Authors: Elswyth Thane
“Jeff says there’s going to be trouble again with Germany,” Sylvia put into the pause which overtook him just then, and they all looked at him questioningly, never doubting his infallible knowledge of such things.
Jeff raised his eyes slowly, and met Stephen’s across the table.
“Yep.” He nodded. “They’re winding up again, over there.”
“What’s the
matter
with them?” Stephen asked lightly, but his eyes held Jeff’s.
“They’re just being Germans,” said Jeff. “Germans are just that way.”
“But we settled it once.”
“We didn’t settle it, that’s the trouble. We let ’em off. We let their army march home with bands and flags as though it had won. We didn’t rub their noses in the dirt and stamp on their ribs, which is the way they express their own superiority when they get a chance. Show sportsmanship to a German and he thinks you’re really afraid of him. Kick him around and he thinks you’re braver than he is.”
“Nice people,” said Stephen, watching him.
“What they’ve got over there now,” Jeff went on, “makes
the Kaiser’s Prussians look like milk-sops. These Nazis are the real Frankenstein product. They could teach Bismarck about blood and iron.”
“You were there,” said Stephen.
“I was there, yes.”
Still their eyes held, young men of what would be the same military class, linked by a common destiny, which loomed like a common doom in the quiet room, where a chilly wind seemed now to intrude.
“Well, come on—give,” said Stephen with some impatience. “Just because we’re stay-at-homes doesn’t mean we’re not interested. We read your newspapers, you know, and we listen to a lot of hot air on the radio. Or is it hot air?”
“Not all of it, maybe.”
“Why isn’t Bracken on the radio, to tell us what’s what?”
“I’ve an idea he will be, pretty soon.”
“What’s this story tonight about Alexander? Have the Nazis got anything to do with that too?”
“What about Alexander?”
“Shot. At Marseilles.”
“
Killed?
”
The word itself was like a pistol going off. Jeff had not moved, he had merely tautened in every muscle. His immobility was frightening, his concentration on Stephen’s reply was like a vice.
“Didn’t you hear?” said Stephen. “It was on the radio news.”
“
Was
he
killed?
”
“Yes, and Barthou with him, as they drove away from—”
“
Barthou!
”
cried Jeff.
“—as they drove away from the ship at Marseilles. The assassin was a Croat, it said. I’m afraid none of this means much to us here in the backwoods, can you make it a little easier?”
“Where’s your radio?” asked Jeff, and at the same moment his eyes fell on the cabinet in the corner and he rose.
“There won’t be any more news for a while,” Stephen said with a glance at the clock.
They watched while Jeff crossed the room and snapped the button. After a few seconds, while nobody spoke, music
swelled out of the instrument. He spun the dial—a girl’s voice, singing—the gabble of a comedian, and laughter—more music—he snapped it off, and stood staring at the air in front of him. Then—
“Mind if I ring up Bracken in New York?” he said, and was gone into the hall where the telephone lived.
The connection was quickly made. They could not help but hear Jeff’s side of the conversation in the dining-room where they sat.
“—I just heard about it, Steve told me, I missed the radio news tonight…. But
both
of them, where were the police? … That must have been pretty, and besides, he might have talked…. No,
not
a pretty world, is it. Shall I come back tomorrow? I feel kind of cut off down here, no papers or … Oh, yes, I’ll listen to the radio from now on, I just—for one night I just relaxed a bit, and now look…. I shouldn’t wonder if the French could run a whole war without me, but they don’t seem to be doing too well at the moment.
What
about
his
bodyguard,
didn’t they give him one? … Well, when you get it worked out maybe you’ll let me know down here. We’ll have the Richmond papers tomorrow. Has Richmond heard of Yugoslavia, do you think? … Yes, they have now, that’s right….”
Jeff came away from the ’phone still looking dazed, and sat down again in his dislocated chair at the table. His preoccupied gaze travelled slowly to Gwen’s anxious face with the family’s habitual necessity to cherish its womenfolk.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Gwen, but Steve sort of sprung it on me and I reacted just like a newspaper man. Even Bracken feels a bit shook-up, as it were.”
“What’s it mean, Jeff? War?”
“Maybe not. Can’t tell yet. Remember Kipling’s line:
‘There’ll
be
trouble
in
the
Balkans
in
the
spring.
’
There’s
always
trouble in the Balkans in the spring!”
“Who was he? The man they killed.”
“He was the King of Yugoslavia, which is a country they made up at Versailles, including Serbia. He was the Crown
Prince of Serbia in 1914, and it was the murder of an arch-duke in Serbia that started the last war. Now the Serbian King has been murdered in France—that’s near enough. But Bracken thinks it was Barthou they really wanted, and they got him too.”
