Once an Eagle

  “Except for the poor old Indian, that is,” Emily said quietly.

  “Oh my God, don’t bring up Indians!” Tommy exclaimed, “—if I hear anything more about Indians I’ll shriek …”

  “Oh, yes,” Emily said. “The court-martial. I think you did a noble deed, Sam.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Damon answered with a wry, mournful smile.

  “He drove us all crazy with it, I can tell you that,” Tommy told them. “Sat up till all hours preparing the case. Reading tomes that would choke a carabao. Ridiculous! You’d think he was defending Emile Zola … They said he had tears in the eyes of half the court when he got through. I don’t believe it, though. Do you, Court?”

  Massengale laughed, watching her lips. “Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind/ Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind …” The trial of Brand had become a cause célèbre on the post for the last month—a source of mirth, irritation and violent argument in the messes. Everybody had an opinion. The fault was McClain’s for not keeping a private in hand; the fault was Jarreyl’s for running such a stupid, bloody Andersonville; the stockade was a trifle severe perhaps, but there was no help for it, it was simply necessary to keep the EM in line: if you started making exceptions where would you stop? Damon’s heart was in the right place, but his enthusiasms were unfortunate; he was quixotic, he wasn’t sound—trouble with him was he’d never got over being an EM himself; he was a God damned fool who ought to run his company and keep his nose out of things that didn’t concern him—injecting the racial issue into a fuss of this sort was bad medicine out here in the Department, where we had a position to maintain; the whole affair was prejudicial to the best interests of the service …

  The wrangles, the cautious, muffled arguments had gone on and on; Massengale had listened in amusement. The question of the Melburhazy girl was dynamite, of course—if her involvement became a matter of record it could have some serious consequences. Colonel Fahrquahrson was furious with Damon, and it was rumored that General Whitley was displeased by all the notice the affair was getting throughout the Islands. But the Captain had skirted the girl’s implication neatly. When he’d been able to establish the fact that McClain had been drinking the morning of the episode and had pursued Brand with the knife, the anti-Damon faction went into fits; and his summation on the duties and responsibilities of noncommissioned officers was a little masterpiece. The court’s deliberation had been brief: Brand was acquitted, the case was closed, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

  Massengale watched the author of all this acrimony seated at the other end of the table—shortened now for the four of them—eating with deliberate care and listening to his wife. Damon was a disappointment to him. Taking the case had been stupid, essentially: stupid because it alienated those in power without accomplishing anything commensurate. He’d handled it superbly, but what good was that? Now Fahrquahrson and half the rank out here had him down for a Bolshevik, a guardhouse lawyer. That was the trouble with Samuel: for all his competence he was really like most career officers—he had never got over being a boy, stamped with a boy’s enthusiasms. True, he wasn’t a poker addict (though he did play occasionally), he didn’t philander or turn into a rummy the way a lot of them did; and he did continually struggle to expand his mind to meet military and political problems—which was what had attracted Massengale to him in the first place. But it was all wasted if he let sentimental impulses like this business with Brand ruin his chances for advancement …

  “How is the noble red man?” he asked, his eyes twinkling. “Is he properly grateful?”

  The Captain’s face became very still and somber. “Yes,” he said. “He’s grateful.”

  “Oh, Court,” Tommy cried, “—how can you ask such a question? He’s wild with worship, he says he’ll follow Sam wherever he goes—he wants to be Sam’s orderly.”

  “He could do worse,” Massengale observed.

  “But Sam won’t do it. He says Brand is NCO material and it might stand in the way of his getting ahead. But Brand says he doesn’t care.” She tossed her head, and her hair swung delicately against her throat. “He’s so devoted! They’re all like that. Loyalty from the bottom up, I believe it’s called.”

  “That’s what it’s called,” Damon said. “Don’t let this digression of Tommy’s interrupt you, Major. Go on with your westward theory, will you?”

  “Oh. Yes—I’m sorry, Court.” Tommy looked charmingly rueful. “I get up here in this palace and everything goes to my head. But honestly, do you think we ought to just—take them over? the Philippines?”

