“You’re quite wrong, Ezra. The Huns need to be taught a lesson,” Penelope Foster said.
The rising power of Germany obsessed almost everyone in England. Their fleet and army were challenging Britain’s supremacy everywhere, in Africa, China, the south Pacific. Their corporations were invading markets such as America, where English goods had once been supreme.
“If we have a war, do you think your planes will be in it?” Penelope asked.
“As scouts,” Frank said. “They’ll be the eyes of the army. In fact, their mere presence may make war impossible. How can a general maneuver a great army when a plane can swoop down and discover it miles before he can reach his objective? Planes can produce a stalemate, where neither side can gain an advantage.”
“I think you badly underestimate the brutality of generals,” Pound said. “What about planes as bombers? In the Arabian Nights, Sinbad the Sailor describes how two ships were destroyed by Rocs, giant birds carrying huge stones.”
“We don’t have motors powerful enough to lift a serious amount of bombs,” Frank said, guiltily omitting his experience bombing Mexicans from Rag Time. He did not want to believe that anyone who experienced the exaltation of flight could use it to rain death on human beings. Even Craig had been dismayed by the effect of their bombs on Los Banyos.
Frank escorted Penelope Foster home to a nearby flat. The daughter of a colonial office civil servant, she was a poet who tried to create small, exact word portraits of nature and humanity in a style Pound had dubbed imagism. Pound told her she had talent and the samples she showed Frank in her rooms proved it. She called them London Lives. In ten lines or less, each depicted a London type, a burly bus driver, a screeching fishmonger, a banker flourishing his umbrella “like a scepter,” a scrawny messenger on his bike, risking his life in the traffic “like a sparrow in a gale.”
“All lift, no drag,” Frank said. “I hope I can create planes like these some day.”
“You will. I can sense it in you. A pulsing thing Ezra calls the gold thread in the pattern. Some people possess it instinctively.”
“How does it work?” Frank asked.
“I’m not sure. It’s part spirit, part technical mastery. A desire to grasp the essence of things—in art, in machines.”
A plaintive sadness throbbed in Penelope’s voice. Her lovely head drooped in a kind of mourning. “I sense the gift has passed to you Americans. You’re the guardians of it now. We English nurtured it for a century—”
“Can I—may I—kiss you?” Frank said.
He wanted to possess this Sibyl, to explore her body as well as her soul. “No,” she said. “It’s much too soon.”
“I want to make you part of my golden thread, my essence,” Frank whispered. “In California, we believe it’s never too soon.”
The first part of that plea was Frank Buchanan, the second part was Craig. Frank was still an unstable blend of the two personalities. But Penelope proved she was worthy of her classic name when it came to evading suitors.
“This isn’t California,” she said.
In love for the first time, Frank became a regular visitor to Pound’s Kensington circle. He listened to the poet read his magical translations from the Provençal and the Chinese and discourse with casual brilliance on Dante, Shakespeare, Homer. Frank took Penelope Foster up for a ride in a de Havilland Scout, the sturdy two-seat reconnaissance plane they were building for the Royal Flying Corps. She adored it but unlike the Baroness Sonnenschein and Muriel Halsey, she still declined Frank’s offer of a similar ascent in her bedroom. Instead, she gave him a poem.
Crouched on the grass
The plane is a clumsy cicada
Who could believe
It devours clouds
Consumes cities and rivers
Challenges the sun
With its growling shadow?
Frank called Penelope his priestess and accepted the celibacy she imposed on him. Although they saw themselves as citizens of the new century it was a very Victorian love. Pound was their high priest, weaving a spell of beauty, a promise of triumphant art, around their lives. For three months Frank Buchanan, soaring in planes and poetry, was a happy young man.
But history was rumbling toward them on the continent. The Great Powers, as the newspapers called them, had devoted millions to building huge armies while their frantic diplomats devoted hundreds of hours to weaving intricate alliances to maintain a balance of power that was supposed to make war impossible. When a Serbian anarchist assassinated the crown prince of Austria, the illusion of peace evaporated. Austria threatened Serbia, Russia warned Austria, Germany threatened Russia. France warned Germany.
