The Climate of Courage

“With this sort of training,” he had said, “we can’t lose the war.”

The second round of drinks arrived, dumped in front of them by the cheerful, durable barmaid. She bad the hard brassy brightness of those women who would be out of a job if there were no men.

“Who’s your friend?” she said to Jack Savanna. “Another boy from your unit?”

“This is Mabel, Vern,” Jack said. Mabel smiled at Vern as if he were the only boy in the world, winked at him as if she knew all about him, then went away down the bar. Jack looked after her, then turned back. “Well, how’s the leave going? How are Dinah and the kids, chum?”

“Fine.” Vern sipped his beer, the good strong Australian stuff that made all the other beers taste like waste water. “What have you been doing?”

“Just taking things quietly,” said Jack. “Sort of easing myself back into Sydney so the impact won’t be too much for the population. But I’ll have to start stepping out soon if I want to get something out of my leave. Celibacy shouldn’t be one of the aims of such an occasion.”

Vern turned to the two men nearest him, Bluey Brown and Dad Mackenzie. “What sort of leave are you having? Has celibacy been one of your aims?”

“I’m too bloody old,” said Bluey Brown. “I’d like to know I had the choice of being celibate or not. I’m known as Old Impotence in our house.”

Staff-sergeant Brown had been a First World War man, and had only got into the current show by putting his age back and because he had been a member of the same club as the battalion’s first C.O. Vern knew that Bluey could have had a commission as the battalion quartermaster, but for his own reasons he had preferred to be nothing more than an N.C.O. He was forty-eight, cheerfully plump, his red hair was now only a suggestion, like rosy cirrus clouds round the beaming sun of his face, and he was the most popular man in the whole battalion despite the fact that he was the company quarter-master sergeant.

Dad Mackenzie grinned, the smile as cautious as everything else he did. “Things have changed since we went away. The chookies seem much easier.”

“Influence of the Yanks,” said Jack Savanna. “I don’t know that it is a bad thing.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Vern. “I can’t ever remember you supporting the morals of the community. You were always doing your best to bring about a lowering of them.” He had known Jack before the war, when the latter had worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission: not much more than casually, but enough to know that Jack was something of a rake. “Easy chookies, as Dad calls them, were always your meat.”

“In this particular instance,” said Jack, “I am trying to be impersonal. I am looking at the picture from a distance, as it were. I have a great interest in the future of Australian womanhood.”

“He’s a nephew of Dorothy Dix,” Bluey Brown told Dad Mackenzie.

“Go on?” said Dad Mackenzie. “Legitimate or illegitimate?”

Jack hadn’t heard the interruptions. “I think a leavening of the Americans’ preoccupation with sex, their wonderfully uninhibited attitude towards it—at least while they’re abroad—may do something towards breaking down the broad, if not admitted, puritanical streak in our national make-up.”

“I haven’t detected any broad puritanical streak in you,” said Bluey. “Turn around and let’s have a look.”

“I have done my best to eradicate it,” said Jack.

“You’ve been eminently successful,” said Vern, then turned round to see Charlie Fogarty grinning at them. “Hallo, Charlie. What the hell’s that you’re drinking?”

“Shandy,” said Charlie. “Three parts lemonade, one part beer. It saves the barmaid embarrassment.”

“Meaning?”

“Some of them don’t know if they ought to sell an aborigine grog, even if he is in uniform. This saves ’em having to ask the boss if it’s all right.”

Charlie Fogarty was the best-looking aborigine Vern had ever seen. He was tall and broad-shouldered and his smile was as wide and bright as sheet lightning. His voice was soft and musical, the voice of a man who belonged to broad sunlit plains and singing streams; it wasn’t an apologetic voice, but Vern couldn’t imagine its ever being dogmatic or insistent. He knew Charlie’s story, it stretched behind him like a travelogue of Australia. The mission in the Northern Territory where they had made him conscious of his magnificent black body by putting it in white man’s clothing; the cattle station in western Queensland; the abattoirs in Brisbane; the flour mill in Sydney; the army camp at Ingleburn—he was more Australian than any of them, but he was also more alien.

“I wonder how they’ll treat you coves after this is over?” said Vern.

Charlie smiled again, not a trace of bitterness in his dark shining face. “I’m thinking of going back to the tribe. Then we’re gunna bring in a Black Australia policy and kick all you white bastards out of the country.”