“But—a Frenchman in his own country?” said Gwen helplessly.
“It wasn’t a Frenchman who fired the shot,” said Jeff. “Apparently. Barthou was one of the last senior statesmen. He had ideas. He had an idea that Europe could unite against aggression—aggression is diplomatic for Hitler and his crew. Barthou was not popular in Berlin. But that doesn’t explain why the French bodyguard was spaced out the way it was, at Marseilles. This fellow ran in on foot and fired into the car which carried the King and Barthou. He had all the time he needed before anybody got there to stop him.”
“And you think a war can start—from that?”
“A war can start now if somebody sneezes,” said Jeff. “This may be it.”
Gwen’s hand went uncertainly to her face in a pathetic gesture of confusion and her eyes caught Fitz’s down the length of the table. She managed a little smile for him, at her own foolishness.
“I had a funny feeling,” she said, almost apologetically. “It was like that first night I came to Williamsburg as a bride, and Bracken was up from Cuba in his war correspondent’s uniform, do you remember, and his father came down from Washington and said that the Spanish Ambassador had asked for his passports. It wasn’t a week till you were both on the way to Cuba—”
“Now, Aunt Gwen, wait a minute—” Jeff rose repentantly and went to bend above her chair, at the same instant that Stephen flowed upward from his own place across the table, saying, “Here, here, nobody’s on the way anywhere
now—
”
Stephen reached her first, because of the oiled and slippery way he moved, and they stood over her, their hands on her shoulders, rueful and reassuring.
“You ought to know about newspaper men by now,” Stephen went on. “They always jump the gun.”
“No guns yet,” said Jeff, and added conscientiously, “Except at Marseilles, that is.”
Gwen looked up at them dubiously, her hands in theirs.
“D-does Bracken think—?”
“Bracken’s sitting tight. If he thought the balloon was really going up he’d be off for France.”
“And you with him?” That was Sylvia, so that Jeff began to feel a bit surrounded.
“I’m not ordered back,” he told her over Gwen’s head. “So long as he leaves me here, things haven’t got out of hand.”
“Oh, Jeff, you’re too
young!
”
cried Gwen, and bit her lip.
“What, to carry a typewriter?” Jeff returned to his chair matter-of-factly.
“Correspondents are worse than soldiers sometimes,” said Gwen. “They go everywhere, I ought to know!” And she looked with something like pride at Fitz, who had gone up towards San Juan Hill in Cuba, carrying a gun to which he was not, as a correspondent, entitled. “I wish,” said Gwen, still holding to Stephen’s hand, “I wish I could understand these things. But I never do. I never rightly understood how the last one began.”
“It’s like jackstraws,” said Jeff. “Nudge a little one at the bottom and the whole thing caves in on you.”
“What do the Nazis mean?” said Gwen. “What do they want?”
“That’s kind of a long story,” he warned her.
“Please, Jeff,” said Sylvia. “Please try to explain.”
So for nearly an hour Jeff tried to explain, while they listened without interrupting. Once Gwen rose to snuff the burnt-down candles and turn on the electric light. Once Fitz moved to make three whisky-and-sodas and set one at each man’s place. Once Stephen, still listening, quietly laid a log on the dwindling fire.
They heard about the man called Hitler, who had once been regarded as a harmless sort of clown even by his own
countrymen, and about what he had made of Germany and might still accomplish there if nothing stopped him. They heard about Berlin during June of that year, with the sound of the execution squads firing all night and all day at Lichtenfeld prison, and about the July day in Vienna when Nazis disguised as Austrian troopers held the Chancellery for hours while Dolfuss bled to death, unattended, on a sofa. Jeff had been in Europe when these things happened, he had seen and heard and felt with his own nervous system the presence of violent death and treachery and terror. He had been taught to choose his words. He spoke as he had learned to write—dispassionately, concisely, without flourishes or dramatics—to the point. So that horror entered the quiet room on his words, and a realization of fear as they had never dreamed it could be. And even then he spared them, and when he finished he was sorry for what he had said, and he said that too.
“But do people
know
about this?” Gwen asked at last. “
We
didn’t. Do they know about it in Washington?”
“People over here don’t want to know about it,” said Jeff. “You can’t blame them, can you. They’d rather not n-o-t-i-c-e what is happening in Germany. As it is, I feel rather like an unwise nanny who has been scaring the children stiff with ghost stories at bedtime. But you did ask me, and everybody has got to realize sooner or later what we’re up against. Everybody will, eventually, whether they want to or not.” He glanced at his watch, and rose to snap the radio on again.
