Gleefully they decided to go out and sleep in the woods at Pine Brook that night. Peter stealthily went downstairs to an old chest and smuggled some blankets out on the porch, where he hid them beneath the hammock. Then he went back upstairs and they drank more coffee and talked a lot more until two o’clock in the morning, when they decided to set out with the blankets.
“This is a night I shall never forget,” said Alexander, jubilantly slurping up his coffee. “I shall never forget it because, don’t you see, it’s so damn significant, honest! Just think! Tommy is going off to the Orient, we’re saying good-bye to him. Don’t you see, Peter! After all the years that you’ve known Tommy and played with him as children, after all the dreams of youth. It’s a parting of the ways, for all of us, and really sad! We’re on the threshold of a new age, and God knows what it’s going to be—in any case, hugely important to mankind! And how is each one of us going to fare in the great convulsion of the times, what are we going to contribute individually? What will we contribute to the great brotherhood of mankind?”
“You know, Alex, that’s one thing that’s always amazed me about you,” spoke up Tommy with an eager smile. “I was going to write a play last year with just that as a theme, with a character like yourself in it speaking up for the brotherhood of men. But as an anti-thesis I was going to have someone else representing the voice of necessity and practical philosophy. You see the conflict there?”
“But, of course, Tommy, it’s my whole life—sensing that conflict and being tortured by it,” said Alexander, amazed by Tommy’s words.
“You know, I believe you,” grinned the good-natured farmboy. “But here’s the way I see it, the raw truth of it: I never got time to write that play, due to Spring plowing and my father needing a new pasture fence. So you see, the conflict answered itself. I didn’t have to write the play, it was all there. Spring plowing and a new fence, contributing to food and livestock for the citizens of the world, in other words, the brotherhood of men in action.”
“Yes,” said Alexander vaguely—he was worlds apart from this idea—“yes, I see.” And he fell silent, typically, only to burst out moments later with raucous exuberant laughter as they swung the subject to something else. It went on like that for hours, with Peter dashing about making more coffee and getting cake from the breadbox. Finally they were ready to go out and sleep in the woods.
Just as they were getting ready to leave Peter’s room, a sudden light tap was heard on the door and Mrs. Martin appeared in the doorway with a sly smile on her face. They looked at her, dumbfounded.
“I know what you young devils are up to tonight,” she said, pointing a finger at them and shaking her head. “Don’t think I don’t know about those blankets you hid on the porch. Hey?”
The three boys glanced at each other with a kind of sheepish pleasure.
“Yes, yes,” she went on, “I know. You were planning to sleep out in the woods, out in the woods in the middle of night where you can catch cold in the mist and get bit by spiders and snakes. You couldn’t fool me!” she smiled cunningly.
“Well, no!” protested Peter with pleased astonishment. “Not exactly! We were just going to go down to Pine Brook—and go in swimmin’ this morning, early this morning—and—well—”
“Go in swimming at this time of night?” And she sat on the edge of a chair and clucked her tongue almost mournfully. “Oh, no, no, no,” she said sadly. “It’s dangerous to sleep out in the woods like that. You never know what kind of bugs and snakes there are, especially by the water like that.”
“Hey, Ma,” cried Peter gleefully, “look at Tommy here! He’s a soldier, he’s going to sleep out in the jungles in the Philippines and everything like that. What about that? Huh?”
The boys laughed excitedly.
“I know, I know,” replied Mrs. Martin, “but it’s not right just the same. You’ve got a nice warm house, why should you go out and sleep in the cold wet woods like that? You’ve got a nice bed here and there’s an extra bed up in the attic, the boys can sleep here, there’s room for both of them. You won’t get chilled and you’ll be comfortable and before you go swimming you can take sandwiches with you and a bottle of milk if you like. Now isn’t that a much better idea?”
“But what about the jungle, Ma?” cried Peter, laughing.