“Speaking of bastards,” said Dad Mackenzie.

They all turned, and for a moment Vern didn’t recognise the burly figure in the tight blue suit pushing its way through the crowd towards them. Then suddenly he remembered the figure as it had been in khaki, remembered the arrogance and stupid discipline and petty spite of ex-Major Caulfield, and he knew this was going to be an awkward moment.

“Hallo, men,” said Caulfield, and the smile on his face was as shaky as a scaffolding in a gale. The big red face with the dark freckles on the forehead and across the broad nose did its best to look friendly; but, as one, the five men turned back to the bar, picked up their drinks and stood in silence. Farther along, two other men from the battalion, Joe Brennan and Mick Kennedy, interrupted their close confab and stood looking silently at Caulfield. Vern, looking down at his drink, knew that Caulfield could hear that silence more than he could hear the hubbub of voices or the occasional shout.

Caulfield stood there behind them for a moment and Vern could only guess at the expression on his face; then he said, “Ah, come on, let’s forget all about rank for just this once. Just call me Jim.”

No one moved and Vern felt the prickle of embarrassment spreading through him: he had never had the defensive thick skin of a superiority complex. He was sensitive to other people’s feelings, even to those he disliked. He could feel Caulfield’s reaction almost as much as if it were his own when Jack Savanna turned slowly from the bar and said, contempt thick as spittle in his mouth, “Why should we call you anything?”

Jack raised his glass, looking at it and not at Caulfield, took a drink, and just as slowly turned back to the bar. Then Bluey Brown said, “If I called him anything, it wouldn’t be Jim.” He smiled at Mabel, the barmaid, who stood at the taps just in front of them. “You wouldn’t like to hear me using bad language, would you love?”

“Why, what’ve I done now?” Then Mabel caught sight of Caulfield clinging to the edge of the group like a giant limpet. “Hallo, is this another of your boys?”

“No,” said Bluey. “He’s one of our bastards.”

Then Vern felt the touch of his arm and knew what he had feared had come. “Hallo, Vern. How’s tricks?”

Vern could feel the others waiting to see what move he would make. He was the only one who, as far as the Army was concerned, could meet Caulfield on a social level: rank called to rank, the only caste system, outside of money, that Australians had so far had to contend with. Vern remembered with what resentment the Australians had viewed the Officers Only signs outside the hotels in the Middle East, and now here was Caulfield trying to strike up a conversation on an Officers Only basis.

“Hallo, Ape.” It was the first time Vern had called him that, the name the battalion had given him two days after he had joined it; Vern, with a thought for discipline, had never referred to Caulfield by that name even in private conversation with the other men. He stood there looking at Caulfield, wondering why the latter had deliberately walked into such a situation, then suddenly he knew. Caulfield took the insult without a blink, as if he had been expecting it and was prepared for it. He had been slapped across the face with the past and he had taken it without any of the violent outburst that might have been expected. Vern knew then that he was lonely. The man had been invalided home six months before, after the Syrian campaign, and he had found that it was home no longer.

“Ah, we can let bygones be bygones, can’t we?” He licked his thick lips and smiled tentatively. “I’m another bloke altogether now.”

“A leopard can’t change his spots,” said Bluey. “Neither can an arch-bastard.”

“A very true statement, staff,” said Jack. “Your own?”

“Just made it up,” said Bluey. “Inspiration.”

Dad Mackenzie turned round and Vern was surprised at the fire in the heavy stolid face. “You were an officer and a gentleman, Caulfield, while you had a crown on your shoulder. An officer and a gentleman, by the King’s permission.” Dad Mackenzie’s grandfather had been a Glasgow Scot and his grandmother a London Jewess, and he’d inherited all the caution of both races. But he had still been one of those who had suffered at Caulfield’s hands, just as much as the reckless types like Greg Morley and larrikins like Mick Kennedy. There was no hint of caution now in Dad, just a quiet hatred that was more chilling than any display of anger. “The King doesn’t know you like we do. You’re not a gentleman, Caulfield, you’re not even an officer, because an officer is someone who deserves to be in charge of men. You shouldn’t even be in charge of dogs in the council pound.”

