The Pantomime

by MONICA STIRLING

1

WHENEVER the weather was fine the patients were wheeled into the open — all except two of them. These were Guy Doumerge, a young French pilot, and Milan Curcin, a middleaged Yugoslav sailor. Both were so badly wounded that it was apparent even to themselves that their deaths were likely to take place soon.

Although they had met for the first time in the hospital, the two men had already become friends rather than acquaintances. Each preferred the other to his alternative neighbor and found in the inadequately sunlit afternoons when they had the ward to themselves an opportunity to talk with an intimacy encouraged by the acknowledged imminence of death.

It was sympathy of temperament rather than community of interests that made a bond between them, for their pre-war experiences had little similarity.

Guy’s life had until the war been of orderliness and industry all compact, and his belief in the value of these two qualities was an intrinsic part of his nature. Despite the events of the past four years, he still had a virtuous and gently nurtured child’s horrified disbelief of the injustice and violence now encompassing him: he often felt either that there must be some reasonable explanation that had hitherto escaped him or that he would presently wake to find the war had been a dream.

His father, a professional soldier, had been killed in 1918, and his mother had spent the years that followed trying to prevent her two children from realizing that the texture of their life was poorer than it ought to have been. The elder child, Emmanuele, had been educated at, the famous school for the daughters of holders of the Légion d’Honneur; the younger, Guy, at the Lycée Louis le Grand. Both had, by anxious striving, done well at school.

But when the 1939 war broke out, Emmanuele, then studying science under Madame Curie’s elder daughter, became a nurse, and Guy, regretfully but with no doubts as to his duty, left the Sorbonne for the army. And fortunately for their peace of mind, this incapacity to doubt the nature of their duty, to which their mother’s account of their father’s life and death had committed them, survived even defeat; and in the autumn of 1940 they both set out to be finished abroad.

Like many of their contemporaries, they found the moving accidents by flood and field which they suffered so unlike anything they had been taught to expect that after they had been in England a few weeks they almost ceased to believe in them.

But when, soon after this, Emmanuele was killed in an air raid on London, it seemed to Guy that his private life could scarcely become grimmer. He continued to apply himself to his work with the steady devotion now habitual to him, but his youthful taste for its adventurous element completely left him.

Despite his extreme reticence, Guy was popular with his comrades. They had for him the regard appropriate to a mascot: three times he had his aeroplane badly mauled but brought it safely home, his crew unharmed. On the first occasion he had broken his ankle; on the second his left arm was slightly burned; on the third he sustained bruises. But in the autumn of 1943 he was shot down with more disastrous results, which was why he now lay, weak but clear-headed, with one leg amputated, the other in an appalling condition, and both arms severely burned.

He was admired by everyone in the hospital for his remarkable powers of physical endurance, but he was still too young for suffering to have induced the resumption of childishness that endeared so many of the sick men to the nurses. They found it difficult to joke with the young pilot in the traditional manner.

The only person who fully understood the French boy was the Yugoslav sailor beside him. For he, having had a beneficially adventurous life, perceived Guy to be struggling not only with physical pain but with intense disappointment at the emptiness of the short life he was about to leave. In consequence he allowed the boy to persuade him to tell again and again the story of his own remarkable life.

2

BORN a Slav subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Milan had had little real choice as to his profession. Like most of the more intellectual of his compatriots, he had entered the Church, hoping to find in its nominal internationalism some alleviation of the alien nationalism encompassing him. But as this hope was unconscious, and his natural piety strong, he had been able to fulfill his priestly functions with sincerity as well as efficiency.

When the Empire disintegrated, his first great moment occurred — and with a boy’s excitement Milan told Guy of how one day a gypsy had run into his village presbytery saying, “The Emperor has gone”; of how, as if by magic, the five thousand souls who made up the population of the village grasped what was happening and, committing themselves to anarchy, began to loot; of how they rushed, fluid and inexorable as the sea, from shop to house and from house to shop; of how they would have wrecked the presbytery had not Milan happened to own a machine gun which he had bought for a piece of bread from a party of deserters; and of how with his gun, a drum of ammunition, and the help of two boys even younger than himself, — Slav soldiers still wearing tattered Austrian uniforms, — Milan had encircled his village with peace.

Setting up their gun in the market place, Milan and his two friends fired the first rounds of ammunition. Rat-tat-tat-tat. The peasants, unaware that this sound had only symbolic value, ceased looting and returned to their homes. Scarcely had they done so when another gypsy brought news that Imperial troops were advancing on the village. Firing the remaining ammunition, Milan answered firmly: “Tell them we are waiting for them.” The Imperial troops did not come. And for six months the young priest kept his village contentedly free from bloodshed — until the happy day when the first Yugoslav government came into being and was able to tend its own. “By this time,” said Milan with a naïve pride extremely touching in so good and wise a man, “I had increased my army. We were no longer three. We were twenty-four.”

