The Climate of Courage

“Bought your own drum and flag, eh?” Fredericks laughed, and Vern felt a flash of anger; then abruptly the editor’s round face was stiffly sober. “I’m sorry, Vern. I shouldn’t have said that. I think more of it than that, myself. And it’s a credit to you that you do think of yourself as a soldier.”

Vern moved a hand in a gesture of embarrassment. “I’m not being jingoistic. I’m just trying to point out that if you’d offered me this job two years ago, I’d have said yes right away. Now I’d like time to think it over.”

“Of course.” Fredericks lay back in his chair, crossing his hands on the mound of his stomach, looking like a wicked old bishop. After a while he began to fiddle with the old-fashioned gold watch-chain that hung like a small hawser across his waistcoat. “It will be the biggest story you’ve ever covered, Vern.”

“I guess it will,” said Vern, thinking Fredericks was stating the obvious.

“Bigger than you realise.” Fredericks seemed to be making up his mind about something, his forehead creased into rolls of fat and the twinkle gone from his eyes; then he let go the watch-chain, dropping the hawser with a clink against the bursting buttons of his waistcoat, and said, “Vern, the Japs could walk into Australia to-morrow.”

Vern sat quietly. Through an open window he could hear the nervous hum of traffic and the harsh cry of a newsboy, like a metropolitan crow, coming up from the street below. A clock ticked away placidly on Fredericks’ desk, then its sound was gone as three planes went overhead in a roar that drowned out everything. He looked out the window, almost as if expecting the bombs to be already beginning to fall.

Over the past two years he had become too accustomed to bad news to be shocked by it. But now suddenly it had deeper significance and was a good deal harder to comprehend. The fall of France, the debacle in Greece, Pearl Harbour, even the surrender of Singapore, had had a remoteness about them that made it hard to imagine the same thing happening to Sydney or Melbourne or, even though the bombs had already fallen there, to Darwin; even when the Japs had landed in Timor and New Britain, one had still had some blind faith that they could come no farther. What was to stop them, one really didn’t know: one just didn’t bother, or was afraid, to think. No enemy had landed in Australia before and it was just impossible to imagine its happening. Invasions, like earthquakes and pogroms, happened to other countries. One clung to the old bromide: it can’t happen here.

“I didn’t know things were that grim,” he said. “There’s little hint of it. So many of us on leave——”

“Camouflage.” Fredericks waved a hand. “Trying to keep the people from knowing. The truth is, we haven’t enough equipment to outfit the whole Army. We’re short all along the line: planes, artillery, transport, the whole bloody bundle.”

“What about the Yanks?”

“They’re coming,” Fredericks said, “but they’ve got a long way to come and I don’t know that they’re much better prepared that we are. Two years to get ready, and they’re still dragging their heels.”

“Maybe they’re like the people in the street outside.” Vern had often felt in the last two years that the Americans should have come into the war, but he had tried to be fair-minded about it. In 1938 he had spent a year in the New York office of the paper, and he knew how strong was the influence of the Middle West isolationists. “Just couldn’t believe the war would fall into their laps.”

Fredericks shrugged, a movement that would have been a convulsion in a smaller man. “Maybe. I shouldn’t talk about them in that way, not the coves who are out here to fight, anyway. Politics has been the whole trouble over there.”

“What happens if the Japs get here first?”

“Christ knows.” Fredericks shrugged again. “I’ll probably lose a lot of weight.”

Vern looked down at the blue overseas strips on his sleeve: they represented the stretch of time in which Australia had come from the outskirts of war into the very centre of it. He wondered if the country could see it through, and was suddenly frightened and disgusted at his lack of faith. “I think I’d have felt better if you hadn’t told me how bad things are.”

“Mind you, what I’ve told you is top secret. Or it’s supposed to be, as far as the general public is concerned. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t known what a close-mouthed bastard you can be. Anyhow, you’ll discover it for yourself when you get out into the field as a correspondent. Things are so bad, I don’t know how we’re going to keep it quiet much longer. Right now they’ve got MacArthur to hold their attention. You’d think Christ had come back to earth.”