There was another silence, then a drunken soldier stumbled out of the crowd and bumped into Caulfield. The latter spun round, anger in his eyes ready to be turned on anyone, but the drunk put his arm about him and hiccupped loudly in his ear.

“G’day, dig. Me ol’ mate, me cobber. Everybody’s me mate to-day. Ain’t it a lovely day? It’s a lovely day to-day, not t’morrer, like the song says. Plentya beer and lotsa people. ’At’s what I like. It’s me birthday, dig. Many happy returns. Thanks. It’s me birthday and everybody’s me mate. Hoo-ray.”

He patted Caulfield on the shoulder, beamed droopily at the others, then stumbled on in search of another mate. Caulfield looked after him, then back at Vern and the others.

“You ought to have gone with him, Ape.” Mick Kennedy spoke for the first time. He had always been one of the loudest in his hatred of Caulfield, and his voice now carried far enough to attract the attention of the policeman who had just come in the door. Vern saw the policeman look towards them, and he hoped Mick Kennedy wouldn’t run true to form and start a brawl. But Mick looked as if he was quite satisfied to use his tongue this time instead of his fists. “He wanted to be your mate, Ape. You ain’t in a position to knock back offers like that.”

Caulfield suddenly threw away the air of friendliness he had brought with him, almost with an expression of relief, as if he had known from the start that it would be useless. He put his hands behind his back and rocked back on his heels; the pose was familiar to the men leaning against the bar, but it was out of place here.

“This is going to be good,” said Bluey. “Company, shun!”

“Righto,” said Caulfield. “So I made a mistake. I tried to be a good soldier, but it wasn’t your idea of what a good soldier should be. All right. But there were some of you who weren’t good soldiers, some of you who were up before me more times than I can remember, who weren’t my idea of a good soldier. Some of you had rank, but I’ll tell you now I only agreed to your promotions because there was no one else. But I’m forgetting that——”

“Generous to a fault,” said Jack Savanna.

“—Those days and those mistakes are past.” He stopped, suddenly lost, as if he had just realised he wasn’t on the parade ground and that the men in front of him couldn’t be dismissed. He brought his hands from behind his back and shoved the right one, with its stumps of fingers, into his jacket pocket. He had dropped his parade ground voice when at last he said, “I was hoping we could make a new start.”

It was Jack Savanna who answered. Vern knew that, with his rank, he was the one who should have answered for the men and while Caulfield had been talking he had been searching for the words to reply to him. But now they wouldn’t be needed. Jack, drawing himself up to his full height, his hat pushed back on his head, his sweeping moustache accentuating the curl of his lip, had taken over.

“I doubt that your brain, Caulfield, shrivelled as a piece of old copra, could understand how we feel about you. You were all right as a soldier, perhaps—at least you had guts, which not all of us profess to have. But you weren’t a man, that’s our complaint. We know something of your background, that you spent fifteen years in New Guinea before you came into the Army, and perhaps that’s to blame. I’m told that only missionaries and fools treat boongs as human beings—and you had some idea that everyone in the Army was a boong.” Jack cocked an eye at Charlie Fogarty. “You will forgive my using the term boong, Charlie? I am trying to speak in this bastard’s language.”

“Go ahead,” grinned Charlie. “In the tribe we’d call him a white boong.”

“Stay out of this, darkie!” Caulfield snapped.

The men straightened up and Vern tense, ready to step in front of Jack Savanna, expecting the latter to swing his fist into Caulfield’s furious red face. He had seen Jack in action several times when he had lost his temper; time and place meant nothing to him if he thought a swung fist was the answer needed. Caulfield seemed suddenly aware that his incautious tongue had gone too far again, and he took a step back. He was pressed against the crowd as against a wall, his eyes flickering over the men without fear but expecting them to move towards him, and Vern waited for the moment to blow up.

“Sock the bastard!” Mick Kennedy snarled.

“Pull your heads in,” Vern said, and tried to sound reasonable and not like an officer throwing his weight around. “He’s not worth the strife it would cause. There’s a copper over there.”

“You’re right, Vern.” Jack Savanna was surprisingly calm. He looked again at Charlie Fogarty. “Although we’ll hit him if you like, Charlie.”

“Skip it,” said Charlie, and looked at Caulfield with a dark, impassive face. He’s got more dignity than the rest of us put together, Vern thought.