“I don’t know about the jungle,” she said with a sudden sad absentmindedness. “No, I didn’t make the army, I didn’t make the wars they have either. Why, if it’s going to mean jungles for Tommy there’s no sense in this now.”
And it seemed so true to them suddenly. They all stared at her rapt with fascination as they thought of her warm quilted beds, her clean house, her food in the icebox, her warm radiators in the winter and all the things of a homestead. They remembered how good these things were to come back to after a night of drinking riot and weariness, how really sweet these things were, and how they never actually thought of them.
“Yes,” she went on, “you should all be grateful that you have nice comfortable homes if nothing else in this world, you should be very grateful and make use of them and enjoy them while you can. Now isn’t that true?”
And they thought of “wars and armies” and of men who were the opposite of Mrs. Martin with all their flimsy tents and trenches and guns and cauldron-food and bloody battles, and they grinned fondly.
“Now,” she said, “maybe you should do as I say and you’ll see that the old lady isn’t so dumb. Sleep here and then get up early in the morning and go swimming when the sun’s up and all the birds are singing and it’s nice.”
“Okay, Mrs. Martin!” said Tommy Campbell, jovially going up to the mother and putting his arm affectionately around her. “You’re absolutely right! We’ll do that, we won’t sneak out, honest! On one condition, though, and that’s if there’s any caramel pudding in the icebox—”
“Well, there isn’t any right now, but I’m going to make some Sunday and if you want to come and visit Petey again—”
“Ho ho ho!” yelled Tommy happily. “I was only kidding you, Mrs. Martin. I’ll do it even without the caramel pudding. Remember when you used to make caramel pudding for me and Pete on rainy days, when we used to draw pictures up in his room? Boy, was that a long time ago!”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Martin almost quaveringly, “I do remember, and now look at you, a soldier and everything. Why did you go and join the army! I think there’s going to be plenty of time for that later—”
“You know me, Mrs. Martin, always on the go!”
“Well, I’m going over to see your mother soon and have a good long talk with her. Good night, boys, and remember what I said”—she turned and peered at them severely—“no sneaking out of the house!”
But after she had left the room, Tommy leaned towards the others and whispered: “When the sun’s up and all the birds are singing. But what about bats and night mist!” They laughed splutteringly. “But we’ll do as she says, I’m tired anyway. Let’s get some shuteye and go swimming first thing at dawn.”
So they slept in the house that night. Mrs. Martin had exerted her last benevolent powers over the comfort and well-being of Tommy Campbell and the mysterious likes of him in his generation, the kids who were going off to war and death. She perhaps did not know this; they could not know it. What happened that night Peter was to remember later with a distressed sorrow.
At dawn, bleary-eyed but joyful, the three youngsters took off across the wet dewy fields and went into the woods to the brook among the pines, where they had done the old swimming as little kids. And just as they got there the sun began to come up, the mists stirred over the hillsides and over the placid brook, birds peeped in the pines, the last pale stars trembled, and great light began to overspread the world.
“Rosy-fingered dawn!” howled young Panos with indescribable delight, and they were all awake now, strangely ecstatic, and each began to sing, babble, and wander around in the woods throwing sticks, Alexander himself singing in a loud bawlin
g voice that might have been heard two miles away in the profound stillness. He even ran tripping to the top of a little hill, yelling joyous hosannahs and holding out his arms to the sky, while Peter and Tommy watched him, amazed.
Peter, for his part, kept looking up at the sky and yelling “Space!” or down in the water with a show of moodiness, saying “Lucidness,” or stamping his feet on the ground and repeating over and over again, “Solidness, solidness, solidness,” though he hadn’t the vaguest idea why he enjoyed doing this. And Tommy Campbell, flinging his tunic over his shoulder in the warm morning, began to sing in a high cracked voice, On the Road to Mandalay, which echoed and re-echoed in the woods, especially when Panos lent his own thunderous voice to the refrain. They felt wonderfully foolish and happy and they let go with anything that came to their minds.