“What’s he like?” Vern said. “The boys haven’t been impressed. His type of soldier doesn’t go down too well with the Aussie, all that grandiloquent bull of his.”

“Well, they’d better get used to the grandiloquent bull. He’s here as boss.”

“Blamey won’t like that.”

“Blamey will look after himself,” Fredericks said with a grin. “I’m no admirer of him personally, but he’s the bloke we want if we’re to have any say in the way things are run. MacArthur reckons he has God on his side. He’ll need Him, if he’s to push Tom Blamey around.” Then he tossed the two generals out the window and said, “How much leave have you?”

“Eight days. I report back next Monday morning to Ingleburn. Where we go from there, and when, I haven’t the faintest.”

“Righto, call me at home Sunday. It’s still the same place, Macleay Street, and the number is in the book. You just need an American visa to come up there now, that’s all. How are the wife and kids?”

“Fine. I’m like a stranger in the house, seeing them for the first time. I just sit back and admire the three of them, and feel bloody proud of myself.”

“Good for you.” Fredericks extended a plump hand across the desk; Vern had forgotten the strength, in the plump fingers. “I’m glad to see you got back all right, Vern.”

Vern said good-bye to Fredericks, promising to give a lot of thought to the war correspondent offer, and went out to the lift. It was operated now by a girl, instead of the World War 1 veteran who had been there for years (had he gone back into the Army? Some people didn’t know when enough was enough. But Vern had noticed when war first broke out that the older men had rushed just as quickly as the young men to enlist). The girl was a blonde who munched on bubble gum, and gave him a franker stare than he had been accustomed to from Australian girls before the war. She stood leaning on the power handle, one hip thrown out in an attempt at dislocation that was supposed to be provocative, a bubble now and again hanging from her lips like an ectoplasmic burp. She stared at him again as the lift bounced gently to a stop.

“Ground floor, loo-tenant.”

“Thanks, babe,” said Vern, and winked at her as he got out. She smiled and watched him as he went out to the street, her hip still thrown out, still blowing bubbles, one hand stroking the blonde hair. Some of these Aussie boys weren’t bad when you came to think of it. Why, her sister Elsie had even married one….

Vern, unaware that he had almost been tagged as eligible, had turned out of Elizabeth Street and into Martin Place. He walked down and turned into George Street and was walking against the crowd as he headed down towards the harbour. The faces came swimming towards him above the dark river of bodies. He looked for signs of worry or panic, but there was none. True, some faces were unhappy, the eyes a little dead and the mouths drooping in self-pity, but the unhappiness was personal: a husband had been killed, a girl had given back an engagement ring, there were bills to be paid and no money. But there was no general mask of concern, no nervous attitude that showed the crowd knew danger was just around the corner. The Australian had always had the reputation of being easy-going: to Vern’s suddenly acute and worried eye, he had never looked more easy-going than now. Vern walked on, beginning to have the first doubts that the country would have what was needed when the time came.

He skirted the wharves of Circular Quay and climbed the steps to the Bridge and walked out into the middle. He stood there and looked out at home. It was an Australian early autumn day, no hint of dying in it, and the upper sky was streaked with thin cloud that looked like the brushings of a white wind. The light was clear and fine, and everything, even the smoke from ships in the harbour, had an edge to it. The sun put a silver sheen on the afternoon air and everything glittered with the sharpness of a poignant memory.

Above him the arch of the Bridge reared against the sky, a heavy tracery of steel touched with sun that went in a single curving leap from pylon to pylon, and the pylons themselves towered like bleached medieval forts above the polished harbour. The coloured roofs of Milson’s Point and Mosman stretched away over their hills with a pointillism effect that danced before the eyes. A ferry came across the water, its hooter protesting in a sharp moan at nothing at all, and an American naval launch went over towards Garden Island, spreading a cool white fan behind it. Beyond the island he could see the grey shapes of an American cruiser and some destroyers; he looked away from them, a reminder of how close the war had come to home, and up towards the city. The buildings were stacked in confusion on top of each other, their windows flashing like small explosions and the shadows stretching down between them like black bombing scars. Already, he thought, the war is giving me my similies: I’m half-way to being a war correspondent.

