Sword of Honor

  Guy had not dismissed the Jews from his mind. The reprimand rankled but more than this he felt compassion; something less than he had felt for Virginia and her child but a similar sense that here again, in a world of hate and waste, he was being offered the chance of doing a single small act to redeem the times. It was, therefore, with joy that he received the signal: Central Government approves in principle evacuation Jews stop Dispatch two repeat two next plane discuss problem with Unrra.

  He went with it to the Minister of the Interior who was lying on his bed drinking weak tea.

  Bakic explained, “He’s sick and don’t know nothing. You better talk to de Commissar.”

  The Commissar confirmed that he too had received similar instructions.

  “I suggest we send the Kanyis,” said Guy.

  “He say, why de Kanyis?”

  “Because they make most sense.”

  “Pardon me.”

  “Because they seem the most responsible pair.”

  “De Commissar says, responsible for what?”

  “They are the best able to put their case sensibly.”

  A long discussion followed between the Commissar and Bakic.

  “He won’t send de Kanyis.”

  “Why not?”

  “Kanyi got plenty of work with de dynamo.”

  So another pair was chosen and sent to Bari, the grocer and the lawyer who had first called on him. Guy saw them off. They seemed stupefied and sat huddled among the bundles and blankets on the airfield during the long wait. Only when the aeroplane was actually there, illumined by the long line of bonfires lit to guide it, did they both suddenly break into tears.

  But this little kindling of human hope was the least impressive incident on the airfield that evening and it passed quite unnoticed in the solemnity with which the arriving passengers were received.

  Guy had not been warned to expect anyone of importance. He realized that something unusual was afoot when in the darkness which preceded the firing of the flarepath, he was aware of a reception party assembling, among whom loomed the figures of the General and the Commissar. When the lights went up, Guy recognized with surprise those rarely glimpsed recluses, the Russian Mission. When the machine came to ground and the doors were open, six figures emerged all in battle-dress who were at once surrounded by partisans, embraced, and led aside.

  The squadron leader began supervising the disembarkation of stores. There was no great quantity of them and those mostly for the British Mission—rations, mail and tin after tin of petrol.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?” Guy asked the pilot.

  “Wait and see. There’s a jeep to come out.”

  “For me?”

  “Well, for your major.”

  “Have I a major?”

  “Haven’t they told you? They signaled that one was coming. They never tell me anyone’s name. He’s over there with the gang.”

  Strong willing partisans contrived a ramp and carefully lowered the car to earth. Guy stood beside his two Jews watching. Presently an English voice called: “Guy Crouchback anywhere about?”

  Guy knew the voice. “Frank de Souza.”

  “Am I unwelcome? I expect you’ll get the warning order on tomorrow’s transmission. It was a last-minute decision sending us.”

  “Who else?”

  “I’ll explain later. I’m afraid in the whirligig of war I’ve now become your commanding officer, uncle. Be a good chap and see to the stores, will you? I’ve got a night’s talking ahead with the general staff and the Praesidium.”

  “The what?”

  “I thought that might surprise you. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Begoy, for your information, is about to become a highly popular resort. We shall make history here, uncle. I must find a present I’ve got for the General in my valise. It may help cement anti-fascist solidarity.”

  He stooped over the small heap of baggage, loosened some straps and stood up with a bottle in each hand. “Tell someone to do it up, will you? and have it put wherever I’m going to sleep.”

  He rejoined the group who were now tramping off the field.

  “Right,” said the pilot. “I’m ready to take on passengers.”

  Two wounded partisans were hoisted in; then an American bomber crew who had bailed out the week before and been led to the squadron leader’s headquarters. They were far from being gratified by this speedy return to duty. There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane.

  Last came the Jews. When Guy held out his hand to them, they kissed it.

  As always on these night incursions, Guy had his sergeant and orderly with him. They were plainly exhilarated by the spectacle of the jeep. He left it and the stores to them and walked back to his quarters. The night of high summer was brilliant with stars and luminous throughout its full firmament. When he reached the farm he told the widows of de Souza’s coming. There was an empty room next to his which they immediately began to put in order. It was just midnight but they worked without complaint, eagerly, excited at the prospect of a new arrival.

  Soon the jeep drove into the yard. The widows ran to admire it. The soldiers unloaded, putting the rations and tins of petroleum in the storeroom, de Souza’s baggage in the room prepared for him. The Praesidium, whatever that might be, was of no interest to Guy; he was glad de Souza had come; very glad that his two Jews had gone.

  “The mail, sir,” reported the orderly.

  “Better leave that for Major de Souza in the morning. You know he’s taking command here now?”

  “Yes, we got the buzz from the Air Force. Two personal for you, sir.”

  Guy took the flimsy air-mail forms that were then the sole means of communication. One, he noted, was from Virginia, the other from Angela.

  Virginia’s letter was undated but had clearly been written some six weeks ago.