On August 4, 1914, Frank Buchanan awoke in his Hendon rooming house. Guy Chapman, his fellow junior designer, was pounding on his door. “Frank, Frank!” he was shouting. “It’s the bloody war. It’s started!”
Frank stumbled out of bed and found Chapman clutching a copy of the London Times. GERMANS INVADE BELGIUM roared the headline. England had warned Germany that if they violated Belgium’s neutrality to attack France, Britain would declare war. At the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, chaos reigned. Geoffrey de Havilland and several other key people had been drafted by the Royal Flying Corps. Frank and Guy Chapman were the only designers still on the job.
Over the next year, Frank watched the airplane turn into a weapon of war. From the scout the generals had envisioned it became a fighter plane, when a Dutch designer named Anthony Fokker taught the Germans how to synchronize a machine gun to fire through the propeller. Then it became a bomber as more and more powerful motors created larger and larger planes capable of carrying as much as a thousand pounds of high explosives.
Penelope Foster’s first reaction to the war was exultation. She was sure Germany would be smashed in a matter of weeks. As dozens of her friends and relatives, including her older brother, were killed by German machine guns and artillery in France, rage became her dominant emotion. She changed from a cool, detached imagist poet to a ranting, chanting writer of patriotic verse in the Kipling tradition. She shouted her poems from platforms to intimidate men into enlisting in the British army.
At night, in her Kensington flat, Penelope wrote more bad poetry to the heroic dead, and abused Frank Buchanan. She still refused to let him touch her. “Where are your heroic countrymen?” she hissed. “Why aren’t they here, fighting for civilization? The barbarians are at the gates!”
Frank tried to defend President Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality. He portrayed America as the one nation that could negotiate a just peace between the warring powers before they destroyed each other. Penelope called him a coward and a fool.
One terrible night at Pound’s flat, after one of the best imagist poets, T. H. Hulme, was killed in Flanders, Penelope reviled Pound for not fighting beside him. Her diatribe was a paradigm of the way the war annihilated Pound’s dream of a civilization redeemed by art. He began to sneer at the idea of patriotism, to see literature and art, not as a vortex transforming the world, but as a refuge from a world gone mad.
When German zeppelins and Gotha bombers appeared over London, smashing churches and homes, killing hundreds of people, Pound mocked Frank’s vision of the plane annihilating frontiers. Its new goal was the annihilation of the countries behind the frontiers.
“I can hardly wait for them to bomb you American cowards,” Penelope raged. She glared at Frank, her Pre-Raphaelite face livid with loathing.
The dreamer-designer Frank Buchanan shuddered under these blows. He wandered the streets of London consoling himself with streetwalkers while Craig whispered in his soul. They’re only good for one thing, kid. When you listen to their yak-yak they drive you nuts.
One night, after a particularly unsatisfying encounter with a prostitute, Frank found himself on Brompton Road, standing before a building with a small sign crudely lettered over the doorway: Church of the Questing Spirit. Inside about two dozen people listened to a gray-haired minister talk about a world be
yond their tormented visible one. The rectangular room, with a dome of stars painted on the ceiling, was the London headquarters of the sect Althea Buchanan had joined in California.
At the end of the sermon, the minister gestured to Frank, in the first row, and said: “Young man, are you as troubled as you look?”
Frank poured out his growing despair and confusion over the war. The woman he loved called him a coward for defending his own and his country’s refusal to fight. What should he do?
The minister stepped into an anteroom and emerged with a shirt that had somehow been ripped almost to shreds. “Put this on,” he said.
Frank shrugged off his jacket and thrust his arms into the shirt. Instantly he felt an incredible lash of pain across his back. Again again again, a fiery agony unlike anything he had ever experienced seared his flesh. He ripped off the shirt and flung it at the minister.
“What is it? What are you trying to do?” Frank gasped.
