XVIII
John Grandin was not alone in his feeling of being an outsider. If other civilians present did not feel themselves unwelcome guests, they did look upon the real guests of the evening with a kind of awe. The hundreds of uniformed young men—heartbreakingly young, most of them—of all ranks and branches of the service and each looking his cleanest and best, were the admiration and envy of all, the very spirit and beauty and life of the evening, while the Nantucket dignitaries at the reception table were anonymous and less than nothing.
The clubhouse had become charged with an atmosphere of youth, an oppressive feeling of young masculinity so real as to be almost tangible, unlike anything John Grandin (or for that matter, any one of them) had been accustomed to in the recent and comfortable past. Evening parties, receptions, dances and other public gatherings of this sort had always largely been given over to the attraction of, and response to, pretty women and girls. Young women in bright dresses set the tone of the evening, and the success or failure of the social occasion depended on the femininity present, its quality, glamour, or charm. Now the reverse was true. The evening was given up to the worship of the male; it was his night. The uniform dominated the scene like a physical lure, it imposed itself on the consciousness of all, and made even the least imaginative respond to its attraction. Something of this feeling seemed to have entered into the behavior of the young men themselves. The normal shyness characteristic of youth in the presence of girls and older folk was nonexistent. The boys were too aggressive in their attitude toward their adoring partners; and what ordinarily would have been commented on by their elders as arrogance or actual rudeness was recognized tonight as the natural and charming play of young men about to go off to war. Under the influence of the predominant uniform, women and girls bloomed like flowers, and the citizenry responded alike with pleasure, with admiration, and with affection. No one could do enough for the boys.
There was a small flurry at the door and Toni Lansing, in a simple white dress like a tennis frock, came in. She walked rapidly and with enormous composure to her place at the reception table, followed by a young naval officer carrying her light fur-collared coat. She apologized to the Commander for being late, then ducked under the table and came up on the other side next to him, as if it was far too much trouble to go all the way down to the end and back. She looked up brightly at the boys who, one and all, stared at her, and she signified humorously, with an inviting little pantomime which seemed good-naturedly to burlesque her celebrity, that she was ready and willing to give out autographs all night long if anyone should be so foolish as to want one. During the little performance she managed with charming tact to convey the impression that they would be doing her a favor instead of the other way around.
Billie Hauman gazed enthralled. Grandin himself could not but be impressed, though for different reasons. It was curious to look at that slight figure and realize what an enormous earning capacity she had, what an extraordinary amount of money she attracted to box offices throughout the country, and what she meant, in romance and glamour, to millions of men and women. Apart from her skill, Toni Lansing had little to do with it. It was an illusion: something that existed only on the screen or in the frustrations of many humdrum lives. . . .
Suddenly all conversations ceased and the entire place came to attention, respectful and grave. It was a full moment before John Grandin realized that the national anthem was being played.
Erect, he waited beside Ethel amid the suddenly quiet crowd of strangers—which now, for some reason, included the Howards and Billie. The strains of The Star-Spangled Banner floated down from the raised platform and provided a curious suspension of time, a break in the normal sequence of events, a time out, in which John Grandin felt as alone as if he had been in a vast empty room. In all that strange crowd he knew only his wife, cared only for her, belonged to no one else; side by side with her during the playing of the anthem he felt acutely the poverty, loneliness, and brevity of life, its ineffable transience. He heard her voice, a confident but quiet alto, and he was deeply touched. Out of all the confused people in the whole confused world she was the one he knew; it was urgent (but now!) that they should look at one another, see who they were, and hang onto what they had: life moved so fast! Each single moment was alive, if one was only aware of it, and none more charged with meaning than this. He had lost track of themselves for so long, but it now seemed clear, plain, and immediate that a man’s sole purpose was to look about, to see whom it was he loved, and to love her. . . . He felt for the hand beside his own, found her fingers and clasped them in his, while the voices soared around him. He turned his head to catch her glance. She was looking straight ahead at the platform where the band played, her chin slightly raised. His eye was caught by something just beyond. In the doorway was Cliff Hauman, standing alone at attention. From his visored cap to his shoes, his uniform was a resplendent, a breath-taking white.
