Women's barracks

By Tereska Torrès

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Title: Women's barracks

Author: Tereska Torres

Translator: Meyer Levin


        
Release date: October 4, 2026 [eBook #79716]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1950

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79716

Credits: Adam Buchbinder, Jens Sadowski, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN'S BARRACKS ***




                                WOMEN’S
                                BARRACKS


                             TERESKA TORRES


                   Copyright © 1950 by Tereska Torres


    Originally published in 1950 by Fawcett Publications, Inc., New
                               York, NY.




                          TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE


While working in the newsroom of the Office of War Information in London
during World War II, I met a young woman who was our liaison with the
French information services. Tereska was a volunteer in the women’s
division of the Free French Forces, corresponding to our WACS. We became
friends, and I visited her often in the ancient mansion on Down Street
that had been turned into a barracks for these Frenchwomen. I came to
know Tereska’s circle.

Recently I met her again in Paris, happily married and the mother of two
children. Tereska had just written a book about her companions in the
Free French Forces, and she showed it to me. I recognized all the girls
of the little circle in Down Street, and their stories, which I knew to
be true.

It seemed to me that this book, with all its tenderness, was an
important book because it told a story that had not yet been truly told,
the story of women in war. This was the story of the effect of living
together in military barracks upon a group of young girls, many of them
utterly innocent when they entered the service, where they were to
encounter jaded women who had lived through every type of experience. I
recognized the authenticity of every line.

The problems brought forward here are problems that must be recognized
wherever women have to live together without normal emotional outlets.
What is told here should help to bring understanding of these special
problems, for the story of Down Street reminds us that women must be
women, even in war.

                                                      —George Cummings




                                FOREWORD


My husband tells me I ought to write my memoirs of the women’s army in
which I spent five years during World War II. It’s very difficult. I
don’t know where to begin or how to tell it. My husband tells me
laughingly that it will make a sensational book, and I really don’t see
myself as a writer of sensational books. But, he insists, the story will
be interesting to Americans because we were a barracksful of Frenchwomen
in exile, and it seems that Frenchwomen have a great deal of allure
abroad.

“You know I don’t like to talk about myself,” I protest.

“Well, then write about the others.” And he adds jokingly, “They’re more
interesting, anyway. Besides”—and he becomes serious—“it will be useful,
it will help people understand.”

It’s raining. It’s been raining since we arrived at the seashore. It
seems that it rains a great deal in Brittany. And the rain reminds me of
the summers in England when the rain fell ceaselessly.

I can still see, in every dismal detail, the big house on Down Street as
it looked on those wet, cheerless days. Down Street, for all those who
lived there, will always remain that big house of blackened brick in the
narrow gray street, that cold and somber house bracketed between high
brick walls. The dirty windows penetrated by yellowish light, the dim
corridors, the large glacial assembly room, the dismal dormitories, the
dining rooms with their bare tables—all had a prison-like aspect. Down
Street—for me the name evokes the list of infractions and punishments
posted in the entrance hallway; stairways to be swept, potatoes to be
peeled, floors to be scrubbed on our knees. It evokes the little
switchboard room, which someone dubbed the “Bordello,” with its high
walls and high grilled window. I can’t count the times I stood before
that window, seeking a bit of sky; but always facing us, standing there
in front of the hotel across the street, was the one we called “the
Ambassador of Peru,” holding himself erect, tall, thin, with painted
cheeks, forever watching our barracks with his strange demonic smile. He
seemed to me to be an angel of evil guarding our house.

But more than all these, Down Street evokes the women with whom I lived
in that house. The truth is, I’m one of those people who live a great
deal in the lives of others. Perhaps that’s why people seem to feel easy
in telling me things about themselves. I like to listen.

Sometimes at the barracks I wondered why so many of the girls in our
little group chose me as their confidante, and poured out their most
intimate feelings to me, their secret thoughts, while I didn’t offer
mine in return. I even asked this once of little Ursula. “Perhaps it’s
just because it is not an exchange,” she said. “When I talk to you, I
feel it’s not a bargain in which I leave you my troubles and you leave
me yours. You take mine, and that’s all.”

I never felt I was taking anyone’s troubles, though there were times
when I terribly wished I could help my friends in some way. I felt it
was wonderful to have people trust me and let me into their lives. And I
will try to write of their lives, telling not only what I saw, but of
the feelings and thoughts that they revealed to me, and of some of the
things I divined.

Naturally I was not present myself during all of the incidents that I am
about to relate. Yet I know that these things happened, and I know well
the women to whom they happened. These episodes are important, because
they are significant of the pressures and tensions that all of us felt,
and that all women must inevitably feel when they are isolated from
normal living, caught in the strange turmoil of war. And so, since I am
so well acquainted with the women who experienced these things—with
their characters as well as their outward lives—I shall from time to
time pretend, like a novelist, that I was an invisible witness to the
private moments of my comrades.

                                                       —Tereska Torres




                               CHAPTER 1


When the war began, I was in my last year of school at the convent of
St. Celestine. I was seventeen and unobtrusive, though not really plain.
I had never even gone out with a boy. I had been raised in the warm
family seclusion that is characteristic of respectable French families.
My mother’s parents lived with us in our small house near Orléans.

My father was a sculptor, and most of the friends of our family were, I
suppose, middle-class people—university professors, some minor
government officials, writers, and other artists. My own school friends
were a rather serious-minded set of little girls. Though we did our
share of giggling, we discussed such grave problems as the emancipation
of the Frenchwoman; for at that time, women in France still did not have
the vote. And though we knew nothing of men, we had long discussions
about the number of children we would have. I was an only child, and was
therefore ambitious to become the mother of a large brood.

Then the war was upon us. Papa enlisted. During the long winter of the
“phony war” we felt secure. Then the war began in earnest. Papa was at
the front, and we were sure France would win.

When the Germans reached Liége, Mother said we would have to leave
Paris. I said she was out of her mind. I said the Germans would never
get as close to Paris as they did in the last war. A week later the
Germans were at the Meuse, and my mother and my grandparents insisted
that we should prepare to leave.

And so one day in May I took off the navy-blue uniform dress of my
convent school, and with my mother and my grandparents I left Paris. We
were in danger, my mother said, because of our origins—her parents, who
had come from Poland, were Jewish.

We had heard nothing from my father for several weeks. Then there was
the news of the disaster at Dunkirk. Perhaps my father was there,
helping the English.

Everyone was leaving Paris—all the prominent people, and all the people
in government circles, including some of our friends, and everyone who
had a car. We had no car. We left on a train that was crowded like a
subway. We were going to St. Jean de Luz, where we could stay with my
father’s cousins.

We were certain we would be back soon; so certain that my mother left
the family silver and all our other possessions unlocked in the house,
simply telling the concierge to keep an eye on things. And I left my
Teddy bear sitting on my bed. He was just exactly my own age, and he had
slept with me all his life. It was for him that I wept when I thought of
the Germans taking possession of our house.

After three almost unbearable days of crowding and confusion, of trains
that stopped running and trains that changed destination, we all arrived
at St. Jean de Luz, where the sun shone, and there was a beautiful
beach, and there was the sea. The war seemed very far away.

I was sent back to my studies, to prepare for my graduation examination,
which I should have taken that year in Paris. I passed it at last, at
Bayonne, and was qualified to enter college. The day of my graduation
was the day when France signed her armistice of defeat.

I was only a girl, scarcely out of my childhood; I didn’t understand
what was happening at all, but I was shocked beyond comprehension. We
had been promised victory, and we were being handed defeat. There was
still no news of my father. My mother wept all day long. And the Germans
were coming, everybody said, even to the south.

It was on one of those days that I met one of my mother’s friends in the
street, and she talked to me about General de Gaulle and his
proclamation from London, asking for volunteers for his Free French
army. In that moment it became clear to me that the one possible answer
to the chaos in which we had been plunged was De Gaulle.

It was then that I began to beg my mother to leave. Day and night I
insisted that we had to leave France. Our lives, and the lives of her
parents, were in danger. And slowly she began to be persuaded.

Our fashionable little town was filling with refugees. Some of them were
refugees de luxe in their big cars, but there were also bewildered
remnants of troops in the streets, unshaven, distraught men—our own, and
also many soldiers from a Polish regiment that had been enlisted in
France. The Poles were fleeing for their lives, and no one could
understand them or help them until they found us. I remember that one
day we succeeded in finding civilian clothes for half a dozen Polish
soldiers who wanted to try to escape into Spain.

On the twenty-fifth of June, 1940, I went with my mother to Biarritz,
where there was a Portuguese consulate. We applied for visas for
ourselves and my grandparents, and we were among the very last to
receive them. That very night there were notices posted in St. Jean de
Luz announcing that German troops would be in town the next day. In the
morning all the shops were shuttered. I saw a troop carrier move through
the street, and turned my face away. That same day, I hitchhiked to
Hendaye, to secure transit visas through Spain. That night we packed our
bags and rucksacks; even my grandparents were loaded with all they could
carry.

The next day we took the train to Hendaye. We got out and approached the
customs station on our side of the international bridge. We could see
the Spanish flag floating across the bridge, but on our side there was
no flag; our tricolor had already been taken down. But at least there
was still no swastika. As the customs man stamped our passports, he
said, “_Les salauds_, they won’t remain here long.”

We walked across the bridge, managing to lug all of our baggage. After
the formalities on the other side, we took a taxi to the railway station
at Irún. On the way the driver stopped at a check post, and while our
papers were being examined, a carful of German soldiers drove up. Our
driver gave the Hitler salute. I shuddered. But the Germans did not
question us, and we drove on.

At Figueira da Foz, in Portugal, we found ourselves in a luxurious
vacation center with the elite of France and Belgium: diamond merchants,
movie stars, famous authors and statesmen, who sunned themselves on the
golden beach, or strolled along the palm-shaded walks, or amused
themselves in the cafés. We were refugees together with Danielle
Darrieux, Dalio, Maurice Chevalier. We passed our days in endless
gossipy discussions—should we leave for Chile, Argentina, or Brazil?
Some said the United States was sending a ship for us all. Others said
we would leave in a week for Canada. There were bullfights in the
afternoons, movies in the evenings, and I attended my first ball.

It was there in Figueira da Foz that we received our first news of my
father. Some French officers arrived and informed us that units of my
father’s division had escaped across the Channel.

We were overjoyed and frightened at the same time. There was a good
chance that Father had escaped from France, but was he safe and well?
Had he actually arrived in England at all? Nobody knew.

Mother could not leave her aged parents to go to England and search for
Father, but I could. I had to do a good bit of persuading, but in the
end it was agreed. My mother and her parents would sail for Canada, and
I would go to England.

I left before they did. A British ship was taking volunteers for De
Gaulle’s forces, and place was found for me aboard.

After I reached London it took me only a few days to find an army
comrade of my father’s, and to learn that my father had been taken
prisoner. He was to remain in prison throughout the war.

The Free French Forces had just announced that they would recruit women.
Here was the very opportunity I had hoped for. I had arrived at the
opportune moment, and presented myself on the first day of female
recruiting. There, in the large barren hall, I felt that I would at last
be transformed from a schoolgirl to a woman with a purpose.

A few score women were already on hand. I wondered just what sort of
girls were to become my companions, for surely they would not be
representative of the average, typical Frenchwoman. To be in London at
all during the war, they had to be drawn from special groups.

There was always a certain number of students from France, but French
families are extremely closely knit, and in times of stress, these
students would most likely have been drawn home, so that the only ones
to have remained in England would be the children of disturbed or broken
families—divorced parents, disoriented homes. And then there would be
some girls from the working classes—French maidservants and the French
prostitutes of Soho. Another category of women were the adventuresses,
emancipated women, and career women who for one reason or another had no
family life.

In the end, there were to be some five hundred of us in this service
during the war, and more than as many again in an ambulance and nursing
corps that was formed later for service in France. Our own group was
like the WACS or the ATS. We were to replace men in all sorts of jobs,
so that they might be released for combat.

From that first day, we were to be united by one act—our act of
volunteering. For whether we had come from Paris or the provinces,
whether we had already been in London when the war broke out or had made
our way there from abroad, whether we joined in 1940 or reached London
in 1944, all of us were impelled by the same ideal. All of us, workers,
students, servants, divorcees, secretaries, the younger and the older,
volunteered with the sincere hope of giving ourselves to France—the
France beloved of every Frenchwoman, the France for whom every one of us
was certainly ready, on that first day in the recruiting station, to
die.

                   *       *       *       *       *

From the recruiting desk I passed into a huge, cold, gloomy room where a
dozen young women stood shivering, naked, waiting their turns for the
medical examination. The first one with whom I became acquainted was
Mickey, for, with her easy, impulsive way, she was never slow to greet a
stranger. A rather tall girl, with the gawkiness of a figure just out of
adolescence, she commented freely and laughingly as she looked about,
finding something extremely droll in the military air that we all tried
to assume. As she watched the physician, hurried and coarse, examining
the teeth and eyes of the girls while keeping up a stream of
questionable pleasantries, Mickey remarked that it was funny to be
getting acquainted with the bodies of our future comrades before we even
knew their names.

Mickey said she had just escaped from France, where she had been
spending her summer holiday with her aunt and uncle. Mickey’s parents
were in Scotland, where her father taught French in a small college. He
was French and her mother was English. They had married late in life and
she was a “December child,” somewhat pampered, as we were to learn,
impulsive, and avid for excitement, since she had been brought up as an
only child in the muted household of an aging couple. Her father was a
typical absent-minded, gentle old professor, and Mickey rattled on,
telling everyone within earshot about him, as we waited for our medical
examination. She simply adored him, she said, slurring the accent in
“adore” with a quaint tinge of English inflection. Because of her
father, Mickey considered herself French rather than English. She had
spent much of her young life with her father’s family in France, and now
she had returned on a fishing vessel to enlist in the Free French
Forces.

Mickey prattled on, seemingly quite at ease in her nudity—perhaps
because she knew that she was pretty. One could see that Mickey felt
sure of herself in her body, as though she were wearing a Paris dress
that no one could help admiring. Hers was a slim, boyish, somewhat gawky
figure in perfect modern style, marred only by a few pimples on her
shoulders, a temporary blemish.

“What you need is to make love. That’ll get rid of those pimples for
you,” said a slightly older woman, winking at Mickey confidentially.

Mickey laughed, almost as though the whole thing were agreed upon; after
all, she was eighteen, and the day was coming when she would “make
love.” The expression was obviously exciting to her, touching as it did
upon something that was still mysterious and forbidden.

In a corner a little girl awaited her turn, seated on a chair. She had
pulled up her slender legs and hugged them close, so that all one could
see of her was her head of glossy chestnut hair, cut in a page-boy bob,
falling straight and thick on both sides of her face. Her legs hid her
body, while her forehead rested on her narrow, boyish knees. Trembling
with cold, she hugged her legs closer to her body. The older woman’s
advice to Mickey and the coarseness of the woman’s laughter seemed to
strike the little girl, for she reacted as from a muddy-handed slap.
This was Ursula.

I noticed her then, noticed how her frail body contracted at the crude
words. Instinctively she passed her fingers over her face, and she
turned her head away a trifle. Later, when I came to know her well,
Ursula told me that this had somehow been a terrible moment for her; not
that what was said was in itself so coarse, but because she had never
before completely undressed in front of others, and because the ease,
the very naturalness of the remark and the assumption that went with it,
not only for Mickey but for all of us, gave her her first shock of
reality, her first sense of what our coming life might be like. At that
moment, she later told me, she felt as though a kind of dirtiness had
entered her, and was sliding down her throat.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed her revulsion, for a silken-looking
young lady standing beside Ursula said, “I hate vulgarity, don’t you? My
name is Jacqueline. I’m from Grenoble. And you?”

Ursula told her name and said that she was from Paris.

“You’re cold,” Jacqueline said. “Take my coat. How old are you?”

Ursula seemed to hesitate. When we became friends she confessed that she
was wondering, then, whether to reply with her official age, eighteen,
or with her real age—just short of sixteen! She hesitated, for Ursula
never learned how to lie quickly, and she ended by saying that she was
seventeen. That seemed an honest compromise to little Ursula.

“You look fourteen,” Jacqueline declared, with her patronizing
knowingness that was to become so familiar to us. “You still look like a
baby, really. Listen, I’ll help you out. I’ll get us assigned to the
same dormitory.”

Ursula thanked her. And yet, despite her frail and childlike air, she
was, as we were to learn, quite a determined little person, used to
living alone and managing for herself. Her parents were divorced, and
she had been raised in a variety of schools and by servants, by cousins,
by nurses, in the course of travel from place to place. Indeed, she
showed some embarrassment at the sudden possessiveness with which
Jacqueline, aristocratic even in her nudity, had taken charge of her,
and she politely refused the coat Jacqueline had offered.

A door opened and a woman in uniform entered.

“All those who have completed their examinations come and get uniforms,”
she shouted.

Mickey led the rush to the next room, where there was a table piled with
khaki garments. She was broad-shouldered, with narrow hips, long
muscular legs, and diminutive pointed breasts, and she moved with a
tennis-playing directness that nevertheless had a touch of the
peculiarly awkward feminine charm of a girl of that age. Just after
Mickey came Jacqueline, who, at the alluring call of the uniform, had
momentarily deserted her new protégée. Jacqueline was, in contrast to
Mickey, finely made, with delicately rounded hips and exquisite round
breasts, and small altogether, as though all that was coarse in
civilization had been refined away, to leave this elegant little body, a
complete statement of perfection.

The corporal behind the table took our measures at a glance. “Sizes
medium and large.” She tossed each of us a jacket and a skirt of rough
hard wool, two khaki shirts, two neckties, a pair of stockings, a
rose-colored brassiere, a linen undershirt, a pair of knee-length khaki
jersey panties, and shoes.

We all began to dress, emitting little cries, laughing. We tried to knot
our ties, to button skirts that were too large and jackets that were too
small.

The only one who seemed to know how to knot her tie properly was a
strapping large girl with a boyish haircut, who looked immediately
natural and in her place in uniform. When she had finished dressing she
glanced around the room and called out to the corporal, “Do you want me
to help you?” She had a heavy, almost masculine voice, reassuring and
cheerful, and the confidence in her voice contrasted with her
expression, which was a little oppressive, and predominantly sad. The
oppressiveness was in her heavy chin, and there was a sadness in her
very beautiful eyes, violently blue, and in her mouth with its large
lips, sunken at the corners.

The corporal accepted her help, and I think that several of us noted,
mentally, that the large calm girl with her air of self-possession and
an ability to command would make good officer material.

“What’s your name?” the corporal asked.

“Ann,” the other replied in her deep voice, and the light feminine name
seemed unsuited to her.

Ursula was among the girls before the counter. Ann handed her a uniform,
and then helped her to dress and to knot her tie. She had a friendly,
easy way of being helpful—like a big brother.

We studied each other in our uniforms. It was dainty Jacqueline who
immediately drew every eye. She was instantly classified as ravishing—so
ravishing that one could scarcely feel jealous. Jacqueline had the sort
of impersonal beauty in which every other woman feels she is somehow
represented. Jacqueline’s complexion was the freshest, purest, rosiest
imaginable. Her face was positively luminous, irradiated by her
glamorous hazel eyes; her beautiful white teeth, bright and gleaming,
were framed by a mouth with rather large sensual lips, as soft to the
eye as they would be to kiss.

Jacqueline twisted her reddish-brown hair into an amusing little bun,
and smiled at Ursula with a well-bred graciousness precisely suited to
her appearance.

Mickey was laughing over the way we looked; she laughed over everything
and over nothing, eager to find fun. Her pale blue eyes were perpetually
wide-open, and her nose puckered out of sight when she laughed. Because
of her mixed Anglo-French parentage, she spoke French always with that
quaint little British accent which added another droll quality to her
fun-loving air.

“Are you English?” Jacqueline asked her.

“No, I’m French,” Mickey insisted, repeating her history. “My mother is
English and my father is French, but I’m French! I just came from
France. I adore France!”

With her impulsive warmth, she seemed to be establishing herself as a
firm friend of Jacqueline’s. And indeed, Jacqueline responded to her as
to someone who was also, obviously, from a family with good breeding.

The silken, precious-looking Jacqueline came from the world of the
aristocracy. Her story, too, came out soon enough. She was among us
almost as a runaway, to escape a depressing family life, mangled as it
can sometimes become only in high society. Jacqueline’s father had died
when she was a child of seven, and her mother had remarried only a year
later. Jacqueline had never liked her stepfather, and as soon as she
reached adolescence the child had discovered that her beauty carried
with it something of disaster and doom. Her stepfather’s too pressing
attentions had aroused a frightened loathing in Jacqueline, and as soon
as she was old enough she had seized the first opportunity to escape
from her family on an exchange visit with some of their friends in
England. But there too her beauty had won her too much attention, and
one night she had tried to escape by dropping from the roof, and had
injured herself quite seriously. As soon as she felt well enough, she
had come to London to enlist.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The corporal shouted, “Form ranks in pairs, and try to march in step if
you can. Forward march!”

With much confusion we managed to form ranks. The scene reminded us
somehow of our classroom days.

“Silence!” cried the corporal, and our little column marched out of the
room, with the women jostling each other and choking back their laughter
as they squeezed through the narrow doorway.

Outdoors, in the street, it began to rain; a small, fine, clinging rain,
sharp and cold. No one marched in step. I was surprised how difficult it
was, since marching always looked so easy when one watched a parade of
soldiers. I was in line with Ursula. “I never believed marching was
something that had to be learned,” she remarked, and blushed for having
offered her observation.

A few passers-by turned to look at us. I wondered whether they could
possibly realize how much that march meant to us. We were literally
marching into a completely new life. I kept saying to myself, This is
what I wanted. This is what I came for. This is the first time that I
decided on something for myself, and made it come true. And it gave me a
frightening sense of entering not only the Army, but life itself.

And so we marched behind the corporal, who had placed Ann at the head of
the column, and it was a ridiculous column, zigzagging, with the tall
and the short all jumbled together, a column of women half running, in
our ill-fitting uniforms, too long, too short, too wide. But neither
long-striding Ann nor the glowing Jacqueline nor the elderly woman with
the coarse voice nor even the fun-loving Mickey—not any of us thought of
laughing.




                               CHAPTER 2


A truck stood in front of our barracks, and a soldier was gesticulating
for assistance; there was luggage and furniture to be unloaded.

“I want a volunteer to help unload the truck!” our corporal cried out.

The first to offer herself was tall, husky Ann. With ease she lifted a
table onto her back, carrying it as though it were a feather. The rest
of us were immediately assigned to clean the house.

Another corporal, dark and dry, with a face like a prune, meted out our
tasks. Dainty Jacqueline and little Ursula were ordered to scrub the
large entrance hall of the ancient mansion. I was to work on the main
stairway that circled upward to our dormitories.

Jacqueline donned a huge beige-colored smock, rolled the sleeves up to
her elbows, got down on her knees, and began to scrub. Ursula stood
there staring at Jacqueline, as though she didn’t know where to begin.
She looked at the pail of grayish water, the wet brush, and the
blackened rag. I suppose she had never been faced with such a disgusting
task, and there was a dismay about her, as though she had no idea how to
go about scrubbing a floor, as though she might just as well have been
suddenly commanded to run a locomotive.

Jacqueline was scrubbing energetically. It seemed all the more
aristocratic of her not to be upset by the most menial of tasks. But
suddenly she gasped and put her hand to her back.

The prune-faced corporal, passing by, cried out, “Well, my little one,
so you’ve already got a sore back after two minutes of work! This is a
barracks, not a drawing room!” And seeing Ursula standing there confused
and inactive, she was overcome with sudden rage. All these daughters of
the idle rich! She poured out her anger upon Ursula. “You! You will do
me the pleasure of scrubbing the hall, and after that, I’ve got work for
you in the kitchen.”

“There’s no need for you to shout,” Ursula murmured, red with shame and
dismay. Whereupon she received a look that announced more clearly than
words that this girl was already on the corporal’s black list.

Jacqueline raised herself on one foot, with her hand still to her back.
A lock of hair had fallen over her forehead, giving her a slightly
melodramatic look. She looked a bit as though she were acting in a film,
playing the part of the poor and beautiful orphan, forced to slave under
the command of an ill-tempered mistress. To everyone’s astonishment,
Jacqueline talked back to the corporal, defending Ursula.

“Can’t you give that sort of work to the stronger girls? I don’t care
what I do, but she’s too little, she’s much too frail. Why don’t you
find something else for her to do?”

“If she’s too frail, then she’s got no business joining the Army. She’ll
scrub the hall, and you’ve got no business interfering!”

The tension was eased by Ann. From the height of a ladder, on which she
stood washing the high hall windows, she called out in her deep, easy
voice, “Come, come, children, don’t argue! It’ll give the little girl
some muscle to work a bit. The corporal is right.”

I couldn’t tell if big Ann were making fun of the corporal, or trying to
help out Ursula by appeasing the corporal’s anger. In any case, the
result was good, for Pruneface softened a little; she even squeezed out
a smile for Ann, and went off without saying any more.

Ursula got down to work near the stairs. She was furious with Jacqueline
for having come to her defense. “Now the corporal hates me,” she
whispered.

She watched Jacqueline, who kept at her scrubbing, pausing from time to
time to gasp. Mickey, who was working beside me, waxing the stairs, was
also intrigued by Jacqueline’s behavior. “It’s an act,” she said. But
Ursula called to our distinguished-looking scrub lady, “Is something
wrong with your back? Does it hurt all the time?”

With a resigned and rather mysterious air, Jacqueline replied, “It’s
nothing. Don’t worry.” And at the same moment the brush fell from her
hand, and she toppled unconscious on the stone floor.

At our outcry, the corporal came hurrying back, with an air of supreme
annoyance. She stood over us as we tried to revive Jacqueline. After
all, the girl’s collapse might be considered her fault.

Ursula slapped Jacqueline’s hands. Ann arrived with a glass of water.
Jacqueline quickly opened her eyes, apologized, and said that the
fainting spell was of no consequence. She insisted that she could go on
working. After a moment’s hesitation, we all went back to our tasks.

Mickey, with her chattery ways and her funny little accent that made
everything she said seem somehow a bit more intimate, now declared, “You
know, I think she really did faint. She looks like she’s acting all the
time, but I think the faint was real.”

One of the girls above us on the stairs began to sing “_Auprès de ma
blonde_”; she had a Brittany accent. The warm, reassuring voice of Ann
joined in the refrain, and then, one by one, we all picked it up. The
tense and somber atmosphere that pervaded the large dim hall seemed to
dissolve.

Ann paused in her singing to remark that it was still raining outdoors.
This was London, where it always rained. We would get used to it, as to
everything else.

                   *       *       *       *       *

A bell rang, and several women came up from the kitchen, carrying
enormous steaming dishes. “Dinner!” they cried.

There were not yet enough tables and benches for all of us in the dining
room. We had to crowd together on the benches. Finally everyone managed
to squeeze in somewhere, and there was a kind of general sigh of relief.
But just then the corporal shouted, “Attention!”

Ann was the first to jump up. The rest of us instinctively imitated her.
The door opened, and several women entered. They were dressed in
impeccable uniforms, with gold stripes on their sleeves.

The Captain was in front. She was a large and handsome woman, with
graying hair cut short. She had a heavy face with a self-satisfied
mouth, an intelligent forehead, and impenetrable eyes. Behind her stood
the warrant officer, Petit, a smallish woman who had the look of a
little old man, with reddish-gray hair and a face filled with small
wrinkles. She was altogether like a gallant old fellow holding himself
quite erect and looking over the girls with a friendly eye.

“Everything here is still on a makeshift basis,” said the Captain. “In a
few days we’ll have the house furnished and each of you will be assigned
to a job in the forces. If any of you has any difficulty, come and see
me. You know that my job is to help you, and I count on making this
barracks a home for each and every one of you, since you are so far away
from your families. I have some important projects in mind; I have big
ambitions for you. I hope that you will put in a great deal of work
these first days, and that you will get along well with your officers.
France, for whose sake you have....”

While the Captain talked, I could see Ann studying the warrant officer,
Petit. Yes, Petit had the air of an elderly man, and I suppose Ann knew
that it was inevitable that Petit should notice her. She touched her tie
to make sure the knot was in place; she passed her hand over her hair.

Petit was studying all the girls, smilingly, looking from one to the
other of us, until her eyes met Ann’s, and then her eyes remained
immobile for an instant. Petit had small gray clever eyes. It seemed to
me, watching her, that her little pupils were suddenly drowned in Ann’s
large somber blue eyes, and even I, only a bystander at this silent
exchange, could sense a current passing between the two women.

They looked at each other over the heads of the rest of us, and I
thought, They’ve never met before, but they recognize each other; they
know they’re the same kind. It was plain that there was no need of words
or of explanations between them. It was quite simple, quite clear, and
even if nothing came of it, they could count on each other in the
eternal battle between themselves and other women—those of us who were
subject to the needs, the fears, the weaknesses that neither Ann nor
Petit felt.

We resumed our places at the tables. There was no table linen, but the
food was good. After all, the cook was French, and from Normandy. She
knew her work; she had operated a restaurant before the war. The cook
was large and fat, with hair dyed a hard black. She didn’t know how to
speak without shouting, and her voice was rough.

Assigned to her in the kitchen were three little girls from Brittany who
had just arrived on a fishing boat. They were young, fresh,
round-cheeked; they didn’t use make-up, and they looked even more
unsuited to their uniforms than the rest of us.

No one ate very much. We all felt homesick. On the wall, there already
hung a huge photograph of General de Gaulle. Occasionally someone would
raise her head toward him, as though looking for reassurance.




                               CHAPTER 3


The alert sounded precisely at six o’clock, as it did every night. No
one had gone out that evening. It was our first day, and we were busy
arranging our things, and besides, very few of us knew anyone in London.

In the evening, a second group of a dozen women arrived, and we “old
ones” experienced a certain feeling of superiority. We were already
forming little groups among ourselves.

The silken Jacqueline, noisy Mickey, and little Ursula were in my
dormitory, and from the first we were somehow drawn together. The reason
came out, perhaps, when a young woman with a large full mouth and an
absolutely round face approached our little group, and standing facing
us asked, without any preliminaries, whether we were virgins.

Mickey began to laugh. Jacqueline assumed a haughty, offended air.
Ursula simply blushed and said yes. On the instant, our dormitory was
baptized “The Virgins’ Room”—though the young woman who had asked the
question could obviously not be included in that category. Her name was
Ginette, and she informed us that she was a salesgirl and a divorcee.
She undressed, promenading naked among the cots, and declared to
Jacqueline, “You know, the best thing about my face is my legs.” It was
true that she had pretty legs.

Presently Ginette held up a pair of the regulation khaki panties they
had handed out to us. “Just look at that! What a monstrosity! How can I
expect to get a lover with that?” And on the spot, Ginette brought out a
pair of scissors and a needle and thread, and began to turn the panties
into briefs. At once, the rest of us followed her example. Each of us
remade the regulation underwear.

A bomb fell not far away; then there was a crash of breaking glass.
Mickey, sitting at the foot of her bed, was putting curlers in her hair.
A woman who was a hairdresser in civilian life came over to help her,
and then the hairdresser began to discuss Ursula’s coiffure. She
declared that Ursula ought to have her hair done up in curls, to make
her look a little more mature. An argument began. Jacqueline wanted
Ursula’s hair put up in a bun, to make her look sophisticated, and
Mickey was all for having it in short curly clusters, to make her look
boyish. But Ursula rejected all of our suggestions, holding her head in
her two hands as though to keep us from tearing out her hair.

At nine-thirty the corporal came to put out the lights. As soon as the
door was closed, Ginette turned them on again.

Mickey, in pajamas, began teaching Ursula a dance step. Jacqueline was
writing a letter, on monogrammed stationery; one of the girls was
growling from under her covers that she wanted to sleep.

I could see that Ursula was beginning to feel a kind of warmth and
security in the room with all these new friends—a warmth, I learned
later, that she had never known in her life before. After all, the room
was bright and filled with human sounds, and all these girls were like
big sisters busying themselves with her. Outside, there was night,
exile, bombardment, a foreign city bathed in fog and rain. Here people
spoke French, laughed and worked together, and it was as though
everybody had always known each other.

Mickey told her, “As soon as I heard General de Gaulle’s appeal, I
wanted to enlist. I’m so proud of being French, and I adore De Gaulle! I
saw him once in a parade.”

“What’s he like?” Ursula asked.

“Oh, he’s marvelous—very tall, and he looks awfully serious and sad.”

Ginette spoke up. “I crossed over the Pyrenees on foot, and I got myself
pinched in Spain. I told them I was a Canadian. I was with a man, an
American, a good-looking fellow. He made love like a stick, but I liked
him well enough. He’s in America now. He’s going to send me silk
stockings and lipstick.”

“You’re lucky,” sighed Mickey, puckering her little nose.

Jacqueline raised her head, pausing in her writing to mutter something
about women who permitted themselves to be kept. But Jacqueline’s lofty
attitude didn’t annoy Ginette, who was now busy tailoring the jacket of
her uniform, making it over to her measure, with the help of the former
hairdresser. Somehow, I felt, nothing could annoy Ginette.

The door opened again, and the face of the corporal appeared, pinched
and angry. She was about to shout something when she noticed Mickey, who
had her scissors in one hand and her khaki drawers in the other. The
corporal glared at her. Then she announced icily, “If I see the lights
burning in this room once more after lights out, the whole lot of you
will stand punishment.” She snapped out the light and slammed the door.

Ginette, who was caught in the middle of the room, cursed because she
couldn’t find her bed. The woman who had wanted to sleep grunted that at
last there was justice. Jacqueline and Mickey gossiped from their beds.

Over the house, all night long, we could hear the growling of planes.




                               CHAPTER 4


I opened my eyes at dawn. That first morning I lay motionless for a
moment, studying the large gray room. A foggy light came through the
dirty windows. The rain beat on the panes and staggered down. The room
must at one time have been a library, for there were empty shelves all
around the walls, and the vacant shelves somehow made me think of blind
eye sockets.

I could make out the figures of the other women in the narrow camp beds;
here and there a head, a mass of hair, or an arm protruded from under a
gray blanket. There were no sheets. There had even been a shortage of
cots, and two girls were asleep on straw pallets on the floor; one of
them snored. I thought, This is my life now, and I didn’t mind; I felt
rather proud.

I realized that Ursula was awake, and looking at me with her large quiet
eyes. Mickey woke up yawning, and as she stretched she threw a joyful
“Hello, baby!” to Ursula. This awakened all the others, and presently
the entire room was alive with movement.

“I dreamed that the corporal made me scrub the roof,” Jacqueline
announced, “and I was terrified that I was going to fall. I was so
frightened that I woke up.”

The bell began to ring, and none of us knew whether it was ringing for
reveille or for breakfast. The room was freezing cold, for the furnace
had not yet been lighted. The building that had been turned into a
barracks for us was an old mansion, abandoned many years ago, and almost
impossible to heat properly at any time.

Most of the girls were parading back and forth to the bathroom in their
dressing gowns. Ursula was dressing under her covers, complaining that
she was too cold to emerge. Jacqueline went over to her, in that
protective way that she had, and knotted Ursula’s tie, like some society
matron taking care of a waif.

The door opened and the prune-faced corporal appeared. “Everybody in the
hall for inspection!”

Although it was seven in the morning, the main hall was still so dark
that the electricity had to be turned on, but there was only a small
yellowish bulb that gave very little light.

All of us were formed into a circle. The sergeant, two corporals, and
Petit, the warrant officer, stood in the center, and called out the
names of the recruits. Each of us had to reply, “Present,” and come to
attention.

After the roll call, the corporal whispered something to the warrant
officer, who thereupon turned to glare at our little group from the
“Virgins’ Room.”

Petit approached Ginette, commanding her to raise her skirt. Her hefty
thighs appeared; high up they were rimmed in khaki. I thought of the
pieces cut off from all of our regulation drawers, scattered upstairs in
a corner of the dormitory. Petit said nothing to Ginette, and passed on
to the next woman. Then she went beyond our group, with the same
inspection. And it became evident that not only in our room, but in
practically all of the dormitories, the women had had the same idea, and
shortened their underwear. Petit returned to the center of the circle.

“All those who have desecrated their uniforms will be deprived of
liberty during the entire week,” she announced. “They will receive
another pair of drawers and are required to wear them according to
regulations. I am aware that they are not in the latest style, but you
are soldiers, and not ladies of fashion, damn it!”

