As Helen and Wils alighted from the car, Jackson ran over and began to talk of luggage and papers. Helen turned to see that Riley was at the dock with Morris, loading a steamer trunk into a crate. He waved convivially and she walked to him. Morris went to call for a sailor to help nail the crate’s lid shut while Jackson boarded the ship.
Suddenly she was there, alone with Riley.
He looked down at her. The wound around his eye was completely healed. “Glad you came, Helen. Wils would have been in a lot of trouble if we left without him.”
“I want to wish you well,” she offered.
He gave a slight laugh. “Will you congratulate me on my upcoming marriage?”
“What?” she asked, puzzled. “Marriage? To whom?”
“Edith.”
“But—”
“But what?”
She was confused. “I didn’t think you were engaged.”
“Well, it turns out that thinking will do you no good. Sometimes our choices are made for us.”
“But you don’t love Edith. You said so.”
“Helen,” he said good-naturedly, “please don’t put impediments before my fragile will. I have only belatedly found my honor, and even if belatedly, I would think that you of all people would applaud. Do you love him?” he asked, gesturing toward Wils.
“With all my heart.”
She saw the muscles in his cheek tighten. “Why?”
“He knows who I am and loves me for it. And I’m better for that.”
He sighed. “My cousin has been a prince to me, even though God knows I’ve never deserved him.”
“You saved him from Archer.”
“No. I avenged him—and I’m lucky to have gotten off for it. If I had saved him in the first place, then he wouldn’t have deserved me.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Until we meet again?” he offered.
“Godspeed, Riley,” she said and he turned away.
“Riley,” said Helen suddenly. “Be careful. France is about to fall.”
“Such lack of confidence!” he said. “I’ll straighten them out.”
She laughed as he turned and walked up the gangplank into the ship.
The boat’s bell sounded. “Hurry!” called Jackson to Wils from the ship’s deck.
Wils was suddenly at her side. “Now?” she asked.
He gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I can make it until Christmas, Helen. Can’t you?”
She nodded mutely.
Morris walked out, waving at the men. As he passed Helen and Wils on his way back to the dock, his eyes widened in surprise.
“You’re with Helen?” he asked, incredulous. He shook his head as he walked away. “Women,” they heard him mutter.
They both laughed. “I love you,” Wils said.
She nodded. “And I, you.”
“Oh, and I have something for you.” He released her and handed her an envelope. “Read it after I go.”
She gave a brave smile. Then he took one last look at her: her cheeks were ruddy, her eyes bright. But behind them he saw a look of bewilderment.
He understood. He kissed her once more, gently, then suddenly pulled away and walked to the ship. “Stay there,” he urged.
Inside the cargo hold he found a cold, cavernous room, lined with steel beams and fitted with dozen of crates for shipment.
“Wils, there’s something to eat in the main cabin,” said Riley, who was making his way to the upper deck. But Wils rushed past him to the steep steps. He held on to the thick ropes alongside the staircase and ran to the upper deck railing. There he turned and searched, and burst into a smile, seeing that she was still there. He waved furiously—unable to help himself.
The sun was fading; the sky striated in purple and navy and pink. The motion of the pier—the travelers, the crates, the stevedores, the fishermen—began to slowly recede.
He stood silently on the deck looking out to where he’d left his heart. Her skirts blew around her legs, her hair in the wind. She held to the dock’s railing as if it were an anchor, waving back. Little by little the distance grew, until he could no longer see her.
Oh God, he thought. Don’t let this happen. Not now. Let the war stop, he prayed with open eyes.
All that was beautiful was going. Like a garden that withdraws into the ground before a very long winter.
* * *
It was only time, she thought as the ship left her view. She had lived for years without him until now. Waiting a bit more could be endured. She had no choice.
She closed her eyes. Someday—someday—they’d sit idly in the same room, only a few feet apart from each other, knowing that they had forever together. She’d look up from a book and see him writing notes in the margins of his own. He would read for a bit, then come over and kiss her, eventually resuming his reading beside her. They would go to the symphony, and sit together at dinners, and drive to Maine along the rocky coast, stopping for picnics or for kisses that were no longer hurried, and no longer stolen.
They would talk of all the things under the sky and still have ever more time. But for this they would have to wait.
Helen walked back along the pier, barely noticing those pushing by her, with suitcases and anxious looks, arriving from a long journey, or eager to start one. She was numb. He was gone.
A young boy ran by and bumped her hand. The envelope fell to the ground. She quickly reached down and grabbed it.
“One moment,” she called to Seamus, still at his employer’s car. She went into the waiting room of the inspection office and sat down in an old wooden chair under the dull light of an electric lamp. She opened the envelope and found a single piece of paper.
The Watch
by Wils, for Helen
Without so much as a “By your leave” you
Changed my perfectly calibrated watch
For one that stops when you leave a room and
Won’t resume until your return. The watch
You could have kept, but you stole my breath too
And that I needed to say: “My heart was
In that watch. Keep it ’til the God of peace
Stills its motion at eternity’s edge,
And a river spirits my soul away
To the source of your smile
And the place of God’s laughter.”