He turned and walked back along the Bridge, now and again turning his head to look back at the harbour and the city sprawled about the hills. It all looked good, better even than the memory that had changed almost imperceptibly, like a growing child, as time had dripped down out of the glass and the desire to come home had grown stronger.

Home was where people worshipped racehorses and took no pride in work and drove the seeds of their culture overseas; but he didn’t want it invaded nor did he want to leave it ever again.

“They offered me a job to-day as a war correspondent,” he said.

“Gee, that’s wonderful, Daddy,” said Jill, and hastily swallowed a lump of meat. “My, won’t the girls at school like this! Someone glamorous in the family!”

“Thank you,” said Dinah. “Let me tell you, when I was in the chorus I was called glamorous, seductive——”

“Ah, you’re all right, Mum,” said Michael. “But being a chorus girl isn’t like being a war correspondent.”

“I told one of the nuns the other day that my mother had been a hoofer,” said Jill. “She said she’d say a rosary for you.”

“That’s nice,” said Dinah. “Tell her in return I’ll put on my tights and do a bit at the school concert.” She stabbed at a piece of kidney. “A hoofer!”

Michael was looking at his father. “Where will you go, Dad? Up to New Guinea? Will you get your name on your stories? Heck, I hope there’s a war on when I grow up——”

“If there is,” said Dinah, “I’ll see you get a nice soft cop in a reserved occupation.”

She said it without any particular emphasis, but Vern looked along the table at her. She smiled at him, a smile as unreadable as a chorus girl’s. “Go on, darling. Did you take the job?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Ah, ’struth!” Michael carved at the air with his knife, disgusted with a father who didn’t recognise opportunity when it knocked. “Someone else will get it if you don’t hurry up! I bet everyone on the paper wants——”

“Don’t you want it, Daddy?” said Jill.

She was eleven, small but well-built, with her mother’s feature’s and her father’s colouring, but with the temperament of neither of them. She already had all the poise that Vern had spent years trying to acquire; a trick of retiring into herself that made her completely beyond and independent of what went on about her; and an intelligence that sometimes dismayed Dinah.

Vern looked at her, aware that, with her uncanny sense of feeling, she knew something was troubling him. “I don’t know. It’s not something I can just say yes to, just like that——”

“I could,” said Michael. “Ask me.”

Dinah was the first to admit that her brain was little better than a chorus girl was required to have, but like her daughter she could sense when anything was worrying Vern. “Righto, Michael, we’ll ask you when you leave school, in six or seven years’ time. Now get on with your eating and let’s forget all about the glamour.”

Michael grinned, his blunt dark face suddenly like his father’s. “Ah, you’re only jealous. How’d you like to be a lady war correspondent?”

“I’d rather be top of the bill at the Tivoli,” said Dinah. “And by golly, I would have been if it hadn’t been for you two coming along.”

“Other women have had babies and continued their theatrical careers,” said Jill. “Even hoofers.”

“When you’re married and going to have a baby,” said Dinah, “let me see you do the can-can.”

Vern again felt the sudden warmth that had come over him several times in the two days since he had arrived home. The children had developed amazingly in the two years he had been away, and his pride in them was like a heady tonic. But what pleased him more was the intimate, almost adult relationship they had with their mother. That, he realised, had come about because of his absence: she had encouraged it, perhaps unwittingly, to make up for what she had missed by his being away. The family seemed to have become tighter knit while he had been away, and yet he didn’t feel out of it. Dinah had kept him a part of it, and he looked along the table at her now and loved her more even than in the lonely moments overseas.

Later when they were going to bed she took off all her clothes and stood in front of the big wardrobe mirror. She turned side on and patted her stomach. “Think I’ve got fat while you’ve been away? I went on a diet when I knew you were coming home, even did exercises. Hoofer’s exercises.”

Vern hung his trousers in the closet. “The belly’s all right, but I detect a slight droop in the bosom.”

“What do you expect at thirty-two? You wanted to marry a thirty-six inch chest. I remember distinctly that was the first thing you said to me after you’d asked my name. You said I had a magnificent chest.”