We scattered, some laughing, some muttering.

“The dirty bitch!” said Ginette, with a look at the corporal. Ann’s deep
voice growled a second to Ginette’s outburst.

Nevertheless, a few moments later in the dining room, I noticed Ann
gossiping gaily with the corporal. Ursula was sitting with me, and she
too remarked on the sudden change. Like me, she was wondering whether
Ann were just an opportunist, sincere only in seeking her own
advancement. I took it that Ann knew how to get along with people, but
as Ann came toward us I saw that sensitive little Ursula was blushing.
Ann was a likable person, and I suppose, like all of us, Ursula was
sorry to recognize an imperfection in someone whom she wanted to admire.

Ann sat on the other side of Ursula, setting down her plate, in which
the porridge had mingled with a dollop of orange marmalade. Ann shrugged
over the disagreeable mess. There simply weren’t enough plates;
everything had to go on one. “Well, little Ursula,” she boomed, “is
everything all right this morning? Do you like the soldier’s life?”

Her deep voice was filled with warm comradeliness, and Ursula instantly
recovered from her doubts of a moment before. She smiled at Ann, but
didn’t seem to know what to answer.

In general, Ursula didn’t know how to make conversation. This was
probably due to the queer childhood she had had. The lone daughter of
divorced parents who had wandered separately in different parts of the
world, she was the little girl of no one. She had been born in France
and had lived almost everywhere, raised by servants and left largely to
herself. For her, France had provided an illusion not only of a
homeland, but of a home. Little Ursula, as we came to know, worshiped
France with all her soul, because she had nothing else to worship.

At the time of the Franco-German armistice, her mother was in America
and her father in China. No one was especially interested in Ursula. In
the drift of refugees from Paris, she had found her way onto a British
ship that was evacuating troops from Brest. And so she had gravitated to
Down Street like the rest of us.

Her heart was filled with dreams and longings, with love, with a sense
of the intimacies she had missed, and all this was mingled with a
strange fear of life itself. She had never felt equal to things, neither
with her mother, nor with servants, nor with strangers, nor in the
schools to which she had been sent, in one country or another. And here
in the barracks she continued to feel lost and terrified, without
knowing why. It seemed to her that all her life would be like
yesterday’s problem of scrubbing the floor—she would never know at what
corner to begin, and no one would ever take her seriously.

“When I am grown up,” she would say, and then suddenly she would realize
that she was already grown up, that she was nearly sixteen and she was a
soldier. And she would look terrified.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Mickey was at the end of our table; she was laughing loudly over one of
Ginette’s rough jokes. Mickey’s teeth were slightly pointed, like those
of a puppy, and her mouth pouted forward, very red, heart-shaped in the
form of a kiss. She was so eager to be part of everything.

“... and what a _conne_!” Ginette ended her tale.

“What does that mean, _conne_?” Mickey asked, opening wide her large
blue eyes.

There was a roar of laughter, and one of the women undertook an
explanation.

                   *       *       *       *       *

That day, too, we were assigned to house cleaning.

Toward evening, a truck unloaded straw for mattresses—and also a batch
of five new recruits, who were immediately sent off to peel vegetables
in the kitchen. Ursula and I had just finished cleaning the three
bathrooms. She had been chattering rather easily most of the day, and I
had begun to feel that I understood this frail girl, who nevertheless
was streaked through with decided, even passionate elements of
character.

As we came out on the stairway we noticed one of the newcomers crossing
the hall, laden with a huge pile of straw. It was a lady. A lady such as
one saw in films. At first glance, the lady appeared fairly young—thirty
or thirty-two. But on closer scrutiny one saw that she was somewhat
older.

Ursula stood still and murmured, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

The woman was tall and extremely blonde—a peroxide blonde. Her hair
curled in ringlets over her forehead and fell in waves alongside her
face. Her nose was fairly long, but quite narrow and very slightly
arched, giving her an air of distinction. She was heavily made up.
Ursula stood stock-still, a wisp of a girl wrapped in her long beige
smock, watching the passage of this beautiful creature. The woman had
such a marvelous scent! And in passing she threw Ursula a smile that was
as perfumed as the woman herself.

At that moment our sergeant-cook appeared, roaring, “Hey, you there, the
new one—Claude! What are you doing with that straw? You’re supposed to
be in the kitchen!”

To our astonishment, we beheld the one called Claude raise a snarling
face over her pile of straw, and from her beautifully made-up mouth
there came forth one of the most violent replies that I had ever heard.
As for Ursula, she stood agape. “You can go to hell!” the lady spat at
the sergeant. “Just because you’re a sergeant, don’t think you can get
away with anything! First, I’m going to fix my bed, and when I’m
through, I’ll come and peel your potatoes, and if you don’t like it you
can kiss my behind!”

The sergeant-cook must have realized that this was no little girl from
Brittany, for she went away without saying a word.

Now Claude turned toward us. “Can you imagine, talking to me in such a
tone of voice! What does she take me for—her servant? More likely, she’d
be mine! I volunteered out of patriotism, and not to be treated like an
inferior by a conne like that!”

It was strange, but the coarse words with which her speech was peppered
seemed to lose their vulgarity when they were spoken by Claude. She had
a very beautiful voice, cultured and modulated, the sort that could
permit itself the use of slang.

“Can you tell me where to find the switchboard room?” Claude then asked.
“That’s where I’m to bunk. I’ve got to take charge of the telephone.”

An assignment of this sort seemed prodigiously important to us. Full of
respect for Claude, we showed her the little room near the entrance that
had been set aside for the telephone operator.

Claude dropped the straw on the floor, went to the window, opened it,
and leaned on her elbows, looking out into the street.

Facing our barracks was a large hotel, and in front of the hotel
entrance stood the doorman, very tall, very thin, with graying hair and
thin lips. His cheeks were highly rouged, his eyelids were painted a
bright blue, and he bowed with feminine grace before every man who
entered the hotel. Then he resumed his haughty nonchalant stance,
staring directly before him at the windows of our barracks.

“You could take him for the ambassador of Peru,” murmured Claude. We had
no idea why “ambassador” and why “Peru,” but the phrase enchanted Ursula
and she started to laugh.

“How old are you, child?” Claude asked her.

This time Ursula replied, “Seventeen,” without hesitation.

Claude placed her hand on Ursula’s head and stroked her soft hair. I
felt as though I were intruding. “You have the air of a tiny little
girl, and you’re ravishing—you’re like a little bird,” Claude said.

It was obvious that this was the first time anyone had told Ursula she
was ravishing. And yet, because it was said in another person’s
presence—mine—it was quite normal, almost a conventional remark.

Ursula never forgot her feelings at this first meeting. When she spoke
about it to me later she said that Claude’s voice was so gentle,
Claude’s hand was so soft that she felt the very inside of her heart
melting. She wanted to reply, “Oh, and you are so beautiful!” but she
didn’t dare, and she uttered the first banality that came to her. “I’ve
been here since yesterday. I’m from Paris. Where are you from?”

Claude was about to answer when a corporal appeared—a third one. We
seemed surrounded by corporals. This was a large girl, rather gentle and
reserved; she had charge of the office. She had some forms in her hand
and she gave them to Claude to fill out.

Ursula tugged at me, and we left.




                               CHAPTER 5


Our aristocratic Jacqueline was the first to receive a secretarial post.
She would always be first everywhere, with her enchanting face and her
air of being owed the best, and yet this was so natural to her that we
could not resent her manner. She returned at noon, absolutely delighted
with her office. Her lieutenant was a man of excellent family, she
announced to us, highly cultured. And he had already invited her to have
lunch with him tomorrow. Of course, he had a wife and children in
France.

Soon most of us were assigned to work in various offices at GHQ. I
became, for the time being, a file clerk and the operator of a
mimeograph machine in the Information Bureau. But the Captain had no
idea what to do with Ursula. Most of us could type, at least; Ann could
drive a car; but Ursula had no accomplishments. Finally the Captain put
her down as sentry for the barracks.

Ursula remained seated all day long at a little table by the entrance,
keeping a registry book in which she noted down all of our comings and
goings. Opposite her was the switchboard room, where Claude was
stationed. Through the half-open door she could glimpse Claude’s
glistening blonde hair. From time to time, Claude came out of the little
room for a chat. She still wore that same wonderful perfume. But with
tender dismay one night Ursula asked me if I had noticed that Claude had
little creases at the sides of her mouth, and white hairs mingled with
the blonde. Indeed, Claude could have been her mother. And in those
first days I felt that this was what drew Ursula to Claude, the wish
that she had had a mother as gay and amusing as this woman, with her
inexhaustible store of gossip about all the celebrities in Paris.

But soon the stories Ursula brought back from Claude were less innocent.
Ursula was fascinated and yet a little puzzled by the ease with which
Claude related her bedroom experiences; she had slept with most of the
currently fashionable actors and writers of the capital, and she kept up
a continuous stream of intimate chatter about her lovers to the girl.
Ursula would repeat Claude’s gossip, somewhat in awe, and somewhat as
though wanting reassurance that there was nothing wrong in her adoration
of Claude. Claude would tell her, “I absolutely adored that boy, and
then suddenly I had enough of him. My only love was always my husband,
but he’s a dog. He drinks too much, and he’s a fairy, damn him! As soon
as we’re together, we fight. Luckily, I had Jacques. He was my great
consolation. He was still a child, a high school boy. He used to come to
me after school. I trained him. I made him my best lover.”

Ursula couldn’t get over her astonishment at this woman who adored her
homosexual husband but fought with him, and who had so many lovers, and
who was so much at ease about it all. The world of grownups had always
seemed distant and mysterious to Ursula. With Claude, that world became
even more distant, and all the values that Ursula had so painfully
established for herself were overturned.

But one thing was certain: Ursula felt that the one person who really
cared about her was Claude. Big Ann was pleasant and sometimes brusque;
the aristocratic Jacqueline irritated her, perpetually wanting to fuss
over her and take charge of her; Mickey was a clown who made her laugh;
and I suppose I was just someone who listened, someone she found it easy
to talk to. Ursula complained that the corporals scolded her endlessly,
and the Captain could scarcely remember her name. But Claude talked to
her, confided in her as in a friend, called her her little bird, stroked
her hair, smiled at her with her perfumed smile. Claude knew so many
stories, she was afraid of no one, and she had a way of looking at
Ursula with her black eyes, a way that made Ursula forget every desire
except to remain close to Claude as much as possible.

One night there came an order for the sentry to sleep in the switchboard
room with the telephone operator, so as to make sure that the service
would continue in case of a serious air attack. I helped Ursula drag her
iron cot into the little telephone room. Her heart must have been
beating with joy. What heavenly evenings she would pass with Claude!

That same evening, Claude decided to throw a secret little party in the
switchboard room. We organized it among a few of the girls, and sent
Ursula out to the corner pub to fetch some bottles of beer.

Ursula put on her cap and hurried out. It was the first time she had
been out since her arrival at the barracks. It was raining. Down Street
was narrow and dark. Ursula found her way to the pub, which was brightly
lighted and full of smoke, and crowded with soldiers in various degrees
of drunkenness. They called out to her, “Oh, Frenchie! Look at the
French girl!” Ursula told me later that she didn’t know what to do with
herself. The soldiers’ eyes shone and their lips were wet with beer.
They had thick red hands. Ursula’s heart fluttered. She kept her eyes
fixed at a point on the wall while she was being served. Finally it was
finished. The soldiers tried to catch hold of her arms, but she freed
herself and ran out. Ursula plunged toward the barracks as to a refuge.

I was standing in the doorway of the switchboard room when we heard
Ursula’s hurrying footsteps on the stairs outside. Claude brushed past
me into the hall and opened the door for her. She stood there in the
doorway, so shining, so blonde, with her khaki shirt partly open,
revealing her white throat. Ursula pressed herself suddenly against the
woman, and Claude held her in her arms. Her hands gently caressed
Ursula’s hair.

I can only suppose that Claude forgot my presence, or perhaps she
thought I had gone on into the switchboard room. But I remained in the
doorway, and I saw Claude gently press Ursula’s head against her full
breasts, separated from Ursula’s cheek only by the khaki shirt.

It was not hard for me, then or later, to understand Ursula’s feelings.
After her first, unnerving visit to a pub full of roistering soldiers,
she had hurried along a dark, alien street and found again at the end of
it Claude—beautiful, shining Claude—who at that moment must have seemed
to her the very embodiment of warmth and safety and gentleness.

Claude raised Ursula’s chin with one hand, drawing her face closer, and
suddenly, in the dimly lighted hall, she kissed Ursula on the mouth. It
was a quick light kiss, like a brush of a bird’s wing, a kiss so
discreet as not even to startle the girl.

Just then Ann and Mickey came along, with their drinking glasses hidden
under the jackets of their uniforms.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In the switchboard room, a little clock sounded nine. The corporal of
the guard had closed her eyes to our soiree, since Ann had given her to
understand that Warrant Officer Petit was invited, and, naturally, any
corporal reporting our little party would only be making trouble for
herself. (I had already noticed that Ann seemed to be born with a sense
of how to manage things in the Army.)

Petit was the last to arrive. The little room was filled with cigarette
smoke. Claude had taken off her uniform, and was now wearing a dressing
gown—blue with little white dots. She was seated on the bed with one of
her legs folded under her, and the other kicking a red slipper. A lock
of platinum hair fell over her forehead. A cigarette trembled in her
lips, while she was engaged in reading Mickey’s palm.

Petit surveyed the room, with her scrunched-up eyes of a man of the
world. Petit might readily agree that Claude was beautiful, but a woman
like Claude had no interest for Petit. To our warrant officer, Claude
was only a dilettante. One might pass a pleasant evening with a woman
like that, but nothing else. At bottom, to the Petits of the world,
Claude was a pervert, a perverted woman of the sophisticated milieu, but
a woman in spite of everything. As for Ursula, Petit scarcely glanced at
her, obviously summing her up as a nice little thing, but nothing
special. She looked at Mickey. Her expression said, “A little fool.”

Ann was standing against the table with her arms crossed. She had rather
thick muscular arms and broad masculine hands. Petit poured herself a
glass of beer, and drank it down without stopping; she was satisfied. It
was said that her last two intimate friends had remained in France on
the farm where the three of them had lived before the war. She was all
alone here, and felt herself aging. Soon enough she’d be fifty years
old. In Ann, she must have seen herself as she had been at
twenty-six—solid and robust, with a deep voice and a man’s hands. Ann
looked directly into her eyes, and from her relaxed and satisfied
expression Petit seemed to know that everything was going well. It was
probably then that Petit decided to use her influence to have Ann made a
corporal as soon as possible. That would make things a lot simpler.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Much was to happen between the women who were at Claude’s little party,
and when I traced back their stories, I found that the threads began to
be woven together on this night.

Mickey was laughing as usual and playing the little comedian. Claude
knew that she was making no mistake; she had wide experience with men,
with women, and with life: Mickey would go far for adventure, even
though she was still a typical _demi-vierge_. She was pretty, in her
gawky way, she was ready for anything, she was gay, a good comrade and
well liked by everyone. Claude predicted a rich lover and a long voyage
for her. Then Claude turned her gaze upon little Ursula, sitting
silently at the foot of the bed, and Claude’s face filled with
tenderness for the child. A girl still so young, so new, altogether
inexperienced and untaught. She must have thought of her own life as a
little girl, for despite her bravura manner of an adventuress and a
_femme fatale_, she was born of a provincial middle-class family. Ursula
had already brought me Claude’s story of how she had been lifted out of
her small-town shell when quite young, through marriage to an elderly,
dissipated Parisian who had initiated her into the city’s circles of
debauch. He had finally succeeded in completely disorienting a character
that was at bottom healthy. Claude had left him at last, and married a
younger man, an engineer by profession. But her second husband had his
special passion, and had taken a job in London so as to be near one of
his male friends. Claude had followed him in May, just before the fall
of France, for she was in love with him despite his habits. She was a
woman overfilled with love, and her love had to be dissipated. All the
love that she might have had for a child had to be used somewhere. And
here was this girl, this little Ursula. I think there was the same
mothering desire in her love for Ursula that she had felt when that boy
Jacques had come to her with his school books under his arm. And yet
there was with it a devouring avidity for something as delicious as a
slightly green fruit. It was strange, absurd, but when Claude talked of
Jacques one could see that it had seemed to Claude as though she were
carrying on in a motherly role, continuing a boy’s upbringing, just as
someone who had taught him to wash, to eat, to walk. She, Claude, was
also a mother in her way. She had taught him to eat of another sort of
food—and she was proud of his progress, with a maternal pride. And
little Ursula—how wonderful it would be to watch her little mouth open
for the first time, and to see her overcome with happiness, like a child
to whom one has just given a beautiful toy!

Even while she kept chattering with the rest of us, Claude studied the
girl through the corner of her eye. She smiled at Ursula, and drew her
nearer, putting her arms around her, living again the intimate moment in
the doorway.

Petit was watching, with a malicious and slightly obscene light in her
eyes. She had the air of saying, “I leave her to you. That one doesn’t
interest me at all.” But it was flattering to Claude that Petit
understood at once. Claude always enjoyed the idea of being considered a
dangerous woman.




                               CHAPTER 6


The barracks had been in existence for more than a month. Every morning
we went through our drill in Down Street before hurrying off to our
various jobs. One day the Captain announced that a military ball was
taking place, to which all of us had been invited.

That evening we were all loaded onto trucks and carried across
blacked-out London. As we bumped along, Jacqueline regaled us with tales
of the formal balls she had attended before the war, dressed in white
tulle. She remembered the family limousine, with the chauffeur in
uniform, bowing as he opened the door for the young lady. I suppose she
could not help feeling her superiority to most of the girls in the
truck, who behaved with a good deal of vulgarity. And I suppose that
Jacqueline really had no desire to go to a dance at a training camp,
where she might be pawed by any soldier from anywhere. But neither did
she want to remain alone in Down Street. Besides, it might be amusing to
see what a soldiers’ dance was like, just once.

The truck made a few too many sudden stops. The driver must have found
it amusing to jolt our bunch of girls so that we fell all over each
other. Most of us laughed, but Jacqueline protested for her back was
again giving her trouble. One of the women called her a snob, and told
her to cut out her mannerisms.

When I really came to know Jacqueline, I understood that she suffered
from a perverse need to impress everybody. That night, she hoped that
she would faint, so as to make that woman regret her words. But it
didn’t happen, and she didn’t quite feel like feigning a loss of
consciousness, as she sometimes did by letting herself slide into a kind
of feebleness that readily took hold of her. But the bouncing truck
brought tortures to her back. She had been suffering these odd spells
ever since that night of her flight and her accident. I knew the pain
was real enough, but I sometimes wondered why she had jumped from the
roof of the house in the first place. Was it really because of that pair
of perverted drunkards whose children she was taking care of? Was it
really to escape from them? Or had she done it because of some need she
carried within herself, a need for drama and for disaster?

I was astonished, and filled with admiration for her honesty, when
Jacqueline told me once that she often asked herself the same questions.

“There seems to be a tradition of melodrama in my family,” she said.
“One of my first memories is of being surrounded by people, all of them
talking about the airplane crash that killed my father.”

Soon after that, Jacqueline told me, there had been a stepfather,
elegant, attentive. She recalled the household scenes, later on, between
her mother and her stepfather, because he would kiss her when she came
home from school. She spoke of the attempted suicide of her stepfather.

She had left home to escape this concentration of hatred and misfortune,
veiled by riches and good manners. But her fate followed her wherever
she went. Or was it perhaps that she carried it with her? Jacqueline
wondered.

A week after her arrival in England, in the first family to which she
had come on an exchange visit, the husband had died of a heart attack.
After that she had lived with a couple, a man and his wife, who came in
turns each night to knock on her door. She hated them. She wanted to
punish them, to bring about some sort of explosion, to provoke a drama.
Yes, she said, she knew now that it was drama that she wanted most of
all. She could just as well have left quietly. No one would have kept
her back by force. But she had preferred to stage an escape—to jump. She
had had visions of herself as a beautiful corpse beside their house.

But instead, Jacqueline had howled in pain under their windows all night
long and no one had come. In the morning she had dragged herself to her
room. It was finished. The drama had failed.

Soon afterward, she had read a newspaper item about a feminine
contingent being formed in the Free French Forces. That was her
salvation. All the history of France passed before her eyes—pictures
remembered from her childhood: the parades of July Fourteenth, Jeanne
Hachette, Ste Geneviève, the queens of France, the _Marseillaise_,
Verdun—she was going to become part of all that! To save France! To
avenge the armistice, the great shame! Her father would have been proud
of her—that legendary father who had fallen from the sky like Icarus.

As soon as she was well, she had volunteered. And now she was a soldier,
mingled with the women of the people. There were indeed several girls of
good family—Ursula, Mickey, a student of pharmacy, the daughter of a
consul—but they were the exceptions. Most of Jacqueline’s comrades now
were women of an entirely different sort from any she had ever known
before.

She spoke with contempt for all the members of her self-satisfied
family—so sure of their prerogatives, so certain that it was a great
distinction for anyone to be invited to their table—and yet, was she
herself so different from them? Since she had come to live at the
barracks, I knew that Jacqueline had her doubts. It was true that she
accepted any sort of physical task without the slightest complaint, and
that she did her best to accomplish it through pride—just to show us
that she was perfectly capable of scrubbing the floor or peeling
potatoes. But there were so many coarse women, with the tales of their
cheap affairs with men already resounding through the barracks—she hated
them all. They permitted themselves to be taken to filthy little hotels.
They went to bed with sailors, copulating like animals. She, Jacqueline,
would never permit a man to take her at his will. When the others talked
of their cheap affairs, Jacqueline said nothing. But I knew she was
thinking of the lieutenant in her office, so eager to please her,
bringing her books and flowers and gifts, inviting her to the Mayfair or
to the Claridge. All the men were in love with her; Jacqueline had
become used to that, and she would have been astonished if it were not
so. She loved to watch the shine come into their eyes, and to provoke
their compliments. The other evening in a taxi, after being taken to
dinner, she had permitted a young officer to kiss her on the mouth, and
then had come running in like a child, her eyes sparkling, to tell me
about it. It was fun, it was really like one read in stories, like
playing with fire, to feel him burning close to her, and to be able to
put him off whenever she wished. Before the war, in France, she had been
engaged to a handsome lad, quite well-to-do, belonging to her own world.
Jacqueline had permitted him to kiss her and to fondle her breasts, and
she had found it amusing to hold him off after that, and to feel him
trembling with desire, a slave of his desire for her. It was as though
she had made a discovery, that in addition to being born to an
aristocracy in which one always was in the position of deciding how
other people should behave, she had been born into the aristocratic sex,
for it was the woman who could always decide, always command, in
relationships with men. It had been a pleasant discovery. Jacqueline had
been seventeen at the time.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The dance was in full swing when we arrived. The men welcomed us with
shouts and cries of joy; they were mostly French, though there was a
scattering of uniforms from other nations—Polish, Norwegian, and
Belgian. I liked dancing, and found myself in a little circle of swing
enthusiasts. Everybody was learning the Lindy, and I danced with one
after another in a strange exhilaration, so that I scarcely knew or
remembered with which boy the dancing went well. They were still all
boys to me.

Mickey was seized by a master sergeant of the Air Corps, who squeezed
her tightly as they danced. He was short and slightly bald, but Mickey
said he was nice enough. Mickey was never especially particular. She
liked to have fun and was willing to taste out of any dish, finding them
all pleasant. As she danced, soldiers called to her. They assessed her
with an expert air. Her mouth especially excited them—an arched red
mouth with the upper lip slightly advanced, as though the girl were
constantly ready to be kissed.

While they danced, the sergeant kissed her throat. For form’s sake,
Mickey pretended to be shocked. But even the sergeant could see well
enough that she was not at all offended.

I looked around for Ursula, but she didn’t seem to be anywhere in the
room. I learned later that, after having danced with a fat soldier who
was nearly drunk, she felt that she had had enough, and sought to
escape. The cigarette smoke was so thick that it stung her eyes almost
to the point of tears. She was afraid of these men, didn’t know what to
say to them, and was terrified merely at the idea of being touched by
any one of them. She saw a door and fled outside. There was a little
courtyard, and the fresh evening air made her shiver. Ursula sat down on
the steps. The cool air caressed her cheeks, and she shook out her hair,
relieved in her escape. Then she noticed that a soldier, quite young,
was sitting on a crate in the courtyard, and watching her. There it is,
she thought. I have to leave this place, too.

But in order not to appear ridiculous, she told me with her quaint
nicety, she remained for another moment, planning to get up and leave as
though she had just come out for a breath of air.

She kept her eyes averted from the soldier so as not to give him an
excuse to speak to her. The music came from the hall—muted, but reaching
them nevertheless. In there, a voice was bellowing “Madelon.”

Suddenly the soldier said to her, “It’s better out here than inside,
don’t you think?” And as soon as she heard his calm voice, tinged with a
slight foreign accent, Ursula felt reassured. Now she looked at the
soldier. She could scarcely see him in the darkness, but he had a very
young air and seemed rather small in stature. She replied, “Yes,” and
didn’t know what else to say.

They remained silent for a long while. Ursula was suddenly quite
astonished to hear her own voice break the silence.

She said, “Have you been in England long?”

The soldier answered, “I’ve been here three days. Last week I was in
Spain, and it’s only about fifteen days since I was in France.”

Now Ursula looked at him with a kind of awe. He came from France! Only
fifteen days ago, he had walked on the earth of France and spoken to the
people of France and looked at the trees, the sky of France. It seemed
to her that she had been in London for years rather than months.

She raised her head and watched the searchlights sweeping the sky. It
was beautiful to see. The alert had sounded, just as it did every
evening, but there had been no sound of aircraft. The German planes must
have headed somewhere else instead of coming over London.

“Aren’t you cold?” the soldier asked. He spoke so nicely, with so much
gentleness in his voice, that Ursula said she was touched. She shook her
head. He was probably not French. He had an accent, but Ursula couldn’t
tell from what country. And yet he spoke perfect French.

He was silent again for a little while, and then he said, “I admire you
for joining the Army. It’s not much fun for the men, but for women it
must really be hard.”

And now Ursula began to speak. Whenever she knew she was to be in the
company of young men, she worried her head for days in advance to
prepare some conversation. And she confessed that her voice always
sounded affected to her own ears. Young men had always seemed members of
another race to her, mysterious beings with whom she had no point of
contact.

But this evening in the dim courtyard, Ursula found herself talking
freely to the unknown soldier. She told him about her life in Down
Street. She described Jacqueline, “absolutely ravishing, but a little
bit artificial”; Mickey, “a good comrade, and so funny”; Ann, “everybody
thinks she’ll be the first to get her corporal’s stripes”; Ginette, who
“talks nothing but slang, used to be a salesgirl, and can sew her own
uniforms to measure.” She spoke of Claude, “very intelligent, very
generous,” who was her protectress. Then suddenly she saw us all, all of
her comrades as we were in the mornings, tense, badly adapted to this
life, ready to find distraction in anything, hungry for love, each
hiding her homesickness at the bottom of her heart. Ursula saw the main
hall of Down Street, and her little sentry table. And all day long the
phonograph that we had just acquired kept playing the same records,
“Violetta” and “_Mon coeur a besoin d’aimer._” She spoke about our
captain, hurried and distant, a smirk always on her lips, calling us her
“dear girls,” always giving the impression that she was really going to
do something, that she was going to help us somehow, that she was going
to create an atmosphere of friendship in Down Street. She talked about
this at every opportunity, but after each of her speeches one found
oneself just as lonesome and empty as before.

The soldier listened without interrupting her, and when she had finished
all he said was, “I understand,” and Ursula felt herself to be truly
understood, although she didn’t really know what there was to
understand. It seemed to her that this boy comprehended things even
before she had grasped them herself. This comforted her, like finding a
schoolroom problem solved without having to trouble over it.

                   *       *       *       *       *

We were all ready to go home, and had been hunting for Ursula.
Jacqueline opened the door to the courtyard and called, “Ursula, are you
there? Ursula, where are you?”

Several voices shouted, “Blackout!” But we just had time to make out two
forms, like little children clutched together in the dark. They started
up, coming toward us.

“Hurry!” Jacqueline called. “What a relief! At last we can leave,” she
said to me.

Ursula came slipping through the door.

The truck was waiting outside, and we piled in. This time I suppose the
driver was too tired for his game of jolting us against one another. It
was far past midnight, and some of the girls slept, leaning their heads
on each other’s shoulders. Suddenly I heard Ursula murmur, “Oh. I forgot
to tell the soldier good-by.”

Just across from us sat Claude; she was holding Mickey’s head on her
shoulder. I could feel Ursula stir unhappily. It must have seemed to her
that Mickey had stolen her place.




                               CHAPTER 7


We jumped from the truck, one after the other, and were swallowed in the
barracks hall. The house seemed to come awake, invaded like a beehive.
Doors slammed, women ran up the stairway, women called to each other
from room to room.

Mickey, in pajamas, began to dance in the middle of our dormitory.
Jacqueline was dressed in one of her elegant flowered linen nightgowns.
She sat massaging her face with cold cream. Ann, who was already
carrying out the duties of a corporal, even before being promoted, came
to remind us that the reveille for tomorrow was for six o’clock, as
usual, and to put out the lights. One door after another was heard
closing, and the night quieted. There were still a few whispers from bed
to bed.

“I was dancing with a sailor, and he’s crazy about me.”

“He’s a perfect dancer. He wants to take me out someplace where we can
have fun. You know.”

“He’s going to phone me tomorrow.”

“But honey—it’s amazing—he knows my brother! They went to the same
school in Lyons.”

As for myself, I hadn’t met anyone special. I had given my name to a few
of the men, perhaps for one of those evenings when a girl is so lonesome
she’ll go out with anyone. I’d seen some of the girls do things they
probably wouldn’t do otherwise, out of this loneliness, and I hoped it
wouldn’t happen to me.

The whispering gradually ceased. Ursula slipped through the room in the
dark. She had been in the bathroom, as she was still modest about
undressing; she had put on her regulation rose-colored pajamas. This was
one of the nights when she slept in the switchboard room, and she
slipped out of the dormitory, going downstairs.

                   *       *       *       *       *

When Ursula reached the little switchboard room, Claude was already
stretched out on her narrow camp bed. A storm lamp stood on the floor.
In the feeble light, Claude’s bright hair shone. Everything else was in
shadow. Outside, the guns began to roar.

Ursula went to sit on the edge of Claude’s bed. The alternate nights
that Ursula was assigned to sleep in this room were impatiently awaited.
For on these occasions Claude talked to her at length about her husband,
about her lovers, about her life before the war. Claude told about
places where opium was smoked, and about her travels, and about her
pets. It was always passionately absorbing, and Ursula would listen
without saying a word, extremely impressed by the number of important
people Claude knew, by her countless adventures, and flattered to be
spoken to with such intimacy. No one else had ever been like a real
friend to her. Especially a really grown-up mature woman.

Ursula adored Claude, and was attracted to her in a special way she
could not explain to herself. Sometimes it seemed to her that Claude
took particular pains to charm her, as though she, Ursula, were a man.
But that would be absurd, and Ursula rejected so ridiculous an idea.

That night as she sat on the edge of the cot Claude said to her, “What a
whorehouse that dance was! Where did you hide yourself? I drank I don’t
know how many glasses of port. Everyone offered me port to drink. I’m
sleepy. Kiss me, Ursulita.” She drew Ursula against her as she had that
evening by the door, and suddenly she kissed her on the mouth. But this
time the kiss was not so short. Ursula felt Claude’s lips burning hers.
She didn’t know what was happening to her. She was lost, invaded,
inflamed. She tried to get hold of herself as though she were drowning,
dissolving in Claude’s arms. Claude drew her into the bed.

Ursula felt herself very small, tiny against Claude, and at last she
felt warm. She placed her cheek on Claude’s breast. Her heart beat
violently, but she didn’t feel afraid. She didn’t understand what was
happening to her. Claude was not a man; then what was she doing to her?
What strange movements! What could they mean? Claude unbuttoned the
jacket of her pajamas, and enclosed one of Ursula’s little breasts in
her hand, and then gently, very gently, her hand began to caress all of
Ursula’s body, her throat, her shoulders, and her belly. Ursula
remembered a novel that she had read that said of a woman who was making
love, “Her body vibrated like a violin.” Ursula had been highly pleased
by this phrase, and now her body recalled the expression and it too
began to vibrate. She was stretched out with her eyes closed,
motionless, not daring to make the slightest gesture, indeed not knowing
what she should do. And Claude kissed her gently, and caressed her.

How amusing she was, this motionless girl with her eyelids trembling,
with her inexperienced mouth, with her child’s body! How touching and
amusing and exciting! Claude ventured still further in discovering the
body of the child. Then, so as not to frighten the little one, her hand
waited while she whispered to her, “Ursula, my darling child, my little
girl, how pretty you are!” The hand moved again.

Ursula didn’t feel any special pleasure, only an immense astonishment.
She had loved Claude’s mouth, but now she felt somewhat scandalized. But
little by little, as Claude continued her slow caressing, Ursula lost
her astonishment. She kept saying to herself, I adore her, I adore her.
And nothing else counted. All at once, her insignificant and monotonous
life had become full, rich, and marvelous. Claude held her in her arms,
Claude had invented these strange caresses, Claude could do no wrong.
Ursula wanted only one thing, to keep this refuge forever, this warmth,
this security.

Outdoors, the antiaircraft guns continued their booming, and the planes
growled in the sky. Outside, it was a December night, cold and foggy,
while here there were two arms that held her tight, there was a voice
that cradled her, and soft hair touched her face.




                               CHAPTER 8


Sometime during the night, Claude shook Ursula, telling her to return to
her own bed. Ursula was so tired that she moved as though in sleep to
the other cot.

At seven o’clock the corporal came on her tour of inspection. Claude was
singing in the bathroom. She had a beautiful voice, rather low. She
sang:

   “Tel qu’il est,
   Il me plaît.
   Il me fait
   De l’effet
   Et je l’aime!”

The corporal glanced at Ursula, who was polishing the buttons of her
jacket, and Ursula blushed. It seemed to her as though “that” must be
visible on her face, as though the whole world would notice the change
that had taken place in her, for she had made love, and now she was a
woman. She was Claude’s woman. And Claude seemed to her extraordinary
and marvelous.

Now there came back to her mind certain phrases that she had heard in
the barracks. Disagreeable remarks about Ann and Petit, about Claude
too. Expressions she had read in books. She had never paid much
attention to them, she had never quite understood them, but now
everything was clear. She understood. No, Claude had invented nothing
last night. Just as there were homosexual men, so there were homosexual
women. Ursula had known it about men for a long time, because one year
when they were rich her mother had employed a chauffeur, and he had been
like that, and everybody had made jokes about the man. But she had not
known about women. Now she understood. And yet a mystery remained. If
Claude were “that” way, how was it that she had so many male lovers? And
how could she still love her husband, as she said she did?

It was so difficult to learn about life all alone. Yet she didn’t come
to me then with her story. Much of what I now relate to you was revealed
to me later.

What hurt Ursula most of all, that morning, as she later expressed it to
me in her pain and perplexity, was Claude’s indifference. For when
Ursula turned to her Claude seemed cold and distant, as though what had
happened during the night were insignificant, common. Ursula didn’t dare
to touch upon the thousand questions that trembled in her. Claude,
humming, went off to breakfast.

                   *       *       *       *       *

I noticed how miserable Ursula looked that morning, and wondered what
had happened. But we all had to rush off to our jobs, and it was not
until evening that I had an opportunity to talk with her, and by then
she had told a good deal to Mickey.

For Ursula had been off duty in the afternoon, and she had gone out. She
didn’t know a soul in London, and walked haphazardly through the foggy
streets, wanting only to find a corner somewhere, to hide away and cry.
Huge red busses passed, and the policemen at the crossings seemed to her
immense and majestic, and they seemed to know something about her.

She walked along Piccadilly, looking at the marvelous shop windows, and
for a moment she thought of buying Claude a beautiful gift. But her Army
pay was very small. She had only five shillings in her pocket, and
besides, she knew so little English that she didn’t dare go into a shop.

A house that had been hit during the night was still smoldering. A few
firemen were at work in the ruins. The passers-by didn’t even glance at
the house. Because it was done for, because it was lost, and because one
should never remember the night before, in the day.