  Soberly he nodded. “We were moving correctly—Hawaii, Commodore Perry’s trip to Japan were in the right line. But then we turned sentimental. We allowed a simple geographical obstacle to prevent us from pursuing our destiny. The Pacific. We shrank from it: it was perfectly silly. We should have gone on to Manila then—not as a result of the accidents of battle—and established our hegemony in Borneo, New Guinea, possibly even New Zealand and Australia. Don’t be shocked—we’re talking of the vast movements of peoples here, not a romanticized concept of representative democracy. An ocean empire, sustained by small, efficient, professional garrisons and a vast fleet based at Salamaua, Brunei, Soerabaja—even Bangkok …”

  “Court,” Tommy chided him, “you’re not an army man at all—you should have gone into the navy.”

  He smiled, pleased with her. “You know, you might be quite right about that. There’s a finality, a sense of clean strategic force about naval operations that the land service can’t match. Don’t tell old Fahrquahrson, though—he’ll start huffing and puffing and slashing at the desk with his crop. It’s bad enough to have him mad at Samuel without his getting down on me.”

  “Wouldn’t we have run into the Dutch and British interests if we’d followed that course?” Damon asked.

  “Of course. The turn of the century was full of clashes: the British and French almost went to war over Siam, the Dutch and Portuguese wrangled over Timor—even the United States got into the row over Samoa with the Germans and the British. It was the great heyday of Western ascendancy, the imperalist apotheosis; and we should have led it, not dragged our feet the way we did. Can’t you see it?—a huge oceanic salient from New Guinea to the Ryukyus, oriented toward that vast, swollen belly of the China coast. That was the true line. But we got all muggled up in murky ideas of international brotherhood, universal self-determination.”

  “What about the Drang nach Osten?”

  “A counterwave, an anomaly. Doomed to defeat from its inception. It never really succeeded, Samuel. Such German elements as tried to establish themselves only became Slavicized. The East Prussians are more Asiatic than West European—look at their mystic fervor, their incredible fatalism. They paid the penalty of swimming against the tide. That’s why our AEF excursion in ’17 was doomed to disaster—we could no more impose our doctrines on Europe than the sun could reverse its course.”

  He watched the Damons as he talked, catching up threads of history, geography, political science, weaving them into the fabric of his design. The part you transformed in people was the part you possessed, and only that: all the rest was a walled-off area as remote as Tashkent, a land you never penetrated. Tommy was leaning forward, her hands folded beneath her chin—he could almost feel her spirit swaying toward him in the soft dusk, entranced and suppliant. But it was Damon he wanted, not the woman. Many officers fell under his influence in a rush—became, like Ryetower or Burckhardt, devout supporters, “Massengale men” who recognized his ultimate ascendancy to power; or they broke away in confusion or fear and stayed outside the orbit of his concerns, as poor Storey had. But Samuel had done neither. He had been attentive, respectful, even on occasion deferential (though some of that was probably the matter of rank); but there was never that sway of acknowledgment, that final surge of acquiescence that let you know you’d left your mark.

  Abruptly he broke off. “That’s enough hindsight theoriz
ing,” he declared.

  “Oh, don’t stop,” Tommy protested. “It makes me feel like Bismarck—or Clemenceau. Remaking the map of the world …”

  He laughed, eying her through half-closed lids. She felt it, too—this hunger to transform, control, possess. If only she were a man …

  “Tell me, how’s your father?”

  “Oh, he’s fine. Happy as can be. He loves teaching—he says the new generation is brighter than anyone would think. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “Miles Draper wrote me he did a monograph on the First Marne that was masterful. Miles has nothing but praise for him.” Of course old Caldwell should have been teaching at the War College long before this; he’d been held back all during the time MacArthur was Chief of Staff. The old feud. Now the Chaumont crowd were getting in their innings, and the realignments and reshufflings were starting again, the gears grinding—you could almost hear them way out here. And yet MacArthur was the ranking general officer of his age group; he would command the armies when war came …

  “Wonderful man, your father,” he said aloud. “That great intellect, that manner. Has he ever had political ambitions?”