“Because the sun is coming up!” howled Alexander. “Only because the sun is coming up! We came here just for that!”
“We thronged!” shouted Peter triumphantly.
“Yes! Through the woods!” bawled Alexander. “Oh, listen to me! Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, and that is all ye need to know!”
“Chambers of beauty!” cried Tommy Campbell, pointing to the rays of light streaming down between the pines.
“God’s cathedral-l-l!” called Alexander through cupped hands in a great shout that carried across the fields, and they all laughed savagely.
Then, as the sun came up in full brilliant array far off over the hills, fanning light all over the sky and gilding little dawn-clouds that were regimented beautifully overhead, the boys fell silent, in awe, and stood on the two little hills watching, Panos and Campbell on one hill, and Peter alone on another, all of them brooding and reflective. It was a strange little moment of meditation in the deep stillness of the morning, with only the sound of a farmer’s horse neighing faintly far away and clip-clopping on a road, and someone whistling far away, and a barndoor closing.
They trudged back home wearily, after a quick shivering swim in the brook where Alexander splashed about prodigiously, screaming: “Mumbo Jumbo God of the Congo and all of the other Gods of the Congo!” Now, their meditations over as whimsically as they had begun, they jabbered excitedly all the way home; Alexander wound a flower around his ear, Peter chewed the stems of long grass, and Tommy strode along like a prophet, carrying a huge limb from a rotted tree. They happened to see two veiled old ladies trudging along the road, apparently towards the church in Norcott, two darkly-clad old women faithful to some endless novena. Peter pointed at them with the air of a prophet, saying: “Fear.” Alexander went into a little dance that was intended to represent fear, and Tommy Campbell raised his huge tree-bough and waved it thrice in solemn blessing.
They strode on home eagerly, hungrily. Alexander cried: “Up there!” and they all stopped. Alexander was pointing at the sky, saying: “Glory!” They all stared up at the sky.
“Here!” cried Tommy Campbell, pointing to the ground at his feet. “Death!”
Alexander knelt on the ground and tenderly took the flower from his ear, and laid it down, and covered it with a little bier of earth, his whole body, meanwhile, seeming to tremble suddenly from some spasmodic feeling.
“What’s left of life,” he said mournfully, “what’s left of life, a little flower. Immortal little flower that venerates us, that venerates us and all that this morning means. Weep for the little flower, weep for the petals in its heart, weep for us, weep for us!” He knelt there, while the boys watched grinning, he knelt there and seemed to be wrapped in a secret, prescient ecstasy of what his life was to him.
And then they went on home.
[2]
In the warm summer night all cricket-stirring and soft, under tall drooping trees and the sultry stars of night in June, on the side of a dark road, below gaunt telephone poles and the long swooped wires, on the road where cars passed in a lonely spear and reach of lights with a haunted rush of voices and radio music faintly inside, the roadhouse glowed red neon and blue in softest darkness among congregated gleaming cars on the white graveled drive. Music came pulsing in the air, and the noise of laughter and dancing and all the singing, lyrical, somehow hopelessly sad sounds that Americans make at night.
Liz Martin came walking down the road dressed in slacks, carrying a small handbag, looking around somewhat frightened yet with childlike haughty scorn, a lonely and disconsolate figure in the weaving light of passing cars. She had got off at a bus stop half a mile away.
She came to the red neon roadhouse beneath the trees and stopped, with a rueful and attentive air. The music pulsed faintly, the cars gleamed darkly on the white bright gravel, the ventilators roared whirring above the door, summer moths fluttered in the neons.
“Liz, gal,” she said to herself, “what are you waiting for?” She wondered if she had “lost her nerve.” She stood there on the driveway in front of the entrance awning trying to decide just how to go in the place.