At Piccadilly Circus, Ursula bumped into Mickey. It was five o’clock,
and Mickey had left her office an hour early to go to the dentist. At
last, a familiar face! As Mickey hailed her with her usual enthusiasm,
Ursula felt as though she had met someone of her own family. Out of the
anonymous, out of this strange city from which she had expected nothing,
at last a face emerged that had a point of connection for her. And
Mickey was so excited at seeing her, so friendly, always in good humor,
with her turned-up nose, her clear eyes, and her heart-shaped mouth. She
took hold of Ursula’s arm and pulled her along.

Then all at once Ursula unburdened herself. The need to speak was almost
a physical compulsion. She began to talk about Claude, and little by
little she described what had happened in the night. She said, “I was so
happy, Mickey, it was so marvelous and so strange! And yet I feel as if
it can’t be right. What does it mean? She’s a homosexual, isn’t she?”

Mickey laughed with superior knowledge, then grew sober at the
perplexity and worry in Ursula’s face. “You mustn’t do it again, Ursula.
You’ll get sick. And besides, you mustn’t go around talking about it.
Don’t tell another soul!”

Ursula didn’t feel that she knew any more than before. Yet Mickey seemed
to take it for granted now that everything was explained. And Mickey,
too, had a story to tell. Just before the dance, in the canteen at GHQ,
she had met an officer who was absolutely wonderful. “Handsome as a
god!” She was in love with him. Whenever she had to go into his office,
Mickey felt chills and fevers running up and down her spine, she began
to perspire, she couldn’t stand still, and she was sure that he noticed
all this. He had invited her to go to the movies tomorrow. He liked her.
But Mickey had noticed that he liked all women. He was very dark, with
green eyes, a rather strong nose, and thin lips. His name was Robert. He
was nervous and disorderly. He often appeared in Mickey’s office. He’d
arrive in a rush, kiss the typist on the neck, call Mickey “darling,”
and pass his hand down the back of another secretary. The women laughed,
and scolded him without conviction.

It crossed Ursula’s mind that she would die of fright in the presence of
such a man, but Mickey adored him. They had reached the dentist’s door,
where they separated. Ursula didn’t know what to do with herself or
where to go. It was six o’clock, and night had fallen. In the blackout,
one could scarcely see the pavement. Everything was black and
depressing. The alert sounded; no one paid any attention.

Ursula readjusted her gas mask and helmet. They were heavy and clumsy,
but regulations required that they be worn in the street. She waited for
a bus and mounted to the top. In the day, it was amusing to sit up there
and look down into the street. But at this hour one could no longer see
anything beyond the windows.

Everybody noticed her French uniform. Ursula was proud of her uniform. A
woman nearby leaned toward her and said with a strong English accent,
“_Vive la France!_”

“_Merci_,” said Ursula. “Thank you very much.”

A man said to her, “I was in France in 1914, at Douai, Verdun,
Valenciennes.”

Ursula smiled. It was amazing how many Englishmen had already stopped
her in the street to tell her things like that. They had all been at
Douai, Verdun, Valenciennes. Indeed, Englishmen often pressed my hands
in the street, repeating the same words. The English are nice.

Ursula got down from the bus. For a moment it was difficult for her to
orient herself in the dark, but she managed to find her way toward Down
Street.

                   *       *       *       *       *

That night there were fewer of us at dinner than usual. It was a
Saturday, and many of the girls had begun to make friends and to go out.
In the rooms at night, there were always some who talked about their
lovers, recounting their experiences in full detail, while laughing and
often ridiculing the men. I suppose for some of us, this served to
increase our curiosity, and at the same time to decrease the importance
of such things, to lower the barriers to love affairs, so that it didn’t
matter much if one went out and did the same. After all, all this was
temporary. The war would soon be over. In the spring of 1941 there would
surely be a second front. And then our exile would be ended, together
with all these local love affairs and the loneliness of Down Street. But
for others of us, this easy talk had another effect, making promiscuity
repulsive.

The talk went on when we went down to supper, and while we stood in line
for our food. Sergeant Machou, the cook, dished out the portions
according to her preferences. The best servings were handed to the women
who flattered her, or who could talk back with her own vulgarity. She
also had respect for those who were friendly with the officers, and so
she was always generous with Ann.

Ursula stood in line for her soup, and then she looked around, and I
knew that she was looking for Claude. But Claude had liberty, and had
gone out to dinner. Mickey was gossiping at another table. She kept
whispering to Ginette and glancing at Ursula. I had already heard a bit
of Mickey’s tale upstairs. Although Mickey had warned Ursula to keep
silent, she apparently felt no need to follow her own advice. As Ursula
hesitated, looking so isolated, missing Claude, I motioned her over to
the place beside me.

That evening in the dormitory, the women all looked at her coldly, and
scarcely anyone spoke to her. I helped her carry her bedding up from the
switchboard room.

Ginette made a remark about _gousses_, and there was a general burst of
laughter. But Ursula didn’t know what it meant. She went to bed early,
and in spite of the light and the noise, she closed her eyes, trying to
sleep. Poor girl; she had told me everything, as we trundled her bedding
from the switchboard room, and I knew that she could not sleep, and that
she was lying there with a cold feeling oppressing her heart.




                               CHAPTER 9


I had been given more interesting work to do. Every day our contacts
with France grew better, and some of the resistance reports came to me,
to be adapted for use in propaganda. I became deeply absorbed, excited
by my work, and it was perhaps because of the excitement of my task that
I felt less need for a personal emotional life than so many of the
girls. Or perhaps I was only slower to develop, emotionally.

Jacqueline, doing the same sort of work, nevertheless was soon
personally enmeshed. She was in an office next door to mine, for her
chief, Lieutenant De Prade, was working on establishing more contacts
with the resistance movement.

From the day when she had been assigned to his office, Jacqueline had
told herself that she was fated, and that it was her fate always to be
unlucky. For here she had discovered the man of her life. He was
intelligent, elegant, cultivated, handsome, and they had the same tastes
in everything. But he was married, and he adored his young wife and
children, whom he had had to leave in France. Moreover, De Prade was a
devout Catholic, and he treated Jacqueline like a young sister.
Nevertheless, she was certain that he was desperately attracted to her.

As for De Prade, he struggled against Jacqueline’s attraction with all
his strength. He knew that she was in love with him, but he tried to
persuade himself that this was only a youthful infatuation, and that she
would find another man to love. She was so pretty, and she was so much
sought after by all the officers at GHQ, that things would certainly
arrange themselves.

De Prade had rented a little house in Kensington where he lived with
three other officers and a servant. Every weekend Jacqueline visited
them. She had become a sort of mascot, a symbol of home for the group.
Jacqueline knew how to manage a house, and the men had grown quite
accustomed to having her take charge of their servant. She played the
lady of the house, arranged all the menus, and acted as hostess when
they had guests.

With her distinguished grace, with the beautiful manners of a young
Frenchwoman of good family, Jacqueline reminded De Prade’s comrades of
their sisters, their wives, or their daughters. All of them were more or
less in love with her, and they deluged her with flowers and candy.

But Jacqueline loved De Prade. Beneath her air of pampered urbanity, she
had a will of iron. She wanted De Prade; in spite of and against
everything, she wanted him. During the course of weeks, she had been
working on him, playing the innocent young girl, calling him Uncle Alain
(he was twelve years older than she). And every day she felt that she
was gaining ground, that he was slipping closer to intimacy in their
seemingly innocent relationship. She had her own room in the house in
Kensington, and slept there on Saturdays and Sundays. De Prade would
come to say good night, tucking her into bed and kissing her cheek. Then
he would leave.

He was still a young man, and each weekend this game grew more
unendurable. But he too was stubborn. He was determined to remain
faithful to his wife. For some time the struggle continued. Inevitably,
it had to come to an issue.

                   *       *       *       *       *

While for Jacqueline and for most of us there was a growing life outside
the barracks, in our jobs or in love affairs, Ursula was still there at
her little table in the hall, on duty, and all her life seemed to be
enclosed in the switchboard room with Claude, only a few steps away.

One afternoon Ursula was seated with her check list as we went back to
our jobs from lunch. It was not long after the famous night with Claude.
We hurried past her. Most of us got into one of the trucks that were
waiting outside, but the richer ones went to the corner to take the bus,
and the most ambitious marched off on foot for the exercise.

Ursula wrote down the names of the last to leave, as they hurried past,
running because they were late.

The Captain walked rapidly by. Ursula rose to attention. The Captain
gave her a condescending little nod, and went into her office.

Ursula could hear Machou yelling in the kitchen; she was probably
cursing out one of the girls on K.P. The poor things! Of all the
punishments, this was the one Ursula most dreaded. She preferred the
heaviest labor to spending five minutes in the presence of Machou.

She couldn’t understand how the regular kitchen helpers could bear their
slavery. There were several little girls from Brittany permanently
assigned to Machou, and somehow they seemed to have adjusted themselves
well enough to their kitchen tasks, and also to life outside the
barracks, in London. On their smooth round cheeks their newly employed
rouge appeared almost obscene, and their heavily reddened lips seemed to
be bleeding. Ursula wondered about them, and she talked to me about
them, for they were girls of about her own age, and they seemed to find
this life agreeable enough, while she learned so painfully.

The little girls from Brittany had arrived in different ways, mostly
from Brest. Some had come on the fishing boats of their brothers or
cousins; others had arrived after wild adventures, stowed away in naval
craft. One of them had found herself running along the quay during a
bombardment of Lorient in 1940. She was deathly frightened. A sailor ran
alongside her. He told her to jump into his boat for shelter. The girl
had followed his advice, screaming as each bomb fell. The sailor had put
her down in the hold, and in the meantime the captain had raised anchor
for England. On arriving, he had been startled to discover his stowaway.

The little girl had been even more astonished, but there she was in
England, together with a number of French sailors, who advised her to
stay. She had wept, imagining that her mother would believe her to be
dead, but she had decided to remain, hearing the call of General de
Gaulle. A woman’s army was about to be formed—and at home there was the
Boche.

That was how most of these daughters of the fishermen and peasants of
Brittany had arrived, to be assigned by the Captain to kitchen work or
to the daily cleaning of the barracks. The little girls from Brittany
went out with the sailors from their own province, who took them dancing
in sordid little halls and slept with them in disreputable hotels.
Otherwise, they’d have been left alone, always stuck at the barracks.
With the sailors they could talk of home, of St. Malo, of Brest, of
Cherbourg. What else could they have done, in a London filled with
heretics who had never even set foot in Brittany?

As assistants, these girls had the women who were on punishment. The
penalties were posted in the hall. One could read:

   Jeanne, 50 lbs. of potatoes to peel, for being drunk.

   Louise, dishwashing, for painting her nails red.

   Andrée, confined to quarters for a week, for disrespect to an
   officer.

Two or three times, Ursula had been punished. Once she had appeared late
for morning roll call. Another time the corporal had found her hair too
long. Ursula peeled potatoes to atone for her long hair—it had reached
to the collar of her jacket, which was forbidden. This regulation was
relaxed later on, and Ursula again let her hair grow; but at first this
rule, like all the others, was rigidly enforced.

Seated on the kitchen stool, enveloped in a long yellow smock of rough
canvas, she had endured the jesting and the ribaldry of Machou and her
acolytes for two hours. No one spoke directly to her, but their voices,
which seemed to be purposely raucous, and their descriptions of their
affairs with men disgusted Ursula. She felt sick and dirty. There was no
feeling of superiority in her, as in Jacqueline. On the contrary, Ursula
was embarrassed by her own feeling of revulsion. She would have liked to
be able to hide it, as though it were some disability, and to laugh with
the others, and to be treated as one of them. She wanted so much to be
liked, but there was nothing to be done. Whenever she opened her mouth,
her voice seemed to come out false, strange, and forced, so that Ursula
herself couldn’t recognize it, and she was sure that the others were not
deceived. They called her a sissy, and gave their tales an extra
seasoning so as to make her blush.

All this was not purposely vicious; except for Machou, they weren’t
badhearted. But they were bored in the kitchen, and the presence of a
timid little girl who blushed was a diversion. Their cruelty was only
childish. Actually most of them were of the same age, or scarcely older
than Ursula. And they knew well enough what would be thought of them at
home if their mothers or fathers were aware of the life they were
leading in London.

At her table in the hall, Ursula heard the coarse voice of Machou, and
the voice of one of the Brittany girls answering in the same tone. She
sighed and opened a book that she had taken from the barracks library.
The door of the switchboard room was closed. Claude was angry with her,
and wasn’t speaking to her, for it was generally known how the news had
spread of their night together, even though Mickey swore that she hadn’t
said a word. And for Ursula there was another complication. The women
were no longer speaking to her. Claude, nevertheless, had lost none of
her popularity. She was admired and rather feared by the girls. It was
Ursula whom they all held in disfavor, and every night Ursula wept in
her bed.

For the first time in her life, she was aware of her body. It had a
special independent life of its own. It longed for the warmth of Claude
and for Claude’s hands. It twisted in every direction in the narrow
little bed, hungry and cold, in search of the other body that had
awakened it.

The evening before, a new order had been issued: The sentinel was no
longer to sleep in the switchboard room. Ursula thought she would fall
sick with frustration. If at least Claude would talk to her or smile....
But Claude didn’t even look at her.

Miserably, she tried to fix her attention on her book. She didn’t know
what she was reading. Then suddenly the half-open door of the barracks
was pushed open, and a soldier entered. He wore a Polish uniform. He was
a very young man, small in stature, a little chubby, not handsome, with
a round childish face, a thick mouth, and very large black eyes. He
looked all around, with his brows raised, and this gave his face the
expression of a questioning, astonished child.

Realizing that Ursula was looking at him, he asked in a foreign accent,
“Isn’t this the barracks of the Free French—the women’s barracks?”

It was only then that Ursula recognized him, and she felt a rush of joy
in her heart, as at recovering a friend.

“Yes, it’s me!” she cried, and at the same moment she grew very red, for
there was really no way for her to know that it was she whom he sought.
But the young soldier smiled and approached her.

“Now, that’s really lucky! I was wondering how I would manage to find
you, because I only knew your first name.”

“But how did you know my first name?” Ursula asked.

“Why, when you were leaving, your friend called you Ursula.”

Ursula gave him a chair and he sat down beside her. Once he had got that
sentence out of him, he fell silent again, and Ursula found him a little
dull. Claude, for instance, always had something to say. She kept you
continuously hanging on her words.

The young soldier asked her what she was doing and whether she was free
for dinner that evening. Ursula said she was. It would be better than to
stay in the barracks when Claude wasn’t even speaking to her.

Then he arose, and asked her pardon for having come without warning, and
left.

Nevertheless, Ursula felt more cheerful because of his visit.

Her turn of duty was over at five o’clock and it was still daylight,
gray and rainy as usual. Ursula went up to the empty dormitory. It was
cold; the window was open. The cots were made up as in men’s barracks,
with the sheets and blankets carefully folded at the head of the bed in
a square packet with no overhanging edges. The mattress was folded
double, so there was nowhere to sit except on the bedsprings.

Ursula stood in the middle of the room. Although the women were still
forbidden to put things on the empty shelves around the walls, the
officers had relaxed their attention to this regulation during the past
few days, and little by little, photographs, holy images, little vases,
and books had appeared next to the beds. But there was nothing at all by
Ursula’s bed. She had no mementos. She decided that she would buy
herself a bunch of violets to put in the toothbrush glass above her cot,
as Jacqueline had done. She would go out right away for the violets.

In the street, Ursula bought the violets for sixpence, and suddenly she
had the idea of giving them to Claude. As soon as the thought came to
her, she couldn’t wait. She began to run in the street, holding tight to
the little bouquet, which consisted mostly of leaves around four or five
violets. She arrived at the barracks out of breath and knocked at the
door of the switchboard room. Claude’s melodious voice said, “Come in.”

Claude was seated in front of the switchboard, manipulating the plugs.
She kept her back erect, as always. The blonde hair was brushed back.
She turned her head toward Ursula, slightly contracting her plucked
brows in an annoyed manner. Ursula, her head lowered and her heart full
of uncertainty, held out her little bouquet to Claude, without saying a
word.

Claude’s frown dissolved in a smile. “Oh, how nice!” she cried. “What
lovely violets! Come let me kiss you!”

And drawing Ursula to her, she kissed her eyes. In that second Ursula
came back to life. Her brown eyes were once more alight, her heart was
like honey. She felt happy and light. Everything was beautiful,
everything was perfect, her life, the barracks, London—since Claude
still liked her, since Claude didn’t hold anything against her. She sat
down on the camp bed, and between two telephone calls Claude recounted
her woes—she had seen her husband again, she was desperately in love
with him, she would never love anyone else. Claude drew a photograph out
of her pocket and showed it to Ursula.

Claude’s husband had an air of self-confidence and cruelty. Claude began
once more to relate how she had met him, and how they had married after
years of quarreling and love-making. Her voice became feverish as she
spoke, and all at once she seemed almost an old woman; a woman showing
age, filled with agitation, with dark reflections in her eyes, with
bitterness against everything—against herself, against her husband,
against the barracks. And suddenly she began to quarrel with Ursula,
complaining that the evening before, in Claude’s absence, Ursula had
failed to note down a telephone call from Ann. Then it was finished.
Ursula could never again be happy for more than a few seconds with this
strange and ever beautiful woman. The dinner bell sounded. A voice
called Ursula.

She went out sadly, trying to hold back her tears. In the hall, the
young soldier waited for her.




                               CHAPTER 10


There was no secrecy in our dormitory. It had become almost a law to
announce whom you were going out with, and on returning to describe the
results.

One evening Mickey perfumed herself with chypre, borrowed from Ginette.
She used a depilatory under her arms, and selected her best khaki silk
tie. She said that she had a date with Robert. Ann laughed, because
Mickey had gone through all these preparations a few evenings before,
for a movie date with Robert, only to have him call it off at the last
moment.

Mickey hadn’t even been angry. She had told us that she was sure he had
a date with another woman, but it was all the same to her. She had
nothing against him for standing her up. She was neither susceptible nor
vengeful—and Robert had invited her to dinner for tonight.

“Where are you meeting him?” Ginette demanded.

“At his hotel,” Mickey said.

“Well! Something’s going to happen!” Ginette predicted.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Something’s going to happen, Mickey thought while dressing. Something is
certainly going to happen. I can’t go on in this state.

She had felt sick with excitement for several days. She no longer ate or
slept. She wanted “something” to happen. It was Robert. When he came
into the office, Mickey’s whole body reacted. Her typing became
scrambled, and she didn’t hear what was being said to her.

She had had enough of waiting and holding back. She had been playing at
the approaches to love for three years now. She remembered a certain
actor she had known, and the recollection, agreeable enough until then,
suddenly became disgusting to her. She had, indeed, rather bragged of
her “affair with an actor” to all of us in the dormitory. He had taught
her everything, without ever going to the very end. He had taken her,
one summer day, to a field filled with daisies, and he had caressed her,
and then he had said, “You’re too young. Go home, quickly!” She had been
satisfied to go home then, for at that time she had not wanted to
explore any further.

Now she had had enough of these sterile caresses. Before putting on her
uniform shirt, Mickey glanced at her back in the mirror. All those
pimples were so ugly. Soon, now, she wouldn’t have them any more, and
Ginette would treat her as an equal, and she would know, she would
really know what it was like.

She had met the actor at the home of some friends. He had been
performing in a small theatre in the provinces. Backstage, where she had
gone to see him, he had bent her against a pile of ropes and kissed her
while caressing her thighs. She had found it amusing. This sort of thing
had continued for a year. He had of course been much older than she.

Afterward, she had flirted with a number of boys, but still she knew no
more than she had ever known. The men saw only little pieces of her and
she gave herself in little pieces, laughing, wrinkling her nose, opening
wide her large innocent blue eyes, so that all of them felt a little bit
remorseful, and treated her like a little girl, without insisting too
much.

After a few months in Down Street, Mickey was beginning to feel tired of
being treated like a child—especially by Ginette. Ginette was very fond
of her. They often went out together, and sometimes Ginette took a few
others of us along, when her men friends wanted dates for their friends.
Ginette was ugly, but she was a great success with men. She had sex
appeal. From their first look at her, men seemed to know that she liked
to make love.

But Mickey had a certain lack of success when she went out with Ginette.
Ginette used the same trick with all of us—“They’re virgins,” she would
say with a kind of pitying scorn. For a while the idea of being out with
a virgin would amuse a man on a casual date, but after some time he
became irritated, and even seemed to find the circumstance humiliating.

Ginette was a pure type of Paris _midinette_. She was coarse, logical,
practical, intelligent, and goodhearted when she wanted to be. Her
husband had beaten and deceived her. He was a handsome lad, a champion
cyclist. Ginette had divorced him at nineteen. She had worked as a
salesgirl and supported her parents, who were old and sick. She had
become hardened by life, she was afraid of no one, and she knew how to
get along. At the barracks she was in the good graces of all her
superiors, and even Machou feared her a little. Everybody said that she
would be promoted to private first class at Christmas. Petit had
confidence in her and often assigned her to special tasks.

Somewhat to our surprise, Ginette advised Mickey against taking the
great step.

“Marry as a virgin, Mickey, it’s better,” Ginette declared, though with
the air of someone who expects that her advice will not be taken, and
indeed, would be just as pleased. “If you begin by sleeping with some
fellow, you won’t be able to stop, and you’ll go to bed with everybody.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Mickey studied herself in the little mirror on the wall of the Virgins’
Room. She thought, I’m making myself ready for my wedding night. And it
seemed to her comical to see herself in a khaki uniform with cotton
stockings, and wearing a necktie, instead of being dressed in a long
white gown. It seemed so comical to her that she began to laugh out
loud; although at the bottom of her heart she suddenly felt sad. There
were so many romantic dreams that little girls had when they were
fifteen, when they went walking and stopped in front of the shop windows
to study the mannequins dressed in white satin and tulle. Now she had
definitely to separate herself from those dreams. It was a bit
terrifying and sorrowful to pass in this way from girlhood to womanhood.
In this way, all alone, and without ceremony. And, Mickey thought,
without love, either. No, she was quite sure that she didn’t love
Robert. She only wanted him. She wanted him, and she wanted to know, and
besides, it would be so agreeable to have a lover, like a real woman.
And yet she said to herself, I hope I’ll love him afterward.

Slowly she climbed the stairs. She knocked at the door.

Robert opened it. He was in civilian clothes, and it was odd to see him
dressed so; he appeared a little less cruel. His green eyes covered
Mickey with caresses. Without saying a word, he seized her in his arms
and began to kiss her. Mickey freed herself and began hurriedly to
undress. She wanted to seem experienced. Robert watched her, probably
astonished. Things were going almost too fast. But she was already nude,
and he was good enough to praise her, as a connoisseur. Long-muscled
narrow limbs, a supple, well-built body with handsome shoulders,
scarcely any hips, and small pointed breasts. He undressed just as
quickly, flinging his clothes over a chair.

His body was cold when he lay down next to her. He was very bronzed and
very hairy. He kissed her again, but hurriedly. Mickey looked about her.
The hotel room was violently lighted by a bare electric bulb. There were
jonquils fading in a vase. She felt alone, utterly isolated from this
man who was going through a ritual that did not affect her.

He was astonished to encounter a physical barrier. He had not believed
her to be a virgin. When he hurt her, Mickey uttered a short cry. It was
all so quick, so strange, she felt disappointed. Nothing but that! All
that fuss about such a little thing.

Robert still had said scarcely anything, nor had she. And now it seemed
that there was even less reason to talk.

Robert arose; he was very handsome, with his air of arrogance. He smiled
at her and said, “Come to the bathroom, honey.” His suddenly intimate
manner of speech gave her a sensation of horror. There was no reason for
his now assuming the right to say _tu_ instead of _vous_. Why did he use
the intimate form of address as soon as she had made love with him?

They dined almost in silence in the hotel restaurant, like strangers
exchanging banalities. Nevertheless, Mickey felt better. She was freed
now from that storm within herself—from that thirst and from desire. She
felt herself calm and appeased. It was done. She was a woman.




                               CHAPTER 11


Mickey returned to Down Street. Faithfully, almost as though she had
gone through the experience in order to tell us about it, she recounted
the scene. She felt disappointed, but like all of her feelings, this
didn’t penetrate deeply. “It’s life,” she concluded, and she was
satisfied.

That night, when the phonograph had finally become silent, and when the
last bed-to-bed whisperings were over, Mickey could not get to sleep.
The roaring planes above the barracks and the regular explosions of the
bombs didn’t disturb her; she was used to all that. But she was thinking
of Robert, of the hotel room, of the faded jonquils in the vase.

I was on fire-watch duty that night on the roof, and suddenly I found
Mickey sitting beside me on the parapet in the dark; a pensive Mickey,
who talked almost as though to herself.

“It’s life,” she repeated musingly, and then she told me what she had
been thinking, and somehow she was led back to a childhood memory, a
very distant memory. It was of the time when she had first realized that
lies were a part of life, that it was necessary to lie.

One summer she had been in the mountains with some of her father’s
family in France. Mickey had then been six or seven years old. One day
in August her uncle and aunt had taken her along on an excursion. Mickey
loved the mountains, and she loved these walks.

Toward midday they had picnicked in a little clearing at the edge of a
stream, in bright sunlight. They were all alone in the sunlit silence of
the mountain.

They had finished the lunch of boiled eggs, potatoes, and fruit that her
aunt had prepared. Mickey’s uncle, a thin little man, jaundiced and
bad-tempered, was standing looking at the slope across the valley. His
sharp silhouette was outlined against the cloudless sky. He pointed with
his cane to something in front of him and said, “Look at the goats over
there.”

Mickey’s aunt rose, joined her husband, shaded her eyes, and said,
“Where?” And following her husband’s directions, she finally discovered
the goats, tiny black and white spots, going down the opposite slope of
the mountain.

Then Mickey too rose and slipped to her uncle’s side, trying to see what
he saw. She sought everywhere, inspecting every rock, every tree, every
bush, following his every indication, but she couldn’t find any goats.
At first her uncle had tried to help her out. “But look, look there,
right in front of you. You see the tree, the small round tree, you see
it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now look to the right, and down a little. You see the white
stone? Good. To the right now, a little lower, you’ll see them, eight
goats with a black one in front. You see them now?”

Mickey saw nothing.

Then her aunt had joined in, adding her explanations. “But pay attention
to what you are told, my dear. Don’t you see the rock that your uncle
showed you? And the three trees in a diagonal line? Then drop your eyes
six feet to the right, and you’ll see a white stone. And still to the
right, a sort of reddish spot—you see the red spot? There, there, a
whole flock of goats!”

Mickey tried desperately to see them, her eyes searching in all
directions, going up, going down. She didn’t see any goats anywhere at
all. There was nothing to be done.

Her uncle lost his temper. “She’s doing it on purpose!” he shouted.
“She’s making fun of us. Why, it’s impossible! She’s not blind.”

And then, in order to put an end to the shouting, and simply to please
them and to have some peace, Mickey told a lie. She announced that she
saw the goats at last. “Oh, yes, there! Of course! To the right. I see
them now.”

Her uncle and aunt smiled upon her again, and her aunt gave her
chocolates. For the first time in her life, and at the age of seven,
Mickey had discovered that in the world of grownups, it was necessary to
lie. She was astonished and a little sad. She had just discovered that
the world was different from what she had thought until then, and that
life was different. People had always told her, “You mustn’t lie.” And
that itself was false, because it was necessary to lie. Therefore
probably everything that she had been told was false.

From that time on, she had listened with skepticism to the moral counsel
of her parents. Besides, they were both so old, as old as other
children’s grandparents. And her aunt and uncle were also aged. Mickey
did not like old people. She was always wanting to laugh, to have fun,
and that made noise. And so she was always in rebellion. But among the
things that she still believed in at the age of eighteen, there had been
love with a capital L, such as one read about in novels.

That night she decided that love, too, was like the rest. Still another
lie. And she laughed in the dark.

“Oh, after all, it’s not important. One can be satisfied with what it is
and have fun. It’s not serious.”

She didn’t want to pity herself like an old woman. She declared, “Since
it’s necessary to lie and to say that it’s wonderful, I’ll learn to do
it. I’ll learn to make love.”

She didn’t yet know how she was going to go about this, but she knew
that she was going to begin on the very next occasion. She wanted to get
to be like Ginette, like Claude. And already, her scene with Robert, as
she remembered it, seemed less sad. Robert was handsome. The jonquils
hadn’t been so faded after all.

I was thankful to Mickey that night, not only because I felt she had at
last shown me her true self, but because, in a way, she had been through
something for me, for every one of us, and perhaps she had spared me
pain.




                               CHAPTER 12


It was the first Christmas of the war. A huge fir tree had been set up
in our assembly room, and the chaplain was celebrating Mass in the
barracks chapel. More than two hundred of us were there. Our captain
stood in the front row, with her officers beside her. Then came the two
warrant officers, Petit and Morvan, the sergeants, and the corporals.
Ann, Ginette, and several others had just received their stripes. Claude
had made quite a scene, for she had not even been promoted to private
first class. She was furious, and refused to sing in the choir. Still,
she had come to Mass like all the others.

Every woman had her eyes fixed on the little manger with its figurines
of the Holy Family, and on the priest with his slow beautiful movements.
We listened to the tinkling of the bell, and each of us wanted to weep,
wanting to be pure and clean and small—to be a little girl, to be in
France.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Before coming to the service, Claude had had one of her moments of
warmth and candor, when she could be so touching. I had been in her
little telephone room with Ursula, and admired the sprigs of green that
Claude had put on the walls of the narrow chamber and over her
switchboard. And suddenly Claude had told us that for years she had been
promising herself every Christmas to return to the faith, to have no
more lovers, neither men nor women. She would again become the pure
little girl that she once had been. We had come together to Mass.

“_Les anges dans les campagnes_,” sang the choir, and Claude, sitting
beside me, bowed her head and clutched her missal till her knuckles
shone white through the thin skin of her lovely hands, and a tremor
passed through her. Then with a little sigh she relaxed and raised her
eyes. Seeing me watching her, she gave a little smile and shrugged.

Jacqueline was staring straight ahead of her, a look of intense
concentration on her face. But I knew it wasn’t the Mass that Jacqueline
was concentrating on. Jacqueline could think of little these days but
her fated love. In these last days her back had been paining her more
than ever, and early this evening she had complained that the pain was
intolerable. She took it as a punishment in advance, as an exchange for
what she so desperately wanted. As the choir sang, she suddenly bent her
head in prayer, and I thought I could divine her prayer. “Dear God, give
him to me. I love him, I won’t do anything to hurt him. There’s a war,
and it will be a long time before he’ll see his wife again. She won’t
know anything at all about what happens here. I don’t want him to leave
her for me. I only want to have him once. At least once. I want it to be
with him. That will be enough for me. Forgive me, I know it’s bad, but
what can I do? Forgive me, help me.”

Ursula had no religion. No one had thought of providing her with
anything of the kind. She had been given neither education nor faith.
She must have felt a stranger to what was taking place here, and yet
been drawn into the wondrous prayerful atmosphere that had been created
by all these women, her comrades.

All at once everyone had changed. All the faces had suddenly become
peaceful. As I watched Ursula scanning the altered faces of her friends,
I knew she was wondering what the feeling of this religion could be. Was
it something so good? Would she never know it? She studied Petit, her
arms folded like a man’s, her eyes closed. It was strange that Petit too
was religious. She had to ask someone—as she asked me later—whether
someone like Petit weren’t disowned by her religion. And she herself,
Ursula reflected—was she like Petit? Was she too disowned?

Claude had rented a little room in the city, and several times Ursula
had gone there to be with her. She adored Claude more than ever, and
permitted herself to be bullied, without the slightest resistance.
Claude was never in the state of humor that one expected to find, and
Ursula always felt herself to be walking a tightrope with her. One day,
Ursula knew, she would fall and hurt herself badly.

As the singing voices rose, Ursula felt doomed. She was lost, there was
no hope for her, she would end up like Ann. She wanted to cry, for she
would never love anyone other than Claude. Not even someone like
Michel—for she knew his name now, Michel Levy. He was so generous, so
intelligent, so calm, and so gentle. He had never even tried to kiss
her. Ursula felt secure in his presence, and yet she was sure that she
was not in love with him. She didn’t like his small hands and his chubby
body. He bored her sometimes, and he was timid. She preferred the
caprices, the angry moods, and the phantasies of Claude. She was ready
to endure anything for the pleasure of half an hour of Claude’s gaiety
and charm.

                   *       *       *       *       *

And I—I thought of my dear father, somewhere in a German prison camp, of
my mother and grandparents in Canada. Would we ever be together again
for Christmas in our little house near Orléans? It was better to lose
myself in the thoughts of the other girls....

The priest raised the Host. All the heads were bowed. A few women were
weeping in their hands. I saw tears drop between the fingers of one of
the little Brittany girls.

It was already being rumored that the invasion would not take place in
the coming spring. Our exile was being prolonged. Over there in France,
little brothers were growing up, parents were hungry and cold, the Boche
contaminated Paris, and here we were so far away—so lost. Would all this
never come to an end? “_Noël, Noël, Il est né, le Divin Enfant._” The
season of joy was even more difficult to endure than the gray days.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Michel Levy was waiting for Ursula as she came out of the chapel. He had
a gift for her—a book of poems. Several times in the last few days, when
Michel asked her to go out with him, Ursula had put him off in order to
be with Claude. But tonight Claude was celebrating Christmas in her room
in town with some English friends and a few of us from the barracks, and
Ursula had promised to have supper with Michel. Claude always teased her
about her “lover,” and Ursula would have liked to stop seeing him, but
she didn’t know how to manage it without hurting his feelings.

All the women who had asked for leave were scattering down the street
with their friends, soldiers, officers, and there were little groups of
girls going out together. Ann and Petit went out arm in arm.

Ginette was spending Christmas respectably with a married couple she
knew. Jacqueline left for Kensington. Mickey, in a sudden excess of
remorse, had not wanted to spend Christmas night with Robert. She had
asked Claude if she could come to her party.

Hot chocolate had been prepared in the barracks for those who were
staying in. Down Street went to bed late, and when the women slipped
into their cold cots they sighed, “_C’est la guerre._”

Others were dancing all through the night, and drinking.

And all of us, wherever we were, were thinking, Next Christmas, surely,
we’ll be in France and we’ll make up for all this. How glorious it will
be to return in uniform, we, the volunteers of Free France! Everyone
will honor us. Our parents will be so proud, the bells will ring _Noël,
Noël_ for us, _Noël_ for liberated France, and we’ll march under the
Arch of Triumph! Oh, France, France, our next Christmas will be in the
France that we will have freed!

Yes, our life here was only temporary; another few months to pass, at
most a year, and it would certainly be over.




                               CHAPTER 13


There was a little Italian restaurant that we had discovered on Greek
Street. It was modest and cheap, and it was there that Michel took
Ursula, for he had very little money. And yet, despite his poverty as an
ordinary recruit, he never seemed to be able to think of enough things
to do to give Ursula pleasure.

Before the war he had been a student. He wanted to take his degree in
philosophy, he told Ursula. In 1937, his parents had got out of Poland,
and he had continued his studies in Belgium.

That was nearly all that Ursula knew of him, and she was not enough
interested in Michel to wonder about his history. She liked him well
enough and she was touched by his gentleness and his discretion.
Sometimes when Ursula talked to him about Claude, Michel gazed at her
with his childlike eyes, so unreally pure, and the black eyes, with
their thick brows always raised in a startled expression, seemed to look
at her with so complete a comprehension that Ursula thought that he must
know everything, must have divined everything, for he never asked her
any questions.

This evening he seemed gay. It was Christmas. Neither he nor Ursula was
Catholic. Ursula was nothing at all, and Michel said he was in search of
truth. And yet Christmas made them both happy.

After dinner they went out into the black street, where groups of people
passed singing. They walked without any special destination, and Michel
took hold of Ursula’s arm. At first she wanted to withdraw it. She
couldn’t understand why the slightest physical contact with Michel
frightened her. But not wanting to offend him, she did nothing, and they
continued to walk like that.

“Merry Christmas!” people in the streets called out to them, and once
more Ursula felt her heart heavy and sad. She wasn’t thinking of
Christmas in France, for she had had neither childhood nor holidays nor
a family in her past. There was almost nothing. It was as though she had
been born only the day before; her heart and her spirit were still
unmarked and they floated in a sort of prenatal obscurity.