  She blinked in surprise. “No—not that I know of.”

  “It’s a pity. Couldn’t you see him as Secretary of State? that combination of force and tact?”

  “Oh yes—he’d be in his element!” Her eyes shone. “Things to—well, to mold, to fashion …”

  “That’s it.”

  “But he’d never put himself forward in any way—he’s almost as bad as Sam. He’s always felt the army officer should be unpolitical.”

  “Yes: the old tradition. But these things are changing. Perhaps you should pray to Quetzalcoatl and Huracán.”

  She laughed, her eyes very wide and clear, and for an instant Massengale had the sensation that he was being drawn into them, as into a still, deep pool … Sitting erectly in the high-backed Spanish chair with the candlelight playing over her, she was uncommonly beautiful. She was vivacious and lithe and she had that exciting delicacy of feature, her father’s legacy. Gazing at her, half-obsessed, he saw her all at once sprawled indecently on a couch, her lovely face puffed and sodden with drink, her hair in wild disarray, her dress torn from her body and her exposed thighs smeared with dirt, blood, offal—and his heart leaped tightly. Then the vision vanished and the old fear returned; he looked down.

  She was saying: “Sam’s the one that ought to go into politics, after that court-martial triumph. But he’d never do it, either. Why are people all so perverse?”

  “The fatal flaw.” He lighted her cigarette, watching her lashes droop softly toward her cheeks. “You wouldn’t want us to be without our fatal flaws, would you?”

  “Oh, it isn’t everybody,” she said. “You haven’t got one at all….”

  The familiar disquietude began to seep into the edges of his heart. He picked up his butter knife and bent it rhythmically between his fingers. “Perhaps,” he said lightly, “you just don’t know me well enough.”

  The dinner party broke up then; the two women vanished into the living room and he and Damon went into his study, which looked north toward the governor’s palace. For a time they talked desultorily of one thing and another. Everything seemed to be in a state of flux. Craig’s appointment as Chief of Staff had surprised Massengale. He had been certain Drum would get it—but of course Craig had been on Pershing’s staff, too, as well as an old favorite of Hunter Liggett’s. His moment had come, he’d seized it; but what had been the precise confluence of obligation and influence that had led to it? Hugh Johnson had the President’s ear now, he knew that much; and Johnson had been a lieutenant in Craig’s first cavalry troop. He sighed. In any event the balance was shifting. The Pacific was where the power lay now: Drum in Hawaii, MacArthur here putting the Philippine army together, Haz-litt down in Palamangao …

  “How about a game?” he asked. “Feel up to it?”

  “Fine, Major, if you do.”

  Ramon brought in the chess set and a bottle of Grand Marnier and glasses and they began to play as darkness fell, and the cries of Manila drifted up to them faintly. You could tell so much from a game of chess. If a man was rash, if he was smug or laggard or unimaginative or timid—there it all lay before you, revealed in the space of an hour, as surely as if you had put your hand on his inviolate soul. Massengale liked to launch an overwhelming attack out of the traditional Ruy Lopez, sending up his knights and bishops in unorthodox ways, pressing unusual variations that would open up vast areas of assault; or to lie back behind the dense intricacies of the Sicilian or the Dutch Defense and then explode with devastating effect on either flank, watching his adversary’s mounting consternation through half-closed lids.

  Damon usually denied him these pleasures; he never panicked, he never succumbed to easy pawn grabbing or wildly speculative diversions. He took his risks, but soberly, and when he forced exchanges it was with a judicious care—decision tempered with reluctance, as though he were always conscious of the worth of the pieces he had sacrificed. Above all he was imaginative, and tenacious beyond belief; he never lost sight of the main objective.