But though every detail of Milan’s improbablesounding adventures gave Guy intense vicarious pleasure, it was the Yugoslav’s account of his paradisiacal student days in Paris that made the boy pale, tremble, and at last turn away to hide his tears.

Knowing that one of the first needs of grief is not to be soothed but to be recognized as legitimate, Milan said quickly: “I know, little one. I know. There is so much you have missed, and will never have, that there is nothing an older one can say — nothing that would not be pretentious. But consolation apart, in this war at least you have done bravely. Is it not so? No one could have expected more of one life.”

“Thank you,” stammered Guy. “Perhaps not. Not more. But something different. I expected something different — of myself, I mean. You see — when you talk — when you. talk — I can see you — younger than I am now, standing in the market place, absurd and gallant with your one gun and your two boys —but more than absurd and gallant. Much more. Because you were a priest fulfilling his function. You did not let events deflect you from your vocation: you had five thousand individuals in your charge — and you did not let life intimidate you into choosing death. And now, though you are dying before you are old, you can look back — ” Guy’s eyes began to glitter feverishly — “you can look back and say to yourself that whatever else there has been in your life of disappointment, there was a moment when you had five thousand individuals in your charge and it was as if you went to each one and made him a present of his future. You can feel there was, at least, one moment when you fulfilled your destiny.”

And because Guy was deriving needed sustenance from the thought that someone of his acquaintance had known consummation, Milan refrained from telling the boy that he had for years bitterly regretted his precipitate choice of profession; that for years he had been bitterly afflicted by his longing to marry a Serbian girl whom he had met too late. Instead he nodded gravely and said, “But you, little one — did you not for a moment fulfill your destiny when you escaped to fight?”

“No,” said Guy, softly but firmly. “Oh, no. And I am not being modest when I say that — only truthful. I did what was right, yes. But it was — as it were — outside my part. Because I wasn’t made for great adventures as you were, but for a modest existence: to do my job, to fulfill my responsibilities towards my family, to marry a girl I loved and who loved me, and to have children. That above all. Above all. I have never had casual love affairs. Because I wanted, when I married, to love once and for all. And now I am dying. And I have never even caught sight of my destiny, let alone fulfilled it.”

“And you regret the ‘casual love affairs’ you might have had?”

“Yes — no — oh, I don’t know. It’s only that I regret love.”

“Now then!” called the kind, undiffident voice of the youngest nurse. “What’s all this? You two are as bad as a couple of old women for gossiping. You mustn’t tire yourselves out, you know. You don’t want to miss the pantomime, do you?”

When the nurse found that neither Guy nor Milan knew the meaning of the word “pantomime,” she had to explain it. She exclaimed with disbelief at their not knowing what everyone else in the hospital had known for weeks: that tomorrow afternoon some actors and actresses from a near-by repertory theater were coming to perform their Christmas play to the wounded.

“But that is most kind,” said Milan with enthusiasm. “And most right—that we should be initiated into the folklore of our allies.”

“That’s right,” said the nurse, who did not know what he was talking about but was untroubled by her ignorance. “That’s right. We’ve fixed up a sort of platform in the lecture room. So you’ll both be able to go — if you behave yourselves and sleep well tonight.” She was a good-hearted girl and thought that it gave wounded men courage if one pretended that eating and sleeping, living and dying, were alike processes under their own control — and in many cases she was right.

3

AS SOON as the men had been taken into the lecture room, they began to create an atmosphere of disproportionate excitement like that often found at school plays. The actors had arrived more than an hour before. They were for the most part very young, and the classically student-like air of their bright, eccentric clothes, the absorption in their tasks that one and all displayed, and the remoteness of these tasks from the recent experiences of the attendant soldiers, many of whom were, and knew themselves to be, engaged in a doomed struggle with death — all this reminded Milan of the arrival of the players in Hamlet. Every now and again a sound of hammering came from behind the improvised curtain, and once a girl in green trousers came into the auditorium and fussed with wires and lamps.

At last a heavy silence fell. Then from a gramophone behind the stage came the sound of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz.

The curtains drew jerkily apart and a very young girl, dressed in white tulle and rather badly made up, waved a papier-mâché wand and announced that she was the Fairy Queen and was about to reveal the true story of the Sleeping Beauty.