“And I remember you shoved it out a little more.” Vern had sat down and begun to take off his shoes and socks. “I had to stand back to make room.”

“Well, the older I get, the tireder I get holding it up. But while you’re home I’ll make a special effort.” She drew back her shoulders. “There, how’s that? My God, you’re lucky, you know.”

He was, he knew that. Her bosom had deepened after the birth of the two children, but it was still firm and lovely. Her waist was slim and there was no thickening over the hips; they curved, then came in a smooth sweep to her long thighs. No birth wrinkles marred her stomach: her slightest movement brought exciting shadows to the firm modelling of it. And the face with its good wide bonework, short straight nose, dark sparkling eyes that could suddenly become lazy-lidded, all of it backed by the shining black hair, had remained vividly clear in his memory over the last two years. She wasn’t strictly beautiful, but she was Dinah and there was no one else. He was lucky, all right.

“There are a lot of men who would give their right arm to get into bed with a body like this,” she said.

“Good-o, try your luck some time. We’ll collect right arms.”

She had climbed into bed. “Come on! God, I’ve never seen a man so slow at getting into bed. Are you as slow as this in the Army? You must get in just in time to get up again for reveille.”

“I don’t have naked women in my bed in the Army.”

“It’s not making you move any faster now. Why the hell did I have to marry such a damned neat man? Drop your clothes on the floor and get in here quick!”

He got into bed and put his arms about her. There had never been anyone before her, and he was as excited now as he had been the first time. They had had no trouble discovering each other in those early days and their love-making had been successful from the start. But now he was trying to restrain himself. He hadn’t yet become accustomed again to the idea of having his wife beside him in bed each night. It was like a second honeymoon: everything, the smoothness, the intimacy, the claiming surrender, was still a little unbelievable.

But now he was beside her she had suddenly quietened down. “Darling, what is it about the job as a war correspondent?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t really want it, do you? Wouldn’t it be a good job?”

“Better than I’ve ever had before,” he said, and all at once was surprised how remote he felt from the newspaper office. Two years ago he would have been excited about the job, would have lain awake well into the night to talk with her about it. Now it was as if the job had been offered to someone else, someone he knew but wasn’t particularly interested in. “Remember how ambitious I used to be? This could be the answer. I might finish up famous, make a lot of money——”

His voice trailed off and after a while she said, “So what’s holding you back? Am I too dumb to see something?”

“No.” He grinned in the darkness and patted her shoulder; sometimes she was more of a child to him than the two youngsters in their rooms down the hall. “Though I don’t know if you’ll understand when I do explain it to you——”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m not dumb, just a little backward.”

But he hadn’t heard her. “I don’t know that I completely understand it, myself. Darl, I don’t want the correspondent’s job, because I want to prove myself to myself.” She made no comment and he went on, “I’ve been an officer now for nearly two years. In another month or so my third pip will be through——”

“Captain Radcliffe,” she said, testing it for sound. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I was going to surprise you. I know how rank-conscious you women are.”

“I’m just surprised you’re not a colonel by now. The Army doesn’t appreciate you like I do. I think you’re wonderful.” She moved closer to him, if that were possible. “The hope of the nation.”

“Thank you.” he said, and patted her shoulder again. “Trouble is, I don’t think I’m so wonderful. Darl, for two years now I’ve been responsible for other men and I still don’t know if I’m big enough for the responsibility. I’ve never been tested. Every time we were in action in the Middle East there was never a time when a decision rested wholly on me. There was always someone there who out-ranked me, and all I had to do was carry out their orders. And what I don’t like is that I was always glad they were there.”

“Is that something to be ashamed of?”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I haven’t thought about shame, because no one else knows about it. But I worry—am I good enough to be responsible for the lives of other men?”

“The Army must have thought so.”

“One of the things you learn in the Army, darling, is that it is far from infallible. It has a greater talent for making mistakes than any other organisation yet devised. I could be one of its major mistakes.”

She was silent for a while, then she said, “How you feel—is it really so important?”