  Their games followed a fairly consistent pattern: an early onslaught by Massengale which resulted in a minute positional advantage; resourceful defenses by Damon, and then a fierce, attritional struggle that ended in a close victory eked out by one or the other—or, more commonly, a draw. Tonight the same pattern emerged, but the exchange with Tommy had unsettled Massengale, filling his mind with conflicting speculations. You haven’t got one at all, she’d said, her eyes full of wonder, the reflected light from the candles glinting in them; tiny saffron points. Little she—or anyone else—knew. Well, that was his Tashkent; everyone had one. Even Hugh Drum. Schuyler had written him that there was great opposition to Drum in high places, that he’d never get it; they were looking elsewhere, among the younger men. “In any event the solution is political, not military.” Schuyler liked to salt down his letters with rather pompous generalizations. Pershing was no longer listened to as he had been—there were those who said he was becoming a senile, tiresome old man. Massengale smiled faintly. They could accuse the Old Man of a lot of things, but senility was not one of them: what he thought he had good reasons for thinking. But perhaps his day was done. The rumor was he’d given Drum his blessing, and now Drum was on Oahu, raging and scheming …

  In any event the solution is political, not military.

  Damon had moved again. He bent forward over the board, pursuing the possibilities, his mind running on two levels at once. As a result of the exchange of knights Samuel had succeeded in advancing a knight’s pawn to the fifth, and had supported it deftly.

  He translated a bishop and sat back again, relaxing his mind—watched beyond the screens the lights in the palace flaring through the dense stands of acacia. He loved Manila: Manila was bold and wild, a barbaric white citadel all tangled up in pagan and Christian attitudes, a torrid arena where Malay and Igorot and Chinese and Moro swarmed, vying with one another. On nights like these, with the stars sweeping near in great silver globes and rowels, he could feel his senses dilate as if under the influence of some potent drug. There was so much that could be done—so very much. Long vistas swung open into the future—he could almost put his finger on the boundary stones of his future achievements, triumphs, glories. In a sense his life had started here, in these islands: it would find its culmination here as well. All the tumultuous dreams of years trailed through his mind, burgeoning, demanding solution …

  He had been raised in a huge Federal stone house with white pillars, overlooking the Hudson. The front parlor—no one ever went in it except for serious occasions—was sedate and still, cool under the drawn shades; there was an Empire sofa of horsehair with a carved back, and slender marquetry chairs and a rosewood organ with porcelain stops. On the center wall was a full-length portrait of his father in dress uniform, holding a sword; and in a glass case on the lowboy was the
medal he’d won at Bamolos in ’98, in those very hills out there beyond the palace. “A glorious victory, Courtney. Captain Pershing himself told me it was the most valiant action of the entire campaign.” His mother’s voice: high, like the upper register on a cello, but more insistent; she had been slender and pretty, with her hair in loose, brown waves over her temples, and her eyes rested on his with a soft, implacable ardor. “You must live up to him, Courtney. In every way. So that he would be proud of you.”

  The sword was in another case; it had been brought back by a brother officer a few years later. He had taken it out one afternoon, secretly, and drawn it from the scabbard. A slender, blued blade adorned with the most delicate leafy scrolls, still bluer; the tassel on the hilt had tickled his wrist as he’d raised it to the salute. His father’s eyes watched him from the wall, animate and commanding.

  In every way.

  There were ponies he rode, and the great downward sweep of dun fields to the river where he swam in the lazy July afternoons, when the elms drooped in the sultry heat, and even the birds were still; there were lawn parties where people came in carriages and automobiles and stood around holding tea cups and chatting, the great hat brims of the ladies bobbing gently as they moved. His mother and his Aunt Harriet took him to the stiff French Renaissance palais of the Capitol at Albany, and looking down he listened to the voices of the legislature thundering like the voices of gods; and later his Uncle Schuyler, who was a state senator, had smiled at him and shaken his hand and asked him if he wanted to go into politics when he grew up. The men talked politely with the ladies, and stroked their mustaches; their watch chains bristled with little gold charms. He had said nothing, but standing there holding his mother’s hand he knew that one day he would rise and speak in that great hall.