The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (16 page)

             
The subdivision, you could call it, of the current conversation, was "executive women," or "business women," but really what was meant was women running things that men normally do or holding jobs men have always held in the past.

             
Mason Williams was in his usual noisy, if not good, form. He told a long story about some woman in a brokerage office who had annoyed him by doing something or other she shouldn't. Williams is a bore and the story was both interminable and completely uninteresting. Several of us were openly yawning before it mercifully ended.

             
Yet oddly enough, the anecdote, dull and trite though it was, struck a response among a number of others present. A quiet guy named Callahan, a lawyer, spoke up quite vigorously for more women's rights and said that very few women ever got a decent break in any profession. I personally have always felt this was true in my business (I'm a retired banker) and chipped in a few examples of how I'd known capable women who got "new" titles and drastically lowered salaries to do exactly the same work as the men they were replacing.

             
Of the ten or so present, we were finally all talked out on the subject. Except, that is, for Donald Ffellowes, our retired British Brigadier. (He always corrected anyone who said 'Brigadier General.') There is no one more worth listening to on any subject. His commission was supposed to have been in the Royal Artillery, but his experiences ranged from the Colonial Police to MI-5 to the
R.A.F
. I mean he'd been
everywhere.
He had a liking for obsolete American slang and he'd say "I've seen the elephant and heard the owl." A lot of his stories were absolutely wild and almost unbelievable.

             
A few anti-British types, like Mason Williams, said he was a liar and a fake, but I noticed they never left once he'd started talking or telling a story.

             
Anyway, he'd been sitting, saying nothing about women or anything else, and finally it became obvious that he was the only one left who hadn't said anything. We sort of looked at him and he suddenly looked up and blinked, as if he'd been a long way off, in time and space.

             
"Let us see," he said, "the subject was, or is, women as executives, eh? That is, women running things, and especially men; supervising or ordering them about, as it were. Is that it? And you are good enough to ask my opinions on the matter?"

             
Williams mumbled something mostly inaudible in which I caught the word "Limeys," but no one paid any attention, especially Ffellowes. This annoyed Williams more than anything else, by the way.

             
"To be frank," said Ffellowes, "I feel that much of what has been said this evening rather begs the question—evades it, don't you know.

             
"You see," he went on, his ruddy, smooth-shaven face calm and reflective, "women are perfectly constructed, mentally, physically and spiritually for certain things. They possess, in my opinion, and that of others such as Kipling, a quality of stark ruthlessness which is an outgrowth of the maternal defense mechanism."

             
He stared moodily at his Scotch and soda as if seeking inspiration, took a hearty gulp and continued.

             
"But constructive imagination on a large scale is perhaps not their long suit. They don't usually
innovate
well, to coin a barbarism, and once they find a comfortable or accustomed pattern of living, they are very reluctant indeed to change it. Did any of you married chaps ever have an easy time getting the wife to move to another area? (None of us knew whether Ffellowes himself was married and no one liked to ask.)

             
"As the Benedicts grinned in response to his question, he took up the thread of his theory again.

             
"As I see it, then, one can't say women are suitable for this and that position, unless one knows both the woman concerned and the position concerned very well indeed. Some women such as Elizabeth the First and Catherine of Russia have made admirable rulers. Still, I think a continuous matriarchy is not a good thing, really. It tends to, well,
freeze
in a mold, allowing no change to occur, and in nature, that sort of thing is quite unnatural."

             
He looked reflective again, and then said a funny thing.

             
"To make a very unpleasant pun, 'freeze' is exactly the word I wanted to use. Matriarchies are bad things in the long run and when there is an element of something else added, the situation is compounded for the worse. Much the worse.

             
"Now I once encountered a situation of this sort. Would you like to hear a story?" He knew us all pretty well by now and didn't wait long before starting.

             
"In May of 1941, the Germans had completely overrun Greece. I had been sent over by Wavell's intelligence people since I speak Demotic—modern—Greek to do a spot of resistance preparation. It was obvious to all of us, except Winston apparently, that we couldn't hold the Panzers back, even though we'd stripped North Africa to do it, and some farsighted blokes decided to help set up a guerrilla network in advance.

             
"It was an excellent idea and we did good work. But the
Jerries
moved one hell of a lot faster than even the most pessimistic of us had thought possible. Instead of taking a leisurely departure through channels laid on in advance, I had to run like hell and trust to luck, if I weren't to be snaffled and stuck in some ghastly
stalag
.

             
"Well, I got to the coast and found the last of the Royal Navy had just left. With another chap, a Greek intelligence
wallah
whom we badly needed and whom I'd been guarding, among other things, I located a small motor-driven
caique
,
a Greek fishing boat, and we shoved off for Crete.

             
"I had kept a pretty useful radio with us and I raised our people in Crete easily at night. They told us to keep off and as you say here, 'get lost,' because Student's crack
Fallschirmjager
division was dropping out of every plane and Crete itself was obviously a short hop from a total loss.