He said nothing for a while, wondering if she would understand when he did tell her. Women had a greater sense of responsibility than men, but they also had a different perspective. There were certain things that a man saw in himself, questions that worried him and had to be answered, that a woman could never take too seriously. Honour, for instance. Women had a sense of honour, but they were rarely foolish or heroic about it: they were not so afraid of the alternative, dishonour, because they had a greater armour against shame. Would Dinah understand, or think him a fool, playing up to some schoolboy code?

At last he made the confession: “It’s important to me, darl. More important than the job as a war correspondent. If I take that, I’ll never know if I had what it takes when the moment called for it. I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to know that I’m not a coward.” He turned and looked at the dark mass of her head on the pillow beside him; in the darkness he couldn’t see her face and (cowardly, he thought) it was better that way. “Do you understand what I’m getting at, darl?”

“Does a woman ever understand a man?” It was the answer he had half-expected. “I don’t want to understand it, darling. If it’s the way you feel, then it’s all right with me.” He could feel her fingers digging into his back. “I just don’t want to lose you, that’s all.”

“I could be killed just as easily as a war correspondent,” he said, and knew at once that he was being cruel; he ran his hands gently over her. “Don’t let’s think about that part of it, darl. I’m not going to shove my neck out to prove I’m not a coward. I’m not searching for physical courage, although I don’t know that I have an abundance of that, either. It’s something else again, something I’d like to know I had, even if I never have to use it but once.”

“I said it a moment ago, Vern. If it’s what you want, it’s all right with me. I told you a long time ago, all I want is for you to be happy. And that includes every way, In the Army or out of it.”

There was no answer but to kiss her, to draw her to him and take the love that he sometimes felt was more than he deserved. Life had been a long climb over the rocks before he had met her, and disappointment had lost its bitterness for him. When he had met her he had expected something to go wrong with their love as a matter of course, but it never had. It had been a long time before the surprise had worn off that she loved him completely and forever.

She murmured sleepily as he held her to him, and the bed creaked as she moved closer to him. Outside in the street some youths laughed as they came up the hill from the picture theatre, and in the Hastings’ house next door he could hear the phone ringing peremptorily but in vain. A car went swishing by and a cat cried mournfully at the night; the phone next door stopped ringing and the youths had gone on, and abruptly there was silence.

The sounds I’ve missed, he thought, and almost instantly fell asleep with his face buried in his wife’s neck.

Standing there in the bar, amid the loud foreign-sounding babble of the hundreds of anonymous voices and beneath the thick blue smoke climbing lazily to the ceiling like diaphanous vines, he thought of the bazaars they had visited back in the Middle East and their superior comments on them, and he smiled to himself.

“What’s so funny, chum?” said Jack Savanna.

“Just thinking.”

“Well, quit thinking and start drinking. We’re waiting to order again.”

Just before the train had drawn in at Central Station and each of them had been whirled into the tight embracing circle of his own welcome home, several of the men had arranged to meet here in the Marble Bar this evening. In the confusion at the station, embracing wives or girl friends at the same time as they wished each other a good leave, saying hallo to relatives while they shouted See you in the Marble Bar! they had forgotten that the civilised drinking customs of the backward Middle East were now behind them. They were in civilised Australia again with its backward drinking customs, away from the Wogs and back with the wowsers, and one just didn’t join one’s friends for a drink at the Marble Bar or any other bar. Drinking in Sydney wasn’t as simple as that.

Vern had come in from the street, had looked about him, seen Jack Savanna waving to him above the heads of the crowd like a man calling for help in the middle of a riot, and had prepared for battle. He had taken a deep breath, raised his arms in front of him so that his elbows had stuck out like cow-catchers, and had ploughed his way through the sweating, yelling crush that is the Australian man in his leisure moments after a day’s work. Some day, perhaps, the blue laws that closed all hotels at six o’clock would be rescinded. In the meantime the wowsers, the narrow-minded of certain churches and societies, went smugly on in their belief that Sydney was being saved from further degradation by having limited drinking hours. Vern arrived at the bar bruised, dishevelled and feeling more degraded than if he had come by way of the sewer.