“That shirt belonged to a seaman in Nelson’s navy who was lashed to death,” the minister said. “You’re one of us. Everyone in this room has felt that pain when they wore this shirt. Most people feel nothing.”
“What does it mean?”
“Each of us has to find his own interpretation of that pain.”
Outside the church, Frank found the night sky full of searchlights and flares. The Gothas were raiding London again. Huge explosions made the sidewalk tremble. The bombs were falling only a few blocks away, around Marble Arch. A man grabbed his arm. “Where’s the nearest subway station, pal?” he asked. His accent was as American as his vocabulary. People were using London’s underground for air-raid shelters.
“I don’t know this neighborhood.”
“Ah, what the hell. Let’s have a drink.”
They pounded on the door of a nearby pub. Behind the blacked-out windows a dozen fatalists were savoring what could be their last pints. The American ordered double Scotches for himself and Frank and held out his hand.
“Buzz McCall’s the name, flying’s my game.”
“Likewise,” Frank said.
Buzz was a chunk of a man, with black hair and a complexion as swarthy as an Italian’s. He had a square fighter’s jaw and a swagger to his walk and talk. Except for his stockier physique, the resemblance to Craig was uncanny.
Buzz began telling Frank he was on his way to France. A group of Americans had volunteered to form a squadron in the French air force. They were going to call it the Lafayette Escadrille. “We’re gonna teach these German fuckers a couple of lessons for bombin’ women and children,” he said.
“Have you got room for another pilot?” Frank said.
Death machine, his mother whispered. But Frank dismissed her once and for all. Buzz and Craig and this war-maddened world were suddenly connected to the fiery shirt he had just torn from his back in the Church of the Questing Spirit. If he hoped to live as a man and not a momma’s boy, he would have to wear that ancient shirt, no matter how much pain it cost him. He would have to endure history’s lash.
THE GIRL FROM THE GLORIOUS WEST
“America stands for peace and nothing but peace!”
Auburn hair streaming to her waist, Amanda Cadwallader trembled in the icy January wind cutting through Harvard Square. The barbaric weather was not the only reason for her tremors. It was her first public speech, her first attempt to bring California’s message of peace to war-infatuated eastern America.
As a crowd gathered, two of her fellow sophomores at Wellesley handed out leaflets quoting poets and philosophers, including Harvard’s own William James, on the folly of war as the solution to settling quarrels between nations. A big bulky young man in a well-tailored dark suit snatched one of the leaflets, glanced at it and crumpled it into a contemptuous ball. He planted himself directly in front of Amanda and shouted: “Are you German?”
“I’m from California,” Amanda said.
“That explains the nonsense you’re preaching. You’ve got an orange for a brain!” the young man bellowed. His thick-lipped wide-boned face had an adult cast. He looked like a faculty member.
“Yeah, yeah,” jeered a half-dozen grinning young men in the crowd. “An orange for a brain.”
“I’ve got a perfectly good brain,” Amanda said. “I had a straight-A average at Stanford. I’m getting the same grades at Wellesley. Why can’t you discuss the subject like—like gentlemen?”
“Because there’s nothing gentle about a German. A German is a Hun,” her chief antagonist said. “If we had any guts, we’d be over there fighting them now.”
“Right. Absolutely right,” rumbled from the crowd.
“We don’t agree with you in California,” Amanda said. “America should be a voice of peace in the councils of the nations.”
“Tell it to the Kaiser,” sneered her antagonist.
Amanda glanced at her two followers, one of whom was her Wellesley roommate. Both easterners, they had been dubious about this venture. She had persuaded them to try it with the sheer force of her western enthusiasm.
“My friends told me this would happen. I had to see for myself. You’re nothing but—barbarians.”
She began to weep. Abominable! Amanda hated the way she wept whenever she was extremely angry—or extremely happy. Her mother had opposed the idea of letting Amanda go east. Her half-brother had been almost gleeful, he was so sure she would make a fool of herself. Her father had encouraged her. He said it would be a good way for her to find out just how confused and spiritually sick America was on the Atlantic seaboard.