Jack turned back to Caulfield. “You’re fortunate, Caulfield. But don’t ever make a remark like that again while we’re around. You’ve just illustrated what I was saying about your thinking everyone in the Army is a boong. It may surprise you, but to every one of us here, Charlie is just a man who’s a little more sunburned than the rest of us. But you would never be able to see it that way. You have to be a man, Caulfield, to know how to treat men properly. And you never knew how to treat us. If the boongs disliked you as much as we did, then I shouldn’t go back to New Guinea if I were you. Not now, when they could blame your death on the Japs.”

Caulfield’s face got redder, the freckles turning almost black, but before he had a chance to speak the men had turned back to the bar; and there was that little island of silence again in that sea of noise. Vern stood there waiting for the burst of temper that they all knew of old.

But Caulfield just muttered, “You’ll be sorry for this,” and when Vern looked back over his shoulder he had gone.

“I’ve been waiting to say that for two bloody years,” said Jack. “In the circumstances I thought I was remarkably restrained.”

“Too bloody restrained,” said Mick Kennedy. “I’d of jobbed him if I’d been closer to him.”

“I wanted to job him,” said Bluey. “Trouble is, my days of jobbing people are over. Even with that bung hand of his, he’d have knocked me arse-over-Bluey.” He looked wistfully into his glass. “You miss a lot when you get past forty.”

“‘I’m another bloke,’ he said.” Joe Brennan almost spat into his beer. “‘Let’s make a new start.’ Christ, what does he think we are, lovers?”

“Now in the tribe,” said Charlie Fogarty, and sipped his shandy, “we would’ve pointed the bone at him, and he’d of been dead in a week. You blokes are too civilised.”

Vern had been thinking of all they had had to put up with in the time Caulfield had been with them. The sarcastic arrogant way he had of talking to the men; the looking after his own comfort and ignoring that of those under him; the trivial rules instituted just to show his authority. The company after a while had called itself Caulfield’s Boongs, and had put up with him with good-humoured resignation. Then the good humour had begun to run dry and threats were muttered against him. On the trip to the Middle East he had headed the shark-bait list; but somehow he had landed safely in Palestine and had survived the months spent there and at Mersa Matruh. Then the battalion had gone into the Syrian campaign and he had had his hand mangled by a shell splinter, and he had been invalided home to the accompaniment of loud cheers from the men. Vern had never seen anyone hated so much, and now here was the man daring to come back and ask that the past be forgotten. Was he so thick-skinned or just blind or did he have more guts than the men, though reluctantly, had conceded him? And what had he meant by his remark that they would be sorry?

Chapter Three

JACK WATCHED Vern Radcliffe board the tram, waved at him, then turned away with the feeling of being lost that had kept recurring ever since they had first landed back at Adelaide. Vern had asked him home for dinner, and he had almost accepted. But then he had recognised the invitation for what it was, sincere but a spur-of-the-moment thought; he had thought of Dinah sharing the moments with her husband after two long years, and so he had told Vern he had a date.

Well, he’d better see if he did have a date. He crossed the road to St. James station, lined up outside the phone box and ten minutes later was dialling a number, conscious of the thick stuffy smell of the box and the belligerently impatient queue outside.

“Rita? This is Jack here.”

“Jack? Jack who?” Her voice sounded the same, light and empty as her head.

“Jack Savanna. How many Jacks do you know? They had once lived together for three months, but now she had forgotten him. He grinned to himself and patted his bruised ego.

“Jack Savanna! Well, Ah declare! How you been, huh?” Her voice had changed, after all: it had crossed the Pacific. “Long time no see, Jack, honey.”

Why did I ring her? he thought; and thought what a trap was the telephone. In the old days, when one had to write a letter there was always time for a second thought. But now: two pennies in the slot, a spin of the dial, and bingo! Why had he called her? Rita, with the blank pretty face, the pretty blank mind and the beautiful body—yes, that was why he had called her. “I’ve missed you, too, Rita, honey. How about dinner to-night, and afterwards we can talk about old times, huh?”

“Ah gee, Jack honey, if I’d only known! But I already gotta go out—I’m gonna see”—he could hear her two-stroke brain changing gears—“my aunt.”

“Your ant? Are you interested in entomology now?”

She laughed, light and meaningless as a child’s bell. “Still the same old Jack! Still making with the big words.”