But Michel was happy to feel her near him. She was so young. She was the
only woman who didn’t frighten him; because she seemed so defenseless,
because she didn’t know how to chatter or to laugh like most women, who
always either had an air of being on the defensive or were aggressive.
Until now he had told himself, I don’t have the right to touch her, or
to take her with me, for I have nothing to offer her, neither God, nor a
home, nor security, nor even myself—a self that wanted only to die until
I met her, a self that still wants to die. He beheld her again in the
courtyard, opening the door and halting on the lighted doorstep, a black
hazy shadow against a background of light. He saw her sitting on the
steps and saw the little movement of fear that she had had upon noticing
him—like that of a little wild animal that trembles on seeing a man. He
saw again her odd, small face, framed by her glossy hair falling thick
and straight like that of a little Indian. And an immense tenderness
more powerful even than love invaded him again.

He thought, Do I still want to die? And Michel had to answer himself
that it was still so, despite his knowing her. He loved her, but he
couldn’t draw from her the nourishment that he needed. She could not
silence the questioning in him and the agony in him. He knew that he had
found nothing and that he still wanted to die, as on that day some
months ago in Switzerland, in Fribourg, when he had decided to kill
himself. Solemnly, his great eyes open with their strange candor, he
told her all that was in his mind.

Michel, interned with several other Poles in a camp in Fribourg, had
been granted the exceptional privilege of being permitted to take
courses at the university. Scarcely seventeen, he felt as though he
carried the moral weight of the whole world on his shoulders. He lived
in profound despair, telling himself that there was no hope, that human
stupidity and the cowardice of the human mass was so great that one
could never change anything, that there would always be wars and
barriers of hatred. He wished that somehow he could speak to mankind,
explain that only humanity itself could put an end to these horrors. But
how, and in the name of what could he speak? He was timid and ugly and
he had no power of leadership. Then of what use was it to take part in
the human farce and to love when love did not exist, and to bring
children into the world in order that they might be killed in the next
war in the name of some country that pretended to be more important than
another? What for?

The boy Michel had decided to kill himself. He had bought some veronal,
and was on his way to his rooming house when he met a fellow student
from the university. This student was a monk, and strangely enough, a
Jewish monk, a convert—a huge, handsome lad who enjoyed great popularity
among the other students. He walked along with Michel, his white robe
brushing the boy at every step. The sun warmed the snow on the
mountaintops, and the air was so clear and so pure that one might almost
have washed in it. Suddenly Michel began to talk. He told the monk that
he had found his own truth and that it gave him a will to die. He told
of his decision.

There are people who always talk about committing suicide but who never
do it. But on Michel’s face there was something so serious, his black
eyes raised toward the monk were filled with such agony, that the monk
realized that Michel had made up his mind.

Instead of moralizing, he proposed a sort of bargain to Michel. “You
want to die,” he said. “Agreed. But you don’t have the right to die in
cowardice, or stupidly. There is a war going on. Every day there are men
who die, though they want to live. Leave Switzerland. Go to Spain and
then to England. Enlist, and let yourself be killed while fighting.
Perhaps you will die in place of the father of a family. Perhaps your
death will save others. Perhaps your death will hasten the peace. Go get
yourself killed, Michel. But only there, through England.”

Three days later, Michel was in unoccupied France. He managed to get
across France without much difficulty, arrived without mishap in Spain,
and passed through without being noticed by the police. This voyage,
which took months for others, took him scarcely fifteen days. From
Gibraltar he embarked for Liverpool. For Michel, everything proved easy
and simple.

Now he walked in the blackout with Ursula, who was silent. Ursula’s thin
arm was enlaced in his, and once more a flood of tenderness for her
invaded him. He wanted to help her, to be with her, to take her face in
his hands. She was so little, so gentle. She would never make him
unhappy. He would take her away from that miserable house, and from that
woman who held this child in fascination and would surely bring her
suffering.

Michel halted, and with the sudden courage of the timid, he brusquely
drew Ursula to him and kissed her on the mouth.

Ursula had expected nothing of the kind. An immense disgust welled up in
her mouth upon the touch of Michel’s lips. She felt his full lips
crushing her own, and his masculine breath, and his cheeks scratching a
little. Claude, Claude! she cried inwardly. She freed herself, and with
her eyes filled with tears she began to run in the blackout, running
blindly. She had only one thought: Claude. Claude’s gentleness, her
perfume, Claude’s soft body close to her own. Ursula cried as she ran,
surrounded by the thick night.

To reach Claude’s house was her only aim. She turned into one street
after the other, got lost, crossed a square into another street. “Merry
Christmas!” people cried in the night. And then suddenly she was in
front of Claude’s house.

The house was filled with noise. It was Christmas Eve. The Christmas
dawn would soon be born. The little room was crowded, and men and women
were laced together, some drunk, some half drunk, some boisterous, and
over everything there was a gloss of alcoholic jollity. We shouted when
the bell rang, as though some great and wonderful friend would now
appear.

Claude went to the door, her glass of whisky in her hand.

Ursula mounted the stairs, running. At the top of the stairs stood
Claude. She was wearing gray trousers and a rose silk shirt. One could
see her round breasts pressing against the silk. Ursula threw herself
into her arms, sobbing.

“What is it, Ursulita, my little girl, what’s wrong?” Claude repeated.
She drew Ursula into the room.

When she was a little quieted, with her face against Claude’s breast,
feeling calm against her, against this maternal refuge, Ursula told
Claude that Michel had kissed her.

Claude laughed, pressed the child in her arms, and told her she was a
little fool. But deep in her eyes, it seemed to me, I saw a glint of
triumph.




                               CHAPTER 14


One day in January, in the midst of drill, Jacqueline fainted. Ginette,
who was near me, said, “There she goes again, our fancy lady!” Others
were saying, “Jacqueline must have something wrong with her heart. She
ought to be discharged.”

As soon as Jacqueline had regained consciousness, Corporal Ann told
Mickey and me to take her back to the barracks to rest. The doctor
happened to be in the building just then, talking to the Captain. The
Captain asked us why we had left drill, and we explained that Jacqueline
had fainted. This was a wonderful occasion for the Captain to display
her concern for “her dear girls,” and she had the doctor examine
Jacqueline right away.

We took her up to the infirmary. The doctor was in a hurry. He thought
Jacqueline must have had a simple attack of vertigo. But in examining
her he touched her back, and she let out a cry. Then he realized that
there was something wrong with her, and sent her to be X-rayed.

Two days later Jacqueline was taken to a hospital, where she was put in
a plaster cast for several months. She had a spinal fracture.

Jacqueline’s cot in the barracks was at once occupied by a new recruit,
a student, whose only passion was chemistry. Every evening, amidst the
noise of the dormitory, our newcomer, Monique, calmly devoured her
chemistry manuals, just as some of us read novels. During the first days
the noncoms regarded her with suspicion; then they classified her as
crazy but harmless, and left her in peace. After three days, we talked
no more about Jacqueline. No one mentioned her. The hospital to which
she had been taken was too far away for us to visit. The girls said,
“She’s just unlucky,” or “How did she manage to do that to herself?”
Only a few of us knew the history of that melodramatic night, before she
entered the Army, when she had fled from her too ardent hosts. It was
true that she now was gossiped about, like the others, for her weekend
ménage and her numerous suitors, but this other matter seemed to touch
upon the more remote and mysterious areas of life, and it was left
undiscussed. Indeed, Jacqueline was soon forgotten. Each of us had her
own worries, her own preoccupations, her own problems, and then came
those of one’s closest friend. There was no time to think about anyone
who was gone.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Ursula had received a letter from her little soldier, Michel, filled
with apologies, in which he begged to see her again. She had not
replied. Just now, Ursula was happy, for Claude was in a good mood these
days. Whenever Ursula was free and Claude was off duty, Ursula went to
Claude’s place.

The little room was on the fifth floor, reached by a narrow stairway.
Civilian dresses, blue silk sets of underwear and stockings were
scattered over the chairs. Claude made toast in front of a gas radiator.
On those days Claude wiped off her make-up, and then her face took on a
touchingly youthful look. As soon as she was relaxed, there was a kind
of childishness that returned to her face, which became fresh and clear.
Despite all of her habits, her lovers, her opium, her women, her whisky,
one had only to scrape off this veneer of debauch in order to uncover in
her a simple little bourgeoise, filled with a foggy remainder of
“principles.” She had been born to be a good wife and a good mother in
some provincial town, and at bottom her lack of equilibrium was due to
her having been turned away from this life by a series of circumstances.

She was religious, superstitious, and fairly well cultivated. She
considered that a girl ought to be a virgin when she married. Another of
her principles was that a decent woman would never permit a man to come
to her place to make love. She preferred to come home alone from her
lovers in the middle of the night, rather than to allow a man to sleep
in her room. All the perversions seemed acceptable to her in love, but
this one thing she could not allow. And why that one rather than
another? Perhaps only to preserve for herself a sort of token of
rectitude.

In the afternoons, when Ursula came to her room, Claude busied herself
with little womanly tasks, mending her dresses, repairing stocking runs,
washing her clothes, knitting pull-overs for herself. If she had had a
kitchen, she would have cooked excellent dinners. Claude was nearing
forty and she had been leading a dissolute life for twenty years.
Nevertheless, one felt that all that was basic in her came from her
peaceful childhood and from her provincial adolescence. She was not a
good drinker—even one drink went to her head right away—and yet she
drank a great deal. Then she would do anything, scarcely knowing what
she was doing.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In the evenings, in the dormitory, Mickey kept us posted on her affair
with Robert. She was seeing him fairly frequently. She told us that he
had several other mistresses, but she wasn’t jealous. Despite her
excitement at the beginning of the affair, her senses were slow in
awakening. She found it agreeable to make love with him, but the
experience aroused no particular feeling in her. It was a sort of game,
with a touch of gymnastics in it. And she practiced this sport mostly to
be able to say that she had a lover.

                   *       *       *       *       *

When spring came, everybody began to say that the second front would not
take place that year either, and a wave of depression swept through Down
Street. We would have to spend still another winter in London. Our exile
was thickening on us like a crust. Every morning we marched through our
drill, commanded by Petit; we marched around automatically, dreaming of
our families, or of the landscape at home.

Hyde Park was covered with blossoms. In her strong, deep voice, Petit
called out her commands: “To the left, march!” We obeyed, expert
automatons now, though sleepy after the all-night bombardments.

And the bombardments grew in intensity. One night, as I stood fire watch
on the roof with Ginette, Ann, and two other girls, we decided to
relieve the monotony by telephoning down to Claude, who was on duty at
the switchboard, and asking her to sing something for us. Pressed
together around the receiver, we heard the distant melodious voice of
Claude as she sang:

   “C’est toujours l’onde
   Qui m’a charmé,
   Vagues profondes
   Aux flots legers.
   Aussi toujours,
   La nuit, le jour,
   Je veux chanter
   L’onde, mon seul amour.”

And all of us on the roof joined in the refrain:

   “Bonsoir, Madame la Lune, bonsoir,
   C’est votre ami Gerbault qui vient vous voir.
   Bonsoir, Madame la Lune, bonsoir.”

One day, years later, I opened a newspaper and read that the poet Alain
Gerbault had just died. In the same moment, I saw all of us again on the
dark roof, and I heard myself singing, together with the distant voice
that rose to us from below:

   “Bonsoir, Madame la Lune, bonsoir,
   C’est votre ami Gerbault qui vient vous voir.”

On that small roof, weren’t we also afloat in a little boat, like the
poet? And this night-gray stormy sky that surrounded us—wasn’t it the
immense sea with which Gerbault was in love?

The noise of the planes became deafening, and the DCA sounded on all
sides. When we spotted a flare falling in our vicinity, Ginette
immediately telephoned down to Claude, giving the direction in which it
had fallen, and Claude transmitted the information to the local ARP. We
were by now so accustomed to these alerts that the bombardment at first
did not seem to us heavier than usual. But presently one of the Brittany
girls remarked that this time all the bombs seemed to be incendiaries,
and that they were all falling some distance away into a single area. It
seemed to be the part of London known as the “City.” Fires began to show
there.

On the roof, we had sacks of sand ready. Ann peered out into the night,
whistling the refrain from Alain Gerbault’s song. From below, Claude
informed us that the ARP had just come around to tell her that the
entire City was on fire, that bombs were falling there like rain. The
duty officer, Claude said, had ordered all the girls to get up and
assemble in the kitchen. Our kitchen was in the basement and served as a
shelter during the heavy raids.

Ann said she thanked heaven she was on watch that night. She had an
absolute horror of any sort of shelter. Such places filled her with a
mysterious terror and a sense of suffocation. She preferred a thousand
times to be out in the open where she could see what was happening; if
there was any danger, she wanted to see it.

The sky became dark red as though it were a lighted fireplace, with a
flame that increased in intensity every moment. The spectacle had so
extraordinary and horrible a quality of beauty that it filled all of us
with awe. We all left our sandbags and forgot every principle of defense
as we leaned against the railing of the roof, watching the scene.

London was on fire.

The sea of Gerbault was now all around us, a sea of fire. Not for a
moment was any one of us free of the agonized consciousness of all those
whose homes were collapsing and of those who were dying at this instant.
And yet we could not take our eyes from this immense pyre whose flames
seemed to be great enough to consume the world. Ann remarked that we
were like Nero watching Rome burn, and because it was so conventional,
her statement seemed somehow appropriate, with a historic grandeur that
matched the grandeur of the scene.

The holocaust continued all night long. And somewhere deep in that night
of flame, Ann began to talk to me. Though Ann was one of those people
who seem entirely explained by their very appearance, I realized that I
had known little of her until that night. It was as though the purgatory
all around us were the purgatory of her life.

I recalled that other night when Mickey had come up onto the open roof,
after her experience with Robert. But what Ann had to tell belonged to
this night when all was unreal. In her husky voice, held down to a quiet
monotone, Ann talked of her life as though she had to communicate it to
destiny itself, in the face of this holocaust. Like most of the girls in
the barracks, I had taken Ann and all Lesbians somehow as freaks, even
to be considered amusing. Listening to her in that tragic purgatory, I
wanted to weep.

Ann had spent her childhood in France, raised by her mother in poverty.
She was an illegitimate child. She had shown unusual sexual tendencies
when she was still scarcely grown. She had left her mother, and little
by little cut herself away from all her early connections as she entered
the spheres of her particular passion. She had come to England with a
woman. When she had broken with her, Ann had found herself alone and
penniless in London. It was just at the time of the defeat of France,
and Ann had volunteered for De Gaulle’s forces. As soon as she had seen
Petit, she had felt herself to be at home.

Ann could not live without a liaison. It wasn’t so much a need of love
as a need of an affair with all its accompaniment of intrigue, mystery,
and the consequent pleasure. By herself, she was not outside the normal;
she was only so when she had a partner. And yet this departure from
normalcy was necessary to her, as she had found out when scarcely more
than a child. She could not live otherwise. Without a partner she felt
as though something were amputated from her.




                               CHAPTER 15


A woman like Claude offered no interest either to Petit or to Ann. They
rather disdained her, with the disdain of the true artist for the
dilettante. They never considered her a Lesbian. They said of her,
“She’s a pervert, a curiosity seeker.” And as to Claude’s Lesbianism,
this was true.

We had known so little of these matters when we came to the barracks,
and now we were able to distinguish between the various grades. Through
Ann, I realized that Claude made love with women not because of an
absolute physical necessity, but through snobbism, and in order to
excite her masculine lovers. She also felt that she was revenging
herself on them, through feeling that she was just as strong as they in
winning women. Several times in her life she had found men unfaithful to
her. As soon as she discovered herself in such a situation, Claude
sought out her rival and appropriated the girl. It was then she who
became the lover, the taker. This was her strength, in the face of men.

Moreover, she was fond of her role as a dangerous woman. Love-making
with women, opium-smoking, group love-making—all this was part of her
role. She had learned to be a Lesbian, just as she had learned to smoke
opium. For her it was the same sort of excitement. Claude had never
suffered from this condition as Ann and Petit had suffered. She was
married, she had numerous lovers, and she could have lived a normal life
as wife and mother if she chose. As for the rest, it was nothing but a
game that satisfied her vanity and provided her with amusement. She
played being the man. The women of her circle, before the war, all
played at that game. And the men of their acquaintance took them
seriously, being unable to perceive that it was only a game. The men
believed that they were making love with real Lesbians, and felt
flattered and proud. What a man I am! they would think. I can even
arouse a Lesbian! In the great comedy of love, in which everybody lied,
this was only one more lie.

But to Ann, the love of women was no game. Ann had memories of her
solitary childhood, when she had continually been reprimanded for not
conducting herself like a good little girl who plays with her dolls. She
remembered when all of her girlhood friends started going out with boys,
and her own shame at being always alone with nothing but a secret love
for her teachers, or for her mother’s women friends.

One summer she had visited Sweden, and there she had met a woman for
whom she had felt an instant adoration. Soon enough the woman had called
Ann into her room and explained certain things that Ann had not yet
known about herself. She had listened in fear, and yet with a terrible
joy. For at last she knew that she was not alone, and that there was a
way in which she too could love. The woman had become her mistress and
her lover. It was an exhausting love, compounded of jealousies, of
quarrels, of petty intrigue, but nevertheless it brought her the
possibility of loving someone.

Ann was then seventeen. She had her hair cut, and looked absolutely like
a boy. She had never experienced any desire for a man. For her, men were
good comrades; she felt herself their equal. She was never in need of
their help or of their presence.

Since that time, Ann had come to know well the contempt, the closing
doors, and the hardening faces of respectable people. But most intensely
she had known that exhausting love which dies of its own sterility
between brief flashes of passion. It was a love that circled on itself,
like a cat chasing its own tail. But that was how she was made. And
Petit also. And the childhood of Petit had been the same. And the youth
of all these women had been the same, and no one could ever change
things for them.

At Down Street there was never any question of a true Lesbian pursuing a
normal woman. Normal women were rarely interested in the real Lesbians.
Claude could play at such games, for the subject of her attachment was
of little interest to her. It was not the woman that she desired, but
her own self-excitement; or, as in the case of Ursula, it was the child
that she desired.

Ann and Petit enjoyed passing an occasional evening with Claude, for at
least with her everything was clear. They could be their own selves,
without having to hide anything. Claude served as a bridge between the
Lesbians and the other women. Only by this bridge could the Lesbians
approach other women, and in this way come to feel themselves less
isolated in the world.

There were several other Lesbians in Down Street. In their group, every
slightest incident became exaggerated into immense proportions, and
there were the most violent discussions of the smallest bits of gossip,
the mildest adventure. The taste for intrigue was the one feminine trait
that seemed to remain with them, and it was developed to the maximum.

There were also Lesbians from outside, Englishwomen, ambulance drivers,
women from the ARP and ATS, who came to visit the bar that had been set
up in the main assembly room of our barracks.

The rest of the girls, the “real” girls, dancing to the eternal
“Violetta” in the arms of sailors or soldiers from the Free French
Forces, laughed among themselves as they watched the Lesbians.

It was at the bar that Ann met Lee. We all saw this happen. A tall
Englishwoman, thin, long-limbed, with a very pale unreal white face and
yellow catlike eyes, she had the air of a young Oxford student. Lee
belonged to an aristocratic Scottish family. She was working as an
ambulance driver. She had come to Down Street that evening wearing
navy-blue trousers; her short hair glistened; her long hands trembled a
little as she raised one glass of whisky after another. Ann, too, was
standing at the bar, and it was plain to us all that she was intensely
attracted to the Englishwoman.




                               CHAPTER 16


My long talk with Ann on the night of the fire of London had given me a
deeper insight into the behavior of my comrades—of Claude and Mickey as
well as of Ann herself.

There were many ways in which Mickey resembled Claude. She, too, liked
to play the dangerous woman. But while Claude knew exactly when she was
doing good or evil, and while she called her actions by their right
names, Mickey didn’t have the least moral sense. It had little to do
with her youthfulness; she simply knew no wrong. Occasionally she liked
to offer some of the girls what seemed to her to be serious advice and
moral counsel. She would rattle off any number of catch phrases,
platitudes, and it could be seen that they had no significance whatever
to her, and that she never related these precepts to her own behavior.
In her own life, Mickey was always carefree and gay. She was not a very
demanding girl and life was easy for her. She liked novelty, adventure,
and a little danger. If she burned herself, she cried for a few minutes
and then began again. Moreover, she was quite practical and realistic
and didn’t get mixed up in things for the sake of ideas.

She was immensely taken with Claude, for in her eyes Claude represented
the ideal woman. She wished she could be like Claude.

Before long Mickey was chattering to us about her unfaithfulness to
Robert, and for a time she made love haphazardly with one man or
another. Each time she wanted to feel more and more ravished, and so she
would come back and tell us that her new lover was “handsome as a god!”
She was learning the technique of love, like a dutiful student.
Presently she began to report to us that men were telling her she was an
excellent mistress, and in the end Mickey even believed that she was
happy.

Claude and Mickey made an excellent pair, and went out a good deal
together. Claude began to see less of Ursula. She sensed that Ursula was
not really made for Lesbianism, and even felt a little guilty about
having started the girl toward perversion. Lately, when Ursula had come
to her, this feeling of guilt toward the girl had made Claude
ill-tempered and petulant. Often she had sent the child away. Ursula
would suffer, without understanding these changes of mood in the woman
she adored. But with Mickey, things were easier for Claude; with Mickey
she had no feelings of guilt. Mickey was made of the same stuff as she
was, and so Claude got into the habit of taking Mickey along on her
dates. The blonde and blue-eyed youthfulness of Mickey contrasted
attractively with Claude’s air of the mature _femme fatale_. Mickey was
amusing, very gay, and universally pleasing.

One day, when Claude was drunk, she made a little game of kissing Mickey
on the mouth in front of her current lover, and from Claude’s mouth
Mickey passed to the mouth of the lover.

That evening Mickey described her afternoon to me. Ursula was sitting on
her cot, in her pajamas, and Mickey somehow included her, though not
speaking directly to her.

Mickey had gone with Claude to visit a colonel whom Claude had met at
the house of some friends, and who had invited her to come to his place
for a drink. Mickey, as a second-class private, had felt flattered and
impressed at going along to the house of a real ranking officer.

After a few whiskies, Claude began to undress. Her eyes grew quite
small, as always when she was drunk. The colonel was what is known as a
fine specimen of a man, according to Mickey’s description: about forty,
graying elegantly, fairly large and tall. He was a good officer and
probably a good family man. But his family was in France, and there was
no end to his exile. Besides, here was a woman undressing in front of
him without even having to be asked. He studied her, nude. Claude was
very beautiful. She was rather large, with fully rounded muscular
shoulders and magnificent breasts, round and firm. Her skin was soft as
though polished by years of caresses. She had a hard belly and a long
back. Only her legs were a little short, but altogether, for a woman of
forty, she was extraordinary. Seeing Claude nude, Mickey said she
considered that she ought to keep her company, and began to undress in
her turn. The colonel kept on only a funny little undershirt that
reached to his thighs. One could sense that actually he was a little
shocked by Mickey’s youthfulness, for, as he told them, he had a
daughter of Mickey’s age. But Claude gave him no time for recollections.

A brief spring sunlight came through the windows. Mickey remembered a
photograph of a woman, smiling in a frame. A man’s glove lay open-handed
on the floor.

In spite of everything, it was Claude whom the colonel preferred. Mickey
probably reminded him too much of his daughter.

But, “He’s handsome as a god!” Mickey declared. “He makes love
marvelously. It was very amusing.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Ursula had listened without saying a word, sitting there with her bare
feet swinging a little above the floor. She lowered her head, watching
her feet so that we might not see anything in her eyes. But one could
see into her heart. Ursula was pained, unable to accept this
abandonment.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Ginette recounted the tale of her latest love, a Canadian. Two women
whispered together, laughing. From the hall below came the sound of the
record that was most often played after “Violetta,” “_Mon coeur a besoin
d’aimer._” Ursula too went to bed. She buried her head in her pillow.
Her heart beat fast. She told herself, She just used me for amusement.
And all at once she recalled the black eyes, the melancholy eyes of
Michel, and the thought came to her that Michel would never have made
use of her. But he had left, gone out of her life. She herself had
driven him away. A longing rose in her for the calm voice of a man, and
for the security that a woman feels because of a man’s being in love
with her—a man like Michel. Until now she had been a little girl all
alone. But after her experience with Claude, Ursula had come to know the
need of another being. She no longer knew how to be alone; she was
afraid to be alone. And yet she was not resentful of Mickey. It was not
in her nature to be resentful, and she liked Mickey very much.

The idea of evil arose in Ursula’s mind. No one had ever taught her what
was right. Whatever morality she possessed was instinctive. When she
felt happy, she had told me once, it seemed to her that her actions were
good, and when she felt unhappy, she thought of evil. And it seemed to
her that the fear and the sense of solitude and the suffering within her
were the result of evil. She did not know how to cry. Her tears never
emerged, but seemed to remain at the bottom of her throat. Once again
Ursula felt herself crushed by this world of grown-up people who took
little girls and covered them with lies that were disguised as shining
words, and then discarded them. She felt no resentment against either
Claude or Mickey. She resented only the gestures, the false gestures
that were made in the name of love, and that were used by grown-up
people in life as in a play. Every gesture she had made had been pure,
but now her own actions were tarnished, because all that people did was
tarnished.




                               CHAPTER 17


The following evening we had gas mask practice. We were all assembled in
the dining room, and there was a great deal of whispering and laughing
and nudging back and forth while a handsome officer, young and blond,
solemnly explained how to make use of a gas mask, as though we had never
been told before.

Each of us had to put on her mask and keep it on for half an hour. There
were two hundred women in the large hall, and we might have been taken
for a school of monsters from beneath the sea. The rubber tubes slanted
comically in all directions. We talked to each other with our hands.
Inside the masks, we felt hot, and a fine haze covered the glass panes.

Claude was sitting next to Mickey. It was one of her days of remorse in
regard to Ursula. She had again decided not to have any more to do with
the girl, and she had not even looked at her all through the evening.

Behind the little window of her mask, Ursula saw Claude and Mickey
pressed one against the other on a single chair. Their rubber tubes kept
bumping, their masks had an air of laughter. Claude’s arm was around
Mickey to keep her from falling off the chair.

Ursula was sitting behind them, and it seemed to her that she was
entirely enclosed and locked in a huge grotesque mask that isolated her
from the rest of the world. She didn’t know what to do, but she had to
do something. She couldn’t remain abandoned like this. She was too
miserable. And then all at once, as she afterward confessed to me,
Ursula had the idea of pretending to lose consciousness. If she fainted,
the way Jacqueline used to faint, then Claude would be forced to notice
her, to run to her, to pay attention to her. At the thought of such an
action, she blushed in her mask. What if everybody understood that it
was a fraud? What if everybody made fun of her? Worst of all, what if
Claude didn’t even come to her?

It doesn’t matter, she told herself. I have to try. And overcoming all
of her inner resistance, Ursula suddenly caused herself to slip from the
bench to the floor. There was a turmoil around her. All the masks
pressed against her, pulling and pushing at her. Petit roared in her
commanding voice, “Quiet! Return to your places!” Ann had removed her
own mask and was pushing away all the women who were crushing Ursula.
Finally Petit leaned over and undid her mask.

Ursula immediately opened her eyes. Ann held Ursula’s head in her lap
and said, “It’s nothing, baby. You were too hot, that’s all. There, it’s
all over.”

And Claude, Claude was there, her anxious face bent over her. It was
marvelous. It had succeeded after all. Claude was there.

We helped Ursula upstairs to the dormitory. She lay down on her bed.
Claude followed us and sat down by Ursula, calling her Ursulita and
stroking her forehead. Ursula looked at her without saying anything. She
felt tranquil, almost happy, but with a tiny point of contempt for
Claude within her happiness. For it had been necessary to deceive her,
and Claude had let herself be taken in the trap.

But at least Claude was paying attention to her. Ursula sighed and
closed her eyes. For the first time in her life, she felt as though she
had accomplished a grown-up action.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Nevertheless, this brought only a short respite. Several times Claude
took Ursula out with her in the evening, but Ursula felt lost in the
night clubs. Unlike Mickey, she didn’t explode into laughter over the
jokes of Claude’s friends. She was not talkative. She didn’t know how to
drink. Men found her nice but dull. They rarely found her pretty. Her
pale little face with its huge brown eyes had a sort of style, it is
true. But in those years in London, what men wanted of women was to make
them forget the war, forget their problems and their nostalgia, and
Ursula, without wishing to, reminded them of all those things. They much
preferred Mickey.

And for Ursula, these excursions were a torture. One evening, in a bar
near Grosvenor Street, when a drunken soldier seized her in his arms and
tried to kiss her, she let out a cry of terror that brought laughter to
the entire club.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Summer had come, another rainy London summer. The only hope for breaking
the tension and the monotony was to go on leave. But where? Some of the
girls went as guests of English families. Ursula dreaded going to stay
with strangers. And Claude was becoming more and more nervous. Claude
had spells of violent rage for no reason at all. In the switchboard room
the atmosphere was always tense and stormy. She swore at the other
women. One day, in the middle of the dining room, Claude started an
argument with Ginette and called her a slut. Ginette slapped Claude’s
face.

Every day Ursula told me that she was going to ask for her eight-day
leave, and every day she held back, hoping there would be a change in
Claude.

One evening it seemed to Ursula that the change had arrived, and that
everything would be again as it had been. And as always, it was not
because of a sexual need in Ursula for Claude; it was simply a thirst
for tenderness, in which the sexual aspect was only incidental.

It was a Saturday evening, and Claude was off duty. A group of us had
decided to go out on a hen party, just by ourselves, to have dinner
somewhere and then go to a movie. Claude had invited Mickey and Ursula
to come and spend the night at her place afterward. Ursula asked for
weekend leave. Claude was in excellent humor, and as always when a party
was in sight, she seemed to regain her youth.

The beginning of the evening passed well. We went to dinner at a place
called Rose’s, a little restaurant in Soho kept by a sort of witch—a fat
Belgian woman who never served anyone she didn’t like. At her place, the
only dish was horse-meat steak with fried potatoes. Fifteen people at
most could get into the restaurant. Most of the clientele consisted of
sailors of Free France; sometimes there were a few Belgian officers, and
occasionally there was a party of high society people in search of
exotic atmosphere. The radio played, and people yelled and sang. On the
wall there was a photograph of King Leopold, covered with grease spots.
Rose served everybody herself, growling continuously. Beer had to be
fetched from the pub across the street; it cost two shillings six. And
the meal was finished off with a dish of apple sauce. It was always very
gay there, and the food was quite good.

Claude performed imitations and sang “_Ah, que c’est done bête un
homme!_” and Rose’s large ill-tempered face wrinkled up in a smile. When
Claude was in this mood, there was no one on earth who could resist her
charm. Ursula ate with great appetite, and laughed with all her soul.
And Claude was full of attention for her, refilling her plate with fried
potatoes, asking her opinion about everything, treating her like an
intimate friend.

Then someone suggested that it would be dull to go to the movies after
this, so we decided to make a tour of the pubs and bars.

And then Claude began to drink.

At eleven o’clock all of us went off to the barracks, except for Mickey
and Ursula, who were to sleep at Claude’s. The next day, Ursula told me
what happened.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The alert had sounded. Alerts had been rather rare the last few months.
The searchlight swept the sky over their heads, but not a sound was to
be heard. The three women walked home along the length of Hyde Park.

Claude was no longer paying attention to Ursula. She had taken Mickey’s
arm in the dark, and she talked only to Mickey. From time to time she
stopped and kissed Mickey, and Ursula stopped too, not knowing what to
do or say. It didn’t occur to her to make a scene. It seemed to her that
Claude was free to kiss whomever she liked.

They arrived at Claude’s. Mickey went to take a bath. Claude followed
her, laughing, and Ursula undressed and slipped into Claude’s large bed.
Like a suffering animal, she could think only of closing her eyes and
burying her head in a hole. She rolled herself into a ball in the empty
bed, and little by little the laughter of Claude and Mickey became more
distant, and she fell asleep.

Ursula didn’t know what awakened her. She found herself still alone in
the bed. The room was dark except for a luminous circle on the floor, a
reddish illumination shining from underneath the lighted gas heater.
Ursula raised her head and looked about. Claude and Mickey were
stretched on the carpet in front of the fire. They were nude, and the
firelight gilded their bodies. They were extremely beautiful, both of
them. Both very blonde, one with her slender young body and tiny little
pointed breasts, the other with her womanly body and her round breasts,
heavy and firm. There was a strange plastic beauty in these two sleeping
women. Their arms and legs mingled until they looked almost as though
they formed a single monster with two heads.

At that moment, Claude opened her eyes and looked at Mickey. Ursula
clearly saw Claude’s face. It was directly in the firelight. Her eyes
seemed to be two dark holes, immense as chasms, and deep, deep within,
there was a red burning light.

All at once a horrible terror hit Ursula. She said to herself, It’s a
demon! From the deepest part of her being, a primitive comprehension
flooded her. This was a demon.

A kind of shiver mounted all through Ursula, shaking her. She slid back
under the sheet, covering her head, terrified, her heart beating wildly.
She stuffed her ears and bit the sheet, and for the first time since her
very early childhood, tears began to flow.

Ursula finally fell asleep like that, hidden almost at the bottom of the
bed, her face inundated with tears, all curled within herself, and
feeling her body filled with pain, as though she had been battered by a
demonic fist.

On Monday she asked for her eight-day leave, and left to visit one of
the many English families that kindly opened their homes to the troops
of other countries.




                               CHAPTER 18


It was impossible that Ursula’s leave should go by uneventfully. What
happened to her seems to me quite beautiful, very strange, and rather
mad. It could not have happened except during the war, and to Ursula.
She told me all about it in detail, and I shall try to recall everything
and to describe those days without the slightest change. I wish I could
recover Ursula’s very words.

She was visiting in a small harbor town that was forever filled with
wind, a great wind that undid Ursula’s hair, and that sometimes sent her
flying into the arms of passers-by.

The family was charming. Ursula consumed great quantities of lamb,
boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, excellent meat pies, and rose-colored
trembling gelatin. For two days she wandered around the port and the
beach, amusing herself watching the boats, and thinking of Down Street
as seldom as possible.

The port was a wonder to behold, and for childlike Ursula it was
paradise. Bearded sailors, crates being unloaded, monkeys that the
sailors were bringing home leaping about the gangways, people speaking
in all sorts of languages, shops where one could buy the loudest Chinese
silks and little rows of ivory elephants, trunk to tail, one behind the
other on an ivory bridge. Ursula would have loved to buy herself a red
and black kimono or an elephant or a monkey. But as she didn’t have
enough money, she contented herself with looking at these treasures.

In the evenings, the entire family took French lessons from her. The
father repeated, “_La porte est ouverte. La demoiselle est jolie._” The
mother, with great difficulty, managed to read a Free French newspaper,
and the children had Ursula do their French exercises for them.

At night she slept with the three girls, and the mother came to hear
them say their prayers and to kiss them all good night.

All the aunts, uncles, and cousins came to see the French girl, and to
ask her if she liked England and if it were true that the French ate
frogs.

Ursula acquired all the latest news about Princess Elizabeth, which the
family read in the _Tatler_, and together with the three young daughters
she knitted small squares of multicolored wool, to be assembled into
blankets for soldiers.

The three girls had three boy friends, all freckled and timid, who
appeared on Saturday afternoon to take them to the movies with their
mother’s permission. Once one of the boys had even kissed the eldest
daughter, who was fifteen, very swiftly on the edge of her lips as a
sign of engagement, and had bought her a brooch in one of the harbor
shops.

On the third day, Ursula, in uniform, was walking along the jetty when a
voice asked her in French:

“Aren’t you French, mademoiselle?”

She turned, and as there was a sudden heavy gust of wind against her,
she almost fell into the arms of a French naval officer. He began to
laugh. He seemed to be about thirty-five. He had regular white teeth,
thick lips, and brown eyes. Ursula found him big and handsome and nice.

They walked along the port talking. He was attached to a French vessel,
a warship that had been there three months for repairs. He had not seen
a Frenchwoman for months and months. He had just returned from the
Orient and had been in China, in Haiti, and in America.