Few of the men in that audience had visited a theater for months; and as the grave and lovely fairy story was unfolded, with its traditional complement of slapstick comedy, they gradually forgot the crudeness of much of the performance and saw only the ingenuity and wish to please of the young artists; until at last the reactions of audience and players dovetailed in the beautiful pattern of giving and receiving pleasure.

For Guy and Milan this pleasure was increased by the exoticism of the entertainment. Guy, who was extremely fond of the theater, was in a peculiarly receptive mood when the moment came for the Sleeping Beauty’s rescuer to make his first appearance.

Being ignorant of the traditions of English pantomime, Guy was taken completely by surprise when, a fanfare of trumpets having announced the Prince’s presence, the black velvet curtains at the back of the stage parted and revealed a shaft of light in which stood, very still, a young girl who seemed to him the embodied vision of the brightest dream which, like a dawn, heralds the day of life.

She was slender and long-legged — so much so that Guy’s English neighbor hissed appreciatively through a broken tooth: “Gor blimey, ‘er legs come out of ‘er neck, they do an’ all” — and her white satin suit and the way in which her short black hair curled all over her head gave her the look of a Renaissance page boy. But what charmed Guy most was the mingled simplicity and diffidence with which she eliminated both sentimentality and facetiousness from her part, substituting a lyrical solemnity entirely appropriate to a child’s conception of a fairy prince.

Towards the end of the play the Dame in charge of the players came down to the footlights and, with the exquisite irrelevance that is an integral part of pantomimes, asked the audience to join in the chorus of “Every Nice Girl Loves a Sailor.” To Milan there was something deeply moving in the spectacle of young wounded men singing with innocent lustiness a song so naïvely evocative of the sweet, crude pleasures for which many of them were now permanently unfitted. Noticing that Guy was not singing, and wondering if the boy shared his emotions, Milan tried to give him a smile of encouragement.

As if he had been waiting for this signal, Guy jerked his head farther round and whispered, “Please — please ask the nurse if She could come and speak to us afterwards.”

“She?” Milan raised his black shrubs of eyebrows. “Which she?”

Which she? Which she! Once again Guy felt as he had when he was very young: scarcely able to believe in the imbecility around him — imbecility whose gratuitous yet willful nature had once been as clear to him as the no longer apparent fact that black was black and white white, and that two rights don’t make a wrong. And because he was back in this young, intolerant world, his eyes became brighter and his voice clearer and there was a note of happiness in his exasperated: —

“Which she? Why, you sacred species of imbecile — which she do you suppose? The Prince, of course.”

“Aha. The little one with the so delicate face? Now myself I prefer the Princess. A delightful young person. And so blonde.”

So blonde! Guy looked at his friend coldly, and as he did so there came into his mind the priest who had prepared him for his First Communion: a foolish man addicted to saying, “And now my young friend, if you will permit me to descend for a moment from the sublime to the ridiculous — ” So blonde indeed!

“Really?” murmured Guy haughtily. Then, less haughtily, “You will ask, Milan?”

“I will ask,” said Milan, smiling with his lips.

4

BUT though the Yugoslav was a favorite with the nurse, she looked doubtful when he made his request, and tried to put him off by saying that the actors must have tea before catching their train. This was not the real reason for her hesitation: a pure-hearted, phlegmatic girl who after four years of war still considered all diseases to be entirely physical, she divided the world into two classes: patients and visitors — and thought the latter class a pity.

“Oh, come, nurse,” said Milan. “Please. There’s a dear soul. I knew Miss Litton in Yugoslavia. Her family were friends of mine. And it is not often that I have a chance to meet someone I knew in my country.”

“W-ell —” began the nurse; then, remembering that Milan was a very religious man and might therefore be supposed unable to tell a lie (she herself was a staunch Unitarian and never lied on purpose), she gave a small sigh and went to find the actress.

Nora Litton showed no surprise at the nurse’s story, partly because she was not in the habit of showing her feelings except when acting, and partly because the war had introduced such chaos into her private life that her capacity for surprise was almost exhausted.

“Do you want me to come at once? Or shall I get changed? I shan’t be a minute.”

“Oh, I should come as you are. He’ll like to see your costume,” said the nurse, who had been surprised to find the white satin and tinsel so tawdrylooking.

“How good of you to come, Mademoiselle,” said Milan when the nurse at last brought Nora to his bedside. “How most good.” Then, moving his eyebrows up and down, “And now, what about a cup of your national drink? Please, nurse! Just one cup. For Miss Litton. No, no. You’re not to say ‘Suppose’ ” — he mimicked the nurse with skill — “ ‘Suppose everyone were to ask for tea at all hours.’ Everyone wouldn’t. Come, nurse. Or I shall think you are in the pay of Hitler.”