The shoes were so white that the stuff would surely rub off at a touch; the stiff twill trousers had been pressed to razorlike creases. The blouse was emblazoned with gold buttons straight down to his middle, with area or campaign ribbons studded with stars; and the silver bars of his rank adorned his shoulders. The dazzling garment fitted him tight, so that the many gold buttons were somewhat strained; the high collar looked uncomfortably close beneath his chin. Above the shining patent-leather visor, just below the wide starched crown of the cap—and on either side of the high collar of the blouse as well—was the emblem of the Marine Corps in silver and gold: a replica of the Western Hemisphere, showing the Americas, superposed upon a fouled anchor surmounted by an eagle with spread wings.
Here again, but more than ever now, was the hero out of Homer—Hector or Achilles—or Lancelot (far more than Galahad), Siegfried, Jason of the Argonauts, who had been his boyhood companions. A thousand times he had sailed in the windy Argo over the wine-dark sea, eaten with, slept with, fought with and loved with the men of that manly and various crew. Here was one of them now, the epitome of them all, who in another moment would step forward and call him familiarly “Johnnie.”
As he waited for the anthem to end, the expression on his young unselfconscious face was one of strained, almost worried, respect; but the general impression he created was something else again. In his most extravagant flight of vanity or eagerness to please, Cliff Hauman could not have begun to calculate the full effect he had produced. The white made him look even larger than he was; he glowed in the doorway like a figure abstract, luminous, and mythical.
The band came to the finish; with scarcely a pause it broke into a lively dance tune. Hauman stepped forward, and for the moment was lost in the crowd of young men and girls who came to life at once in a swirling mass.
“Here comes Bill Howard,” Ethel said. “Will you ask Mrs. Howard to dance with you?”
But when he approached her, Sarah Howard said: “You don’t want to dance, you’re just being polite. I don’t want to, either. Let’s sit it out.”
From chairs at the side they watched the bouncing frenzied crowd. A young sailor jitterbugged by himself in front of them, while his partner performed the exact same gyrations a couple of feet away; when they came together, it was with the force of a blow. Bill Howard and Ethel passed, their reserve a strange contrast to the modern antics all around them. In the center of the room, his tawny head towering above the others, Cliff Hauman could be seen bobbing happily up and down; Billie, her eyes shut, nestled against the broad white chest, oblivious to everyone but her husband.
“Do you know what this reminds me of?” Sarah Howard said. “I can’t get it out of my mind:
“ ‘There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men . . .’
I suppose that sounds pretty sophomoric to you,” she added.
“Indeed it doesn’t. Do you know how it goes on?”
Sarah Howard gave a small laugh. “I think I do, though I never thought I’d be quoting Byron at my age:
“ ‘A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;—
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell! . . .’ ”
“I had forgotten how good that is,” Grandin said. “It does have a mood . . .”
The band had shifted to a new tune, a slow swinging nostalgic melody like a college song, and in a few moments the voices of many young men and girls had taken up the refrain. They listened to the swaying dancers singing as they danced, moving in a slower tempo now, their heads together, many of them in public amorous embrace. The melody was not unlike the Alma Mater of Hauman’s own university—Where the vale of Onondaga Meets the eastern sky—or the Far above Cayuga’s waters With its waves of blue of Cornell, which was the same; but suddenly, with a mounting disbelief, John Grandin realized what he was hearing. At the same moment Mrs. Howard said:
“My god, did you ever hear anything more comic in your life? Listen!”
“Let’s re-mem-berr Pearl Har-bor
As we go to meet the foe. . . .
Let’s re-mem-berr Pearl Har-bor
As we did the Al-a-mo. . . .”
Heads together, lazily smiling, the young men and girls poured forth the song without thought as they moved slowly around the dance floor. It was a simple melody, the kind which, heard once, one knew immediately; it flooded the hall like a football song on the night of a rally before the big game; and like a football song, when sung in unison by a mixed company of young men and women, it was a love song as much as anything else. . . .
“We will al-ways re-mem-berr
How they died for lib-ber-ty . . .
Let’s re-mem-berr Pearl Har-borr
And go on to vic-tor-reee. . . .”
Grandin felt the need to escape the place for a moment or two. “Would you like to step out and get some fresh air?”
“You go,” Sarah Howard said; “I wouldn’t miss this for worlds.”