They talked a great deal, each delighted to find a compatriot. He took
her along the pier to show her his ship, and he told her the names of
all the ships, and he took her to tea in a curious little establishment
that had all sorts of weird souvenirs hanging from the ceiling.

During the entire year that she had passed in worshiping Claude, Ursula
had never gone out with a man, except Michel. She avoided men,
considering herself definitely outside the normal, like Petit and Ann.
But now with Philippe, everything was so simple, so amusing. He didn’t
frighten her, as all the other men did. There was a comradeship about
him, almost as though he were a big brother, and he was so huge next to
tiny Ursula that she felt sure that he would treat her as a child, and
this was reassuring to her.

Seated there in the strange café, Philippe told her about his voyages,
and to Ursula they all sounded marvelous and strange. He declared that
the life of a sailor was the most beautiful of all and that his only
bride would always be the sea. This expression pleased Ursula greatly.

She listened to his tales of China, where he had smoked opium and made
love to Chinese women, and of America, where he had actually eaten meals
in pharmacies, and of Haiti, where one covers oneself with flowers.

Suddenly he asked her to excuse him for a moment, went out, and
presently returned to tell her that he had requested the commander of
his ship to invite the little French soldier girl to lunch the next
day—to lunch aboard ship, at the officers’ mess. There would be a
special feast in her honor.

Ursula blushed with joy. She accepted, but confessed that she was a
little worried because of the English family. What would they say? Would
they be shocked at her going out with a stranger? Would they understand
that in this exile every Frenchman was a brother? Philippe suggested
telling them that he was her cousin, or indeed her brother. Ursula
thought “brother” would make a more correct impression, and so they made
an appointment for lunch the next day.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The good folk were delighted when she told of her amazing encounter.
They found the coincidence quite within the normal range of fortunes of
war—especially for the French, an exciting sort of people. What luck to
have met her brother in this out-of-the-way port! Sometimes there were
good things, even in war.




                               CHAPTER 19


It was a happy girl who arrived the following day at the gangway to
Philippe’s ship. Ursula had carefully polished the buttons of her
uniform, put on her best khaki silk tie and the silk stockings forbidden
in the regulations, and brushed her chestnut-colored hair, which hung
thick and straight at both sides of her face, like the hair of little
girls on their way to school.

It was twelve-thirty and the sun burned the length of the quay. The
warship seemed so spotlessly clean, and its flag was so blue, so white,
so red! At the gangway the sentry came to attention for her, and for a
second Ursula felt like an admiral. Philippe was already advancing
toward her, followed by a group of midshipmen, all young, all smiling,
all overjoyed at seeing a French girl.

Ursula, with her hair mussed by the wind, was surrounded by all the blue
uniforms and taken to the commander’s cabin. The commander offered her
sherry and showed her his Chinese engravings. Then they went in to
dinner. There was an immense table, and around it sat twelve officers.
Ursula was the only woman. She laughed ceaselessly and Philippe poured
out white wine for her, and then red wine, and this made her laugh and
chatter even more. A dark sailor, a native from the colonies, served
chicken with rice while smiling at the nice young lady.

She had never drunk so much or eaten so much. The pastries were perfect,
and the black coffee made her heart beat faster. After that there was
brandy in lovely stemless glasses, altogether round like little bowls.
Ursula was seated on the couch, the radio played, the uniforms
chattered, and Philippe sat down next to her and began to ask her
questions. Ursula talked about Down Street. It had been the limit of her
horizon for many months; but she said nothing of Claude.

Philippe asked her if she had a boy friend. She said no, blushing, and
she saw that Philippe didn’t believe her. Suddenly it was as though a
light had dawned on her. She comprehended, though vaguely, that all
these nice officers, seeing her in uniform, told themselves that she was
certainly used to drinking, used to freedom, to men, and to life. To
them, she was a little girl in appearance only, for everybody knew
perfectly well that women in the Army were no babies. The whole idea
barely crossed her mind; her head whirled, the radio played, and the
midshipmen began to sing, and Ursula took up the refrain with them, “_En
allant glaner des joncs._”

Most of the afternoon went by like this, in laughter and song. The
commander had gone back to his cabin. The slant-eyed sailor had brought
in tea and cookies, and some of the officers left to go ashore. Philippe
explained to her that most of them came to sleep in their cabins only on
their day of guard duty. During the three months of waiting for their
motor to be repaired, they had rented apartments in the city, and they
spent their free hours and their nights in town.

Then Philippe suggested that he take her around the ship. They left the
dining room. Ursula climbed up ladders, went down ladders, crossed over
narrow passageways, and stepped into the broiling galley, where sailors
were at work half naked. Afterward she leaned against the railing on the
bridge while Philippe showed her all the directions on the compass. That
way was America, and that way was Iceland, and down there was Brazil.

They sat down on a coil of rope, and Philippe showed her how to make
sailor’s knots and Ursula tried to make them the way he did. She wished
that she were a man so that she could be a sailor.

As they rose, Ursula looked at her hands. After climbing all the
ladders, leaning against smokestacks, and hanging onto ropes and rails,
her hands were completely black. “I must wash my hands,” she said to
Philippe.

Philippe led her down more ladders and through long corridors, and
finally stopped before a closed door. He opened it and gestured her
inside. “This is my cabin,” he said.




                               CHAPTER 20


It was a very pretty little chamber, and at first Ursula had no thought
but to admire it. Philippe showed her his work table, his books, his
pictures on the walls, some Japanese engravings, little reproductions of
Egyptian statues, a reproduction of a Van Gogh painting, photographs of
the Orient with palm trees and camels, and a handsome map of the world
over his bunk.

Then he gave her soap and a towel and she began to wash her hands.
Philippe sat on a chair watching her. A ray of sunlight entered through
the porthole and blue motes of dust danced in the sunbeams. When she had
finished, Ursula hung up the towel and turned around.

Philippe rose and came toward her and very casually said, “But you still
have some dirt on your face.”

She raised her chin innocently. “Where?”

Philippe came still closer. “There,” he said, and before Ursula could
realize what he was doing, he was holding her in his arms and kissing
her on the mouth.

It was very strange for her, and at first repulsive, as with Michel. She
detested the taste of tobacco in the mouth that took possession of hers,
and the thickness of the lips, and the slightly brutal force of this
kiss, which she neither expected nor desired. But at the same time, she
wanted to know. She wanted to know how it was, this kiss of a man, and
in the depths of her heart she wanted to know if she couldn’t respond to
it.

She didn’t resist. Philippe lifted her in his arms and stretched her on
the bunk. Then, sitting next to her, he continued to kiss her. Little by
little Ursula sensed that her mouth was becoming habituated to the
strong lips, to the taste of tobacco, and to the stubborn tongue, which
was as knowing as Claude’s, but thicker and more insistent in its ideas.
She went so far as to put forward the point of her small tongue, but the
first contact shocked it so that it withdrew immediately. Philippe
laughed, raised his face from hers, studied her unlaughing brown eyes.

Then he began to kiss her again with swift little kisses; and then again
for a long time with long kisses. And Ursula began to like his kissing
very much.

Then he slipped his hand toward her body, and immediately Ursula’s
entire body contracted. It was like an electric shock. She seized
Philippe’s hand and pushed it away, and raised herself ready to leap
from the bunk. But Philippe only laughed, not in the least embarrassed,
and promised not to touch her again. Then Ursula relaxed and he began
once more to kiss her.

A bell rang. Philippe got up. Ursula raised herself from the bunk. He
gave her his comb and she straightened her hair. Then they went out
together, returning to the open deck. It was nearly six o’clock, and
Ursula said she had to go.

They went down the gangplank and along the quay. Philippe held her arm
as though from now on she was in his possession. This pleased and
displeased Ursula at the same time.

He asked to see her the next day for dinner. He was very formal and said
there would be another officer with an Englishwoman. This reassured
Ursula, and she accepted.

They made no further allusion to his kisses. Philippe began to talk of
the sea again, and as they walked along the harbor road they kept
stopping like typical French citizens to study the people and the shop
windows, to criticize the women’s clothing and their hats. Englishwomen,
they remarked, had a particular gift for wearing any color from mauve to
rose to green to orange without the least embarrassment. This made
Ursula laugh, but Philippe was indignant. He didn’t like the English; he
didn’t like Englishwomen, or English cooking, or the English climate.

“The women don’t know how to make love,” he declared. “Their cooking is
horrible, and it rains all the time.” As though to contradict him, the
sun continued to shine, but a violent wind threw them against each
other, and for an instant he held Ursula in his arms.

When Philippe left her at the house where she was staying, Ursula wanted
to reflect for a while, to put her ideas in order, but the three sisters
surrounded her, the dog began to jump all over her, the mother appeared
to ask all about her brother, and she had to tell about the ship,
describe the luncheon, and then do the French lessons of the girls.

It was only in the evening after prayers, when the sisters had grown
tired of talking about their boy friends and had fallen asleep, that
Ursula was able to return to her thoughts of Philippe. And so, she
reflected, she had kissed a man and found it agreeable. Philippe was
nice and gay, and not complicated or hysterical like Claude. What a good
smile he had, and what nice warm eyes! He hadn’t tried to force her,
when he saw she didn’t like his touching her. Yes, Ursula decided that
she could see him again with pleasure and without any risk, and that it
would do her good, it would help her forget Claude.




                               CHAPTER 21


She spent the whole day on the beach, gathering mussels among the rocks,
for she had taken it into her head to cook them and give the British
family a taste of this delicacy. The dog, Vicky, accompanied her, and
halted before each mussel-covered rock with the patient air of a good
English dog.

The sun was quite warm. Ursula took off her shorts and sunbathed in her
swimming suit, and then she ran into the water, splashing, swimming,
floating, as happy as the great dog whose head stuck out of the water
beside hers.

When Ursula came out of the water she found a deserted crevice among the
rocks, and there she rolled in the sand with Vicky. He leaped about and
rubbed himself joyfully against the rocks, and it seemed to Ursula that
life was beautiful.

The mussels were received with a good deal of suspicion. Each member of
the family ate one out of politeness toward the little French girl,
saying, “It’s odd, isn’t it?” Ursula emptied the plate all by herself,
because she was very hungry, and for the honor of France.

In the afternoon she returned to the beach. The sea was mounting, with a
constant roar of breaking waves. A plane passed far overhead and later
there was the distant sound of antiaircraft fire. Ursula had almost
forgotten that there was a war. A goat was browsing on a hillock, and
from time to time the goat raised its head with a graceful movement.
Ursula thought of Philippe, and a strange shiver passed down her back.
Her heart began to beat faster, she felt cold, and her throat
contracted.

What’s the matter with me? she wondered.

From that moment until evening, the strange shivering continued
ceaselessly up and down her back, and her heart kept beating, beating.
She wished that it were already seven o’clock, and at the same time she
wanted to run away, no matter where. Or perhaps to the soft arms of
Claude, resting her head on Claude’s breast.

She dressed nervously, telling herself she was an idiot. She couldn’t
manage to make a respectable knot in her tie, and her hair was full of
sand. Her hostess gave her a key in case she should return late. She
left at last, quite a bit early, and arrived ahead of time at the church
in the central square where they had agreed to meet. The wind was so
strong that she was barely able to keep erect. She went into the church
to wait.

Ursula had rarely had occasion to enter a church. She sat down in a
corner and looked about. It must have been a Catholic or an Anglican
church, for there were statues and flowers. There was the odor of
incense and of candles. It was very calm. It must be so strange, she
thought, to belong to a church and to feel at home in this huge house.
And this little girl without religion, without a creed, without a past,
left to herself in a world of which she was ignorant, felt herself in
some way linked to a deity who received the prayers of mankind. Not a
special god called by a certain name, and endowed by mankind with a list
of attributes, but simply that unknown and mysterious force to which
people everywhere build temples and toward whom prayers are raised. “God
of Mankind,” she said, in a very low voice, “you see, I am here. My name
is Ursula. I don’t know anything about anything. Please make it so that
I can understand—so that someone explains to me why everything is, and
what I must do. And thank you, God of Mankind, for the sea, the sun, and
the sand.”

She felt quite content and much reassured when she went out into the
daylight. Just outside the church, Philippe waited, turning over his
uniform cap, which was covered with gold braid.

The other officer was a friend of Philippe’s. He was the ship’s doctor,
and quite naturally Philippe called him Doc. The young woman with him
was a very pretty English girl, highly self-assured, very feminine,
smartly dressed, and well made up. She examined Ursula with an air of
superiority. Philippe, like Doc, seemed to go out of his way to please
this young woman, and Ursula found herself with nothing to say. She felt
awkward, embarrassed by her heavy khaki clothes and her hair falling
into her eyes, and conscious of her hands with the nails cut short. She
wished that she also were a grown woman, knowing how to laugh with
self-assurance and how to look men in the eye without blinking, and
wearing a low-cut black dress, revealing her provoking breasts. She
wished she could dance perfectly, wearing high heels and transparent
stockings. But instead of being like that, there she was saying nothing,
feeling queasy ever since yesterday’s meal on the boat, and not able to
eat anything.

Philippe exclaimed at her leaving her plate untouched. He was very fond
of eating, and it seemed to him a sacrilege to refuse smoked salmon and
to leave a roast untasted. To please him, Ursula managed to drink the
wine that was served to her.

The young Englishwoman had the art of turning the conversation easily
around all sorts of obvious subjects, which one couldn’t remember a
moment afterward. The dinner was rather long. Afterward, Philippe
suggested that they finish the evening at his place in town. And since
there were four of them, Ursula accepted, reassured by the presence of
the other woman.

They took a taxi to Philippe’s apartment. It was a modern three-room
flat filled with Chinese and Indian knickknacks that Philippe had
brought back from his voyages. They all made themselves comfortable in
the living room. Philippe brought out whisky glasses. The conversation
languished. Doc and the young woman exchanged glances and whispered to
each other. Suddenly the young woman rose and left the room. Doc
followed her, and Ursula found herself alone with Philippe.




                               CHAPTER 22


She was seated on the couch. Philippe leaned over her and, as on the day
before, began to kiss her. Ursula was astonished to discover that his
mouth was already familiar to her. How warm and good it was, penetrating
her own!

With his free hand, Philippe put out the bright lamp and snapped on
another, which suffused the room with a dim rosy light, in which
everything was intimate and soft. Ursula felt tranquil, happy. After
all, his nearness was natural, not frightening at all, quite normal and
reassuring.

Perhaps half an hour passed. Philippe’s hand began to explore Ursula. It
touched her very lightly, but at the same time much more determinedly
than yesterday; a hand that had a will of its own. And as on the day
before, a mad panic seized the girl. In the same instant she became
rigid and filled with tremors. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want it
at all.

Philippe sighed, took his hand away, and resumed his kissing. But very
quickly he returned to the charge. For quite a while, in silence, the
struggle continued. Ursula would become rigid, and then would relax
slightly, murmuring only, “No, no.” Finally Philippe sat back on the
couch next to her. He looked at her queerly, with an air that was
neither angry nor astonished. With a quick motion of his hand he brushed
back the mass of brown hair that fell in disorder over his forehead. He
said, “Why don’t you want me to make love to you?”

In very low broken words, Ursula said that she was afraid, that as yet
no man had ever touched her, that she didn’t want it. She begged him not
to be angry. She liked his kisses well enough, but nothing else. “I beg
you, nothing else.”

She didn’t tell him that in the depths of her being there was also an
infantile panic at being found ignorant, at failing like a schoolboy who
hasn’t prepared his lesson; a fear that he would make fun of her as of
the Englishwomen who didn’t know how to make love. She didn’t tell him
that she was still in terror of the unknown thing before her, of that
which came after the kisses, and which could not be in any way like what
she had learned from Claude—certainly altogether different.

Philippe looked at her with astonishment. In his eyes, Ursula could see
that he didn’t believe she was a virgin—a virgin after a year in the
Army! He certainly believed that she was just a little teaser playing
the ingenue. After all, she knew how to kiss well enough; it just wasn’t
possible. He didn’t believe it. And this thought pained her very much.
She really liked him. She wished she could prove to him that she was
telling the truth, and she wished that she could make him happy, but she
was afraid, and her fear was stronger than any other feeling.

At first, Philippe said nothing. He took her in his arms again and
resumed his kissing, as though his kisses could convince her better than
words. But when it became clear that nothing was going to change her, he
studied her attentively with a reflective air, as though asking himself
whether she was after all telling the truth, and whether she was indeed
a virgin, a naïve little girl.

Then he said gently, “Why are you afraid, Ursula? I won’t hurt you. Why
are you afraid to make the jump? Afterward you will be a woman. You have
to become a woman someday, and it will make you very happy, you know.”

He said the things that all men say on this occasion, but he said them
sincerely, gently, and Ursula was hearing these words for the first
time.

She wanted to cry and to ask his forgiveness. He was so gentle and nice,
and she was probably behaving very badly, letting him kiss her and then
refusing to go further, like those frightful teasers that Claude was
always talking about in disgust.

She wanted to; she wanted to; but she simply could not.

Philippe rose, poured himself a glass of whisky, and returned to sit
next to her. He no longer attempted to kiss her, but he began to speak
of his childhood, of his home and his parents, of their small estate in
the Pyrenees, of his brother and sisters, and of a way that his mother
had when he was bad of saying that it wasn’t he who had misbehaved, but
“Popaul.” He turned toward Ursula smiling, and said that it probably
wasn’t Philippe, but still Popaul who wanted to go to bed with her.
Philippe didn’t want to annoy her, or hurt her in any way. He was so
good, so simple this way, and Ursula didn’t know how to explain the
gratitude and the tenderness that she felt toward him.

They talked quietly the rest of the evening. He spoke again of his
voyages. It was always to this that he returned most easily. And Ursula
described the barracks, and our warrant officers, and Mickey,
Jacqueline, and me, but without ever speaking of Claude. She sensed that
Philippe would never have understood, that he would have been terribly
shocked.

It was past midnight. There was a discreet knock on the door. Doc
entered with his young woman, who was as elegant and as well made up as
before. The young woman gave Ursula a little glance of complicity filled
with secret understanding. Doc assumed the well-bred air of a gentleman
who deliberately ignores the obvious.

They played the phonograph and danced a little, and then Doc said that
he and the young woman were going to leave. Philippe helped Ursula into
her coat, and the four of them left together.

The streets were black. There was no more wind, and the sky was filled
with stars. Doc and the English girl hailed a taxi and drove off.
Philippe and Ursula walked on without speaking.

At her door Philippe asked her to meet him the following day for dinner.
He apologized again and said that everything was Popaul’s fault, and
then he took her in his arms and kissed her very long and gently.




                               CHAPTER 23


For the first time in her life, Ursula failed to close her eyes all
night long.

She listened to the regular breathing of the three sisters and heard
them sigh in their sleep. She saw the stars fade little by little and
the dawn inundate the sky.

Well, then, she wasn’t normal. For how could Ursula know, all by
herself, that she was behaving exactly as any pure young girl behaves
the first time a man tries to make love to her? She told herself that
she would never get out of her difficulty, that she would never have a
home or children, that she would remain doomed to solitude all her life,
like Ann, like Petit. She couldn’t rid herself of Philippe’s words: “Why
are you afraid to make the jump?”

But she _wanted_ to make the jump, she wanted to love a man, to know
what a man’s love was like, to be linked with that endless chain of
human beings who joined with each other in the same way, and told each
other the same words, always entirely new since the first man and the
first woman.

Why was it, while she found Philippe so good, so handsome, and so nice,
that his hand frightened her so, that she contracted so at his touch?
Could it be because of an idea she had from Mickey’s and Claude’s
descriptions, that there would be pain in losing her virginity? Perhaps
it was only that—a simple fear of pain.

And then, if she should prove to Philippe that what she had said was
true? For she sensed that at bottom Philippe continued to disbelieve
her. He would then really know that she was a virgin. He would be
ashamed of having doubted her word.

To vanquish her deep fear, to prove to herself that she was normal—that
was it. It was the only way to save herself. Otherwise it would be too
late. This was her last chance. If she didn’t take it now, she would
never be able to accept intimacy with a man.

Ursula struggled all by herself, groping for an answer, searching in her
immature and uninstructed mind, encumbered as it was with all the false
ideas that she had gleaned haphazardly during all her life, searching
with her primitive consciousness, and calling upon the most profound
instinct of creation.

That night, without knowing it, Ursula told herself the things that
Catholics tell their priests during confession, and that Americans tell
their psychoanalysts. But she had no one to counsel her and to clarify
her idea of herself.

The day pierced through the net curtains. The three girls stretched like
cats.

Ursula had made up her mind.

She didn’t eat anything all day long. She couldn’t. Her throat was so
contracted that it was impossible for her to swallow.

She went to the beach, crouched against a rock, and tried to think of
nothing at all. The dog laid his head on her bronzed knees, waiting for
her to play with him.

A little green hill rose just behind her. Ursula climbed it with the
dog. Once on top, she beheld the immense sea, open in all the directions
that Philippe had shown her. Newfoundland, New York, Rio de Janeiro.

On the hill there were queer little stakes projecting from the ground
all about. Ursula tried to pull one out, but it wouldn’t give way. She
finally abandoned it and went down the other side of the hill, with
loose stones rolling under her feet. Some fishermen in a little boat
made signals to her, shouting. Ursula couldn’t understand their cries,
but she waved her hand in greeting to them.

It was only when she reached the bottom that she saw a large sign
barring the way up the hill: “Do Not Climb. Mortal Danger. Mined Hill.”

It was at least something to tell the family. They all gasped. They
didn’t cry out, for they were after all British, but the mother and
father grew pale, and the three little girls sighed, “Oh, dear.” But
Ursula, after her original fright, had from the incident a strange sense
of being protected, a mystical sense of sureness, as though this were a
sign that her prayer had been heard.

That evening before dinner, Ursula said good-by to the family. She had
already informed them earlier in the day that her leave was ending and
that she had to return to London. Her brother would take her to the
station. They didn’t have to worry about her.

She packed her little valise, shook hands all around, promised to write,
and thanked them. They told her they would come to see her in France
after the war; they would bring Vicky.

Ursula left, clutching her valise. She checked it at the station and
then went back into town. Philippe was already waiting in front of the
church. He was the same: polite, well mannered, nice, although perhaps a
little constrained.

They went to dinner in a different restaurant, just the two of them, and
Philippe danced with her during dinner, and taught her some new steps.

Ursula forced herself to eat in order not to offend him, but each
mouthful was a torture. The food simply stuck in her throat. Happily,
there was a dessert of strawberries and cream, and that went better.
Philippe seemed not to know what to do with her. He prolonged their stay
at the table after dinner, ordering liqueurs, and finally he asked her
if she would like to go to the movies.

Taking her courage in both hands, Ursula said clearly, “No, I’d rather
go to your place.”

Philippe seemed astonished. He looked at her hesitatingly, and then he
took her hand without saying anything.

They rose and went out.




                               CHAPTER 24


They entered the living room as they had the night before, but this
time, as soon as the door was closed, Ursula asked Philippe to wait a
moment, and went into the bathroom. She had no notion of preparatory
caresses, of love play, of delays. Since she had decided to make love
tonight, then it might as well be done, and quickly.

Alone, she undressed hastily, took off her medallion, folded her
clothes, and placed the medallion on top. Although she had been raised
without religion, it seemed to her that she could not wear the
medallion—which one of her governesses had given her long ago—under
these circumstances. Then, altogether nude, she returned to the living
room.

Philippe had certainly not expected this. He was still standing there,
in uniform, smoking. He saw the door open, and the girl enter and remain
standing silently before him with her head lowered and her straight hair
veiling her cheeks. He saw her childish little body, her tiny breasts,
her thin arms, her round knees, and the demarcations of her bathing
suit, leaving her breasts and her hips all white in the midst of her
bronzed body.

He approached, taking her face in his hands, and he raised her head and
said, “Don’t be ashamed, Ursula. Look at me. You are beautiful.”

The radio was playing. It must have been the BBC’s French program, for a
solemn voice was discussing Alphonse Daudet’s _Moulin_.

Philippe undressed and put on a woolen robe with green squares. He had
not yet recovered from his astonishment, and seemed to be asking himself
if he were dreaming. He picked Ursula up in his arms and carried her
into his bedroom, placing her on the bed. Then in the dimness Ursula
felt the naked body of a man touching her body. And now the terrible
fear returned. The child began to tremble like a leaf; she trembled in
all her limbs. Her teeth chattered, and she trembled and shivered
without being able to control herself. Philippe kissed her and pressed
her in his arms, but he felt the fear and resistance in her.

A sob of utter sorrow broke from the girl. Philippe began to rock her as
one rocks tiny, frightened children. “My dear little girl, don’t cry.
Don’t be afraid of anything. I won’t touch you any more. You see that I
can’t touch you when you tremble like that. It stops everything in me.
Look, little one, my baby, don’t be afraid of anything. You are too
small, you’re still just a little girl. I don’t want to hurt you. Now
you’re going to sleep with me, just nicely, without anything. Do you
want to?”

Little by little Ursula calmed herself. She pressed herself against him.
Philippe hugged her in his arms and talked to her soothingly, like a big
brother, and she fell asleep.

In the middle of the night she awoke. Philippe was not asleep. He got
up, turned on the bed lamp, and put on his dressing gown. He went to the
kitchen and brought back a glass of milk for Ursula, and for himself a
large glass of whisky.

Philippe watched her drink, sitting altogether naked in his bed, holding
the glass in her two hands with her hair falling over her eyes. He got
back into bed; they talked a little and fell asleep.

The morning found them pressed innocently against one another. Philippe
awoke, gay and playful. He licked Ursula’s brown shoulder and told her
that she was all salty. They took their bath together, and Philippe
prepared their breakfast of boiled eggs, buttered toast, and coffee.
Then he dressed and went off, leaving her in the apartment with some
books and magazines.

In the evening they went out again with Doc and his mistress, who
obviously accepted them as lovers. Afterward, Philippe took Ursula to
the theatre. They went to the station for her valise and brought it back
to Philippe’s apartment, for Ursula still had two days of leave.

During those two days she lived at Philippe’s, treated like a little
sister; he never attempted again to make love to her.

Philippe would take her on his knees and say to her, “You remind me of
the sea, the sun, and the sand. You do me good. You make me a better
person. You’ve got rid of the Popaul in me. Someday you will love a man,
and he’ll marry you, and when you have a flock of children you’ll think
about old Philippe. As for me, you see I could never marry you because
my only bride will always be the sea. And so it’s better the way we
are.”

He had the most tender affection for her, and above anything, did not
want to hurt her in any way. Now that he knew she was still a little
girl, he told her that it seemed to him that it would have been a
sacrilege to change her, and then to leave her, as he knew he would have
to do soon enough.

During those two days, Ursula was like a normal woman who busies herself
with a man and lives with him. She found this to her liking and amused
herself with shopping and preparing his meals.

Despite the setback of this last experience, she no longer had any fears
about herself. It was a strange thing, but in spite of everything, she
now felt herself to be normal. And she was at peace. She couldn’t
understand why, but it was so. Perhaps it was because Philippe treated
her as he did, and because he didn’t seem to find anything strange in
her, or to believe that she was anything but normal.

On the last day, Philippe took her to the station. He installed her in
her compartment and bought her some sandwiches for the journey. Ursula
leaned out of the window for his last kiss. Both knew that they would
never see each other again and that they had lived through a strange
episode together.

The train began to move. She saw Philippe on the platform in his blue
uniform, standing straight, watching the train disappear.




                               CHAPTER 25


In spite of everything, Down Street, when Ursula entered again after a
week of absence, had something of an aspect of home for her. She glanced
into the assembly room, cold and somber as ever, and then went up to the
dormitory with its uncovered beds and the photograph of General de
Gaulle on the wall. Ursula listened, and as she had expected, the
phonograph was playing “Violetta.” Machou’s raucous voice was heard from
the kitchen, and the sound of a typewriter came from the Captain’s
office.

It was the barracks; it was the unhappy barracks, in this country of
exile, with everyone longing for the end of this period of military life
that had brought nothing but a series of disillusions.

And still in that immense and strange city of London, it was the only
refuge any of us had. It was at least a lively place, filled every night
with French voices and familiar faces, with smoke and babble. We had all
in a measure become part of this house, which seemed to have taken
flesh, not only through our physical presence, but through the private
life of each one of us, through each one’s history, through each one’s
pain and joy.

And yet, what had we succeeded in accomplishing? Nothing, nothing at
all. We had become classified numerals. Not one of us really believed
she had done any real soldiering. Even the lucky few who, like myself,
had jobs in which they were interested could not help but feel that they
were doing little to free their country. It was said in some quarters
that De Gaulle was against a women’s section in the Army. Sometimes we
reasoned that our presence in the service freed the male recruits for
more useful activities. Very well, then, as Ursula used to say with her
touching, pessimistic wisdom, that meant that three or four hundred
soldiers were thus free to go and get themselves killed. The whole
thought was maddening.

We had imagined that the uniform would somehow put us right into the
middle of the war, but it was not at all like that. The war was taking
place far from us; we were not participating in it. Bombs were bursting
over our heads, but no more over ours than the civilians’, and we worked
in offices with civilian women who were much better paid and who were
free to do what they wished when the office day was over.

And what was the use of all this? What was the use of going on blindly
for months, living in the midst of all these women, not one of whom felt
any real reason or purpose in what she was doing?

Still Down Street was our barracks, almost a corner of France.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was five o’clock in the afternoon when Ursula came home; most of us
were not yet free from our jobs. Ursula noticed that there was a
suitcase on what had once been Jacqueline’s bed, and that the chemistry
student’s books were no longer behind that bed, but in another corner of
the room. So there had been a change during her absence. Ursula began to
arrange her things. The door opened and someone cried out, “Ursula
baby!”

She turned. It was Jacqueline.

She looked as fresh and pretty as ever. She threw herself on Ursula’s
neck, and they sat down on the bed, both talking at once, delighted to
see each other again.

Jacqueline was cured. She had found the hospital extremely tiresome, but
she had been a great success there, too. Her doctor and several of the
patients had, naturally, fallen in love with her. Fortunately, De Prade,
now a captain, with a car at his command, had been able to come and see
her often. He had been simply marvelous to her, bringing her fruit,
flowers, and other gifts.

Jacqueline chattered on, bringing Ursula up to date in the affairs with
which we were all so familiar. De Prade was still her great love, but
she still enjoyed getting every man she met to pay court to her. And
there still wasn’t a man who failed to succumb as soon as he laid eyes
on Jacqueline’s rosy face with her pretty mouth, her regular teeth, and
her shining hazel eyes. For she, too, couldn’t live without at least an
illusion of love, and she used all of her power to create this illusion,
employing her expert eyes, her sensual mouth, and her supple young body.

But now Jacqueline turned all her attention on Ursula, resuming her old
protective air. “You don’t look well, my dear child, you’ve become
thinner. I’m sure you don’t eat at all. It’s a good thing I’ve come
back. I’m going to take care of you.”

Ursula, of course, detested having anyone officiously take care of her;
this had always irritated her in Jacqueline, but she said nothing, for
life in the barracks had already made her more indulgent toward the
faults of others. After all, it was part of Jacqueline’s character.

Now the girls began to come home, one after the other.

I scarcely had a moment to talk with Ursula before Mickey arrived,
shouting, “Ursula! How glad I am to see you!” She danced around Ursula,
with her excited, disjointed gestures, and then sat down on the edge of
the bed, swinging a long khaki-clad leg. Ursula was delighted to see
her, to hear Mickey talk with her slight English accent, and to hear her
laugh. Mickey had a gift for making a room seem warm.

Ginette asked Ursula if she had had a good time, and if she had gone out
with any boys. Ginette had already set herself to polishing the buttons
of her uniform. When they were bright enough to suit her, she began to
clean her shoes for tomorrow; she was meticulously neat. And Ursula was
duly surprised at Ginette’s new hair-do; but actually the new
arrangement only made Ginette’s face, her eyes, her nose, and her mouth
seem rounder and flatter than ever.

The dinner bell sounded. We took our places in the queue, plates in one
hand, mugs and utensils in the other. Machou was shouting as usual,
“Move along, move along! That’s enough, there’s someone else here
besides you! If you don’t like it, go to the Ritz!”

So Ursula was resuming her life, her real life, her life in war.

After dinner, she sat in the assembly room with us. Mickey and
Jacqueline were there. Jacqueline decided that we ought to have a drink
in honor of Ursula’s return, and of her own, and she went to order
Dubonnets at the bar. Her walk was as distinguished, as worldly as ever.

Just then Claude entered. According to the new schedule, she was on
twenty-four-hour duty on alternate days, from eight in the evening to
eight the following evening; she had just finished her stint. Ursula had
not seen her at dinner. Now Ursula studied Claude as she stood at the
door, talking to Ann. Claude carried herself straight, as always, with
her blonde hair pushed back, and she gestured gracefully with her hands
as she talked. She noticed Ursula and made her a distant sign, smiling.
Ursula rose and went toward her, and suddenly, as she was approaching
Claude, she told me later, it was as though someone had at that instant
cut a cord between them. Suddenly Ursula had a physical sensation as of
a weight dropping away from her, setting her free. It was over in a
second; she was advancing toward Claude, and in the next instant she
knew that it was finished, that she was not in love with her any more.

And as Claude went on talking, Ursula saw her for the first time
objectively.

Claude’s magic power no longer worked on her. Ursula saw nothing more
than a woman of forty, a handsome woman, very well made up, but with
little lines at the sides of her mouth and a scattering of white hair.
Her voice was feverish. What Claude was saying no longer interested her.
When Claude began to recount her last dispute with one of the girls,
Ursula found the story tiresome and felt that Claude made trouble over
nothing.

Claude left for the switchboard room, and Ursula remained standing where
she was. She had the impression of having suddenly grown. It was a
strange impression, leaving her with a sort of pride in no longer being
a little girl.

She looked around. Now she was free.




                               CHAPTER 26


Claude soon noticed that Ursula was no longer in love with her. She was
delighted. An adventure with a woman was amusing to her so long as it
wasn’t serious, so long as it was only a game, considered as an unusual
excitement by both partners; but the mute and passionate love of this
child who was too young, too pure, and too sincere had embarrassed and
irritated Claude. This love affair had confronted her with utterly
unwanted problems, needlessly complicating her existence. There were
indeed moments when Ursula’s clear little face, so filled with love and
admiration for her, flattered Claude and even touched her. There had
indeed been days when Ursula had reawakened in her that desperate
tenderness which needed to be directed toward children, and as she had
caressed the girl’s glistening hair, her own heart had been filled with
hunger and regret. But most of the time Claude had felt only one desire,
and that was to discharge all of her irritation upon the nearest victim,
and the victim had nearly always been Ursula.

And so the change that had taken place delighted her. At last she found
a good little comrade in Ursula. Claude liked to watch the girl’s
serious face. And she found again the silent little girl to whom she had
been attracted that first day, but now purged of all sexual desire. That
side was quite finished for Claude too. After all, the pleasure of
watching the child’s first reactions to love, and the enjoyment she had
experienced in educating the girl in this direction, had passed. She was
not a man; she couldn’t marry Ursula. She was not Petit; the idea would
never have occurred to Claude to live in union with a woman. Therefore,
she told me in one of her surprisingly candid moments, everything had
“fortunately gone back the way it should be.”

But I sensed that in the depths of her being, Claude retained a vague
remorse over having initiated Ursula to a vice for which there was no
true natural leaning in the girl. And I wondered what it was that Claude
sought so devouringly in one girl after another, since it was clear that
she did not seek to develop a Lesbian liaison. First she had seduced
Ursula, then Mickey, and recently there had been a fresh young recruit,
Renée. What was this unappeasable hunger for the young, the innocent?

And then I remembered a story Claude had confided to Ursula, in their
most intimate days. They had been talking inconsequentially about things
that made one feel guilty, and Claude had told, first, of a cat she had
once picked up on the street and brought home, a skinny half-grown cat
with no charm whatever. Her lover of the moment had leaped with disgust
at the sight of the animal, and had advised Claude to throw it out the
window. Finally she had put it out in the street. Her guilt over
abandoning that cat had haunted her for years, Claude told Ursula, just
like her guilt over an abortion.

