There were also relatively unimportant side issues: neglect of duty, the uttering of disparaging remarks about the splendid achievements of Special Services, and a general tendency toward playing the martinet—thus earning no little unpopularity with the men. There was also the personal criticism that the Colonel was of a definitely anti-social nature.
Now, of course his old friend Kean knew better than this, but, alas, others did not, and consequently he really thought it the better part of valor to bow to their mistaken conclusions because, after all, the States were home, and incidentally, Mrs. Ashcroft might welcome the change.
The Colonel, in the automobile, now thought of all this. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt his own line of reasoning to that of the General's. But, instead of becoming resigned, he, with enormous impracticality considering the number and power of his adversaries, could think only of revenge. And, with still greater impracticality, he privately considered that this natural and healthy emotion was worse than a disgrace—was, indeed, a sin.
The temptation to revenge was very insidious, for it was so easy to rationalize it. The Colonel might, for example, given a bit of time, convince himself that it was not for the sake of revenge that he was exposing Major Calloway and his accomplices. After ail, it was his duty as a military man to apprehend any variety of misdemeanor within his command. It would be for the good of the Occupation, which, naturally, did not approve of such activities as the Major's.
Yet, while knowing this, the Colonel also knew that this would not be his true reason. His reason would be revenge, petty, sinful revenge, through which he would be at once reduced to the moral level of his enemy. He would have sold out, through weakness, and would voluntarily have given the enemy that which it could never have taken from him by force.
The Colonel took off his cap, smoothed his gray hair, looked from the window, and stroked his silver moustaches. His moral code, long held rigid by training both in the Army and through the ever-present example of his father and his father's father, was slowly disintegrating. He himself felt it and realized it daily in the small concessions which he made—a bit less small every day—to others and to himself. Formerly the code had been strong but not inflexible, for it was more like a religion than a philosophy, and his precepts of humanity and justice and liberty had been entirely personal, as he believed they should be for every man.
Now, however, the code had lost its elasticity; it had become brittle, and it cracked under any strain. The Colonel need only look about him to discover that these self-imposed rules by which he lived were antiquated; that he could have been no more anachronistic had he worn the tall plush hat and gaitered trousers of his grandfather. He was silent as to his beliefs and, as yet, listened patiently to the brainless creatures about him who brayed as their own discovery his own most personal principles.
Major Calloway, for example, spoke of democracy as though it were a newly acquired uniform, his own private jet-plane, the lucky prize for the sixty-four dollar question. Yet, had it not been for the wars, and the resultant public reaffirmation, the Major would doubtless have gone through life quite ignorant of the quality in his country and its government in which he now took so personal yet so cursory an interest. He didn't know too well who Jefferson was, but he spoke with authority of the Founding Fathers, among whom he included Sam Houston as the possible framer of the Constitution. His idea of democracy as a government was somewhat like the parvenu's idea of the high society in which he now happily found himself. Lacking any understanding or sympathy for its actual meaning, its real idea, the Major, under the Germans, would have been a perfect Nazi and, under the Japanese of ten years before, would doubtless have been shouting ,'Banzai! " with the best of them. These were the Colonel's thoughts.
And, Colonel Ashcroft was certain, the Major's thoughts—or feelings—on this subject of democracy were those of the majority. For them democracy had become a possession which added somewhat to the wealth of the country. And to their minds the richest and most powerful became indistinguishable from the best. They patriotically believed that America was the best country in the world. So did the Colonel, but for entirely different reasons.
Come to think of it, their reconstruction of democracy was a bit like the reconstruction of Williamsburg, a city the Colonel had seen once and loathed. It was an empty shell, devoid of life, a travesty on what it had once been, a tourist attraction which was generally advertised as something quite noble and special, something to which one might make an occasional pilgrimage. To the Colonel's way of thinking, their America was like this false Williamsburg. One block from the democratic highroad one saw that the house fronts were false facades, that the backyards were no less filthy than anywhere else, that the lip service paid the geniality of Colonial days was based upon misconceptions from the mouths of waitresses dressed as great ladies of the day or of local businessmen wearing periwigs and knee britches for the occasion.
But their opinions had little in common with those democratic beliefs so firmly ingrained in the Colonel that he himself had never once thought of them, taking them for granted, just as he took for granted the sun and the moon and the stupidity of the Army. They were something to cherish and protect, all right, but as one cherished one's heart and protected one's hands. Thus it was that if the Williamsburg opinions touched him at all, they did so only now, in negative as it were, for the very firmness of his beliefs had precluded the necessity of his ever so much as thinking about them.
Thus, the Major barked about "God's Country" and what he called the "Democratic Way of Life"—by which, the Colonel understood, he most likely meant that way which, through its virtues, allowed him to go unpunished. And he became suspicious of the Colonel when he discovered that his own sentiments were not echoed, that the Colonel's lips were formed in a wry, ironic smile, and that come to think of it, the Colonel had more than once expressed the doubt that the Japanese would ever take to democracy.