The dance band finished, and the commercial began. They waited tensely for the eleven o’clock news, which was still devoted to the death of a Balkan king who until today was hardly known by name to half the people in America who were listening….
‘… Cut down by the sabres of the French guard, the assassin continued to fire while rolling on the ground. Some bullets struck policemen and women in the front row of spectators. The crowd surged forward and would have torn him apart, but the police carried him, dying, to a nearby news kiosk. The King never regained consciousness. European
diplomats deplore the loss of M. Barthou, which could hardly have come at a worse time….”
They all sat without moving till the voice of the commentator gave way again to irresponsible dance music and Jeff turned the button to bring silence. They watched him while he wandered restlessly about the room, they asked bewildered questions which he tried to answer—but the evening was broken, and he soon said good night and prepared to return to Aunt Sue’s house. Sylvia caught Stephen’s eye, and Stephen said they would walk over with him in case he got lost, and Jeff said he had been worrying about that, and the three of them set out together.
One on each side of him, they fell into step as they emerged from the gate and turned towards Gloucester Street. Sylvia’s hand was tucked under his left elbow, Stephen drifted with his light, rhythmic footfall which turned his walk into merely an interlude in his dancing, on his right. For a while there was silence among them, and then Stephen said casually, “Don’t let’s have this war till after Sylvie and I get the new show on in London, hunh?”
“I’ll try to arrange that, yeah,” Jeff replied, also without stress.
“Give us a couple of years, say.”
“1936, that would be.”
“Just about.”
“Of course you realize,” Jeff told him solemnly, “that you will have the Olympic Games to contend with that year.”
“What? Where?”
“Berlin.”
“Oh-oh,” said Stephen. “That I’d like to see.”
“Well, I’ll try and arrange that too.”
“What are you, sort of a trouble-shooter for God?”
They laughed. Their feet were gay and crisp on the bricks beneath, and Sylvia gave a little skip, like a grace note, her fingers tight and confident on Jeff’s arm. It was late enough so that Gloucester Street was almost deserted, dimly lighted, with the glimmer of white houses and picket fences under dense old
trees. It might have been a generation ago, or longer, for all that showed on the face of the little town under the serene southern night. Great-aunt Felicity would have felt at home there, in her hooped skirts and tied slippers. Tibby in her old age had seen it look much the same.
“I’ve kind of got my heart set on seeing England,” said Sylvia. “What’s left of it nowadays.”
“England is still there,” Jeff promised her. “All there, you might say. But don’t wait too long. Williamsburg will be a lot more comfortable to live in soon. England is going to have a front-row-centre seat when the bombing starts.”
“Oh, dear, can’t we talk about anything but war?” Sylvia asked in a small voice.
“By all means. Who’s got a car round here?”
“Stevie has.”
“I’d promised myself a look at Yorktown while I’m here.”
“Sure, we’ll all go down tomorrow,” said Stephen. “Jamestown is more fun, though. It’ll be warm enough for a picnic on the riverbank, I should think. Cousin Sue’s favourite spot, remember?”
And the rest of the walk went into plans and reminiscences, stories about the English cousins, stories about the new show. It was not until Jeff was alone in Aunt Sue’s house again that he remembered he was a newspaper man and that now they had lost Barthou….
D
EAR
J
EFF
,
Well, we might have known, mightn’t we? The idea of having a Christmas together
anywhere
was much too good to be true. I suspect that Prince George’s wedding was just an excuse to go to London, and that Bracken is still expecting that balloon to go up. All we hear now on this side is the
Lindbergh case, and I’m glad in a way that Bracken thinks there is anything more important.
We are still hung up for a cast, and don’t expect to go into rehearsal now before February. That means opening much later than was intended, and with any sort of run
that
means the coming summer is already to hell and gone, we shall be playing in New York till Thanksgiving. Jeff, it is the best show Stevie’s ever had, and you will try once more to see us, won’t you? It isn’t that I want to show off, but it’s all I know how to do and I would like your opinion. Of course as soon as I think of doing a performance with you in front my hands get clammy, but it’s got to come some time. Have you
any
idea when you will be coming back? I know what Christmas at Farthingale means to everybody who has ever been there then, but—we do rather a nice Christmas ourselves right here in Williamsburg.
Well, nothing came of the shooting at Marseilles, did it. And if they are holding the Olympic Games in Germany in 1936 I should think they’d be careful not to spoil that because of all the tourist trade. Except for the English bunch, the 1914 war rather skipped our family, but now it would mean you and Stevie first of all. Is your stepfather still at the War Office? What does
he
think?
Please write about the Farthingale Christmas at great length. If I am to meet them all next year I must get them sorted out in my mind, it will be worse than the London first night! Can’t you draw some kind of diagram?