  Clever Peregrine tells me he managed to persuade them to accept a telegram for you announcing the Birth. I hope it arrived. You can’t trust telegrams any more. Anyway it is born and I am feeling fine and everyone especially Angela is being heavenly. Sister Jennings—Jenny to me—says it is a fine baby. We have rather an embarrassing joke about Jenny and gin and my saying she is like Mrs. Gamp—at least it embarrasses other people. I think it quite funny as jokes with nurses go. It’s been baptized already. Eloise Plessington who believe it or not is now my great new friend was godmother. I’ve made a lot of new friends since you went away. In fact I’m having a very special time. An intellectual who says he knows you called Everard something brought me a smoked salmon from Ruben’s. And a lemon! Where does Ruben get them? Magic. I hope you are enjoying your foreign tour wherever you are and forgetting all the beastliness of London. Ian talks of visiting you. How? Longing for you to be back. V.

  Angela’s letter was written a month later:

  I have dreadful news for you. Perhaps I should have tried to telegraph but Arthur said there was no point as there was nothing you could do. Well, be prepared. Now. Virginia has been killed. Peregrine too and Mrs. Corner. One of the new doodle bombs landed on Carlisle Place at ten in the morning yesterday. Gervase is safe with me. They were all killed instantly. All Peregrine’s “collection” destroyed. It was Virginia’s idea that I should have Gervase and keep him safe. We think we shall be able to get Virginia and Peregrine taken down to Broome and buried there but it is not easy. I had Mass said for them here this morning. There will be another in London soon for friends. I won’t attempt to say what I feel about this except that now more than ever you are in my prayers. You have had a difficult life, Guy, and it seemed things were at last going to come right for you. Anyway you have Gervase. I wish Papa had lived to know about him. I wish you had seen Virginia these last weeks. She was still her old sweet gay self of course but there was a difference. I w
as getting to understand why you loved her and to love her myself. In the old days I did not understand.

  As Arthur says there is really nothing for you to do here. I suppose you could get special leave home but I expect you will prefer to go on with whatever you are doing.

  The news did not affect Guy greatly; less, indeed, than the arrival of Frank de Souza and the jeep and the “Praesidium”; far less than the departure of his two Jewish protégés. The answer to the question that had agitated Kerstie Kilbannock (and others of his acquaintance)—what had been his relations with Virginia during their brief cohabitation in Uncle Peregrine’s flat?—was simple enough. Guy had hobbled into the lift after their return as man and wife from the registrar’s office and had gone back to bed. There Virginia had joined him and with gentle, almost tender, agility adapted her endearments to his crippled condition. She was, as always, lavish with what lay in her gift. Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cozy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy’s heart and pride healed also, as perhaps Virginia had intuitively known that it might do. January had been a month of content; a time of completion, not of initiation. When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skillfully treated, a place of grateful memory to which he had no particular wish to return. He did not mention Virginia’s death to Frank then or later.

  Frank came to the farmhouse at dawn, accompanied by two partisans and talking to them cheerfully in Serbo-Croat. Guy had waited up for him, but dozed. Now he greeted him and showed him his quarters. The widows appeared with offers of food, but Frank said: “I’ve had no sleep for thirty-six hours. When I wake up I’ve a lot to tell you, uncle,” raised a clenched fist to the partisans and shut his door.

  The sun was up, the farm was alive. The partisan sentries changed guard. Presently the men of the British Mission stood in the bright yard shaving. Bakic breakfasted apart on the steps of the kitchen. The bell in the church tower rang three times, paused and rang three times again. Guy went there on Sundays, never during the week. Sunday Mass was full of peasants. There was always a half-hour sermon that was unintelligible to Guy whose study of Serbo-Croat had made little progress. When the old priest climbed into the pulpit, Guy wandered outside and the partisan police pressed forward so as not to miss a word. When the liturgy was resumed Guy returned; they retired to the back shunning the mystery.

  Now the sacring bell recalled Guy to the duty he owed his wife.

  “Sergeant,” he said, “what rations have we got to spare?”

  “Plenty since last night.”

  “I thought of taking a small present to someone in the village.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait and ask the major, sir? There’s an order not to give anything to the natives.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  He crossed the yard to the Air Force quarters. Things were freer and more easy there. Indeed the squadron leader did a modest and ill-concealed barter trade with the peasants and had assembled a little collection of Croatian arts and crafts to take home to his wife.

  “Help yourself, old boy.”

  Guy put a tin of bully beef and some bars of chocolate into his haversack and walked to the church.

  The old priest was back in his presbytery, alone and brushing the bare stone floor with a besom. He knew Guy by sight though they had never attempted to converse. Men in uniform boded no good to the parish.

  Guy saluted as he entered, laid his offering on the table. The priest looked at the present with surprise; then broke into thanks in Serbo-Croat. Guy said: “Facilius loqui latine. Hoc est pro Missa. Uxor mea mortua est.”

  The priest nodded. “Nomen?”

  Guy wrote Virginia’s name in capitals in his pocket-book and tore out the page. The priest put on his spectacles and studied the letters. “Non es partisan?”