The Major didn't care if they did or not. That was beside the point. The point was that it was necessary to believe that they would. And if they wouldn't, then they could always be forced to. After all, who won the war?
And so, while the Colonel was only questioning the advisability, indeed the possibility, of exporting so personal a commodity as these beliefs—just as he often wondered if Christianity, in its true state, were not a complex of emotions rather than a set of laws, and hence not too well adapted for natural growth outside those countries where, through the centuries, it had metamorphosed and hence flourished—this questioning was interpreted by the Major and all those like him only as a questioning of the concept itself. When the Colonel, in an unguarded moment, expressed the time-honored thought that America had never lost a war and never won a peace, the Major, shrewdly acute to the signs of the times, detected the heresy of un-Americanism in the Colonel.
But surely, thought the Colonel, it was just as much a sign of strength in his country that the peace should be lost as that the battle be won. Democracy was scarcely a whipping-stick for the defeated. At the most, it was an example to them. It, in its essence, defied the subtleties of diplomacy and just as rigorously disdained attempts at interpretation, for—paradoxically it is true—it was an aristocratic form of government, not an oligarchy, but a rule by that higher aristocracy which every man carries within himself.
The Colonel's beliefs put him into difficulties in yet another way. Just as he refused his support to a man who, though voicing his own—the Colonel's—opinions in any matter, managed, even though on the "right" side, to misrepresent that side, so the Colonel refused to place himself in the equally embarrassing position of seconding the opinions of a man like the Major, even though those opinions, for all the wrong reasons, happened to be right. There was, in the Colonel, perhaps foremost, pique that his own sacred beliefs should be so mishandled, and second, moral indignation that the truth in them should be so mangled that the presentation all too efficiently invalidated the belief. Granted, the Colone
l's way of thinking was not practical.
His lack of practicality was, indeed, a point of no small honor with him. He fancied himself to be as impractical—that is, as visionary, as idealistic—as was Jefferson himself, who had been imbued with deistic ideas which in themselves were now entirely anachronistic and, probably, always had been, and had refused to warp his noble plan with material considerations.
Yet, wondered the Colonel, had not this very impracticality—which was the cradle of democracy—ensured its immortality? And, further, was it not the vision of Jefferson and others which, in its honest if naive belief in the application of its theory, rendered the concept of democracy valid even now—through virtue of its being a vision, an illusion, a chimera—despite its many misinterpretations, just as valid as it had been in the very hour of its formulation?
And did it not, the Colonel wondered, best suit, through this quality of genius in it (this incapability of capture, this mirage-like quality of eternal promise)—did it not best suit the true nature of man, that nature which, eternally unsatisfied with reality, would continually strive toward that which it could not attain? And then, did not Jefferson and those others know this, perhaps? If not, why that most telling of images, that most beautiful of thoughts: "the pursuit of happiness"?
It was highly suspicious ideas like these which the Major had been quick to detect and—since they themselves, though strong, were also slender and easily twisted—had been even quicker to misinterpret to others. The Colonel's spoken query whether the Japanese had not, in their own way, won the war after all could be damaging as an admission once the Major had presented it. Worse than this, the Colonel had indulged his sense of irony a bit too often. When he had heard the plan of a high-ranking officer to solve Japan's population problem by giving them Manchuria, he had smiled and asked, then what had the war been about? Nor had the Major been long in reporting this.
The role the Major had played in the betrayal of the Colonel was not too clear to the latter, for Kean had been anything but explicit. Therefore, all of this was simply the Colonel's best surmise of what must have happened, and his surmise happened to be absolutely correct—this is precisely what had occurred.
An enameled clock, covered with rosebuds, struck six, and Colonel Ashcroft sat down to dinner. Years with the Army had made the early hour not only acceptable but also pleasant. He had quite forgotten there had ever been a time—long ago—when dinner (called supper) was at eight.
His wife, sitting across from him, had never forgotten. Every evening at six, not yet entirely recovered from a habitual solitary tea at four and a nap after it, she thought of the old days of her youth and of those civilized suppers at eight. Eating directly after work had been the custom of the poor whites and of the Negroes. Now she sat toying with her fruit cup, one hand feeling blindly for fugitive wisps of gray-brown hair, disarranged by the nap. Her eyes were red with sleep, and her lips were puffy. The spoon rang against the plate as she put it down.
"You're not hungry, dear?" asked the Colonel. He always asked this and had asked it for years.
"Not so very much, dear," she replied, smiling. "I had a slight headache this afternoon and took a little nap. It is quite better now, however."
"I'm pleased to hear it," he said.
The Japanese maid removed the fruit cup and brought in the soup. While his wife stirred hers, the Colonel added cream and wondered what they could talk about. Every evening his mind was furiously active during the meal, but he said very little. He was forced to be careful not to speak too much of his work nor, particularly, of the Japanese.
His wife, though she had never said so, disliked Japan very much. If he happened to mention something he had seen on the street or something a Japanese had told him, her lips became straight and she drank water or looked searchingly into her dessert. This somewhat limited their conversation.
