When he got back to camp, Noah found a cable waiting for him. It had taken seven days to reach him. He opened it clumsily, feeling the blood jumping in his wrists and fingertips. "A boy," he read, "six and a half pounds, I feel magnificent, I love you. Hope."
He walked in a daze out of the orderly room.
After supper he distributed the cigars. He made a careful point of giving cigars to all the men whom he had fought with in the camp in Florida. Brailsford wasn't there, because he had been transferred back in the States, but all the rest of the men took them with a surprised, uneasy shyness, and they shook his hand with dumb, warm congratulations, as though they, too, shared the wonder, so far from home, in the fine English rain, among the assembled instruments of destruction, of the state of fatherhood.
"A boy," said Donnelly, the Golden-Gloves heavyweight, the flame-thrower, shaking Noah's hand numb in his terrible, friendly fist. "A boy. What do you know about that? A boy! I hope the poor little son of a bitch never has to wear a uniform like his old man. Thank you," soberly sniffing the gift. "Thanks a lot. This is a great cigar."
But at the last moment Noah could not bring himself to offer cigars to Sergeant Rickett or Captain Colclough. He gave three to Burnecker, instead. He smoked one himself, the first of his life, and went to sleep slightly dizzy, his head wavering in smoky, thick visions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE door opened and Gretchen Hardenburg stood there in a grey wrap.
"Yes?" she said, opening the door only part way and peering out. "What is it?"
"Hello," Christian said, smiling. "I've just arrived in Berlin."
Gretchen opened the door a little more widely and looked closely at him. After a perceptible moment, during which she looked at his shoulder-straps, a light of recognition crossed her face. "Ah," she said. "The Sergeant. Welcome." She opened the door, but before Christian could kiss her, she extended her hand. They shook hands. Her hand was bony and seemed to be shaken by some slight ague.
"For the moment," she apologized, "the light in the hall… And, you've changed." She stepped back and looked at him critically. "You've lost so much weight. And your colour…"
"I had jaundice," Christian said shortly. He hated his colour himself, and didn't like people to remark about it. This was not how he had imagined the first minute with Gretchen, caught at the door this way, in a sharp discussion of his unpleasant complexion. "Malaria and jaundice. That's how I got to Berlin. Sick leave. I've just got off the train. This is the first place I've been…"
"How flattering," Gretchen said, automatically pushing her hair, which was uncombed, back from her face. "Very nice of you to come."
"Aren't you going to ask me in?" Christian said. Begging again, he thought bitterly, as soon as I lay eyes on her.
"Oh, I'm so sorry." Gretchen laughed shrilly. "I was asleep, and I suppose I'm still dazed. Of course, of course, come in…"
She closed the door behind him and put her hand familiarly on his arm, pressing it firmly. It may still be all right, Christian thought, as he went into the well-remembered room; perhaps she was surprised in the beginning and now she's getting over it.
Once in the living-room he made a move towards her, but she slipped away and lit a cigarette and sat down.
"Sit down, sit down," she said. "My pretty Sergeant. I often wondered what had happened to you."
"I wrote," Christian said, seating himself stiffly. "I wrote again and again. You never answered."
"Letters…" Gretchen made a face and waved her cigarette.
"One simply doesn't have the time. I always mean to… And then, finally, I burn them, it is just impossible. I loved your letters, though, I really did; it was awful what they did to you in the Ukraine, wasn't it?"
"I was not in the Ukraine," Christian said soberly. "I was in Africa and Italy."
"Of course, of course," Gretchen said without embarrassment.
"We're doing very well in Italy, aren't we? very well indeed. It is the one really bright spot."
Christian wondered how Italy could seem bright from any vantage point at all, but he did not speak. He watched Gretchen narrowly as she talked. She looked much older, especially in the untidy grey dressing-gown, and her eyes were yellowed and pouchy, her hair dead, her movements, which before had been youthfully energetic, now neurotic, overcharged, quivering.
"I envy you being in Italy," she was saying. "Berlin is getting impossible. Impossible to keep warm, impossible to sleep at night, raids almost every night, impossible to get from place to place. I tried to get sent to Italy, merely to keep warm…" She laughed, and there was something whining in her laugh. "I really need a holiday," she hurried on. "You have no idea how hard we work and under what conditions. Often I tell the man who is the head of my bureau, if the soldiers had to fight under conditions like this, they would go on strike, I tell him to his face…"
Marvellous, thought Christian, she is boring me.
"Oh," said Gretchen, "I honestly do remember. My husband's Company. That's it. The black lace. It was stolen last summer. You have no idea how dishonest people have become in Berlin; you have to watch every cleaning-woman like a hawk…"
Garrulous, too, Christian thought, coldly making the additions to the damning account.
"I shouldn't talk like this to a soldier home from the front," Gretchen said. "All the newspapers keep saying how brave everyone is in Berlin, how they suffer without a word, but there'd be no use hiding anything from you; the minute you went out in the street you'd hear everyone complaining. Did you bring anything with you from Italy?"
"What?" Christian asked, puzzled.
"Something to eat," Gretchen said. "So many of the men come back with cheese or that wonderful Italian ham, and I thought perhaps you…" She smiled coquettishly at him and leaned forward, very intimately, her dressing-gown falling open a little, revealing the line of her breasts.
"No," said Christian shortly. "I didn't bring back anything except my jaundice."
He felt tired and a little lost. All his plans for the week in Berlin had been centred upon Gretchen, and now…
"It's not that we don't get enough to eat," Gretchen said officially, "but it's just that the variety…"
Oh, God, Christian mourned within him, here two minutes and we are discussing diet!
"Tell me," he said abruptly, "have you heard from your husband?"
"My husband," Gretchen said, checking herself, as though she regretted giving up the subject of food. "Oh. He killed himself."
"What?"
"He killed himself," Gretchen said brightly. "With a pocket knife."
"It's not possible," Christian said, because it did not seem real that all that fierce, ordered energy, that intricate, cold, reasonable strength could have been self-destroyed. "He had so many plans…"
"I know about his plans," Gretchen said aggrievedly. "He wanted to come back here. He sent me his picture. How he ever got anyone to take a picture of that face I honestly don't know. He regained the sight of one eye and suddenly decided he wanted to come back and live with me. You have no idea what he looked like." She shuddered visibly. "A man must be insane to send his wife a picture like that. I would understand, he wrote, I would be strong enough. He was queer enough to begin with, but without a face… There are some limits, after all, even in a war. Horror has a proper place in life, he wrote, and we must all be able to bear it…"