  “Miles Anglicus sum.”

  “Catholicus?”

  “Catholicus.”

  “Et uxor tua?”

  “Catholica.”

  It did not sound a likely story. The priest looked again at the food, at the name on the sheet of paper, at Guy’s battle-dress which he knew only as the uniform of the partisans. Then: “Cras. Hora septem.” He held up seven fingers.

  “Gratias.”

  “Gratias tibi. Dominus tecum.”

  When Guy left the presbytery he turned into the adjoining church. It was a building with the air of antiquity which no one but a specialist could hope to date. No doubt there had been a church here from early times. No doubt parts of that structure survived. Meanwhile it had been renovated and repainted and adorned and despoiled, neglected and cosseted through the centuries. Once when Begoy was a watering place it had enjoyed seasons of moderately rich patronage. Now it had reverted to its former use. There was at that moment a peasant woman in the local antiquated costume, kneeling upright on the stones before the side altar, her arms extended, making no doubt her thanksgiving for Communion. There were a few benches, no chairs. Guy genuflected and then stood to pray asking mercy for Virginia and for himself. Although brought up to it from the nursery, he had never been at ease with the habit of reciting the prayers of the Church for particular intentions. He committed Virginia’s soul—“repose” indeed, seemed the apt petition—to God in the colloquial monologue he always employed when praying; like an old woman, he sometimes ruefully thought, talking to her cat.

  He remained standing with his eyes on the altar for five minutes. When he turned he saw Bakic standing behind him, watching intently. The holy water stoup was dry. Guy genuflected at the door and went out into the sunlight. Bakic was standing by.

  “What do you want?”

  “I thought maybe you want to talk to somebody.”

  “I don’t require an interpreter when I say my prayers,” Guy said. But later he wondered, did he?

  IX

  The bodies of Virginia, Uncle Peregrine, and Mrs. Corner were recovered from the debris of Bourne Mansions intact and recognizable, but the official impediments to removing them to Broome (Mrs. Corner, too, came from that village) proved too many for Arthur Box-Bender. He had them buried by the river at Mortlake where there was a plot acquired by one of the family in the last century and never used. It lay in sight of Burton’s stucco tent. The requiem was sung a week later in the Cathedral. Everard Spruce did not attend either service but he read the list of mourners aloud to Frankie and Coney.

  He had met Virginia only in the last weeks of her life but he had long enjoyed a vicarious acquaintance with her from the newspapers. Like many men of the left he had been an assiduous student of Ian Kilbannock and his fellows; a taste he excused by saying that it was his business to know the enemy’s order of battle. Lately in the decline of social order he had met on friendly terms some of these figures of oppression and frivolity—old Ruby, for instance, at the Dorchester—and many years later, when he came to write his memoirs, he gave the impression that he had frequented their houses in their heyday. Already he was beginning to believe that Virginia was an old and valued friend.

  “Who are all these people?” asked Coney. “What’s the point of them? All I know about Mrs. Crouchback is that you gave her enough smoked salmon to keep us for a week.”

  “Before we’d even had a nibble at it,” said Frankie.

  “And a lemon,” said Coney.

  The flying bombs had disturbed the good order of the Survival office. Two of the secretaries had gone to the country. Frankie and Coney remained but they were less docile than of old. The bombs came from the south-east and were plain in view in the wide open sky of the river. All seemed to be directed at the house in Cheyne Row. They distracted the girls from their duty in serving and revering Spruce. Hit manner towards them had become increasingly schoolmasterly, the more so as his own nerves were not entirely calm. He was like a schoolmaster who fears that a rag is brewing.

  He
spoke now with an effort of authority:

  “Virginia Troy was the last of twenty years’ succession of heroines,” he said. “The ghosts of romance who walked between the two wars.”

  He took a book from his shelves and read: “She crossed the dirty street, placing her feet with a meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line as though she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulf. Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring in every step and the skirt of her summery dress—white it was, with a florid pattern printed in black all over it—blowing airily round her swaying march. I bet neither of you knows who wrote that. You’ll say Michael Arlen.”

  “I won’t,” said Coney. “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Never heard of Iris Storm, ‘that shameless, shameful lady’ dressed pour le sport? ‘I am a house of men,’ she said. I read it at school where it was forbidden. It still touches a nerve. What is adolescence without trash? I dare say you’ve not heard of Scott Fitzgerald either. Anyway the passage I read, believe it or not, is Aldous Huxley 1922. Mrs. Viveash. Hemingway coarsened the image with his Bret, but the type persisted—in books and in life. Virginia was the last of them—the exquisite, the doomed, and the damning, with expiring voices—a whole generation younger. We shall never see anyone like her again in literature or in life and I’m very glad to have known her.”

  Coney and Frankie looked at each other with mutiny in their eyes.

  “Perhaps you are going to say ‘the mold has been broken,’ ” said Coney.

  “If I wish to, I shall,” said Spruce petulantly. “Only the essentially commonplace are afraid of clichés.”