Serves me right, he thought, for having designs on her body. He hadn’t taken her mind into account, and he was beaten before he had started. Suddenly the box seemed more stinking and stuffy than ever. Abruptly he said good-bye, hung up and pushed open the door.

“You been long enough, dig,” said a sailor. “Who you been ringing, MacArthur?”

Jack hunched his shoulders. “Want to make something of it, matelot?”

“I gotta ring me sheila,” said the sailor, and skipped nimbly into the box. He grinned through the glass, then turned to the phone, a red-headed, broken-nosed, freckle-faced Romeo who was sure of his girl.

Jack walked past the other people waiting to use the phone and out into Elizabeth Street again. It was a mild night with light still in the sky behind the buildings on the west side of the street. Right above him a few stars, poignant as tears, looked down at the city. A plane appeared from behind the towers of St. Mary’s Basilica, a metal angel with winking red and green light, heading north; it passed over the harbour, suddenly an angel no longer but a small black fly caught in the tangled skein of the searchlights. I should be on that, he thought, getting out of this bloody unfriendly city. And then was angry at himself for being sorry for himself.

He looked about him, aware now of a change in the atmosphere of the city he had loved so well. There was that air of electric nervousness that came upon all cities at this time of day during the war. In London and Cairo and Berlin, and in all cities within reach of the bombers, there would be fear behind the nervousness; here in Sydney and in Melbourne, probably New York too and San Francisco, there was just the hope of a good time. Girls stood waiting for their men, looking at other men, wondering if they were better prospects than their date for to-night: modesty had become a wartime casualty and had been replaced by the roving eye and the calculating mind. Couples walked arm-in-arm out of the great green bed of Hyde Park, flushed with love-making and stained with grass juice. An American sailor, his arm about a brazenly successful girl, stood on the kerb waiting confidently for the cab that would come to him past all the hailing Australian arms. The city had changed all right.

He began to walk along Elizabeth Street, aimless and lost in the city that was his home, big Jack Savanna who was always so definite and self-possessed and impregnable. Then he heard the music coming across the park and suddenly he remembered the Anzac Buffet. There would be girls there, plenty of them, all dedicated to the enjoyment of the boys on leave. He turned and began to hurry across the park, almost as if he had to get there before the supply of girls ran out. He wasn’t drunk, he’d had only four beers with the boys in the Marble Bar, but he suddenly had the pleasant lightness of feeling, that warmth that makes the world a good place that must be enjoyed to the full, and his low mood of the last quarter-hour had suddenly gone like the last light of day behind the buildings across the street. He was determined to enjoy to-night.

He saw the girl as soon as he entered the large hall where the band was bouncing out Chattanooga Choo-Choo. She was sitting in a deep chair, turned away from him, and all he could see was the smooth blonde hair, almost silvery and suggesting metal in its polished sleekness. He stood for several minutes watching the blonde head, waiting for it to turn and let him see the face that went with it. He had seen plenty of girls who looked like Miss Australia from the back and like the wreck of someone’s grandmother from the front. To-night had suddenly become too good to spoil by being in a hurry. Then he saw an R.A.A.F. corporal coming from the other side of the room, heading for the blonde in the chair: the expression on the corporal’s face, the way he was smoothing his hair, the hand straightening his tie, told Jack that the girl could not be too bad. He had to take a chance, otherwise he might miss out and spend the rest of the night kicking himself.

He beat the corporal by a good two yards, without appearing to hurry, lazy and casual, the approach that had been so successful in the past. “Would you care to dance?”

She looked up at him, and he could guess at the disappointment of the corporal behind him. She was even better than he had expected, much better: with the all-out war effort, beauty standards had been raised in the leave centres. Perhaps her beauty had frightened away most of the other men, because a girl as good-looking as this must surely be booked for the night and she was just waiting for her boy-friend to arrive. Her face was an original one: nothing about it had been borrowed from film stars or cover girls or beauty salons. The bones were strong yet fine, and her skin glowed like a golden peach bursting with sun. Her mouth was heavy, but the lipstick covered only the natural outline of her lips: the passionate mouth couldn’t be wiped off with a handkerchief or a kiss. Her eyes were dark, too dark really for the colour of her hair, though the latter looked natural, and when she looked up at him they shone with a soft amused gleam under their heavy lids.