The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (46 page)

 

 

"I suppose in a little while it'll be crowded here," Anne said.

 

 

"I suppose so . . . it's New Year's Eve."

 

 

Anne sighed. "I guess I'm not in the mood. I feel kind of low."

 

 

"Did you get hurt in the crash?"

 

 

"I've got a nice black and blue spot." She toyed with her drink.
"Must be from you. I hit you like a ton of bricks. How about you?"

 

 

"I'm okay," Yale said, wondering how to say the words that filled his mind
whenever he looked at the clean lines of Anne's face. He wanted to stroke
the wisp of hair that grazed her cheek.

 

 

"I suppose that Major Trafford will be around here soon," she said.

 

 

Yale was surprised. "Do you want to see him?"

 

 

"No, of course I don't. . . Yale Marratt." She smiled at his pleased grin.
"If you could be anywhere you wanted tonight, or do anything you wanted
to do . . . where would it be? . . . What would it be?"

 

 

"What do you mean?" Yale asked.

 

 

"Oh, I don't know . . . once a long time ago before wars . . . when I was
a girl . . . it was something you thought . . . who you went with . . .
where you went . . . what you did on New Year's Eve . . . it seemed very
important."

 

 

Yale poured another drink for them. "I guess, if I really stopped to
analyze it, I would say right here is where I want to be. Anything else
would mean either repeating the past or predicting the future . . . both
kind of futile."

 

 

Anne drank her drink silently.

 

 

"What about you?" Yale asked. "For you it would be back somewhere
in time?"

 

 

She shook her head. "No . . . not and know that time was running out."

 

 

Yale understood her meaning. He wondered what kind of man her husband
had been. He asked her. She told him, disjointedly, catching at moments
of her married life. Yale sensed her need and loneliness.

 

 

"He must have been a gentle person," he said. "I was like that once.
There isn't any room in the world for the meek or humble."

 

 

"So now you play at brutality," Anne said. "What about last night?"

 

 

He told her, and in the telling tried to convey his feeling of disgust.
"It wasn't for the money . . . why did I take the gamble? I guess I'd
have to tell you my life's history to explain that." Yale smiled.

 

 

She listened in detail to his recital of the events in Casablanca, asking
him questions and weighing his answers. "I think you are still a gentle
person," she said finally. "Look, it's starting to get crowded in here."

 

 

Yale stared uncomfortably at the officers who had gathered in the
club. Trafford would probably arrive any minute, drunk, ready for
a quarrel.

 

 

"You know, a little while ago you asked me if I could do anything I wanted
tonight what would it be?"

 

 

Anne nodded.

 

 

"When twelve o'clock comes," Yale said slowly, "I'd like to be alone
with you in bed . . . holding you close in my arms . . . reciting the
last lines of
Dover Beach
to you."

 

 

Anne looked at him quietly. "Is there any point to it? What happens
afterwards . . . tomorrow?"

 

 

Yale shrugged. "I guess I just want to escape into another world for
a few hours. Forget it, I'm sorry if I offended you. A few drinks and
I get a kitten complex. I like to curl up with the other kittens."

 

 

Anne stood up. "It's silly . . . tomorrow I'll be sorry . . . but I agree.
It's a sensible way to spend New Year's Eve. Come on, Yale Marratt!" On
the way to her room, she asked him what the last lines of
Dover Beach
were.

 

 

"I'll tell you at midnight," he whispered.

 

 

Her room was tiny. Two wooden charpoys supplied with thin mattresses and
rough wool army blankets and a table were all that occupied the room. They
locked themselves in. Anne found a candle and lighted it. "It's better than
that bulb hanging from the ceiling," she said. "This way there's shadows."
Yale moved the mattresses from the beds to the floor.

 

 

Sitting on the mattresses, they looked at each other awkwardly. For a
moment Anne regretted her easy acquiescence. She wondered what Yale was
thinking. Was she just what it appeared? An easy make? A loose goose? She
grinned, and then started to laugh. Yale asked her what was funny.

