes burning to shake the world, or at any rate that part of it governed by Hitler. And so very, very young. If she had been born ten years later than she was, all that emotion—well, it might have found an outlet in crazy worship of some crooner or other. As it was, she had as single a mind as a tiger cub on its first kill without the help of mother.

  I had not the heart to use her for much except messages; and once or twice, when it was reasonably safe, she accidentally left a little parcel of explosives—disguised as a packet of sandwiches, for example—in contact with a machine lathe. She had little to fear from any ordinary questioning. She could readily admit that she ran innocent errands for me.