And then, in the tumbling way in which Claude had of linking the most
trivial and the most consequential of events, as though they were of
equal importance, Claude had related how she had once found herself
pregnant, and had suppressed the birth of the child. She had been living
with the same lover who had objected to the cat—a dissipated journalist
whom she had met shortly before her divorce from her first husband. When
she found herself pregnant she vacillated for two months, unsure in her
own mind about having the child. Not that she had any fear of scandal.
But the inconvenience.... Still, she had been tempted, feeling something
marvelously warm growing within her. Day by day she had studied her
breasts, which seemed to grow fuller and harder, and her belly, which
was soon to fill itself with child. She had almost decided to have the
baby; and then suddenly, after the incident with the cat, she had sought
out a doctor and had an abortion. She had done that like almost
everything she did, on impulse, without reflection. When she found
herself stretched on the operating table, with two nurses strapping down
her legs and the doctor bending over her with the chloroform, she had
realized that she was about to kill her child, and it was too late.
Remorse had entered her with the odor of the chloroform, and she
awakened, empty and alone, with this remorse within her. Since then,
Claude had tried to have another child—she had tried with lovers, with
her second husband—but she had never again conceived.

As I recalled this story, it seemed to me that Claude’s first instincts
toward Ursula, and probably to all of her girls, had been nothing but
maternal. And while with girls like Mickey the adventure quickly turned
to erotic sport, there had been in Ursula a truly childlike response,
and this had touched Claude more than she knew. It seemed to me that she
felt guilty toward Ursula and at the same time resented the girl for
having let her have her way, for having allowed herself to be drawn into
the game. It was almost a motherly resentment over the bad behavior of
her child. Claude would have loved to find an Ursula who was faithful to
her childhood, and who would remain only a child for her—her little
girl.

All these unhappy feelings in Claude were augmented by her boredom in
the little switchboard room where she had spent the last two years.
Almost daily she was becoming more irritable. Her rages were proverbial
in Down Street. One encountered less of the charming, smiling, and
beautiful Claude, as her place was taken by a nervous, aging woman,
always quarreling with someone or other. All the discontented souls of
the barracks came to her switchboard room to complain and conspire.
Claude was continually discovering new enemies.

At the same time, her liaison with the colonel continued. She went out
often with him, and drank a good deal. Several times she had been
brought back to Down Street dead drunk. Officers in foreign uniforms
would be seen taking her out of a taxi in their arms. She would be put
to bed and would immediately fall asleep, to wake up in the morning in
bad humor, because she was ashamed of herself. Her name was often seen
on the punishment list for having returned to the barracks drunk. Claude
pretended to consider this amusing, especially since the noncommissioned
officers were rather in awe of her, and rarely carried out the sentences
they gave her. Corporal Pruneface didn’t dare send her to the kitchen,
and Machou wouldn’t ask for her. They all knew that Claude was Colonel
Max’s mistress, and they preferred to be in her good graces. Aside from
Max, Claude went to bed occasionally with one woman or another, at Down
Street and elsewhere.

The most extraordinary thing in all this was that Claude was essentially
a good woman, with an astonishing childlike purity. She could take
drugs, get drunk, go to bed with the first man who came along, but she
never uttered a cynical word, and she was never blasé. A bouquet of
flowers gave her more pleasure than the most luxurious of gifts. One
might tell her the most naïve and innocent tales, and her face would
immediately light up. If someone were to say, “The Holy Virgin came down
onto the altar in the barracks chapel and told Mickey to put on a blue
dress,” Claude would certainly have been the only woman in Down Street
to believe in the miraculous tale.

If any of the girls needed money, she could always ask Claude for it.
Claude would give away her last sou, just as readily to a new recruit
who had arrived at the barracks only the night before as to her best
friend.

And there was another side to Claude. She had gathered among her friends
in Down Street an altogether weird collection of women, as different as
possible from herself. These friendships were utterly platonic, and
these women possessed qualities that Claude alone could see. For
instance, there was Paula, the only recruit totally unaffected by the
vogue of sex at Down Street. She was the typical old maid of all the
ages, the same anywhere in the world. Even in uniform she succeeded in
dressing like the “woman in the green hat.” Her khaki skirt dragged
nearly to her heels. Her cap fell over her nose. A grayish bun bounced
against her neck. She was ageless and colorless and even her voice had
no recognizable character.

Claude declared that Paula was an exceptional patriot. The Captain was
highly embarrassed when she tried to find an occupation for this
patriot, for besides all her other shortcomings, she had no training or
aptitude for office work, and she was in ill health and couldn’t work in
the kitchen or in the household. Finally they made a sacristan of Paula.
She appeared only at the hours of religious observances, and no one knew
what she did in between times. Besides, no one was concerned. Claude was
the only person to take the slightest interest in Paula. She even
attempted to persuade us that Paula was attractive, and she was
continually finding new ways for Paula to arrange her hair, which Paula
obstinately rejected.

There was another old maid—an Alsatian, dry, dark, and always in bad
humor. Claude pretended that she was good nature itself, and dragged
this woman from bar to bar to distract her. The Alsatian opened her soul
to no one but Claude. She worshiped her, mending her stockings, making
her bed, polishing her buttons. With everyone else she was acid-tempered
and always dissatisfied. But with Claude she was completely transformed.
The celebrated charm had worked on her too.

There was a little blonde Provençale whom Claude had baptized “Baby” and
who was the most stupid, most vain, and most good-natured little thing
to be found anywhere. She had rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and a perfect
pretty-doll face, and she dyed her long eyelashes pale blue. Baby was
interested only in boy friends, whom she recruited with great
perseverance from the navy. Claude lent her own civilian clothes to Baby
whenever she went on leave, gave her money, and bought her the little
cakes of which she was especially fond. And with Baby, as with Paula and
the Alsatian, Claude’s relationship was never anything but completely
normal.

Now Ursula took her place among these neutral and restful friendships.
She saw Claude as she was, a disoriented woman filled with rare
qualities, and with common faults; a woman who would be old soon enough,
but who preserved astonishing areas of youthfulness in her heart. Ursula
defended Claude to me. At bottom, Ursula felt, Claude had done her no
harm; she had never harmed anyone, for there was nothing destructive in
her.




                               CHAPTER 27


Ann had a date in town with her new love, Lee. She arranged with the
hall guard not to mark down the hour when she went out, for Petit
watched her ceaselessly. Petit knew that Ann was secretly seeing Lee,
and the poor woman’s eternally vigilant jealousy had become the newest
joke of the barracks. Petit questioned the guard, searched through the
register, and was even to be seen lurking in the entry hall, waiting for
Ann to come home. And during her lonely hours of vigil she drank at the
bar, offering rounds to the girls, and taking one or the other of us
into her confidence.

One evening as I was talking to Mickey, Petit got hold of us and
proposed that we come have a drink in a military canteen near Down
Street. It wouldn’t have been healthy for us to antagonize her, and so
we accepted, though Petit was generally known as a bore. And when Petit
was drinking she became more and more lugubrious, and her air of a
little old man became increasingly pathetic.

When Petit opened the door and we entered the canteen, all the soldiers
in the place turned their heads to gaze at us, with particular attention
to Mickey. They seemed to be sizing us up, wondering if the
lively-looking Mickey was in the clutches of the elderly _gousse_,
wondering, I suppose, whether I too belonged to that sect.

Mickey tried to give the men the eye, as though to reassure them that
she was a real woman; but Petit had installed herself directly in front
of us, at a little table, so there could be no side flirtation. Now
Petit began recounting her troubles with Ann.

“Yes, it’s horrible,” Mickey sympathized, with her English intonation,
and opening wide her large blue innocent eyes. Though she was intrigued
by someone like Claude, the love affairs of a real Lesbian like Petit
were a matter of complete indifference to Mickey.

It seemed to me that our indifference, the indifference of the “normal”
world, made the life of such women even more tragic. For they suffered
from their loves, like any other woman, but without the balm of sympathy
and understanding.

Petit went on with her grief. It seemed that the newcomer, Lee, had
acquired a complete dominance over Ann. Lee was very rich, Petit
complained, and showered Ann with gifts. When the three of them were
together, Ann and Lee behaved as though nothing at all were going on
between them. They took pains to turn away Petit’s suspicions. Tricky
lads, Petit said, but she knew the truth well enough. She knew that Ann
was being unfaithful to her. And Lee also, for that matter, for Petit
had gone to bed once or twice with the Englishwoman herself. But Petit
wasn’t going to permit herself to be treated that way. There was going
to be an explosion, they’d see! Ann belonged to her! And she went on
complaining, and then she began to grieve for her life at home in
France, where her two friends were waiting for her, two girls who had
always been faithful to her.

Petit knew, of course, that Mickey had made love with Claude, so she
addressed herself to Mickey, as to someone who was sure to understand.
But Mickey was obviously not listening.

I wondered what Mickey was thinking about. Probably she was letting her
mind roam over her years in the barracks, thinking about Claude, about
Max, about Robert and the other men, and then coming back to Petit, and
drifting from Petit to the Lesbians, and wondering about the soldiers
who were eying her, and remembering a theory of love that Claude had
once propounded to her.

Love, love, love—even what Petit was talking about was love, and my
mind, too, wandered on this all-absorbing subject. I was still like a
bystander at a carnival, watching people risking themselves on a
slippery revolving floor, whirling and bumping and sliding and falling
and half getting up and slipping again, and sprawling on the spinning
floor. Why did they have to do it?

“Come on, come on,” the people sprawling on the floor would cry,
laughing hysterically and beckoning to the timorous bystanders like me.
Indeed, Mickey had often given me the most meticulous explanations of
her love affairs, and of Claude’s theories on the subject. As Petit’s
monotonous complaint continued, I recalled one of these explanations for
love between women.

In every woman, Claude had told Mickey, there is a need rarely satisfied
by men, a need for simply caressing, and she had described how one of
her women friends loved to caress the “neutral parts” of her body for
hours at a time. The neutral parts were the shoulders, the arms, the
throat, the back, the parts that men seemed to forget. The insatiable
desire for tenderness was felt most strongly in these neutral parts,
which were so rarely caressed. Men made love each in his fashion, more
or less expertly, according to Claude, and they were especially fond of
those things in women that were different from their own bodies. When
women made love with men, it was quite often with joy and passion, yet
there was almost always a feeling of deception. It was perhaps the
neutral parts that were disappointed, Claude had instructed Mickey. The
very body of woman seemed to complain, “I want your love over me, aside
from sex, aside from physical desire. I want the feel of your hand
filled with a fraternal affection, forgetting my sexuality, just resting
with pure friendliness on my arm.”

When she had made love with Claude, Mickey had said, there had been long
hours when no one was in a hurry, when it had seemed that the entire
night could pass without the necessity of reaching a final point, and
she had understood Claude’s meaning. This was love between women—to be
able to rest their heads together, to hold hands. The stroking of a
knee, the kissing of a shoulder—all this was part of love between two
women, and this in itself could often suffice.

Inexperienced as I was, I felt that I was becoming something of an
expert on love, matching the evidence offered by my friends, and I
wondered now whether love had the same meaning for Petit, whether with
her also love was a tenderness. And I wondered, almost with dismay,
whether all these physical things they talked about could really express
love. Sometimes when Mickey rattled on with her technical explanations I
felt a disgust growing in me, and had to warn myself that I must not let
this grow, or I might become like Paula, colorless, unlovely.

Now I was suddenly interrupted in my reflections; Petit’s voice had
paused, suspended. I heard Mickey say automatically, “Yes, of course.”
And Petit resumed.

I knew that Mickey did not believe herself to be a Lesbian, although a
sort of understanding had come into being between her and the _gousses_.
Mickey was voluble too about her experiences with men, comparing them
with her experiences with Claude. She had adopted Claude’s technical
explanation, that some women could experience only an exterior climax.
They were frigid within, and could never be satisfied by men. Claude
herself could experience a climax in both ways, and Mickey had
immediately declared that she possessed the same gift.

I wondered if it were so simple. Seated facing Petit, I kept thinking
how sad her life must be, how sad must be the life of Ann, of Lee, of
all these women. Their mournful eyes never laughed, even when their lips
laughed. They lived separately from the rest of the world, cloistered
among themselves, going out together, living together, going to Lesbian
night clubs together, and the only men with whom they had anything to do
were pederasts.

Petit was talking about her farm. It was strange how all of them, before
the war and in their postwar projects, were centered around this love of
the earth. Ann’s one dream was to install herself in the country and
raise horses. Lee had an estate in Scotland. Most of the others who
frequented our bar in Down Street also talked about their farms, or the
farms they were going to acquire.

Then I thought that Mickey’s explanation was altogether wrong. They were
simply more like men, these unfortunate women.

Petit ordered three fresh cups of tea with buns, since no alcohol was
served at the canteen. Then suddenly she looked at her wrist watch. She
got up precipitately.

“Ann should be getting in now. She hasn’t got a late pass. Come on,
we’ll see what she has to say!”

She rose, paid for all of us, and hurried out, glancing over her
shoulder to see if we were following. We arrived at the door of the
barracks at the same moment as Ann.

Petit left us to fall upon Ann. The two of them turned from the door and
went off down the street, talking. We watched the two women for an
instant, disappearing into the fog.

For once, even Mickey’s natural exuberance was smothered. We could not
help but feel a sort of sadness, growing heavier, a sentiment that there
was something rather unjust in Nature itself.

As we went into the dormitory, I realized that among all of the women in
our little group there was not one who was involved in what I had always
dreamed about, in childhood, as love. There seemed to be only frenzied
sexual adventures, promiscuity, or these sad, strange inversions. I
wondered unhappily whether such love could exist in our upset wartime
world, the plain, faithful love between one woman and one man. I thought
of Jacqueline and her passion for her captain, almost as a desperately
wanted token that such love was no childhood myth. I needed their love
to succeed.




                               CHAPTER 28


Jacqueline now had moved all her civilian clothes to De Prade’s house in
Kensington. Every Saturday evening she went to the house, changed into a
civilian dress, undid her little bun, brushed her hair; she became once
more a civilized young lady, and went to give orders in the kitchen,
supervising the menu. She loved this role, and luxuriated in the
respectful attention that she received from De Prade’s officer friends.
Here, at least, she could forget Machou’s curses, Ginette’s vulgarity,
the curt commands of her superiors, and the common atmosphere of the
dormitory.

Every Saturday night De Prade came to her room to say good night, and
then went off. Every Sunday morning Jacqueline, in her pretty flowered
linen nightdress, went to sit on De Prade’s bed and to wake him by
tickling him. This had become a ritual. Each of them pretended to ignore
the obvious; each played the innocent. Jacqueline would say that she was
cold, and slip into bed beside him, while discussing literature or the
weather. De Prade, feeling her warm body next to him, behaved as though
it had no effect on him. There was a tradition of honor in him, a
tradition of hardened generations of strong-willed men who did not
readily accede to any desire that they could not control with their
minds. And in his mind, De Prade had decided that he would not be
unfaithful to his wife; because of honor, because of religion, because
of a sense of duty—a mixture of reasons whose force arose out of his
very blood.

As both of them were from the same sort of world, neither of them spoke
of what was going on within them; of desire, of violence contained, of
home, or of love. Jacqueline still called De Prade “Uncle,” and De Prade
treated her like a young niece, a virgin, and the more warmly he felt
her body against his the more persistently he set himself to speaking of
politics and to pretending that everything was quite natural.

But the intensity of Jacqueline’s desire was as great as De Prade’s will
to resist. Soon their struggle was to reach a decisive point. In a
subterranean way, I felt that the climax was precipitated by a great
event at the barracks.

Once more Christmas had passed over Down Street, and the New Year’s
holiday. Once again we were certain that the invasion would take place
in the spring. It was 1942.

The news came that General de Gaulle was to inspect Down Street. During
the week preceding this event, one would have thought that his
inspection of our quarters was a very important part of invasion
preparations. We polished the house just as though General de Gaulle
were sure to climb up to examine the tops of the wardrobes and to crawl
inside the kitchen stove. Under the command of Petit and the officers,
we drilled and drilled. The assembly bell never stopped ringing, and
punishments for the slightest infraction came down on us like rain. Our
dear captain had launched a veritable offensive in the realm of
discipline. If one of us had the misfortune to fail to salute a superior
officer in the street, if a sentinel forgot to come to attention at the
passing of an officer, if a button didn’t shine brightly enough, there
came an avalanche of punishment details. And the worst crime of all was
to voice an objection, for the officers, naturally, were always right.

The most excited of all of us over the coming of the General was
Jacqueline. To her, he represented something beyond the savior of
France. He was the justification of aristocracy. He was the living proof
that France _had_ to be saved through someone who had issued from this
superior group. Even her passion for De Prade had in it something of
this worship of aristocracy, and I suppose the modern psychologists
would say that she was in this way expressing her love and her longing
for her aristocratic father, who had died when she was a child. But
Jacqueline was so nervous over the coming visit of the General that she
became almost as irritating as the officers; if someone so much as left
an open newspaper lying on a cot, she would exclaim over the disorder in
our dormitory.

On the day of the General’s inspection, everything shone in Down Street,
and we all stood at attention for an hour in advance. The Captain had
assumed her most important air, as though the visit were addressed to
her personally.

Finally he arrived, and every feminine heart beat more rapidly, and each
of us forgot her years of exile and unhappiness. We felt only the pride
of being there among the chosen, among the volunteers, before the leader
who at that time personified all of Free France.

From our first day of enlistment, except for the months when Jacqueline
was in the hospital, Jacqueline, Ursula, and I had kept our places next
to each other in ranks. As we saw the General appearing in the doorway,
it seemed to me that I could feel the charge of pride that passed
through Jacqueline, a possessive pride.

De Gaulle was as tall as we had expected he would be, and he did not
know how to smile. Grave and solemn, he had a face impassive in its
severity. But one could see that he was a true aristocrat, born in the
great tradition of the high French families. He did not try to exert any
sort of charm, to make any conquests, to make himself well thought of.
On the contrary, he was austere and hard. He said a few words to each of
us, asked each woman her name and what she did, and passed on from one
to the other, and our responses seemed to leave him totally indifferent.

All at once a Brittany girl broke the monotony by responding that she
didn’t like her job, that she had too much to do, working as a waitress
in a sailor’s canteen. Her honest, prepared little speech came out in
one timorous breath, like a complaint to a parent. One could see a
shiver of horror going through the Captain and communicating itself to
all the other officers, and then down to the noncoms. But the General
paid no more attention to this reply than to the others, and passed on
to the next volunteer.

During the Brittany girl’s outburst I felt Jacqueline become rigid. She
was staring at the General in a hurt, puzzled way. At first I didn’t
understand why she should feel upset. Jacqueline was the last person to
feel a democratic indignation. But I sensed that in some way he had
failed her; he had not perhaps displayed the concern of a true
aristocrat, a god, for every least one of his children.

This incident of the complaining girl had a continued effect on
Jacqueline. She remarked about it once or twice, until I understood that
for her this incident had meant the loss of an idol. The General had not
cared, any more than our captain cared. And she needed someone to care,
she longed for someone to care as she longed for a father, and as I
suppose all of us long for a faith, a feeling that above us there is
someone who is good, and pure, and responsible—as she told herself her
own father must have been. And now that the General had disillusioned
Jacqueline, he was gone for her, and only De Prade was left.

It was shortly after this, at the end of March, that De Prade received
orders to leave on a mission to Africa.

Jacqueline talked of no one and nothing else but this man with his deep
intelligent black eyes and his square chin and his courteous manners.
And now he was going away—the only person in whom she could believe.

Just because he had resisted her so strongly, just because he had
behaved so honorably, according to the perfect aristocratic code, just
because he had shown himself superior to impulse, she had to seal
herself to him, even if in doing so she caused him to break the code for
which she loved him.

On his last evening in Kensington there was a little party in his honor.
All of De Prade’s friends were there. They danced and drank from a
bottle of Armagnac that had been brought back from France by one of our
secret agents. They talked of the second front and discussed the latest
news of Paris.

Jacqueline was seated on a low chair at De Prade’s feet; he was stroking
her hair. In a way, she knew he felt himself saved. He was going to
leave, and this struggle between them would be over. His honor was safe,
the honor of a De Prade, who had never deceived anyone, neither his God
nor his wife nor himself. He looked down upon the bowed neck of
Jacqueline, looked at her hair, following the few bleached locks that
she liked to wind through the reddish-brown mass. He put his hand on her
shoulder, and she knew that he must have felt her shoulder lift a trifle
in response to his hand. But she did not turn her head toward him. For
if he saw her face, he would know that it was not yet over with them;
even though he was leaving tomorrow, it was not yet over.

When all the guests had departed and the other three men had gone to
bed, De Prade came for the last time to say good night to Jacqueline.
She was lying on the narrow couch in her room. A strap of her thin
nightgown had fallen, baring a rosy shoulder, and it was this shoulder
alone that looked up at him, for her eyes were lowered, and a tear had
stopped on her cheek. De Prade sat down on the edge of the bed, as on
any other night, and began to talk to her softly. He told her that he
would write to her, that he would surely be back in a few months, that
she should be sensible and watch her health. Jacqueline did not answer.
The tear still stood on her cheek, and De Prade could not take his eyes
from her round, rosy shoulder. He was filled with a terrible longing to
kiss that shoulder just once before leaving. He leaned over and laid his
lips on Jacqueline’s shoulder. She flowed toward him, and suddenly he
was holding her in his arms. Without knowing how it came about, he was
kissing her on the mouth, repeating, “I love you, I love you.”

It was very brief. Not a cry came from Jacqueline, for the short pain
was too wonderful, too long awaited. She opened her eyes and saw De
Prade’s face with his eyes closed, his face that of a man utterly
outside himself, with his mouth slightly open and his eyes suddenly
circled with black. She held him pressed in her arms, happy, crushed by
his weight, victorious, her world secure. He fell asleep against the
shoulder to which he had surrendered.

The following morning De Prade left on his mission to Africa.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Jacqueline came late to the office that morning. As our offices were
still next door to each other, I saw her when she came in, and I at
first assumed she looked so distraught because De Prade was leaving. But
at the earliest opportunity she took me aside and told me she was
worried. Nervously, she told me what had happened. And she was afraid
that she might be pregnant. Though this fear was only natural, I
couldn’t help feeling a sickening disappointment; this was the real
love, the real passion I had been watching, and it came down to the same
sort of agitated apprehensiveness and whispering that went on in the
barracks every night, after the girls returned from their casual
affairs. I knew I was being unjust to Jacqueline. Her relationship to De
Prade had been anything but casual; her deepest emotions had been
involved. And yet, for me, this brought only another dismay, another
tightening of my defenses against love. I knew that I should not permit
disgust to invade me. I had to believe that I would one day love a man.
But the same life that was driving some of the girls to sexual liberty
came close to driving me to complete inhibition.

As for the practical side, I was scarcely the one to give Jacqueline
advice. We decided that Mickey, who worked on the floor below, would be
the ideal person to consult, for strangely enough, despite the loud and
common talk that went on constantly at the barracks, we had only the
vaguest scraps of confusing information about practical sex matters.

We hurried downstairs and encountered Mickey, with a stack of files
under her arm, on the way to the elevator. “I have to talk to you,”
Jacqueline whispered, and Mickey understood.

“I’ll meet you in the washroom at ten-thirty,” she said. The washroom
was the one place where the secretaries could meet and chatter in peace.

At ten-thirty we found Mickey there. Fortunately, no one else was in the
room. Jacqueline explained her predicament. Shouldn’t she do something
about not having a child? It might be dangerous to do nothing. But what
should she do?

For all her experience with men, it seemed that Mickey actually knew
very little more than we did about such things. Her lovers always took
care of everything. Mickey would simply leave all the precautions to
them, and nothing had ever happened. But she was quite sure, she said,
that it was too late for Jacqueline to take any effective measures now.
She could do nothing but wait and see, and hope for the best. If it
developed that she _was_ pregnant—well, it was too early to think of
doing anything about it now. “You’ll just have to wait and see,” Mickey
repeated.

Jacqueline started to laugh. Leaning against the washbowl, she laughed
until I was afraid she was becoming hysterical. “How can it be too late
and too early at the same time?” she gasped.




                               CHAPTER 29


It was spring. A wonderful English springtime, with the park covered
with crocuses, with blossoms, with sheep, a spring that sent mounted
amazons with their cavaliers, onto the bridle paths, and sent couples
rowing in the Serpentine.

Once more people were talking of the invasion. It was surely going to
take place this year, and at night all of us dreamed that we were back
in France.

We girls were being photographed in Down Street. One of the propaganda
services was making a short film about the life of the feminine
volunteers in the Free French Forces. The dining room and the
dormitories were cluttered with spotlights and cables.

Jacqueline was filmed taking a bath, dressing, making up, and getting in
the truck to go to work. The sentinels on the roof were filmed, and the
little Brittany girls, enveloped in immaculate white aprons that had
been borrowed for the occasion, were shown preparing our meals under the
smiling supervision of a Machou transformed into a tender, motherly
soul. The infirmary was decorated with tricolors for the occasion. The
nurse, a dirty girl with greasy hair, who usually left the sick ones to
take care of themselves, was photographed in the act of bringing a tray
of food to a fake invalid. Vases filled with flowers were all around the
room, and the place was hardly recognizable. In order to create an
atmosphere of evening diversion, the film-makers perched a couple of
girls on the piano and had them put their arms around each other and
sing “_Auprès de ma blonde._”

It was during the time when Down Street was revolutionized by these
motion-picture activities that a new crisis arose around Jacqueline.
Ursula was the first to learn of it. One day after we had all gone off
to our duties, she found Jacqueline crying on her bed. Ursula tried to
console Jacqueline, without quite knowing what to say.

Jacqueline raised a ravaged face to her. “I’m going to have a baby,” she
said, and she began to cry again.

Ursula looked at her mutely, not knowing whether she should believe
this, whether it was meant as playacting or as truth.

Then, realizing it was serious, she felt filled with respect for
Jacqueline, and looked at her as though the child were already in her
arms. It seemed to Ursula a thing that was strange and sacred and rather
impossible, like a miracle. It was something that could happen to
women—to real women, married, older—but here in Down Street, and to one
of the “Virgins,” it seemed to touch on the world of unreality.

“Are you sure, Jacqueline?” she said in a low voice.

Jacqueline nodded. She had seen a doctor, and he had told her that the
baby would be born in December. It was now May.

Ursula remained seated on the bed, completely incapable of offering any
advice. Jacqueline repeated, “I don’t want a baby. It mustn’t be born.
It can’t. What am I going to do?”

                   *       *       *       *       *

At first only a few of us knew the secret. Mickey was again consulted.
After reflection, Mickey said that she believed there was a drug that
was remarkably effective in producing abortion, but she had never heard
its name. A pharmacist would know.

Presently half the dormitory was aware of the situation, and a great
variety of advice was offered to Jacqueline. Ginette made her take a
series of baths in practically boiling water. She was induced to jump
from her bed fifty times.

After much searching, Jacqueline found a pharmacist who was willing to
co-operate, but the stuff he sold her had no effect. Neither did the hot
water or bicycle riding or jumping. And time passed.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Jacqueline never wrote to De Prade to tell him what was
happening—perhaps because everything then might have been too simple. De
Prade would have sent her money, would have helped, perhaps would have
been able to return. Perhaps he would have promised her to get a divorce
after the war. But Jacqueline would take only the most morbid view of
the situation. The conception of the child was entirely her own fault,
she insisted, and De Prade would never get a divorce. If she told him
what had happened, she would only make him desperate. De Prade had been
filled with remorse when he left. But he had probably gone to
confession, done penance, and promised to forget her. She was certain
that he would never write to her. On returning to France, he would
probably confess their night to his wife, begging her forgiveness, and
that would be the end of it.

Perhaps, I thought, she was right in her understanding of him. He was
from her world. She had selected him because of that. And she insisted
that she simply could not inform De Prade of what had happened. Besides
that, she had a sort of presentiment that this affair could not end for
her otherwise than in still another catastrophe. Catastrophes were the
order of her life. Therefore, in the end, she accepted her situation as
part of this established order.

After her pregnancy had become officially noted, Jacqueline once again
left Down Street. Once more her bed was taken over by a new recruit. A
welfare organization of Free France busied itself with finding a room
for Jacqueline in the suburbs of London, and providing her with
subsistence funds. It was not the first case of this sort at the
barracks, and it would certainly not be the last. But officially, no one
knew the identity of the father. For once, the few girls in our little
circle seemed capable of guarding a secret. It was of course generally
known in the barracks that Jacqueline had passed her weekends in
Kensington, but three or four officers lived in the house, and besides,
they were always changing, and Jacqueline was known to have a great
quantity of admirers.

One morning a little notice was pinned up in the hall in Down Street
among the announcements, sentences, and regulations. This stated that
Jacqueline had been “discharged for reasons of health.”




                               CHAPTER 30


Summer came, a London summer that lasted about a week. There had been no
second front in Europe. The Red Cross messages took longer and longer to
arrive, and it was said that the people had nothing to eat in France,
that women were wearing shoes with wooden soles, and that layettes for
babies were being knitted out of black, gray, or brown wool from men’s
discarded pull-overs.

In London the men kept looking at the photographs of their wives and
their children, trying to memorize their faces, which must have changed
so much. They spoke less often of France now, because it was painful to
remember, and it seemed now that the exile was to endure for centuries.
And still people continued to arrive from France in fishing vessels from
Brittany or through Spain, and they told the same stories about the
resistance, about the occupation, about the lack of food, and they told
the same jokes about the Boche.

For quite a while now the bombardment of London had almost completely
ceased. People went to visit the ruins in the City as one went to visit
places celebrated in ancient history.

Emerging from GHQ at noon, we girls in uniform walked down St. James
Street arm in arm, despite the fact that this was against regulations.
We studied the shop windows, but could buy practically nothing, for
everything was rationed and we had very few tickets. People counted
purchases in tickets now rather than in pounds and shillings, and it
seemed that this too would go on forever.

The richer ones among us didn’t go to Down Street for lunch, but went
instead to treat themselves to a horse-meat steak with fried potatoes at
Rose’s. Sometimes I permitted myself this treat. After the steak, our
supreme luxury consisted in stopping for _croissants_, real French
_croissants_, in a Soho pastry stop. Then we would go for a walk in St.
James Park before returning to our offices.

Rose’s, the park, the movies, the swank clubs and bars, the concerts at
the National Gallery—all this was now part of our habitude of exile.
Little by little each of us constructed a life for herself in wartime
London. For the years passed, and the war endured forever.

All London was pro-Russian. The theatre where Soviet films were
regularly shown was always filled. The newspapers were filled with
stories of Russian heroism. And the people of London and the Allied
soldiers and the exiles from all Europe believed what was written
everywhere—that this was a holy war, that hatred between nations was to
be destroyed forever, and that a free world was going to be built.

The end of the war appeared to all of us the supreme good. With the end
of the war there would be an end, overnight, to all restrictions, to
hunger, and to cold. The United Nations would arise, there would be
universal brotherhood, there would be a United States of Europe, for all
this had to come to pass, since we were fighting on the side of good,
and we were going to annihilate evil forever, replacing it with the
invaluable qualities of intelligence, love, and order, which we
undoubtedly possessed. But all this was still far away, all this was for
“after the war.”

The individual would take his place in society after the war, his
rightful place. The individual would be respected, safeguarded by laws
conceived for his well-being, for his liberty, and for his moral and
intellectual development. But for three years and more, in the little
world of Down Street, as in all other military barracks, the individual
didn’t exist. And those who rose in authority, those who became the
“cabinet ministers” here, were the people who knew how to get along, the
people with connections, the flatterers. Well, then, I asked one night
when we were debating all this in the assembly room, why were we always
talking of tomorrow, and never of today? What would remain tomorrow of
bleeding Europe? There would be those who returned broken from war and
concentration camps, the sick, and a young generation raised in a world
where heroism consisted of committing sabotage, lying, and killing; and
there would be the collaborators, the cowards, and the indifferent. This
was the world that was to rise from the ruins tomorrow, the world upon
which everybody counted so much.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Late in summer, Ann requested permission to spend her leave in Scotland.
She gave a false address to Petit; actually she left for Lee’s estate.

Petit was not deceived. Seated at the bar in Down Street, she confided
her miseries to Claude and to anyone else who cared to listen. “I know
where they are,” she said. “But what’s the use? If I went after her
there, it wouldn’t change anything.”

She resigned herself therefore to wait for Ann’s return, consoling
herself with a fat blonde who was a waitress in the GHQ canteen.

Meanwhile Petit drank a great deal of beer, and intrigued to get herself
promoted. And despite everything, despite her morals, her swearing, and
her intrigues, we all really liked her. For Petit was a brave soul, not
very intelligent, but fair with the recruits, and she did all that she
could to help anyone who came and asked for aid.

Ann passed the weeks with Lee in Scotland. What happened there, the
strange event that was to be whispered about with a kind of revolted
glee, seemed to me the saddest of all the things I had heard about the
unnatural lives of these women. It was something that happened in the
intimate lives of three people, and yet it came out, as everything had
to come out in that atmosphere of war and of the barracks. Petit pried
it from Ann, and then Petit herself spread the story, in a kind of
vengefulness.

Lee came from a very rich family; not far from Edinburgh they owned a
veritable manor in the style of the Stuarts. Every year Lee passed her
vacation there with her brother, a blond young officer who was used to
his sister’s ways and his sister’s friends. He was a type of young man
who seemed to have emerged from the novels of the Brontë sisters. He
drank a great deal, belonged to an exclusive regiment in wartime, and
spent his leaves in boredom at the ancestral manor in the occasional
company of his masculine sister, who went off hunting every morning.

An ancient servant couple took care of the dwelling, which was situated
in the midst of woods and lakes among the arid Scottish hills. Lee and
her brother found the place tiresome, and went there only through a sort
of sense of duty, but Ann was enchanted and astonished by the
establishment. She had been raised in genteel poverty, and had never
known her father. She had always been attracted by riches. It was her
dream to be wealthy and powerful someday. By instinct, Ann always sought
connections with people above herself. In the barracks she was friendly
with the officers, through her inner need to rise in station; and even
her women friends, her Lesbian lovers, were always rich or in some way
powerful. I don’t think she chose them through cold calculation, but it
always turned out that way.

Every morning she went hunting with Lee, or riding in the immense park.
In the afternoons she visited the countryside, and on returning explored
the innumerable chambers of the manor. She loved to walk barefoot on the
bearskin rugs in the evening, and to watch the immense logs burning in
the fireplaces. The servants had the reserved and dignified bearing of
domestics in a household of consequence, and Ann had the impression of
sharing in all this opulence. When she embraced Lee in her hungry arms,
it was the entire manor that she was hugging to herself.

The brother smoked his pipe, his feet on the table, a glass of whisky at
his side, as he yawned through travel magazines.

Lee studied the fire. The fire danced in her eyes. She looked at Ann,
and it seemed to her that she had brought her bride home to her house,
the ancient house of her ancestors. Every evening, when the three of
them were seated like that in front of the rosy fireplace, Lee had the
feeling that with the arrival of Ann she had succeeded in making the
manor a homestead, and that the only thing now lacking to her was a
child, an inheritor. Then she would really have all that a man could
have. She crossed her long legs and stroked her short flat hair. If only
Ann could have a child! But that was impossible. It was the one thing
that she couldn’t give her. Every night when she made love with Ann, Lee
felt herself thwarted by this sterility, and in her mind, where all
values were disoriented, a project was slowly forming.

She reflected on each detail and carefully considered the staging of the
scene. After all, it was her child that was in question.

She spoke of the matter first to her brother.

Her brother had consumed no small quantity of whisky since that morning,
and the idea rather amused him. It would be a bit of a change, at last.

Then Lee found Ann, who was walking in the grounds dressed in a thick
seaman’s sweater and brown corduroy trousers, promenading a pair of
spaniels. Lee said to her, “Ann, my darling, you and I must have a
child.”

Ann looked at her uncomprehendingly. Then Lee explained her plan.

That night all three of them would be together, Ann, Lee, and her
brother, Richard. Ann and Lee would make love, and at the last moment
Richard would possess Ann, while Lee continued to caress her. The child
that would be born would be the child of Lee’s blood, conceived in Lee’s
love; Richard would only have lent the one element Lee did not possess,
the seed.

They walked together in the Scottish fog that enveloped the manor. Two
women without sex, two women outside of human society, profoundly
solitary, even in their love, trying somehow to attach themselves to
that life which had no way of continuing beyond them through
descendants.

In the evening, before the great fireplace with its crackling logs,
Richard watched his sister embrace Ann on the bearskin rug, and Richard
was the first and only man to possess Ann.

Two days later, Ann returned to Down Street, her leave ended.