 

 

"I am," she gasped. "I don't know where I heard the expression, but it's
me all right. A loose goose. I'm asking for it, aren't I? I'm cheap.
On the make." Anne's laughter had turned to sobs. She didn't put her face
down and cry. She just cried, sitting up, her shoulders square, looking
at Yale. Her face revealed such misery and loneliness that Yale wanted
to reach out and pull her into his arms. He held her shoulders and kissed
her gently on her tear-wet lips.

 

 

"Anne, if I thought you were cheap -- or on the make -- I wouldn't have
asked you. I'm not Major Trafford. I haven't been with many women. For all
I know you may have known a lot of men intimately, but I don't think so."

 

 

Anne shook her head, still crying. "I guess that's why I'm scared, Yale.
The only man I have ever been with was Ricky."

 

 

He took her in his arms. She lay close to him, and he kissed her
tear-stained cheeks. For an hour or longer he held her, touching her face
occasionally with his fingers. Outside they listened to the passing of
footsteps, and the low male talk and laughter of soldiers on their way
to the officers' club. They were near enough to hear the throbbing beat
of the music. The candle sputtered and flickered as it burned to the end.

 

 

"Before it goes out," Anne said softly in his ear, "I'll dance just for
you." Yale watched her get up and slip out of her skirt and underclothing.
She moved easily with the rhythmic beat of the music. "I love music,"
she whispered. "It's an aphrodisiac."

 

 

Yale watched the shadows undulating on her breasts and belly. The light
brown pubic hairs at the juncture of her thighs swayed, enticingly
near him.

 

 

"Anne, come here!" Yale shed his clothes and embraced her, still moving
and sinuous in his grasp. "I don't need an aphrodisiac." With the curve of
her buttocks in his hand, her breasts against his chest, he gently touched
her vulva. She sank to her knees . . . her lips parted. She sighed,
"Oh, Yale . . . Yale . . . come inside me quickly . . . hold me close."

 

 

Midnight came. Still embracing . . . Anne was lying on top because his
thigh hurt from the knife wound . . . they held onto the sacredness of
their communion as they listened to the roar of welcome to 1945 from
the officers' club.

 

 

He looked up into her face. She smiled, and leaned over and kissed his
shoulder where she had bitten him. "Happy New Year, Yale Marratt."
He heard her chuckle, and then say softly, "Ah, love, let us be true to
one another! For the world which seems to lie before us like a land of
dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new. . . ."

 

 

He pinched her buttocks, delighted. "You devil, you knew it all the
time." He laughed. "Let me finish it. 'Hath really a joy, a love, a
light, a certitude, and help for pain. And Anne and I are here, as on a
darkling plain, avoiding the confused alarms of struggle and flight, while
revelling in a warmest delight.'" Yale looked at her affectionately.
"A few hours ago I would have said it the way it was written. . . ."

 

 

 

 

 

 

6

 

 

Anne walked slowly along the worn path that skirted the edge of the
Axonby's tea plantation. It was a day like more than a hundred others
she had known in India. Days of heat, and titanium white skies that
suddenly turned red around four in the afternoon when cool winds blew
off the shadowy peaks of the Himalayas.

 

 

A little over three months, she thought. Already, she moved in another
world . . . absorbed in the strange timelessness and placidity of this
land and its people. In the dry smell from the tea bushes that she
plucked as she passed; in the brash hint of animal urine, perhaps from
the tiger that had been lurking near Chatterji's village -- the tiger
that she and Yale had tried to shoot, with carbines, only a week ago,
as they perched giggling in a tree, while a staked-out goat bleated
helplessly -- in the ever present smell of burning dung that dominated
the cool early evening air. She sensed, almost dizzily, the strong sexual
earthiness of the land and the people.

 

 

Walking toward the Indian village, leaving the Air Transport Command base
at Talibazar, was like shedding the vestiges of western civilization that
the Army had brought with it, and putting on the clothes of an older
timeless world that seemed somehow closer to the roots of existence.

 

 

In a few minutes she would be in their house . . . Yale and hers . . .
a tiny bamboo basha covered with dried grass to keep out the rain.
Chatterji and his relatives had built this for them. A house in the
forest, she told Yale. The first night Yale had made love to her in their
basha she felt as ephemeral and evanescent as Rima, the jungle girl, and
she knew that in her first quarter century of life, nothing . . . not
even her marriage, and the loss of her husband . . . had touched and
changed the well springs of her being so thoroughly as had these three
months with Yale.