The crowd began to disperse. But Amanda’s chief antagonist remained behind—and was strangely contrite. “We’re not barbarians,” he said. “We’re perfect gentlemen on every topic but the one you’ve chosen. To prove it—let me buy you all lunch.”
Amanda turned to her two followers. The idea unquestionably appealed to them. The young man was remarkably self-possessed. His tailoring was expensive and foreign. There was something mysterious, intriguing, about his tufted brows and hooded eyes.
Twenty minutes later, Amanda and her friends were gorging on lobster salad, caramel cake, and ice cream sodas in the Crimson Cafe off Harvard Square. Adrian Van Ness talked to them earnestly and honestly about the war in Europe as he saw it in January 1916.
“I spent a year at the Anson School in England,” he said. “Ten of my friends from the upper forms have died in Flanders, at Ypres, on the Somme. I’ve had letters from some of them. There was no doubt in their minds—or in mine—that they were fighting civilization’s battle against the German hordes. Almost every faculty member and every student at Harvard believes this by now. We’re all in favor of American intervention. There are over two hundred graduates already serving with the French and British armies as volunteers. Over a dozen have been killed—”
“Doesn’t all this prove the madness, the stupidity of war?” Amanda said.
“It proves the courage, the heroism of ordinary men,” Adrian said. “The war is a great testament to our civilization’s capacity for self-sacrifice—and courage. Especially in the air. I have a number of friends in the Royal Flying Corps. One of them, Peter Tillotson, is the leading British ace at the moment with forty victories. Another friend, Carlo Pontecorvo, is flying for Italy. He thinks single combat in the plane is reviving some of the ancient ideals of chivalry. It may create a whole new race of men, with a code of honor like the knights of the Crusades.”
Amanda was fascinated by the glow of idealism on Adrian’s face as he talked about planes. Her followers, both from the east, began to change their minds about the war. Adrian was a remarkably persuasive young man. Amanda was losing the argument, but to her surprise she did not care. She sensed Adrian was genuinely distressed that he had hurt her feelings. Almost everything he said was for her. He barely glanced at her followers.
Outwardly, Amanda remained unconverted. She quoted Stanford’s pacifist president, David Starr Jordan, at length. He had inspired her and a half-dozen other �
��peace missionaries” to transfer to Wellesley and Smith and Mount Holyoke to convert the warmongering easterners. She could hardly surrender to a spokesman for the evil East in her first encounter. But she secretly hoped she would see Adrian Van Ness again.
Within the week Adrian telephoned Amanda and invited her to another lunch at the Crimson Cafe—alone. Over more lobster salad he apologized for his slurs on California. “Actually, I know nothing about the place. What’s it like?” he said.
A delighted Amanda talked about southern California—she dismissed the northern half of the state as a foggy, chilly wasteland—with an eloquence even she found surprising. She described the lush beauty of the mountain-ringed San Fernando Valley, the majesty of the coast above Los Angeles, the vistas of the desert.
“Southern California is the last paradise in the Western world,” Amanda said. “A place where art and poetry and philosophy will flower in a new renaissance.”
“Who said that?” Adrian asked.
Amanda blushed and cast her eyes down: “My father.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“He grows oranges. Cadwallader Groves is the largest producer in Orange County. He serves in the state legislature too. In 1910 he was one of the leaders in the fight to reform the constitution. He helped break the power of the railroad barons and other vested interests.”
Amanda sipped the last of her ice cream soda. “What does your father do?” she asked.
“Nothing. He’s dead.”
Adrian’s voice was so cold and curt, Amanda wondered if she had somehow offended him. “I—was never close to him. He was an—introvert,” Adrian said.
Even in 1916, psychology had become an instant explanation for everything. Amanda murmured sympathetically. “My father hates crowds, cities,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll pay you a visit,” Adrian said. “See if southern California improves my poetry.”
Amanda asked to see some of this poetry. Surprise, surprise, Adrian had a half-dozen poems in his pocket. She made him read them to her. Many were about the nobility, the glory of flight.
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