* * *
Across the river, through the Square, in the Yard, and up the stairs of Hollis Hall, Professors Kuno Francke and Charles Copeland were working well into the night. They had come together once again to review the next edition of the Harvard Illustrated Magazine, a student monthly, for grammar and good judgment, of which there was little to be found between the ears of these young sops.
Francke sat on the faded divan before a warm fire in his three-piece suit, shirt still buttoned at the collar. He drank Copeland’s scotch and laughed occasionally with his friend. It was one of those rare moments in his schedule that afforded a respite from the talk of war and defending his German heritage. Copeland was not one he need explain himself to. Such people were in rare supply these days.
For such friendship, he’d come to the squalid room each month to work. He understood why Copeland didn’t move out of Hollis. The place brimmed with vigor. Yet the quarters had never been acceptable for a professor. The ceiling was too low, the bookshelves too few, and the smoke stains on the ceiling from the oil lamps untenable. But his friend could not be pried from Harvard Yard with a crowbar.
Kuno, in his less generous moments, thought it was because his friend fancied himself the heir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had once occupied that room. Even so, Copeland could keep Emerson’s books and not his plumbing, paint, or settee. Modernization could make life better. But such arguments fell on deaf ears.
Copeland sat comfortably in his chair at his desk. His tweed jacke
t and glasses fit him perfectly. The only things out of place were the ends of his mustache, which he twisted as he read through the pages.
“Balderdash! I’m not sure why we don’t just give up on these students,” he mourned. “I can’t understand how any man could make such a fool of himself on one piece of paper.”
“Who is the writer?” asked Francke, looking up.
“Peter Brooks. He writes only in the passive voice!”
“Strange,” said Francke. “I have sometimes—on rare occasions—found young Brooks to be talented—almost gifted. Obviously not in this case, though. Did he get the facts right?”
“They seem to be in order,” responded Copeland. “But you know, a broken clock—”
“Yes, yes, Charles. Right twice a day,” Francke mumbled, returning to his proofreading.
Progress was slow. A number of freshman writers had joined, and little was satisfying. They saw the same mistakes year after year, Copeland thought with ill humor. “I’m too old for this!”
“How old are you, Charles?”
“Fifty-five.”
“Bah! There have been several people as old as that.”
Copeland’s scowl at his colleague was interrupted by a knock at his door.
“What do you want?” he called in an angry tone.
“Message from President Lowell,” came a high voice.
Copeland frowned, straightened up, and answered the door. A young boy handed him an envelope and left.
The professor picked up a silver knife on his desk and opened the letter.
“Brandl has left us, Kuno.”
The German professor looked up and pursed his lips. “Prejudice begets all sorts of horrible things, many unintended and unforeseen.”
Copeland sat back down in his chair and shook his head. “Wilhelm Brandl, Godspeed,” he said quietly.
“I’ll miss Wils,” answered Francke. “Do you think he’ll return?”
Copeland looked over and shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if Harvard will change too much for him. Or how he will be changed by the war.”
“You know, Charles, I got the impression you didn’t even mind him being German.”
“Humbug! He was a gifted young man,” Copeland said, turning to his next page as he dipped his fountain pen in a well of red ink. “His last poem was a tolerable piece of work.” He began to mark up the page proof, but then stopped and looked over at the German professor. “Kuno, as you know very well, in Hollis 15 there is no north or south, nor east or west. He will always be welcome at my door.”
Part II: 1914
War
Flanders
When I tread the verge of Jordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside;
Death of deaths, and hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side.
—William Williams, 1745, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Road to Ypres
The Western Front
Monday, December 14, 1914
Noon
The quick-falling snow held no beauty for the soldiers of the newly formed Second Wiltshire Regiment. It fell from a gray sky, clinging to their boots and coats as they marched along the crowded supply road.
The snow had fallen since dawn. A thin crust barely covered the mud of the Belgian fields leading to the front. But there was enough snow to gum the wheels of trucks moving south stuffed with ammunition and food. Empty vehicles clattered back along the same narrow path, creating a magnificent traffic jam that stretched twenty miles back to the North Sea.
Soldiers trudged alongside the clogged roads through ruts and ditches filled with cold liquid mud, the uneven terrain twisting their ankles. And when they slipped they often cut themselves on road debris, or the sharp end of the spades stuffed in their packs. Riley had cut his ear three miles back when he fell, banging his head against a pallet of metal ammunition boxes that were being unloaded from a truck. The frigid air made it throb.
Lieutenant Rhyland Cabot Spencer marched south with his platoon, bespattered, cold, and quiet. A broken lorry had forced them to dismount and walk along the crowded road starting five miles back. Although an officer, he had chosen to do as his captain did, and carry the same burden as the enlisted men: sixty-one pounds of shovel, bayonet, compass, mess tin, canteen, maps, flashlight, rations, clothing, ammunition, pack, pistol, and rifle. He wished his captain had not been so egalitarian. The weight ground him even farther into the mud—in places it came up well over his knees. It was rare that the mud would reach a man’s hat, he’d heard, but it wasn’t out of the question. The soft ear covers from their cloth hats would just not suffice in these conditions.