A party of people came out, laughing. Behind them sudden loud jazz pounded into the night. The faint tinklings of a piano came from far back. She saw a smoky flash of dancers huddled under low rafters, dark shadowy figures nodding in the pink-blue light, a gleam of bar and bottles. The door closed, the music became a muffled pulse, the cricket-sounds swelled up all around, the people drove away crunching over the gravel. Again she was alone.
“Liz, gal,” she said, primming her hair abstractedly, “there’s no sense just standing out here. You’ve got to go in.”
Even as she said these things to herself, grinning because it was so silly to stay there talking to herself, she knew she was scared to death to go in, she knew it was almost too much for her to walk in all alone and do what she was going to do. She had come to see about her man Buddy Fredericks, who had not showed up for their date that night. He was playing piano inside. She was determined to find out what was wrong, why he hadn’t come as he always did on Friday nights. And with that saucy, petulant, yet grim little manner that girls have on such occasions, she had started out after him from the house, fuming with indignation and wrath. But now she was scared by all the noise inside, and leaned on a car, and bit her lip, and wished that Buddy could be like he was a year ago when he had his motorcycle and would just come and get her and go riding, before he had to start being a musician, before he had to go and trade his motorcycle for a piano.
The night, all around her, was the way it had always been with her and Buddy before—cool, dark, vast, mysterious: with the river gleaming in starlight when they roared speeding down the highway, and she hugged close to him, and they sang shouting in the wind. It was the way the nights were when they would go to “their spot” on the riverbank and spend the night eating fried clams, talking, singing, telling stories, kissing, making love, thinking about what they would do when they were married. The crickets in the mist, the great shadowy meadows, the far-off hoot of the Montreal train, the little lights gleaming far away in the summer darkness, and always the cool lapping sound of water at night—that was the way it had always been for her and Buddy before. Now he was inside this noisy laughing place with a lot of people, and she was scared—and jealous.
“Liz,” she said to herself again, “it’s now or never.” With this she drew herself erect, ran her tongue speculatively around her cheek, tightened her handbag against her, and marched straight up to the door and opened it.
She blinked at the heat and fury inside. The floorbeams shuddered from the stamping of many feet, the din that rose to the low ceiling was deafening, she could see nothing but people crowded and elbowed in a solid moiling mass. There was a sensual reek of cigarette smoke and liquor in the air, and she was conscious of many eyes looking at her from the dimness.
Almost blindly Liz marched straight ahead towards the bandstand on the other side of the room. She was not going to be diverted from her goal by anything. She pushed her way through the crowded dancers who were whirling, bouncing, swerving, colliding, bowing, laughing and shouting, all in t
he din of booming, beating, furious, almost insane tempo.
Now with a roll and racket of the drums the music stopped. There was shattering applause, and for a moment only the babble of voices, the tinkling of glasses, the deep thrumming roar of the ventilators. Then the piano started, a saxophone moaned, the band struck up the quiet blues, the dancers shuffled and embraced on the floor. A blonde girl stepped up to the microphone and began to sing.
Liz walked right up to the bandstand, pushed her way with proud scorn through a group of girls standing in front of it, and stood staring at the pianist solemnly.
He was a big shambling youngster with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his lopsided grinning mouth. He sat hunched over broodingly, his long hands reaching, his eyes staring in a dreamy absent-minded reverie, and he played softly, moodily, as though to himself.
“Hey, you!” she said.
He looked up startled.
“Come here, you!”
“Huh? That you, Liz? What the heck you doing here?”
“Never mind that. Come here.”
“What do you mean, come here? Can’t you see I’m on!”
“I don’t care what you’re on,” said Liz contemptuously. “Come here.”
“Ah, don’t be crazy, Liz!” laughed Buddy suddenly. “Man, sometimes—hey, listen to this!” he cried enthusiastically, beckoning her with his head. “Listen to this—those chords I was working on. Come here, come here, don’t be crazy.”
Liz went over and leaned on the piano, and looked at him wrathfully, with a film of embarrassed tears in her eyes, curling her lip angrily.