"Did anything occur today of special interest, my dear?" he asked, as he always did, and she, as always, smiled, made an effort, and appeared to consider.
"No, I don't believe so," she said, as though she had mentally reviewed a busy day and had smilingly decided that it had been, after all, quite ordinary.
It had been ordinary, for all her days were identical. She did nothing. She seldom left the house: it was the only thing she liked in Japan. It and the huge compound of American homes of which it was one. It was quite possible for an American housewife to spend her entire time in Japan inside the high wire fences of the compound, buying in the Commissary and the local PX, seeing films at the Washington Heights Theater, and reading the Stars and Stripes, which was delivered daily. This was just what the Colonel's wife did. Except for the maids—and they both spoke excellent English—she might never have known she was in Japan.
More and more often now she spent her days in the house, never once glancing in the direction of the outside world. They had not been to a movie for months. Anything which drew her from her house and garden she more and more disliked. When she was forced to leave the house, she sheltered herself behind dark glasses, which she had formerly never worn. And on the few occasions when she had to leave the compound and speak with the Japanese, she was so exquisitely polite that she was often quite incomprehensible.
"No ... I can't think of anything . .. except the garden, of course." She smiled again, and one maid removed the soup, while the other brought in the pork roast, which the Colonel began to carve. They often talked about the garden.
"Would a slice like this one do, my dear?"
"Oh, heavens, that's far too large—perhaps half—and no applesauce, please."
"There—is that better?"
"Yes, just right. Thank you, dear."
Yes, it would be the garden. Even in the snow she was there. And it was such a pathetic little garden, just a backyard like all the others. The others were cluttered up with bamboo lawn furniture and make-it-yourself barbecue pits, while hers was fenced in and cluttered up with a honeysuckle trellis from which hung no honeysuckle, a boxwood hedge, and a little pond in which all the fish had died.
Back home she had had a pavilion set among dwarf-magnolia trees. She wanted one here too, but the earth in which flourished rice and fir and pine and chrysanthemum would not nourish the alien plant, at least not the earth of the former parade ground on which Washington Heights had been built. He had watched the trees fade, while she, in a kind of panic, ran among the withered saplings—he had had them sent over two years before as a surprise—followed by the Japanese maid, making little cuts here and there, uttering little cries of dismay, pruning drastically.
In the same way that the one and only bloom, pale with promise, had died and turned brown, so too had she, the girl whom he remembered with a skin pale as ivory and dark Southern eyes, become a querulous matron who bit her lips when the maids slammed a door.
"This is excellent pork, my dear."
"Why, thank you very much, dear. But I really don't deserve the credit. It is the girls. They are most talented, you know."
"Yes, but it was you who taught them, if I remember rightly."
She smiled, pleased, and it saddened him to realize that this was probably the first time she had smiled with pleasure that day. He could not blame her un-happiness, for she had tried very hard to like Japan and the Japanese. She had tried—and miserably failed. From Virginia, like himself, she had been used to an affectionate disregard of servants and could not now help believing that she lived in a nation of servants, servants moreover whose insubordination was always potential. Of course, in their life in the Army she had followed him to many places besides Virginia, but to none quite so remote, quite so alien.
And still, she had tried. She'd given little teas for the wives of Japanese officials, those men with whom he'd found it necessary to work. She'd had little watercress sandwiches, ladyfingers, and three kinds of tea—one Indian and two Chinese. He could imagine what those teas had been like—everyone sitting in a small circle with nothing to say to each other and no w
ay of saying it. The wives had stayed the expected hour, and later each had invited her to her own home. She had refused all the invitations, and after that had not been invited again.
Thereafter her teas had become solitary, and she often fell asleep over her orange pekoe and ladyfingers. The girls would promise to awaken her, and she, with a smile, would lie straight in her Army bed and sleep until just before her husband returned. At first she had tried to meet the other Army wives on the post, but they soon dropped her, and she them. They were most impolite young ladies who were rude to her at the Commissary and talked behind her back. She never quite realized that it was those same unsuccessful teas for the Japanese ladies which had made her guilty in their eyes of "fraternization," nor would she have been able to understand how a word which she understood to mean "brotherhood" had come to signify a crime.
At first she had meekly refused to judge her countrywomen and would often say that, well, it was just that she wasn't used to Northern ways, or later, that it was just that they were so young. But when she finally condemned them, she said nothing about it to her husband. She never mentioned them again.
So she sat home alone all day and did needle point until it was time for tea. Then it was time for supper, which was invariably excellent, and if she talked at all with her husband, it was about her girlhood in Richmond or her early life with him or to reminisce about some friend long dead. Then he would forget and tell her about his work, which was all he had to talk about, and she would bite her lip and often plead one of her sick headaches, and he would not see her until the following evening. It had been this way during most of their time in Japan
The maid removed their plates. She had not eaten her pork after all. When the salad was brought, her husband smiled at her quizzically before mixing it.
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