                               CHAPTER 31


Every afternoon we had tea in the canteen at GHQ. The girls would make
bets on whether or not Ginette would arrive before the half hour was
over. For Ginette had a lover whom she met every day during the
afternoon recess. She would rush off in a taxi to her rendezvous, and
she was quite proud of being able to make love and get back by the end
of tea. She always managed to arrive in time, a little out of breath,
and the bets would be paid while the girls demanded news of the “teatime
boy.” Mickey found the adventure with the teatime boy absolutely
riotous, and laughed over it every day.

Ann also usually arrived late for tea, but only because she was highly
interested in her work, and her major often took advantage of this to
keep her busy well into the recess. Ann had waited in vain for Lee’s
baby; the child had not been conceived. This had been a bitter
disappointment for Lee, and had seemed to affect their relationship.

Moreover, Petit had arranged a surprise for Ann on her return from
Scotland. Petit had managed to get her promoted to master sergeant, and
even to get her onto a list of candidates for officer training. Once
more Ann and Petit were to be seen leaving the barracks together.
Overnight Petit had recovered all of her good humor. She bought rounds
of drinks, inviting all the girls, calling out in her deep voice,
“Another Dubonnet, Renée, and make it snappy!”

To Claude, Ann had confided that after the war she would probably go and
live with Petit and help her with her farm. Claude was still seeing Max,
and running around with a variety of officers and women, often taking
Mickey along.

Sometimes I thought it was her job that made Mickey more avid than the
rest of us for distraction. Mickey typed coded telegrams. For three
years, from nine o’clock in the morning until six in the evening, and
sometimes much later, Mickey typed all the secrets of the war, with
prodigious speed, and without having the slightest idea what she was
typing. Only someone like Mickey could have accomplished this task
without losing her mind. She had arrived at the point where she could
type automatically, without error, all the while chattering with people
who passed through the office. The typewriter rattled under her long,
strong, agile fingers. She had a well-formed hand, a college girl’s hand
with flat, clear fingernails, masculine in its length. Mickey laughed,
gossiped, called her chief “Uncle Henry,” and never stopped typing.

What was extraordinary in her was that nothing touched her, neither her
love affairs, from which she never asked the absolute, nor her
mechanical labors, which would have driven anyone else crazy, nor the
barracks with its intrigues, nor even the fact that the reality of the
war had never corresponded to the ideal of the early days that she, like
all of us, had felt: to volunteer, to save France, to give all, to
sacrifice, to find comradeship. This had become tarnished like all one’s
ideals, but Mickey had not suffered from the change. She was a realist.
That was life—one had to be satisfied with a dead ideal as with an easy
love or with a meaningless job. She was, in fact, happy so. She had had
fun with Claude, and their parties of three had been amusing, and it was
amusing to have new experiences. And after all, it was necessary to type
the coded telegrams, numbers following numbers in endless succession; it
was an important job.

Sometimes she had her regrets. She would attach herself to a handsome
man who made love “like a god,” who bought her silk stockings and
perfume, and then he would leave her for another woman, or he would go
off on some mission and never write to her. Mickey would weep over her
typewriter, her beautiful blue eyes, too blue, all drowned in tears. Her
fingers continued to type the numerals, her tears fell on the keys, and
then Uncle Henry had to take her to lunch at Prunier’s for consolation,
and this indeed consoled her. She would come back laughing, her little
snub nose wrinkled, and she would continue to rattle off the mysterious
numbers over which the high commanders pondered in their most secret
headquarters. Then she would go out with another young man and go to bed
with him because he was handsome and she would discover that he “made
love like a god,” he too, for life would have been too sad if one
couldn’t shut one’s eyes so as not to see it.

Everybody loved Mickey. Everybody forgave her for being easy and a bit
of a liar; everybody forgave her her facile success. Her lovers retained
the best memories of Mickey, even though her accessibility in the end
proved tiresome. There were so many easy young girls in London during
the war. For a while it was relaxing, and then it became monotonous.

Even Mickey finally came obscurely to sense these things. In the bottom
of her heart she would have liked to find the strength to become a woman
difficult to obtain, one of those women for whom men made an effort. She
would have liked to inspire a great love such as one read about, and
sometimes for days at a time she tried to stop flirting, to maintain a
dignified air, but it never worked. The truth was that what she wanted
most of all was to be like Claude. She laughed with gusto, drank a lot,
let herself be kissed in taxis, and then it was too late to hold back;
the way from taxi to hotel was too short. Once more she would find
herself in the arms of a lad who told her that she had a lovely body,
and Mickey would think, What good would this lovely body be to me if I
didn’t use it?

She admired Claude and Claude’s success. Claude went to bed with
colonels and generals, and with all the women of London. At the barracks
there had been Ursula, and Mickey herself, and Renée, and Arlette, and
Lucienne, and any number of others. It was amusing to think about. And
when Claude went out, when Claude appeared in the clubs and restaurants,
everybody looked at her, people whispered when she passed, and men had a
special way of looking at her. Mickey wanted men to look at her that
way. And so her good resolutions vanished. She said to herself, Later
on, after I’m married....

Uncle Henry put her on the promotion list for sergeant. After all, she
had done quite a job for three years, a job that no one else wanted. But
for some obscure reason the Captain refused her promotion. The reasons
for approving or disapproving promotions were generally obscure in Down
Street. Obscure as the war itself.

Nevertheless, in her own way, Mickey had made progress. She had lost her
awkward and disarticulated look, her boyish movements and pimples. She
had learned how to make up, how to do her hair, and how to look well
dressed even in a uniform. She flirted a good deal less. During her
career as a virgin and _demi-vierge_, Mickey had found it impossible to
remain more than a moment in the presence of a male without beginning to
exert herself, flirting with her eyes, her mouth, her smile. This had
seemed to her indispensable to every masculine encounter. Now she was
much more sure of herself, and put herself out less for the boys.

One evening she went dancing with a young Norwegian paratrooper, and the
same night, coming home with him, she suddenly got engaged. She came
into the barracks and announced it as casually as she would have
announced that she had gone to bed with another date. And three weeks
later she was married. We were all astonished, and Mickey more than any
of us. She had got married almost on impulse, to a boy she scarcely
knew, the only one of her acquaintances with whom she had neither
flirted nor made love. And the amazing thing was that the boy, who
resembled her physically like a brother, could not have been better
suited to Mickey if they had known each other for years.

They found a little apartment in town, and Mickey would go home from
work at GHQ to prepare their dinner, like any young newlywed. Peter was
in London between assignments, and spent most of his time in the little
apartment; all day long the radio blared. Every evening Peter’s friends
came to talk about Norway and the war. Mickey had so much fun with her
young husband, who shared her love of laughter, that she ended by
falling in love with him. It was an odd young household, for they had
the air of two young wolves, avid for life, carefree.

Ursula went often to their flat, and Mickey tried to marry her off to
one of Peter’s friends. But Ursula was too silent, too calm, and she
still had too much the air of a little girl, with her straight hair and
her short fingernails. Peter’s friends scarcely knew what to say to her,
and, uncomfortable at their attempts at conversation, Ursula would bury
herself in a book or magazine.

I went to Mickey’s sometimes with Ursula, and once we talked about her
meager experiences with men. Although a long time had passed, it was
strange how strongly she recalled the soldier Michel. There had been a
strange calm, a kind of serenity coming from him, and yet she had fled
at the first physical contact. Philippe had not frightened her in that
way. From Philippe she had felt a force of life and a healthy
equilibrium that had been necessary for her, but in Michel there was
something else, something that Ursula had not known how to accept. It
was as though Philippe had given her all that he could, while with
Michel there had been an incomplete communication.

Philippe was a man, a man of flesh, normal in the measure of men. Michel
was made of another substance, more fragile, more mysterious, and also
closer to Ursula. She talked of the black eyes of Michel, and how sad
and yet childlike they had looked. If she had been so afraid of him, it
was perhaps because she understood Michel too well. With Michel it would
have been all or nothing, and “all” with Michel was infinity. Michel’s
kiss, which she had refused, had contained all that infinity she had
wanted to escape. It was the whole of Michel she had fled; the kiss had
only been the pretext that she had unconsciously needed. But why? Why?
She was still perplexed over this. I couldn’t help her; my own
experience was even more limited than hers. For though I had known more
men than Ursula, I was still nothing but a date girl, a good dance
partner, a pleasant companion for an evening, but essentially, I
suppose, disappointing to men in wartime London. As for Ursula and
Michel, I felt somehow that she would see him again, because something
of her contact with him was still growing in her.




                               CHAPTER 32


Jacqueline’s baby was to be born in December. Until the very end,
Jacqueline confided to us, she hoped something would happen to prevent
the birth. So many women had miscarriages. But she continued in good
health and the child stirred within her.

Sometimes she placed her hand on her belly and felt the movement of the
infant. Then she would think of De Prade, and it would seem to
Jacqueline that each of these movements of the baby should have been for
De Prade, that he should have been there to lay his cheek against his
true wife’s body, and hear the beating of the secret heart of his child.
Now all these movements were quite useless and lost. And it would always
be so. The first smile of the baby and his first steps and his first
words, all would be lost, without De Prade.

As for the material difficulties, Jacqueline was not frightened. She
came from the sort of aristocracy that took additional pride in being
able to do common tasks better than common people; she was an excellent
cook, and she knew how to design and sew her own clothes. She prepared
the baby’s layette.

For a time Jacqueline continued to go out in town with a number of her
men friends, all of whom were in love with her, and some of whom would
certainly have been willing to marry her, even knowing that she was
pregnant. But when her condition became quite obvious, Jacqueline ceased
to see them; she didn’t want anyone’s pity. Actually, she slipped quite
easily into the role of the unmarried mother, taking a certain pleasure
in playing the courageous young woman, poor and abandoned. The family in
whose house she roomed was proud of her. The husband was a bit in love
with this pretty and unlucky little Frenchwoman. The ten-year-old son
secretly offered Jacqueline his ration of sweets, without saving a
single ticket for himself.

When the final month arrived, Jacqueline realized that she was really
going to have this baby, and that she alone would be responsible for it.
And then she began to be afraid. She had play-acted all her life. Now
suddenly the role she had been acting became terribly real; indeed, she
felt that with the child, the role would be beyond her.

The child came into the world in a hospital in London. Jacqueline told
us she would have liked to spend all her life in that hospital, for
there were nurses to take care of the baby and to bring food to the
mother; she had nothing to do, no worries. Everything was sure, simple,
and well-regulated. And in a few days, she knew she would have to
confront life, fight for the sustenance of her child, suffer for her
child, and she felt herself absolutely alone and entirely without force
in the face of this task.

All of us were struck with the little girl’s resemblance to Jacqueline;
she had her fresh complexion, her shining eyes, and her soft hair,
already quite long. Jacqueline looked as helpless as the baby. With her
finger, she opened the fist of her little girl, undoing it as one might
a delicate flower.

After ten days she left the hospital with her baby in her arms. A French
welfare worker accompanied her. The welfare organization had found a job
for her, and a family where the baby could be cared for.

But after a month we heard that Jacqueline had changed her job and found
another family to take care of the child. Bit by bit, the little girl
became the center of her life. Whenever we saw Jacqueline, she
complained that the baby wasn’t well enough cared for. And she wanted to
have her daughter with her all the time, instead of being able to see
her only once a week. Finally she placed the little girl in a day
nursery, but only to take her out and leave her with another family.
Despite all these changes, the child thrived.

Jacqueline was working in an office. Her job was utterly uninteresting,
and she earned very little. But there was an astonishing energy in
Jacqueline. After work she sewed clothes for herself and knitted for the
baby. She fixed her own dinner when she wasn’t going out with some of
us. She went to bed late and rose early.

A new fixation began to appear in her. She wanted to find a father for
her child. This was now her one idea. Jacqueline was determined to
return to France at the end of the war with a suitable father for her
little girl.

But this was not easy. Young officers took her out and treated her with
respect, as always, and talked to her of love, as always, but Jacqueline
now felt that not one of them wanted to marry her.

It was at this time that Jacqueline met John. I had been doing a good
deal of liaison work with the British, and now the American Information
Service people began to appear on the scene too. I was invited to a
reception for them, at which the guest of honor was to be the famous
English conductor John Wright, who was doing a good deal of cultural
propaganda work. I took Jacqueline along. She was excited, for she had
often seen his name on posters, and she had watched him conducting the
symphony at Albert Hall. He was a man of about fifty, tall, spare,
graying, and rather distant with people. His wife was at the reception,
but it was whispered that they had not lived together for years.

The guest of honor glanced toward Jacqueline. She gave him one of her
ravishing smiles, and they began to talk. His absorption in the
beautiful young Frenchwoman did not go unnoticed. A friend of mine told
me something I had not known: John Wright had been in love with a young
French girl, who had recently died. She had had just such a ravishing
smile.

All that evening they remained together. Wright’s wife was flirting in
another corner of the room.

“What did you talk about?” I asked Jacqueline on the way home. She said,
almost reverently, that John Wright had talked to her of the girl he had
loved and so tragically lost.

“I _must_ see him again,” Jacqueline said.

I remembered De Prade. She was deciding again that a man, this man, had
to love her.

                   *       *       *       *       *

One day tickets for a concert at Albert Hall were passed out at the
barracks, and Ursula and Mickey and I went together. Mickey’s husband
was away on maneuvers in Scotland, and was to be absent all week.

It was a beautiful warm day. Once more it was summer. We had been
permitted to remove our jackets and to roll up the sleeves of our
shirts. On the grass in the park, ATS girls were stretched out beside
their soldiers. And again there had been no second front in Europe. No
one was even disappointed any more, for everyone had got used to
disappointments.

Actually, Mickey preferred jazz to any other music, and classical music
generally bored her. But she had come along because in Peter’s absence
she had nothing to do, and this had seemed to her as good a way as any
of passing the afternoon.

At the intermission, we suddenly heard ourselves called. “Tereska!
Mickey! Ursula!” We looked toward the boxes and saw the smiling face of
Jacqueline. She was signaling to us. We had lost track of her the last
few weeks. Now we hurried to her, delighted to see her again. And we
found, instead of poor unlucky Jacqueline, an extremely elegant young
woman, as fresh and pretty as ever.

She wore high-heeled shoes, which made her seem taller, and her hair was
bleached and worn shoulder-length, à la Veronica Lake. Breathlessly
Jacqueline demanded, “How did you like John Wright? Isn’t he
extraordinary?”

Then I remembered the party. So there had been developments.

People came into the box, kissing Jacqueline’s hand and congratulating
her. “Jacqueline, he was astonishing!”

Ursula stared at this new Jacqueline, who looked so triumphant and
happy. Mickey said, “Do you know John Wright?”

“I’m his secretary,” answered Jacqueline, with a particularly glowing
smile for me.

We asked her about her little girl, and she talked of her daughter as
though she were the only beautiful and intelligent baby in the world.
The baby lived with her at Wright’s house in Surrey. She had a nurse,
who was, of course, the best nurse in all London.

After the concert, Wright came to the box. There was something at once
brusque and timid in his manner, but when he looked at Jacqueline his
expression softened. He scarcely spoke. We all went out through the
stage door so as to avoid the crowd, and Jacqueline invited us to come
and spend the weekend in Surrey.

“I didn’t know she was John Wright’s mistress,” said Mickey when we had
left them.

“But how do you know she’s his mistress?” Ursula asked, astonished. She
would never be able to divine relationships of this sort. “Jacqueline
said she was his secretary.”

“His secretary night and day,” Mickey said, laughing.

Ursula managed a small smile. “Well, at last she looks happy,” she said
uncertainly.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In the car that carried them to Surrey, Jacqueline pressed herself
against John. She closed her eyes. Yes, she was happy. She was in a
beautiful car that was carrying her toward a house in the midst of a
lovely garden, and in the house was her well-cared-for child, waiting
for her. She was John’s mistress, and all the world was attentive to
her. John said he was going to introduce her to his friends in the
theatrical world, and that she would certainly become a great actress.
Everything in life had become so easy, thanks to him. She was proud of
him, and proud also of the role that she played at his side.

Jacqueline studied John’s face. His hair was almost white. Her father
would have been exactly John’s age. And John had given her what a father
gives to his child: security.

De Prade had given her passion, and this had hurt her; and then he had
left her. But to John she owed nothing but joy. He was nevertheless a
strange man, rather unsociable. He didn’t like people, and he preferred
the solitude of his home in Surrey. But Jacqueline told herself that she
would succeed little by little in taming him. After all, he was an
artist, a genius, and therefore he had a right to his idiosyncrasies.

John spent all his days working. In the evenings, Jacqueline would come
and sit on a stool at his feet. She had told him all about the death of
her father, her mother’s second marriage, the advances of her
stepfather, her broken engagement, the war, her attempt at suicide, the
hospital, De Prade, the baby, her solitude, her struggle for life. John
stroked her face and told her, “It’s over now. You shall never suffer
again, my dear. You are with me. Don’t worry about anything.”

Long afterward, she told me that their sexual contacts were quite rare.
John didn’t seem to feel frequent sexual needs, and Jacqueline didn’t
really care for the physical side of love. With De Prade she had
experienced the joy of having conquered, nothing more. And physical
love-making had always seemed a sort of degradation to her. She felt
flattered that John loved her “without that.” For “that” was the
barracks, the sailors, girls who came home drunk, Ginette and her
lovers, everything that was coarse. John gave her music, art,
sensitivity, the beauty of this house, and that sufficed.

She knew that there would be no marriage. John had told her that he
would never get a divorce. Jacqueline knew this, but she didn’t believe
it. Nothing had ever withstood her will; whatever she wanted she could
obtain, even though she had to pay dearly. And she wanted to marry John,
she wanted John to adopt her little girl, she wanted to re-enter France,
her head high, with her husband and her child, and with no one knowing
anything of what had happened to her.

As she fell asleep that night, Jacqueline thought of us, her friends
from the barracks. She was glad to have seen us again. We were her best
friends from Down Street, and besides, we were sure to tell everybody at
the barracks that she was the mistress of a famous man, and that she was
rich and happy. She smiled in the dark. At last she had her revenge on
life. She no longer needed anyone, and everybody would know it. She
decided to invite us to dinner.

Yes, everything was simple now, and she was happy.




                               CHAPTER 33


There were many new recruits, and the dormitories were full. In the
Virgins’ Room, Monique, our chemistry student, finished reading a
passionately exciting chapter on enzymes, without hearing what was going
on around her. Ursula took a last look, to be sure that her bed was
properly made, and went down to her place at the little table in the
hallway. She opened the registry to write down our names as we left the
barracks.

Claude was not at the switchboard that day, as it was her day of leave,
and Ursula was glad of it. Claude had become increasingly irritable of
late, seeing nothing but enemies all about her, and it had become quite
exhausting to listen to the endless repetitions of her quarrels.

Little by little the house emptied itself. Women came to scrub the hall;
they were newcomers, passing their first weeks in taking care of the
barracks. A corporal went by, and managed to find an excuse for making
them redo the hall, which she considered badly scrubbed. One of the new
recruits objected, and the corporal pierced her with a black look and a
few well-chosen words.

Ursula recalled her first days in Down Street, three years ago, when she
had been so proud of this uniform and had felt that she was surely going
to help save France.

Did she still think so? At bottom, yes. She had not yet lost all of her
illusions. She realized that most of us no longer believed we were being
useful to our country by living in Down Street. And yet we all still
believed that after the war everything would change, that the golden age
would begin, and that there would be love between nations. The traitors
would be punished, the collaborators would receive their due, the United
Nations would be created, there would be a world government. New
leaders, utterly pure, would emerge from the resistance—that at least
was certain. Just as certain as the abundance of oranges and bananas and
eggs and milk that one would find again. Ursula closed her eyes and
deliciously recalled the distant taste of an orange. A beautiful orange,
juicy, perfumed, and sweet.

She was sitting like that with her eyes closed when she heard herself
called. “Good morning, Ursula.” She opened her eyes.

Just as on that first occasion three years ago, Michel was standing in
front of her, with his slightly astonished look, his round face, his
full mouth.

“Michel!” cried Ursula joyfully, and she jumped up, reaching her hand to
him. An immense happiness flooded her. Michel had returned. Michel was
found again.

Michel remembered everyone’s name; he asked for news of Mickey, of
Claude, of Jacqueline. As for him, he had been in Scotland all this
time; now he was stationed in London again, and the Army was giving him
free time to attend courses at the university. He was a corporal, he
informed her, showing his stripes laughingly.

“Can you come to dinner with me tonight?” Michel asked.

It seemed to Ursula that everything had become the same as before. Once
again she would ask for an eleven-thirty pass, she would go to dine in a
little restaurant in Soho with Michel, and he would talk very little.
She still knew little about him; but there was one difference—Michel had
been so often in her thoughts that he now seemed close to her, and it
was almost as though she were recovering a part of her childhood.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Evening came. Ursula found herself facing Michel over a little
oilcloth-covered table. Michel spoke more freely than he had before.
Suddenly Ursula too had a great deal to say. And it seemed to her now
that Michel’s replies were real replies. She asked him whether he
believed in God. Michel hesitated for a second, and then said yes. He
didn’t make any imposing speeches, he had the same soft voice, and his
eyes were as calm and sad as ever under their look of astonishment, but
it became clear that he was interested in a great number of matters
about which Ursula had never before thought him concerned.

Michel too believed in the reconstruction of the world after the war and
in the United Nations, and when it was Michel who spoke of these things
all doubt seemed truly impossible.

Ursula asked him where his parents lived now, and Michel said, “In
Palestine.” After the war, he said, he would join them there.

Ursula listened with passionate interest as Michel spoke of life in
Palestine. It was something new and strange, for she had always believed
that Jews were all either shopkeepers or intellectuals, and now it
seemed that in Palestine most of them were farmers living a communal
life. After the war, Michel said, there would be a new Jewish state in
Palestine.

When Ursula told me about all this, there was one thing that appeared to
have touched her most. Michel spoke to her as an adult, she said, as a
person with whom one could discuss anything at all, and Ursula felt
proud that so intelligent a young man should consider her worthy of
listening to all his ideas and projects. She was happy that Michel
didn’t resent her because of that other time when she had run away, and
she was glad that he didn’t speak of it.

He took her home to Down Street and said good night, lifting his black
eyes toward her, profound and filled with gentleness.

Suddenly Ursula recalled her early days in Down Street, her disgust at
all the vulgarity in the house, and she recalled her life during these
last three years, with all its sordid aspects. There was the fireside
scene with Claude and Mickey, and her experience with Philippe, and her
fear of not being normal, and there were the gray days under the demonic
smile of the Ambassador of Peru. She remembered one night when she had
come home and plunged her face in the washbasin, trying to wash
everything from it as though she could wash away all her shame of being
human, while so undeserving of humanity.

This evening, for no reason at all, it seemed to her that all that had
been effaced.




                               CHAPTER 34


Jacqueline came to Down Street to take Ursula and me out to dinner on an
evening when John was away giving a concert. She emerged from a taxi,
carrying a little white dog in her arms. Jacqueline gazed upon the house
where she had scrubbed floors, peeled vegetables, and accepted the
scoldings of her superiors. At last she was free of it! If she wished,
she could stick out her tongue to the Captain. She was free, she was
wealthy, she was almost married to John.

In the cab, she told us that John was being asked by the government to
undertake a month’s propaganda tour in Canada. He would leave soon to
conduct a series of concerts for hospitalized veterans. Jacqueline was
proud of his mission, of his talent, of his glory, but at the same time
she was afraid for him. Perhaps at bottom her fear was not for him but
for herself. Her happiness was so new that she still could not believe
in it; it seemed to her that it was too wonderful to last. A month was
so long a time, and John would be far away from her, among other women
just as beautiful, even more beautiful than she. Jacqueline smiled in
joy over John’s glory, but also trembled in fear. Since she could not
prevent his leaving, she was busy weaving bonds to assure his return,
attaching him to her by a thousand threads. Jacqueline showed us a
sketch for a tombstone that she was designing to be placed over the
grave of the little French girl whom John had loved before he knew her.
During his month of absence, she intended to have this monument built
and the grave arranged. It would all be finished just in time for John’s
return; the dead one would help the living one to draw him back to
England.

Was this, at last, love? I wondered. Would I ever love anyone the way
Jacqueline loved John Wright?

Did love have to contain this exigence, this ferocity? Would I someday
be like Jacqueline, in terror of losing a man? Could you have such
ruthlessness toward another person, if you really loved him? Could you
accept any means at all, so long as they held him bound to you? Perhaps
it had to be so. Perhaps that was what one didn’t understand above love,
until the experience came.

I tried to compare Jacqueline’s feeling to other loves I had witnessed.
Ursula had loved. What she had felt for Claude was love. But it had not
been so possessive. And I wondered whether what was slowly happening
between Ursula and Michel was love. I hoped it was; I wished it for my
sake as well as theirs, for I would feel so much safer if I knew that
love didn’t have to be like it was with Jacqueline.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Jacqueline ordered a meal for her dog, and the waiter solemnly served it
alongside our table. She talked about her infant daughter, who now
called her “Mamma,” and called John “Papa,” and could stand erect, and
was already trying to take her first steps. Jacqueline still talked as
though hers were the only beautiful and intelligent child in the world,
and this irritated me, though it was touching at the same time.

Ursula said to Jacqueline, “You remember Michel, the young Polish
soldier I used to see, about three years ago? He’s back in London again.
I had dinner with him.”

“Oh, yes?” said Jacqueline politely, obviously not remembering him at
all.

“He told me the most amazing things about Palestine. He’s going there
after the war.”

“Oh, yes?” said Jacqueline again. “He’s a Jew?”

It was obvious to both of us that she had no further interest in
Ursula’s friend Michel; her thoughts went no further than John, his
fame, his connections. And somehow, when she said, “He’s a Jew?” it had
been just like slapping Michel.

I thought, for a moment, of saying something. But Ursula was sitting
quite erect, looking at Jacqueline with a maturity and self-sufficiency
that I had never before seen in her. I thought of Michel’s calm round
face, and realized what Ursula must have been feeling—that Michel didn’t
need to be defended before anyone.

After dinner we went to a movie in Leicester Square. Jacqueline insisted
on paying for everything, playing the bountiful lady. This was her
latest role, and there was something truly touching in her need for
people’s admiring surprise.

As we entered the theatre we heard someone call Ursula’s name. We all
turned, and there was Michel. We stood in the lobby talking a few
minutes, and Ursula prodded him with leading questions, drawing him out,
showing him off. Michel still spoke with diffidence, but nevertheless it
could be seen that Jacqueline was impressed by his intelligence.

Two Polish soldiers entered the lobby and recognized Michel. Their faces
brightened, and they hailed him joyfully. They seemed delighted at
having run into him. It was somehow surprising; one would not have
thought that Michel would be popular among the ranks.

When the two soldiers moved off, Jacqueline leaned toward Michel and
said with her seductive air, “Ursula says you’re planning to go to
Palestine?”

There was obviously no subject she could have mentioned that would have
pleased Michel more. His eyes grew animated as he described the
collective villages of Palestine.

Jacqueline said, “But I never heard of anything like that. It sounds
wonderful. And you’ll live like that?”

Michel said, “Yes.” Then he blushed and added, “If I’m still alive at
the end of the war.”

We went on into the darkened theatre then, Michel still with us. We were
seeing _For Whom the Bell Tolls_.

At one moment I looked at the rows of people with their eyes fixed on
the screen, their faces lighted by the projection, and somehow the whole
scene seemed unreal, as though all of us sitting there were part of some
film. It was an odd sensation, and I mentioned it to Ursula later that
night as we were getting ready for bed.

“I know,” Ursula said. “I’ve sometimes felt that way too. Sometimes it
seems as if every last one of us were playing a part.” She sighed. “I
wonder if I’ll ever learn how to play mine.”




                               CHAPTER 35


During John’s absence, Jacqueline often came to take us out—sometimes
Ursula, Mickey, and me together, sometimes one or the other of us alone.
Mickey was with us a good deal in those days, as her husband had
suddenly been sent off on a secret mission. She had no news of him. She
continued to live in their little apartment, coming to the barracks only
on payday and when it was absolutely necessary to appear at drill.

She had set her heart on the idea that her husband would be back for
Christmas. There was a sort of childish hope in her that just because it
was Christmas, Peter had to appear.

But Christmas passed, as did New Year’s Day of 1944. Peter didn’t come
back. But one evening a tall blond young man came knocking on Mickey’s
door, and told her that her husband was in good health, and sent her a
kiss. He said nothing else, and disappeared.

Michel went out often with our little band of women, and sometimes Ann
came along, too. It was strange that after our four years of life
together, it was Michel who finally became a sort of core around which
the little group formed. Before Michel’s advent, we had passed entire
years together, and yet each of us always felt isolated in loneliness.
Now we became a group of close comrades revolving around Michel. Each of
us was extremely fond of him, even Ann. None of us—not even Ursula, as
yet—was in love with him, and yet each of us loved him. Ann loved him as
a wonderfully understanding friend. For Jacqueline he was a revelation—a
restful friendship. Mickey loved him as she loved everybody, except that
for Michel she had a kind of respect that she rarely had for anyone
else, even though she sometimes laughed at what she called his Utopian
ideas. I loved him as one of the few truly good people I had ever known
in my life—good in the sense that he could do no harm to anyone. As for
Ursula, she loved Michel as her salvation. It seemed to her that he had
come back into her life to save her, and that without him she was lost.

Michel was good-humored, even gay, and yet he still retained the
calmness and timidity that had been his chief characteristic three years
before. He went to a great deal of trouble to give us pleasure, hunting
out books that I wanted, finding works on music for Jacqueline, taking
Ursula to the movies, reassuring Mickey about her husband. He navigated
in Ann’s Lesbian circles with composure and naturalness, and he had
become acquainted with Claude, who adored him, kissing him on the cheeks
and calling him her little boy.

He spoke as little as always, but never was mistaken in his judgment of
people. He never permitted himself to be overwhelmed by a personality,
and never let anyone throw sand in his eyes. If Claude began to tell
some extravagant tale that she herself had ended in believing, Michel
simply looked at her with his large astonished eyes, without saying a
word, and suddenly Claude would stop her recitation.

I sometimes watched him leaving Down Street with Mickey, Jacqueline, and
Ursula. He had the air of being equally fond of all three of them. This
was probably the secret of his ability to keep us all together, for he
never flirted. For some of us this was a surprise; for all of us it was
pleasing, since it was a change from the wartime compulsion that seemed
to possess every other man around us. I think that Jacqueline felt a
little vexed at the beginning, used as she was to the immediate and
complete worship of every man she met. But afterward she found that it
was, on the contrary, rather restful to go out with Michel. With him,
one could be natural; there was no part to play.

                   *       *       *       *       *

On the eve of John Wright’s return, Jacqueline took a train to meet him,
for the airfield where he was to arrive was some distance from London.
She had had a new dress made. It was of black silk, cut in a low circle
around her shoulders, and it brought out the fresh tones of her delicate
skin and set off her shining hair. She was breath-takingly lovely. A
young officer in the train began to talk to her, devouring her with his
eyes.

Jacqueline was so happy over John’s return that she even told the
stranger whom she was going to meet, and that she was his fiancée. She
wanted to shout from the rooftops, “John is coming!”

The young officer asked her if she could get him an autographed photo of
John Wright, and Jacqueline promised to send him one as soon as they had
returned to London.

Each of these details she remembered later, for each detail became
invested with a final significance.

She daydreamed of John, of his handsome lined face, of that savage
quality that always seemed to hover about him. Now their life together
was really going to begin. It was impossible that John should not marry
her. She was certain that he loved her, and now her little girl would
have a father in him, a father as fine as De Prade himself.

Before John’s departure, he had left a letter for her, “My dearest,” he
wrote, “if you only knew how much I love you! You have given me back the
joy of life. I want you to be happy always. You shall never again want
for anything. I shall watch over you, my love, as long as I live. You
are my joy.” In the train, Jacqueline reread all these wonderful words.

His plane was to arrive the following morning. She spent the night in a
hotel, and took a taxi to the airfield in the morning.

Everyone smiled at her. Everyone knew that this beautiful young woman
was waiting for the great orchestra conductor John Wright.

Beyond that, Jacqueline remembered nothing.

                   *       *       *       *       *

She saw herself again, waiting in the comfortable little room from which
one could see the planes landing.

And then she had found herself in a bed in a hospital. Her head ached,
and she could no longer remember anything. But little by little a
certainty arose from the depths of her body, a certainty that all was
finished, that John was dead.

A doctor came to see her for a hurried moment; he told her that she was
young, that she would get over her shock. Jacqueline asked for the
newspapers. Perhaps there was still hope. But the debris of the plane
had been found at sea, near the shore, and the bodies were scattered and
unidentifiable.

Jacqueline returned to London. She didn’t go to the house in Surrey, but
cut her wrists in the ladies’ room of a large department store.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Once more we found her in a hospital. Ursula, Mickey, and I went
together to see her. Our presence seemed to help her. We tried to remind
her that she still had her little girl, but even as we said it we knew
that for Jacqueline it was not enough.

I wondered at the strange fate that seemed to hover over her, bringing
repeated disaster, as though some monstrous doom insisted that she pay
for her beauty, her charm, her aristocratic background. I felt ashamed
that I had sometimes been irritated by her ingrained attitude of
superiority. It was only the effect of breeding; she had suffered as
much as we had, perhaps more than any of us.

The little house in Surrey was sold by John’s wife, and Jacqueline found
a job in an office. Once more she placed her little daughter with a
family. Jacqueline began to do her own cooking again, and to sew her own
clothes, and to get up early in the morning. She went out almost every
evening. John was dead, and again she needed a father for her little
girl. She would find one, for she was still the ravishing Jacqueline.




                               CHAPTER 36


Our little group formed more firmly around Michel. To all of us Michel
represented the future, in a way. He was the future already present. And
in a way he represented God. None of us was particularly religious, nor
was Michel religious, but he carried within himself a God whose presence
we all felt, and this was precisely the God of whom we had need. It
wasn’t a particular deity with a form delineated by any religion. It was
rather an open way that made hope possible.

Michel never really entered into discussions with us. The girls didn’t
like intellectual discussions. But in the assembly hall in Down Street
he had long talks with the chemistry student, Monique. Monique was just
twenty years old, like Michel. She was dark, pretty, and serious. She
had passed these years in the refuge of her books, entirely impervious
to the atmosphere of Down Street. With her, Michel talked about the
world of the future and about religion. But in general it was Michel who
asked the questions.

Ursula liked to sit by and listen to them. For the first time in her
life she felt the need of knowledge. It seemed to her that she had come
into the barracks as an absolute child, and the barracks walls had
closed around her. But now the world was opening and she could see the
future appearing.

Since her acquaintance with Michel, Ursula had greatly changed. Little
by little, she had ceased to be a child. She ripened, and sometimes
assumed feminine airs, which suited her very well. She told me she had
decided that after the war, even though she was not Jewish, she would go
to Palestine with Michel. The moment she was offered an ideal, Ursula
seized upon it as though her entire being had awaited nothing else.

She was at last freed from her sentinel’s post at the barracks, only to
fill a similar post at one of the Free French headquarters. I too had
had a change of assignment, and now spent most of my time with the
Americans, at a newsroom that their Office of War Information had
installed in London. I was meeting many new people, and it was there
that I eventually was to meet my future husband.

Each day, when Ursula’s duties ended, she met Michel. At the time,
Michel was working in an office in the Polish GHQ in London.

By this time Ursula had begun to talk more freely to Michel, and one
evening, a little to her horror, she found herself speaking of her
experience with Claude. She told him everything then—her passion, her
suffering, her fear of not being normal. She told him too about
Philippe.

Michel reassured her. The affair with Claude didn’t seem to shock him,
nor the experience with Philippe. He took Ursula’s hand in his, and with
an awkward gesture plunged both their hands into the large pocket of his
coat.

They went regularly now to dine at Rose’s, or in a little Italian
restaurant in Soho, and sometimes Michel would take Ursula to the zoo,
and they would amuse themselves like children.

About that time a whole group of us got into the habit of going out on
bicycle trips in the environs of London on Sundays. We girls had all
purchased secondhand bicycles, prehistoric machines upon which we were
perched at vertiginous heights. Michel borrowed a bicycle from a friend,
and we took along bread, cheese, and apples.