             
"I told our Greek crew, who were all three good men, and we took new bearings for the Southeast. Perhaps we could work our way into the Sporades and Cyprus if our luck held. We had providentially put lots of fuel aboard and could go a long way, if at not too fast a pace. We wore Greek civvies in the hope no
Messerschmidt
pilot would think us worth strafing.

             
"Our luck held exactly ten hours, and then a perfectly ghastly Aegean gale blew up out of Asia, driving at us from the Northeast. We were somewhere north of
Denusa
and were driven southwest at a furious rate, really fighting to just stay afloat. This seemed to go on all night but lasted about five hours, much of it spent submerged, to one degree or another under cold salt water.

             
"Sometime around six in the morning, when the spume and murk was coming a bit alight, we hit something, a rock one supposes, very, very hard. The little
caique
,
which had really behaved admirably, just burst asunder and we were all in the sea in seconds.

             
"The three sailors must have drowned. At any rate, I'm sorry to say I never saw or heard of them again. God bless them, they did their level best for us.

             
"But my Greek officer and I survived, both by chance seizing opposite ends of an empty wooden crate which had been lashed to the deck and which had come loose intact. The weather was so bad and black, spray and all, that it was quite a while before each of us saw that the other was hanging on to the same object.

             
"This seems as good a time as any to mention my charge, the Greek army captain. His name was Constantine
Murusi
, called Connie by everyone, and he was one of the really old and true Greek nobility, a descendant of the
Phanariot
princes who ruled the Balkans under the Turks for hundreds of years. A delightful man, humorous and charming, he was educated in France and spoke a dozen languages. He was steeped in the legends and history of Greece and could make its antiquity come alive for me as no professor ever did. The Greek army thought the world of him and I'd been told by my chief to take very good care of him, since he was slated for high command in the near future.

             
"Well, I had not gotten him killed at this point, but that was about all that could be said for my care. We were unable to do much except cling to our crate, fortunately a sturdy one, and pray, as we were buffeted by spray and pounded by heavy seas. Little by little, the weather was lightening, and finally our range of vision allowed us to actually see one another clearly. Connie
grinned at me and even managed to gesture in a feeble way and I tried to smile back. The force was going out of the waves but we were exhausted and very cold and I knew that it was only a matter of time until I simply couldn't hang on any longer.

             
"Still, the light grew and the wind dropped and we somehow held on, aided by the fact that the crate was lower in the water and we could rest our chests on it a bit, if we were careful. If we weren't, it would fling you off.

             
"Suddenly, the clouds all vanished at once and there was the sparkling blue sea, only a bit choppy now; the bright blaze of the morning sun and about a half-mile off, an island.

             
"It must, I still feel, be one of the odd bits that lie in the triangle between Naxos,
Ios
and
Amorgos
. I am not really sure to this day and I confess I have no intention of going back to find out. It was small and rocky, we could see that, you know, even low in the water as we were, perhaps a mile long, not more. There was a little cluster of white houses near the water's edge where a harbor opened and a larger building set up on a cliff, some distance above. It looked like heaven, I can tell you.

             
"We began to kick and push our clumsy raft as hard as we were able. Neither of us dared swim for it—too tired for that
—
but we hoped to get ashore by floating. The current seemed to help and we had actually gotten near the harbor entrance, before a sign of life appeared.

             
"A small boat, rowed by two men, put out from the shore and we were hauled out of the sea and carted to the beach. When the boat grounded, we tried to stand, but neither of us had the strength and the boatmen, not roughly, but not gently either, picked us up and dumped us on the sand. As we lay, still panting, we got a most unpleasant shock.

             
"A sneering voice said in excellent English, 'An obvious Englishman, probably a deserter, looks like a ragamuffin, and a piece of Greek offal who could be anything, so long as it were sufficiently unsavory. Not much of a catch.'

             
"I looked up and saw that we were lying at the feet of an immaculately uniformed German officer, wearing the black collar tabs of the
Waffen
SS and the insignia of a
Sturmbannfuhrer
,
which was equivalent to our major. A thoroughly nasty-looking piece of work he was, thin, blue-eyed, blond, narrow-headed to boot—could have passed for
Heydrich's
own brother. His only concession to actual war was that he wore a helmet rather than the uniform cap. He now holstered a huge Browning pistol, since we were obviously helpless, and ordered the two men to pick us up and bring us along. He spoke as good modern Greek as he did English, stilted by our standards, but good.

             
"One of the men answered, in a curious, slurred, sing-song dialect, that the
Kyrios
(lord) would be obeyed, and each one put a shoulder under one of ours and one of our arms around his neck. Half supported, half dragged, we were taken in a direction away from the cluster of houses and up a narrow and rocky path to the larger building I had seen earlier. It was quite a steep climb and although the Nazi marched arrogantly along in front, never even turning around, our two supporters were soon panting. But they never said a word and gave us all the help they could.