This being the regulation tone for the cajoling of the hospital staff by military patients, the nurse at once smiled and left them.

After she had gone, no one spoke for a moment. Then Nora awkwardly shifted her inconsiderable weight from one foot to the other, gave a shy, quick smile and said severely, “I’ve never been to Yugoslavia, you know.”

“Oh. That is a pity.” Milan made a grimace that would have done credit to Walt Disney. “You must come after the war.”

So remote and unreal did After the War seem to both of them that neither felt it necessary to qualify the apparently inane optimism of this remark. Instead:—

“I should like to,” said Nora in the voice of a polite child. “Very much.”

There was another pause.

Then Nora gave a little tug at her unwrinkled tights, ran the tip of her tongue over her pale, delicate lips, and said, “Well — well — ”

“You will please forgive me,” said Milan. “It was the only way to get the nurse to agree to fetch you. And my young friend here wished so much to make your acquaintance. Guy Doumerge is his name. And he is a French aviator.”

“Oh — ” She turned from the benevolently wildlooking Slav to the pale, composed French boy. “Oh — ” Then, the shyness that always overcame her when she found herself with non-stage people suddenly making it impossible for her to shake hands in a conventional way, she whispered, “Ilul-lo.”

Her childishness gave Guy confidence, and a little color came into his cheeks. He laughed and said, “Hul-lo.”

She was older than he had supposed when he saw her on the stage; and though her face was just as lovely it was pale, and fatigue had drawn little lines as fine as creases in tissue paper around her large gray eyes and small nervous mouth. But the elusive, childlike quality that had entranced him on the stage was still pronounced and Guy’s voice faltered as he said, mouthing the foreign words as he had not done since his first months in England: —

“I — I saw you act just now, Mademoiselle.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. I thought you were beautiful.”

“Thank you. I — it’s a good version really, don’t you think?”

“Pardon?”

“A good version of The Sleeping Beauty.”

“Ah. Yes. Indeed, yes.”

They stared at each other.

Since he had come to England the French boy had known only one way to prevent his longing for his home from undermining his capacity for daily life: not to think of home. But now, in the presence of this shy, weary little foreign actress with whom he had fallen passionately in love, his whole being was suffused with nostalgia. Forgetting that it was unlikely he would ever have met her in France, he thought of the joy he would have known in showing her Paris and the lovely country around the village on the Loire where he and his mother, now starving, and his sister, now dead, had spent their sweetly tranquil summer holidays; he thought of the affection his mother and sister would have felt for his wife — and as the beautiful word “wife” ran along the edge of his thought like flame along a sheet of paper, he became possessed by the conviction that Nora must know his feelings and share them. And he began to tremble.

Then suddenly a bell, clanging down a distant corridor, reminded him that he was in a foreign hospital, that he was dying, that he was a sick-looking boy who would never be a healthy-looking man, and that, tremble though he might, no woman would ever tremble beneath his gaze unless from compassion. And his eyes filled with tears and he began to stutter. Then, seeing the heavy gold ring upon her finger: —

“But — you are married?”

She shook her head. “I was.”

“Oh.”

Quickly recognizing the need for sympathy, it was Milan who spoke. “I am so sorry. The war?”

She nodded. Then: “Yes, in a way.” She looked at them as if she had suddenly remembered something disturbing of which she ought to have thought before: “He was a German.”

“My dear.” Milan held out his sound hand, “He died in Germany?”

“No. In the Isle of Man. Of pneumonia. In 1940. He was a refugee.” Seeing the expression on Guy’s face, she went close to him, took his hand, and said quietly, “My mother was French.”

“Was she? Was she?” Suddenly his awareness of life slipping away overcame his awareness of Milan’s presence and Guy clutched her thin hand and whispered, “I love you. Oh, I love you. I mean,” painfully, “I could have loved you.”

“I know.” And her eyes filled with tears and she bent and kissed him on the lips. “I could have loved you, too.”

And as Nora and Guy gazed at each other and Milan gazed at Nora, the eyes of all three saw something that did not exist. For the English girl was gazing not at Guy but at the dead German she had loved — not at Guy but at a foreigner whose dying hour was lonely; and the Yugoslav was gazing not at Nora but at the Serbian girl he might have loved years ago — not at Nora but at his defeated past; and the French boy was gazing not at Nora but at the girl he might have loved years hence — not at Nora but at his murdered future, at the destiny of which he was not, after all, to take his leave without catching a glimpse.