The troops did not march with light hearts. They didn’t sing and they didn’t laugh. They stared in horror at the state of the men on the other side of the road, returning from duty in Ypres.
Riley was one of the thousand men of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Second Wiltshire Regiment, formed west of London. His father had obtained an officer’s post for him near Salisbury. He was a good shot, friendly with the men, and, as his father saw it, a natural for the PBI—the Poor Bloody Infantry. So he traveled to Devizes and provisioned at the supply depot before encamping at Weymouth for basic officer training.
The Second Wiltshires replaced soldiers in the British army’s Seventh Division. When the assignment had been made, it looked as if Riley would be training at Weymouth for the duration of the war. The Seventh—the Immortal Seventh—had no need for green recruits. They had assembled eighteen thousand professional soldiers from the corners of the British Empire.
But that changed in mid-October, when nearly ten thousand immortals fell in fierce fighting before the weight of two full German armies. They’d been outnumbered in places ten to one and had been nearly encircled by the kaiser’s onslaught. That they had courage and skill was indisputable. They had also been better trained and stood their ground. But now half were wounded, missing, or dead. Green recruits could not make up for the experience found in the minds and hearts of the men who’d recently been blown to bits. But they’d have to make do. There was still a war to fight.
When Riley decamped from Dunkirk that day, the sporadic battle lines ran from the North Sea coast of Belgium, south past the city of Ypres, and into northern France. For the past two months the carnage had been breathtaking, even for the most battle-hardened. It was said that the bodies of men and animals around Ypres lay so thick that God’s quartermaster used the city for spare parts.
No white covering of snow could paint this a new heaven and a new earth, thought Riley, so God might just save the white stuff and spare them the pain of wearing it as they walked.
The thousand Wiltshires knew where they were going. They walked to meet the five—maybe six—German armies not twenty miles away. Some said that it was possible they’d return. A few actually had. You just needed to keep your head and not have the bad luck to get shelled by a Black Maria or Fat Bertha.
And luck might very well favor them. The new captain of Riley’s company was a lucky man indeed. Twenty-five-year-old Aubrey Tomkins was from the old Seventh, and his careful manner inspired confidence. He had been in the army, it was said, since he was sixteen, and his knowledge and skill were unquestioned. You wouldn’t find him putting on airs. Despite the fact that he was walking in a full pack, his tunic, tie, and breeches showed him as the officer he was. His short blond hair defied military orders to stay down. The enlisted men said Saint George himself had guided the captain’s shots in the last battle. That he had the vision of a prophet. And that his natural father was most certainly Irish, as his luck was uncommonly good. Well, good for one with the misfortune to have been at Ypres.
The captain had introduced himself to his four lieutenants upon their arrival at Dunkirk, and had set them on a course fo
r the front lines, their company at the front of the new regiment. Tomkins marched alongside the column, keeping an eye on them. Occasionally an orderly would rush to him and he’d call the line to a halt. During these respites Riley would turn to his sergeant and discuss the latest issue of Punch magazine or the most recent Christmas package of tobacco and chocolate from Princess Mary to the troops. They’d talk about anything but the mud, which they were all to ignore. Every man had to step in it and complaining would only make things worse. Tomkins would call out to a few men and give them orders. These soldiers would leave to pursue their mission, and the rest would resume their march under the gray sky in the falling snow.
“Step aside!” called Captain Tomkins for a sixth time.
“Aside!” echoed Riley. Four platoons moved back, almost all in good formation. The men made way for an ambulance to push around a rations lorry. Riley looked at the back of the truck as it rattled past. It was packed full of men, on a day the battle lines were quiet. They fell back into place and marched again.
Riley surveyed the wet fields. An old farm, he thought—a crop of death for now. A hundred years at least had passed since the world had given a care about the towns surrounding Ypres. He certainly hadn’t. It had existed for centuries without his help, and he’d prefer it go back to that state.
He’d been told a medieval cathedral stood in the city’s center, a monument to the cloth trade in the times of King Canute or Charlemagne or some such. When the cloth markets moved, the city slipped into obscurity. He supposed children had played around the town’s crumbling walls. Their fathers and uncles farmed in the surrounding villages of Wytschaete, Hollebeke, and Gheluvelt. They made tiles at Zillebeke and bricks at Zonnebeke. They poached in the king’s woods near Passchendaele and Ploegsteert.
Their lives, like his, had been upended by that Prussian lunatic, the kaiser. That man, without a doubt, was even more annoying than Edith at her worst. At least Edith had only caused him heartache. But the Germans! They had marched half their army into France, half into Russia, and the third half—for it was very large—somewhere else around the world, blowing up ships and oil tanks and, in Riley’s opinion, causing all sorts of unnecessary misery.
The End of Innocence Page 19