One Sunday most of us had dates in town, and Ursula alone left for a
bicycle trip with Michel. It rained all day, a thin, acidulous little
rain that drowned the countryside. Ursula laughed, raising her face to
the rain. She was happy just to be alone with Michel.

Toward four o’clock they arrived in front of a little inn that seemed,
as she described it to me, to have appeared out of a fairy tale.

“It’s from the story of the witch who had a gingerbread house,” Michel
said. The roof was thatched, all shining with rain, and just beneath the
roof the little windows seemed to peer at them with secret cunning.

In front of a log fire, the two grown-up children were served an English
tea. There was no sugar, but there were hot buns and marmalade.

There was no more war. They were two young children who had taken refuge
in the forest, far from the rain, far from the night, encircled in
warmth and joy. Michel studied Ursula’s pure face. Life had not touched
her at all; everything had slipped from her as the rain from the
thatched roof. She was still the same little girl who had opened the
door on that night of the dance, when she had slipped outside to take
refuge from the world. A little girl without a past, and with no
knowledge of anything. She was like himself, she knew nothing, and he
had no fear of her. One day he could take her in his arms and keep her.
He had kissed her once, and she had fled; but that had been some years
ago, and then there had been Claude. He had even then suspected
something of the sort, but he had not been sure. But now Ursula had told
him everything, and Claude was no longer a danger.

He looked at her and was filled with a terrible desire for life.
Suddenly Michel wanted to live. Yes, why shouldn’t he claim her, and
afterward take her to Palestine? Everything was possible! There was a
whole world to rebuild! He could not die.

Ursula returned Michel’s gaze. She too was happy, and she knew that this
happiness and peace were in being with Michel. Then quite simply the
words came from her: “How good it is here, Michel! I’m so happy! I
believe it’s because I love you.” Then she halted indecisively, still
looking at him.

He arose, and together they went to the window. Outdoors the rain
continued to fall. Michel encircled her with his arms and kissed her on
the cheek. He held her pressed against him. They were exactly the same
height, like two children. He told her, “I have nothing to give you,
neither a home nor security nor a future.” But Ursula had never had any
of these. His words made her laugh. Then she saw that Michel’s eyes were
filled with tears. She placed her thin arms around his neck and kissed
him gently on the lips. Ursula had weekend leave until Monday. It seemed
quite simple and normal to them to spend the night at the inn.

The bed was wide and very high, with a thick red eiderdown cover. This
was a new experience for Michel as well as for Ursula, and both of them
were a little afraid. They pressed close to one another and were somehow
reassured in sensing each other’s fear. After all, it was neither so
terrible nor so difficult. Ursula suddenly thought of Philippe, and an
infinite thankfulness rose in her because he had left her for Michel.

They fell asleep and then awoke, and this time their bodies were already
acquainted with each other. The discovery had begun. It was still rather
awkward and slow because they were deeply moved, frightened, and happy.
But everything was so normal, so wonderfully and utterly normal, coming
out of these mad years.

Now they were two together and the war was going to end.

They were the future.




                               CHAPTER 37


These were the days of the V-1, Hitler’s “secret weapon.” First one
heard something like the rattling of a plane, but with a difference. The
first time we heard it we leaned out of the windows at Down Street,
looking at the sky. In the distance we saw a small black point, coming
rapidly forward. It passed overhead, and everyone thought, If the noise
stops, it will fall on us. But the noise continued, and the fatal little
machine went on its way. Farther on we saw it suddenly halt, and the
noise stopped, and the V-1 plunged toward the ground. We heard a distant
explosion.

Panic was great in London. After the blitz, after four years of war,
people’s nerves were not in very good condition. They grew wild with
fear. As soon as an alarm sounded, one could see the crowds running in
the street, people plunging into the subways, into the shelters, mothers
seizing their children in their arms. Even the dogs howled. At the zoo,
as soon as the noise of an approaching V-1 was heard, the monkeys
screamed in terror and jumped around in their cages.

The universal terror arose first from the propaganda that had preceded
the secret weapon, and then from the feeling that nothing could be done
against it, that there was no defense.

The V-1’s caused a great deal of damage—almost as much as had been
caused by the blitz. But this time there was a difference. The seat of
destruction was moved, and it was the elegant streets that were
affected, particularly in the Kensington district and in the area around
Hyde Park. Every day I saw more houses in ruins.

Once more there was an exodus to the country. Many of the children who
had come back after the blitz were again evacuated. The railway stations
were crowded, and people climbed into the trains by the windows.

There was a high increase of nighttime subway occupants. As during the
great blitz of 1940, entire families slept underground and on the
stairways of the stations, clutching their most precious possessions,
which they carried along with them every night in battered old
suitcases.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Michel and Ursula had requested permission to be married. As they were
both under twenty-one, they had to secure not only the permission of
their superiors but the consent of their parents. Michel wrote to his,
in Palestine, and Ursula asked Claude to write a letter that she could
enclose with her own to her mother in America. It was a year since she
had written to her mother, and she had only an old uncertain address.
Her father was in China and she did not know his address at all.

Claude wrote a wonderful letter; she spoke of loving Ursula as her own
daughter, and declared that she knew Michel as a serious and intelligent
young man. She said that she herself was old enough to be their mother,
and believed that neither one of them could have made a better choice.

Michel and Ursula went together to post their letters, and then hand in
hand they walked through the foggy London streets. It was the end of
February. The weather was cold and damp. Ursula and Michel wore huge
khaki coats of the same sort; the garments gave them an awkward air.

After four years of military service, Ursula had finally received her
stripes as a first-class private. This had come so late that she could
not even take pleasure in it. Michel was a sergeant. In the mornings he
worked in a Polish headquarters office, and in the afternoons attended
lectures at the university. This was an exceptional privilege, which his
colonel had managed to secure by reporting him as an outstanding young
man of special intelligence and gifts. But Michel had consented to
accept this arrangement only on condition that he would be sent to the
front with the others as soon as there was an invasion.

Our little group continued to revolve around Michel. Everyone had faith
in him. Claude said, “Michel will certainly become someone very
exceptional after the war.”

And though no one knew quite why, everyone had this impression. Michel
himself was outwardly the same as ever—reticent and utterly unassuming.
No one knew him at bottom, not even Ursula.

And yet, since she had come to love Michel, she had been seized with a
desire for knowledge. She wanted to read, to study. She asked Michel to
tell her about socialism, Marxism, about anti-Semitism and about
religion. A world had opened; she was no longer a child. The world was
filled with unanswered questions. And her love had given her a kind of
optimism. Now, it was worth while to study.

One day when we were out with Michel, Jacqueline said to him, “Since
I’ve known you I’ve come to like the Jews. I never did before.”

Michel, smiling his sad serious smile, replied, “That won’t solve the
Jewish question.”

Then Ursula asked, “What will, Michel?”

He replied, “Perhaps a Jewish government in Palestine. In any case,
first a normal country, a normal government in Palestine.”

“And afterward?” Ursula insisted.

Michel laughed. “Afterward a world government of all people. Otherwise
there will always be wars.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Jacqueline had become acquainted with a very rich and rather stupid
young Englishman whom she dragged with her wherever she went. He seemed
to be very much in love with her. Jacqueline would watch him with her
sparkling eyes, always smiling as she looked at him, but behind her
smile one felt her powerful will, as tenacious as ever, and stronger
than anything else between them. What did this young man matter to her,
so long as he might one day accept her child as his own? She never spoke
of De Prade or of John. But something indefinable, a sort of hard
shadow, often passed over her pretty face.




                               CHAPTER 38


At the beginning of April Michel received a long letter from his
parents, saying that they were happy that he had chosen a bride, and
blessing the young people. They said that in Palestine everything was in
flower, that the orange season was drawing to a close, that the heat
would soon begin, and that several new communes had been established.

Everything was calm in Tel Aviv, they said, and they were going to
enlarge the house for the reception of Michel and his bride. Just
outside their windows, the young couple would have a large veranda, so
that they could sleep outdoors in the summer.

His parents had enclosed an official letter in English authorizing their
son, Michel Levy, to marry Mlle Ursula Martin.

The letter to Ursula’s mother came back marked “Unknown at this
address,” and Ursula sent a second letter to another address in
California that she had found among her papers. They were waiting only
for this response before beginning their formalities at the consulates,
their respective armies, and the registration office.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Michel had a tiny room in the city, a cubbyhole filled with books.
Ursula often went to meet him there. But sometimes, while he was waiting
for her, he would fall prey to his pessimistic moods. Once all three of
us had a rendezvous there, and I arrived a little before Ursula to find
him looking strangely depressed. That time he overcame his reticence,
and talked to me. Sometimes, he said, when he was waiting for Ursula, he
couldn’t help asking himself, What’s the good of all this? What use is
it to study and to get a degree, what use to dream of marriage, when
after all nothing in the world has changed? Have I found any answer—the
answer that I sought in Switzerland? Men are still fighting like idiots,
and there is no end to the war. And after the war, what will be the
answer? What’s the use of going around in circles, and even of trying to
construct something? What’s the use of all that, if it’s only in a world
of hatred and destructiveness? One might as well die and be done with
it.

It seemed to me that the God in whom he trusted so obscurely, and whose
face he had never seen, was perhaps rather a yearning in his spirit than
a belief.

He thought of Ursula and wanted to weep over her, for she was so young,
and so hungry for love, and for knowledge, and for happiness. What did
he have to give her? He thought of Ursula’s friends. He thought of all
of us—young women in search of love and of happiness, and in the end,
what could we have? What hope was there for us in a world bent on
self-destruction?

And yet, he said, none of us made great demands. What strange confidence
we had in this life that ceaselessly deceived us! For we wanted to live,
and we were satisfied with our little ersatz loves and with our few
years of difficult life, which would in the end lead only to death. And
then our children would begin the whole thing all over again.

Yes, Michel was very young, and pessimistic sometimes to the point of
melancholy. I thought at the time that, like all of us, he would grow
less heavyhearted with age. But his pessimism was more profound than the
general unhappiness of the young in the face of mankind’s inhumanity. “I
am a hypocrite,” Michel declared. “I ought to cry out the truth, tell
all of you what I really think, tell everyone of my inner despair. Of
what use is it that I, too, should lie to you, and Ursula, and Mickey,
and Jacqueline? Instead of saying what is true, I talk to you about the
future, about love, about reconstruction and peace, when I don’t really
believe in that at all. And you have faith in me. It’s shameful.

“If there were only a man, a man like Christ,” he cried out. “If only
once more there would be such a miracle, that a man would rise up and
speak to the multitude as Christ had spoken! But even that—what use
would it be?”

Christ had spoken and his disciples had betrayed him and his church had
been betraying him for centuries, and his brethren the Jews would not
even recognize him as one of their own, as their greatest teacher. And
all this too was part of the immense comedy that had been playing in the
world since time immemorial.

Michel felt that he had no right to deceive Ursula about his inner
beliefs, and yet he loved her, he wanted her to be happy. At least he
could give her a short while of happiness.

The evening arrived gently, stealing in through the window and covering
Michel’s books. There was a knock at the door, and Ursula entered,
looking at him with her limpid eyes. Michel took her in his arms,
pressing her against him.

I knew that this was somehow to protect himself as well as her, somehow
to keep himself from showing her his deepest bitterness. I knew too that
he drew force from her, against his wish for death. She said, “Michel,
Michel, I’m happy!”

He smiled gently, kissing her girlish round cheeks, caressing her long
glossy hair. In Ursula’s eyes I could read an elation that said, He can
do anything! He will do great things! And in Michel’s eyes there was the
effort of all humanity, it seemed to me, to try to live.

As I saw them together, something unknotted in me. I wanted to cry, and
at the same time I knew that I was healed of all the doubt and fear that
had come into me through these years of living in the barracks. Mickey’s
marriage had seemed to me to contain mostly the excitement of war. But
these were the pure in heart. I would no longer be ashamed of seeking
what was pure. I knew that someday I might hope to feel love like
theirs, and I could wait.




                               CHAPTER 39


The first of June brought a response from Ursula’s mother. It was a
strange, disconnected letter written in a disorderly handwriting,
nervous and irregular. She wished her daughter great happiness, and at
the same time warned her against marriage. Men were all egotists, she
said; they were all cruel and untrustworthy. As for herself, she was
quite ill, but she was feeling better since she had been seeing a noted
psychoanalyst. She described her luxurious life in California without
ever asking whether her daughter was in need of anything. In closing,
she said that she adored Ursula and was sure that she would be happy.
“But do be sensible, dear, and don’t have any children,” she added.

The next day, Michel submitted his marriage request to the Army.

On the morning of June third, he telephoned Ursula at the barracks. He
was at a railway station. He had just received his orders, and had to
leave within half an hour. He thought it was for maneuvers and that he
would be back in a week. He loved her and would write to her as soon as
he could.

Ursula was not particularly disconcerted by this sudden departure. She
was used to the ways of the Army, and counted on seeing Michel the
following week.

The weather was magnificent. At lunch hour our little group went to take
sun baths in Hyde Park. We rolled down our stockings, removed our ties,
and rolled up our shirt sleeves. Sheep moved among the trees, cropping
the grass. Ursula read to us from a book of poetry.

                   *       *       *       *       *

I had a very early errand in Mickey’s office. Uncle Henry was already
there, perspiring in huge drops before a pile of letters that he was
answering. As I waited for some documents, he received a steady
procession of visitors at an accelerating tempo, under the indifferent
eye of the sentry. From time to time an explosion was heard, but no one
paid any attention. It was only another V-2 (for now there were also
V-2’s). Everyone was buried in the daily routine and life was relatively
calm.

Suddenly there was a strange siren—one we had never heard before. A
red-faced lieutenant burst into the room. At the same moment we all
knew. We all cried out together, “They’ve landed!”

“In Normandy! At home!”

“The invasion!”

“They’ve landed!”

We had known in the last days that it was coming, and yet we had not
known, for we had known it for so many years. Uncle Henry’s face broke
out into a great grin of relief, and he sweated more profusely than
ever, for now at last he could confess that he had been in on the
secret—a few in our services had been briefed. The lieutenant pounded
him on the back. Mickey came in just then, late, with a dazed,
uncomprehending expression, and we all fell on her, hugging her.
“They’ve landed!”

It was an unforgettable day. When I went out, the English stopped me in
the street, shaking my hand and crying, “_Vive la France!_” People
walked with their faces radiant. French sailors crossed Piccadilly
singing. American soldiers bought rounds of drinks for the English, and
there was joy everywhere. The second front! The second front in which no
one had believed any more, so long awaited on both sides of the Channel.
Finally it was true! People were happy, as though the war were already
over.

In the street, people tore the newspapers out of each other’s hands.
When I got back to our newsroom I found everyone clustered around the
radio. The British and Americans were already advancing on the roads of
Brittany and Normandy. The Germans were in retreat. The Maquis was
fighting in the interior of France. The FFI had occupied German
barracks, and the population everywhere was in revolt.

I didn’t see Ursula until that evening. So this was why Michel had left
so quickly. Now we understood. Ursula was pale and nervous, but during
dinner in Down Street she, like everyone else, talked of nothing but the
invasion.

We realized that we would all soon be leaving to work with the Army,
driving trucks and helping in all sorts of tasks in makeshift
headquarters under the hazards of war. There was a general fever. Who
would be the lucky ones to be the first to leave? What would be their
jobs? Certain of the girls assumed airs of importance and whispered that
in their offices they had been promised immediate embarkation.

That night there was dancing in the barracks, and the noise became
intolerable. Finally some of us went up to the dormitories. Monique was
meticulously packing her suitcase so as to be ready to leave at an
instant’s notice. Ursula sat down on her bed and began to take off her
stockings. Suddenly she jumped up and went running out of the room.

Worried, I followed her to the bathroom, and found her throwing up her
entire dinner. I told her not to be worried, that it was the emotion of
the day. But Ursula looked at me with her large eyes and said quite
simply that she was going to have a baby. It was just the sort of news
to learn on this day!

Ursula had already suspected it for a week. That afternoon she had been
to see a doctor. He had told her that he could not yet be certain, but
that it was more than likely that she was pregnant.

I said all that I could find to say. That it was wonderful, and that she
should let Michel know right away, and perhaps he would be able to come
back on compassionate leave, and they could be married.




                               CHAPTER 40


Ursula received a postcard from Michel, sent from an English port before
his departure. It contained his new military address, to which Ursula
wrote every day.

In Down Street, packing cases were being hammered closed. Everyone was
preparing to leave, and some of the privileged had already left. Petit
was among the first to go, to serve as a liaison officer right at the
front. We now spent all our lives glued to the radio or scrutinizing the
newspapers.

We passed an agitated week. All of us were so unnerved that we quarreled
for no reason whatever. One felt that the Down Street period was coming
to an end.

At the Carleton Gardens headquarters, bags were being packed, files were
being burned, cases of documents were carried off. And every day
officers left to join the active forces, while the entire GHQ was
getting ready to move.

During the noon hour we all went to the newsreel theatre to see the
American tanks advancing on the roads of France. We watched our own
people, the people of France, throwing flowers to the Americans, and we
saw our villages in ruins.

                   *       *       *       *       *

About two weeks after the opening of the second front I happened to be
on Buckingham Road, passing the Polish headquarters, when I saw one of
Michel’s friends from the office to which he had been attached. The
young man said to me, “You know the news?”

I felt a sort of contraction in my heart, for the Polish soldier’s face
was grave.

“Michel was killed on the first day, during the landing. He got sixteen
bullets in him while he was running to help another fellow who was
wounded. His body was recovered. He’s buried there, at Falaise, in
Normandy.”

I could scarcely keep from bursting into tears right there in the middle
of the street. Ursula, poor Ursula! Poor Michel!

Once more I saw the round face, the great black eyes, the raised
questioning brows, and the small plump form of Michel in his heavy khaki
uniform. And I thought of all the things he had said to Ursula and
Mickey and Jacqueline and me, about the future, and reconstruction, and
the United Nations, the things he had not really believed in his heart.
So he had been right. There was really only death, all death.

Suddenly I thought again of Ursula and the baby. It was frightening.
What should be done? The Polish sergeant told me that a letter addressed
to Ursula had been found in Michel’s pocket, and that his chief had
received the letter and had just informed Down Street that morning.

I had an important errand and couldn’t get to the barracks. I had not
been there for lunch, and I was afraid that Ursula might have been there
and received the news. I hurried to Mickey’s office. When I told her
what had happened, she started to cry, soundlessly, weeping as we
telephoned Down Street to find out if Ursula had come in for lunch. The
sentry said no, and we concluded that Ursula could not yet have learned
about Michel. We had the rest of the day to think of some way to protect
her. We tried and tried to find a solution. It seemed to us that the
child would be the only safeguard. She would have Michel’s child to
raise. Yes, there would be the child, and that would be a help for
Ursula. It was life, it had to be accepted.

At the same time, we simply could not bring ourselves to believe that
the gentle Michel, the foe of all that was hateful, could have been
killed—not that particular boy, immediately, in the forefront of the
liberating army. Mickey said frantically that perhaps it was a mistake,
that he was a prisoner, that the news was false. I could see that she
had to doubt, she had to deceive herself, for if Michel were only the
beginning of the list, if Peter too....




                               CHAPTER 41


Ursula had come to lunch at the barracks, after all. The sentry had not
noticed her as she slipped in. Afterward, she, along with the rest of
us, had to piece together what had happened.

Immediately after lunch, our captain had called Ursula to her office.

The Captain spoke very considerately, and Ursula said nothing. She did
not cry. The Captain knew that she was to have married Michel, for the
marriage request had passed through her office. But like nearly everyone
else, she was ignorant of Ursula’s pregnancy.

Ursula was seated, her head lowered; her hair covered her face almost
entirely. Her hands tightly grasped her knees. The Captain told her to
cry, that it would do her good to let herself go, but Ursula didn’t
answer and she didn’t cry.

There was a long silence, and the Captain could think of nothing else to
do with this child whom she scarcely knew and with whom she had almost
no contact. She told Ursula that she could have a week’s leave, that she
didn’t have to report to her office, and that she could do whatever she
liked. The Captain spoke also of the war, of the hundreds of young men
sacrificing life and happiness that the world might be free of
oppression, that there might be no more concentration camps, no more
refugees on the roads, no more homeless, and no more blood spilled, so
that peace and friendship should reign between nations. She no doubt
said what everyone else would have said in her place.

When Ursula sensed that the Captain had finished, she rose and went out.
She seemed calm. The Captain reflected that the girl was quite young,
and that the sorrows of love are transitory.

Ursula went directly to the infirmary. No one was sick just then, and
the infirmary beds were vacant. Ursula quietly asked the nurse for some
aspirin.

While the nurse went to get the aspirin, Ursula reached out her hand and
took two vials of sleeping pills.

Then she went down to the kitchen in the basement. It was about three
o’clock, and no one was there. The kitchen was clean, with everything in
order. Machou was in town, as were her assistants, for they were always
at liberty between two and five o’clock.

Ursula went to the cupboard, took a mug, went to the sink, poured water
into it, and then emptied the contents of the two vials into the water.
She took a spoon from a drawer and crushed the pills until they formed a
white powder that floated in the water like a cloud in the sky.

Ursula must have gone about her task methodically, as if it were only
one more of her duties, one more thing that she had to do; for she left
no disorder behind her when she finished her bitter drink. There was
only the mug on the table, with the spoon beside it, and a little of the
white powder at the bottom of the mug.

She went upstairs to the Virgins’ Room. How long she remained alone
there no one knows. We know she was there, and that she must have been
very calm, for afterward we found all her things neatly arranged
together on her bed, as though she wanted to make everything as easy as
she could for those of us she was leaving. Everything must have seemed
quite natural and normal to her. Her life had begun with Michel, and now
she was ending it with him. The future was already dead.

When she left the barracks, she slipped out by the kitchen door, so as
not to have to pass before the table at the entrance, where she herself
had so often sat guard.

After having telephoned the barracks, Mickey and I felt a momentary
reprieve. We decided to get in touch with Ann, to help us break the news
to Ursula. Ann was one of the most capable girls in the barracks, and we
believed that her presence would have a steadying effect.

I had to hurry to my office. I was able to telephone Ann during the
afternoon. She took the news in her quiet, strong way, and saw at once
that we would have to help Ursula support the shock. As I sometimes had
to remain late at my office, Ann promised to be at the barracks before
Ursula might receive the news from the Captain.

                   *       *       *       *       *

All afternoon Mickey was worried and heartsick. It was almost as though
the tragedy were her own, as though it were Peter who had been cut down.
She had intended to meet Ann at the barracks after work, to be with
Ursula, but instead she hurried to her little flat, with the panicky
feeling that she would find some message there, some news of Peter. As
Mickey hurried along, a young English aviator fell in beside her. “_Bon
jour, mademoiselle._”

Mickey gave him an automatic smile, and then walked on faster. She had
no heart at all for flirtation; indeed, since her marriage she had been
surprised at the change in herself, at the sense of respectability that
had come over her. A married woman never responded to strangers on the
street. She had flirted like that as a girl, but now the world was
suddenly serious; she was married, her best friend’s lover was dead, and
there was no response in her to flirtation.

There was no mail. Mickey went slowly upstairs. She dreaded the moment
of solitude, of opening the door. She would fix herself a bit to eat,
and then go to the barracks to find Ursula.

As she climbed, she heard a record playing. It was Charles Trenet
singing:

   “Je chante
   Soir et matin,
   Je chante
   Sur mon chemin ...”

Her heart began to beat wildly. She opened the door and rushed into the
room. “Peter!”

It was he. He had grown a beard, and looked somehow different, but it
was really her Peter, big, handsome, smiling. His expression was grave
and matured, as though years had passed, as though he were older. This
was no longer the young lad whom Mickey had married, but a man.

Mickey pressed herself to him while he kissed her arched lips. She
studied his face, and a kind of pride spread through her. Yes, he was a
man now.

“Peter! How did you get here? How could you come back so soon? Oh,
darling, I’m so happy!” she burbled half in English, half in French,
covering him with kisses.

Peter held her off a bit, the better to look at her. It was still
difficult for him to believe that he had a wife, and such a beautiful
wife. What times we’ll have, skiing together in Norway! he thought. But
in the same instant he felt the force of all he had just lived through.
He saw himself clambering over a wall in the night, with his grenades
belted around him; he saw himself in an icy river; he saw himself
bending over a man’s body. Peter closed his eyes. A great disgust welled
in his throat. He saw the dead, all the dead bodies, the burned
villages, the monstrous tanks pushing along the roads; he heard the
shells exploding; and there was Eric, whom he loved as a brother, his
childhood friend Eric, howling in pain, with his guts crowding out of
his belly.

Peter sighed and pressed Mickey close. She looked into his face, feeling
him suddenly removed from her, seeking to understand him, wondering at
the tightness that had come over his face, and noticing the new creases
at the corners of his mouth.

“You’ll stay here now, Peter?” she said. “It’s finished?”

He shook his head. “No, dear. Only one night. I’ve been sent back to
make a report on a German installation we blew up—a big one. Tomorrow
I’ve got to go back again.”

The phonograph record kept going around, the needle caught in the last
groove, repeating over and over, “_Chante, chante, chante._” Peter went
to shut it off. Mickey started to prepare dinner. She felt like crying.

Only one night.

She thought of the tragedy at Down Street. She could not smother this
one night with Peter under that tragedy. She tried to push away from her
the trembling thought that next time Peter might not come back. She
would keep this one night for him.

After their meal, Peter made a fire on the hearth. He lighted his pipe,
and Mickey sat on the rug, leaning against his legs. In the past, they
would have gone out dancing or to a movie. But Mickey felt that all that
was over, that she and Peter would never again be the same.

As though he had followed her thoughts, he said gently, almost as though
he were speaking to himself, “After the war I’d like to live in the
country. Do you think it would be too boring for you, Mickey? I want to
have a house. I’ll build it myself, in the mountains, at home in Norway.
We’ll have a whole lot of children. In winter I’ll take them to school
on a sledge, and in summer—oh, Mickey, it’s so beautiful in the
mountains in the summer. You’ll see. They’re covered with flowers, and
you can hear the torrents rushing down. I’ll raise a lot of things, and
we’ll ski and hike in the mountains. You’re as strong as a man, you’re
made for that life. Do you want it like that, Mickey? I’ve had enough of
cities, I’ve had enough—” he hesitated for an instant—“enough of men. I
want to forget the war, my darling. I want to live, really to live. The
war—it’s the worst, the most horrible punishment that man puts on
himself. I don’t want my children to have to go to war. And there in the
mountains we can teach them to love, not to hate, not to kill.”

“Yes,” Mickey breathed. Then she looked up with an effort and said,
“Peter, I have the most frightful thing to tell you. Michel—Michel has
been killed.”

“He, too,” Peter said. Suddenly he cried out, “It’s more frightful than
that, Mickey, because it doesn’t do anything to me any more! I’ve seen
too many dead, too many of my friends. We’ve all got used to it. Every
day you hear that someone else is dead—fellows like myself, young men,
who wanted to live, to have wives and children. They believed in the
future, like Michel.... Oh, Mickey, I want to begin all over again, all
new after the war. I’ve come to understand so many things. I know what
happiness is, and that every man can build it for himself. It depends
only on us. We can refuse to kill, refuse to die—that has to come from
us, and from the life we choose to live. I know now, I’ve chosen what I
want for myself. You understand, Mickey? Say that you understand.”

Mickey was weeping. Tears shone in her large blue eyes. “You’re talking
just like Michel,” she said, and she tried to smile. “Yes, dear, of
course I understand. And I’d love to live in the country in Norway, and
we’ll go skiing, and I’d love to have a whole lot of children....”
Already she felt lighter, seeing herself surrounded by her sons, a whole
flock of them, climbing the rocks.

Peter took her in his arms. His eyes too had recovered their old gaiety.
“Get me a piece of paper, Mickey,” he said. “Let’s draw the plans for
our house.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Ann was the first of us to return to the barracks. She looked for
Ursula’s name in the register. Ursula had been marked out after
breakfast, and had not been marked in again. Ann therefore concluded
that Ursula was still in town, and knew nothing.

I got home soon afterward. Ann and I decided that Ursula had probably
remained in town for dinner. It didn’t occur to us to speak to the
Captain.

Ursula must have wandered along the streets until her sleepiness became
so powerful that she turned into Hyde Park, and found a quiet corner,
between two trees. Although it was still early evening, she was unable
to see anything; her eyes could no longer focus. She saw everything
double, and the images trembled and danced and multiplied and retreated
before her eyes. Her head ached, ached terribly; she had a pain in her
stomach, and her heart pounded. Then she slipped to the ground, and
curled up as wounded animals do, and she resisted no more.

                   *       *       *       *       *

When Ursula had not yet returned at eight o’clock, Ann reported the
matter to the sergeant of the guard, who hurried to the Captain. We
learned then that Ursula had been there at noon. She knew. Now the
police were telephoned, and a description of Ursula was given out to all
the stations in London and its environs and along the Thames.

Someone had telephoned Jacqueline, and she rushed over to Down Street to
wait with us for the news that we knew must come. None of us in the
Virgins’ Room went to bed. We all waited in silence. The hours passed.

At midnight, although I knew I wouldn’t sleep, I undressed and put on my
pajamas. As I shifted my pillow I heard a soft rustling sound, as though
the pillow had rubbed against paper. But I had left no paper there. Who,
then? Could Ursula have left a note? My heart thudding, I lifted the
pillow.

There was no note, but something more eloquent than anything Ursula
could have written. It was a small snapshot that I had never seen
before, a picture of Ursula and Michel, standing close together,
smiling. It was her only legacy.

Wordlessly I handed the picture to Jacqueline, who had come to stand at
my elbow. She stared at it uncomprehendingly a moment. Then her eyes
widened. She understood. She gave a wordless cry, dropped the picture on
my bed, and ran from the room.

As I gazed after her, I realized that of all of us keeping this hopeless
vigil, Jacqueline alone had really expected to see Ursula again. Only
Jacqueline had ever made a gesture toward death, and she had failed.
There was the night she had lain huddled on the ground beneath the
window from which she had jumped, and the day she had slashed her wrists
in the department-store washroom.

Jacqueline had tried, and failed, and tried again. For Jacqueline there
would always be a new beginning. When she saw the little picture that
Ursula had slipped beneath my pillow, I think she realized for the first
time that for some, there is only one beginning and one end.




                               CHAPTER 42


The next morning the door to the barracks was opened by two policemen,
who carried in the body of Ursula.

She did not remain long in Down Street. For an instant we looked at her
white face, her closed eyes, her blue lips; we saw the head fallen on
the shoulder, and the dead hands.

The Captain’s door was closed to us all. Only a few officers entered for
secret conferences.

The body was taken away at once, no one knew exactly where, and the next
day a lieutenant announced that Ursula Martin had been buried in the
French military cemetery outside London. It was all done quickly,
without fuss. The incident was quite annoying, very disagreeable. The
sooner it was over with, the better.

One of the corporals remarked that Ursula had always been a high-strung
child, and that was her entire obituary.

But Claude wept. She wept sincerely with all her heart, and she came to
me, to Ursula’s best friend, to accuse herself for the wrong she thought
she had done to Ursula long ago.

After a few days no one spoke any more about her, for their minds were
full with preparations for departure. We scarcely went to our offices
any more. We knew now that we were at last going to have active work to
do—with the wounded, driving trucks and jeeps on the bombed-out roads,
working in the newly liberated towns as telephone girls, as
interpreters, in liaison, and as guards. We wanted only to leave as soon
as possible.

Some days later, I learned that before his departure Michel had left a
thick portfolio with his Polish friends. The portfolio contained poems
he had written, as well as his diary. From what we knew of Michel, of
his sense of beauty, of his sensitivity, and from what Ursula had said
of his poems, portions of which Michel had read to her, it seemed
certain that this unique work of Michel’s was truly precious. But there
was a formal direction left with the portfolio: “In case of the death of
Michel Levy, please burn these papers at once, without reading.”

The young Polish sergeant spoke about the matter to Mickey and
Jacqueline and me. We were all absolutely of the opinion that Michel’s
instructions should be disregarded, that the poems had to be preserved.
We felt that their value—of which we were certain—was more important
than compliance with his last instruction.

But the Polish sergeant, a simple, direct lad, knew only one thing. He
had promised to obey the instruction, it was the wish of the dead, and
therefore he had to burn the papers. We attempted to explain our point
of view to him, to plead the cause of beauty and of poetry. It was the
only thing that remained of Michel, we said. Ursula and his child no
longer existed; at least his thoughts should remain.

But the sergeant burned the papers.

That night I wept for a long time. I promised myself that at least if I
ever had a son, I would name him Michel. With all my strength, I wanted
in some way to fill the emptiness that had come into the world where
there had been a voice that had something real to say, and that had been
destroyed.

I thought of all of my friends from this little room, and what had
happened to them. First Jacqueline had lost John, and now Ursula and
Michel were gone. And it had only begun. I felt them coming as though
within myself, all the young, the girls and the men who approached in an
endless line, the dead, all the dead who were being sacrificed without
anyone knowing why.




                                EPILOGUE


It was eleven o’clock in the evening. We were tired, and nearly all of
us were already in bed. Ginette was brushing her hair, and Ann was still
in the bathroom.

The guards were on the roof, watching for bombs. They telephoned to
Claude to ask for hot coffee, and Monique, who happened to be in the
hall, said she would go down to the basement to prepare it. Monique had
just gone down to the kitchen when a terrific explosion resounded all
around us. In the same second the lights went out, and stones and planks
and chunks of plaster and pieces of window rained down upon us. I heard
Ginette scream, and cries went up from all over the house.

After a time that seemed endless to us, we came to realize that a V-2
had fallen on Down Street. I remember that I was first of all stricken
with astonishment. For four years we had seen buildings crumble all
around us, but it seemed impossible that such a thing could happen now
to us.

I moved carefully and stood up. I was unhurt. Ginette was bleeding, but
she could walk. We felt our way forward in the darkness, climbing over
piles of rubble until we found the door of the room. When I opened it, I
saw that the hall was filled with women in pajamas. Someone had found a
candle, and its flame cast a flickering light over the scene. The
entrance to the building had been torn out, and with it the entire front
of the house.

Already groups were climbing over the debris to reach the street.
Presently we were all outdoors, and people came running toward us with
flashlights. We were cold, and Ginette was wiping her bleeding forehead
with a piece of cloth torn from her nightgown.

Opposite us was the big hotel, where a dance was going on. It was there
that the ARP took us, and we made a sensational entrance in our torn
nightclothes, with our faces covered with dust and blood, with our
scratched bare feet and our still half-awakened air.

We were put to bed in the Turkish bath.

The next morning, in the graying dawn, I looked again on Down Street.
The house was a ruin of blackened bricks, disemboweled, open to the sky,
with its rafters torn from their moorings, its stones crushed, its
windows smashed, its doors hurled from their frames. In a cluttered hole
there was a barrel from which a red stream dribbled, forming a puddle,
and under this mass of wreckage, of planks and iron and glass and
shrapnel, the ARP searched with their shovels for the body of Monique,
entombed in the ruins of the kitchen.

This was my last memory of Down Street. I gazed for a long while at the
annihilated switchboard room, at the great assembly hall open to all the
winds, at the bleeding, crushed house.

Standing beside me, I saw the Ambassador of Peru. And he too was gazing,
with a very thin smile, scarcely perceptible, on his overred lips.

Three days later we landed in France.




                          Transcriber’s Notes


This text was transcribed from the unchanged reprint edition by The
Feminist Press, City University, New York, 2005. Materials from a later
date than the original publication year 1950, such as editorial
information, introduction, or foreword, have been omitted.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were
silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

   [p. 74]:
   ... in a sudden access of remorse, had not wanted to spend ...
   ... in a sudden excess of remorse, had not wanted to spend ...

   [p. 116]:
   ... throat. Happily, there was a desert of strawberries and
       cream, ...
   ... throat. Happily, there was a dessert of strawberries and
       cream, ...

   [p. 120]:
   ... the wall. Ursula listened, and as he had expected, the
       phonograph ...
   ... the wall. Ursula listened, and as she had expected, the
       phonograph ...

   [p. 140]:
   ...  of a man utterly outside himself, with his mouth slightly
       open ...
   ... that of a man utterly outside himself, with his mouth
       slightly open ...

   [p. 196]:
   ... had jumped, and the day she has slashed her wrists in the ...
   ... had jumped, and the day she had slashed her wrists in the ...




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