 

 

Helen Axonby had cautioned her against "going native."

 

 

"We all have to watch it here in India, my dear. When you come to know
them there is something irresistibly attractive about these people. The
British have been trying to change India for years. In the end, you'll
see, India will change them and the West too."

 

 

But Anne had not listened and for a few days stolen out of every week she
had gone native with Yale. Wonderful, crazy days when she sneaked out to
Chatterji's village, walking the narrow road across the rice paddies,
to find Yale eagerly waiting for her. But it had been Helen Axonby's
admonition that worried her as much as Colonel Trafford's blunt appraisal.

 

 

She remembered the flight from Abadan, and Trafford's speculative manner
as he surveyed her and. Yale. She remembered his remark, "So you shacked
up together, huh? Well, I don't blame you, baby . . . but don't keep
it all to yourself. Spread it around. You won't wear it out."

 

 

He had guffawed at Yale's "Shut your rotten mouth," and had been silent
for the rest of the flight.

 

 

Anne had been silent, too, knowing that she was "marked" by Trafford,
who would spread the rumor about her availability. Echoes of the popular
notion that Red Cross girls were provided for soldier comfort; rumors
she had heard about girls who had actually gone into business in certain
theaters of war selling a few minutes of "next-in-line" ecstasy for twenty
dollars or more for a thrust or two, swarmed through her mind. She had
wondered what Yale thought about her, and had been sad because the next
day he had said little. She remembered him tenderly tracing the curve
of her face and saying, "Thank you, Anne, for a warm wonderful New
Year's Eve." But she had been frightened. It was a nice thing to say,
but somehow it wasn't enough.

 

 

In Karachi, at the officers' club, eating bowls of shrimp and tremendous
steaks served by Hindus who watched them resignedly as they ate the
"uneatable," Yale told her about Cynthia.

 

 

"You and I seem to reach out to each other the same way, Anne," he had
said. "I don't know what it was about Cynthia. Perhaps because we studied
together for four years I absorbed a little of her into my being. It's
crazy, really. It's more understandable for you since you were actually
married, but I never thought I could experience the same relationship
with another woman." He touched the ends of her fingers. "Maybe because
until I met you I never wanted to experience it with anyone else."

 

 

For two days they wandered the streets of Karachi, reporting back to the
base every night for their orders. They were unable to dispel the feeling
that this wisp of love they had found would soon be blown away. Living
from minute to minute, delighted in their discovery of each other, and
fearing the inevitable separation that their orders would bring; choked
with a feeling of loneliness that almost corroded their relationship.

 

 

Yale hired a gharri to drive them around Karachi. Silently they listened
to the clip-clop of the horse's shoes. Without speaking, they watched
the curved back of the Indian driver who occasionally turned to describe
a historical site. They nodded bemused acknowledgment of his attempt to
enlighten them.

 

 

"Yale," she had asked, "where is the world going? Does this war mean
anything? We all take it so uncomplainingly . . . like the Indians, here,
who follow their Karma endlessly from one reincarnation to another.
I can remember back in college when we used to get angry. There were
America First meetings. We talked endlessly about what a sucker the
United States had been, and how we had fought a war to make the world
safe for the armament makers. . . ."

 

 

Yale remembered. He told her he didn't believe it would ever happen again.
There would be no Sassoons or Hemingways caviling against war. "I think
too many people on both sides like strife; they like the herding together
that occurs in a war. You know the saying, 'They've found a home in the
army.' The gregarious ones . . . the pack which runs together . . .
which is most people . . . they fear loneliness more than anything in
this world. They are afraid to look into themselves and find the great
nothingness that is there. When the war is over the people of the world
will have been conditioned to accept the leader to obey the organization
. . . to identify themselves with the morality of numbers. Why? Because
human beings fear loneliness worse than death." Yale had sighed, and
there were tears in his eyes when he took her in his arms. "God, Anne,
I don't know as I blame them. I am lonely for you. I fear losing you.
If it is because I only want basically to hide my face in your breasts,
it won't be a good love, will it?"