sternly that it would have been unseemly to be whirling around a floor with a girl in his arms at the very moment, perhaps, that his wife was at her crisis of birth and agony, and the first cry of his child was heard in the world. He had gone back to the hotel early, passing the sign on the bandstand that read, ALL DANCING WILL CEASE DURING SHELLING.
He had locked himself in his cold, bare room and got into bed with a feeling of great luxury, alone, at ease, with no one to order him to do anything until Monday night. He had sat up in bed, writing a letter to Hope, remembering the hundreds of letters he had written to her when he first knew her. 'I am sitting up in bed,' he wrote, 'in a real bed, in a real hotel, my own man for three days, writing this, thinking of you. I cannot tell you where I am, because the Censor wouldn't like it, but I think I can safely tell you that there is a fog over the land tonight, that I have just come from a restaurant where a band was playing 'Among My Souvenirs', and where there was a sign that read All Dancing Will Cease During Shelling. I think I can also tell you that I love you.
'I am very well and although they have worked us very hard for the last three weeks, I have actually gained four pounds. I will probably be so fat when I get home, neither you nor the child will recognize me.
'Please do not worry about its being a girl. I'll be delighted with a girl. Honestly. I have been giving great thought to the child's education,' he wrote earnestly, bent over the pad in the flickering dim light, 'and this is what I have decided. I do not like the new-fangled ideas in education that are inflicted upon children today. I have seen examples of what they do to unformed minds, and I would want to save our child from them. The idea of allowing a child to do whatever comes into its head, in order to permit it free expression, seems to me to be absolute nonsense. It makes for spoiled, whining and disrespectful children,' Noah wrote out of the depths of his twenty- three-year-old wisdom, 'and is based, anyway, on a false notion. The world, certainly, will not permit any child, even ours, to behave completely according to its own desires, and to lead a child to believe that is the case is only to practise a cruel deception upon it. I am against nursery schools, too, and kindergartens, and I think we can teach the child all it has to know for the first eight years better than anyone else. I am also against forcing a child to read too early in life. I hope I do not sound too dogmatic, but we have never had the time to discuss this with each other and argue out any of the points and compromise on them.
'Please, darling, do not laugh at me for writing so solemnly about a poor little life that may not, at the moment I write this, have even begun. But this may be my last pass in a long time, and the last time I will be able to have the peace and quiet to think sensibly about this subject.
'I am certain, dearest,' Noah wrote slowly and carefully, 'that it will be a fine child, straight of limb, quick of mind, and that we shall love it very much. I promise to return to him and to you with a whole body and a whole heart. I know I shall, no matter what happens. I shall return to help, to tell him stories at bedtime, to feed him spinach and teach him how to drink milk out of a glass, to take him out in the Park on Sundays and tell him the names of the animals in the zoo, to explain to him why he must not hit little girls and why he must love his mother as much as his father does.
'In your last letter you wrote that you were thinking of calling the child after my father if he was a boy. Please do not do that. I was not very fond of my father, although he undoubtedly had his good points, and I have been trying to run away from him all my life. Call him Jonathan, after your father, if you wish. I am a little frightened of your father, but I have admired him warmly ever since that Christmas morning in Vermont.
'I am not worried for you. I know you will be wonderful. Do not worry about me. Nothing can happen to me now. Love, NOAH.
'P.S. I wrote a poem this evening before dinner. My first poem. It is a delayed reaction to assaulting fortified positions. Here it is. Don't show it to anyone. I'm ashamed.
Beware the heart's sedition,
It is not made for war:
Fear the fragile tapping
At the brazen door.
That's the first stanza. I'll write two more stanzas today and send them to you. Write me, darling, write me, write me, write…'
He had folded the letter neatly and got out of bed and put it in his tunic pocket. Then he had put out the light and hurried back between the warm sheets.
There had been no shelling during the night. Around one in the morning the sirens had gone off, but only for some planes that had raided London and were on their way home and had crossed the coast ten miles to the west. No guns had been fired.
Noah touched the bulge of the letter under his coat as he walked down the street. He wondered if there was an American Army unit in town where he could have it censored. He always felt a twinge of distaste when he thought of the officers of his own Company, whom he did not like, reading his letters to Hope.
The sun was up by now, burning under the slight mist. The houses shone palely, swimming up into the morning. Noah passed the neatly cleaned-out foundations where four houses had been knocked down by shellfire. Now, finally, he thought, as he passed the ruins, I am in a town that is at war.
The Channel lay beneath him, grey and cold. He could see the coast of France, through the thinning haze over the water. Three British torpedo boats, small and swift, were slicing into their concrete berths in the harbour. They had been out the night before, ranging the enemy coast, in a pale, blazing wake of foam, in a swirling confusion of swinging searchlights, streams of tracer bullets, underwater torpedo explosions that had sent black fountains of water three hundred feet in the air. Now they were coming in mildly, in the Sunday morning sunlight, at quarter- speed, looking playful and holiday-like, like speedboats at a summer resort. A town at war, Noah repeated silently.
At the end of the street there was a bronze monument, dark and worn by the Channel winds. Noah read the inscription, which solemnly celebrated the British soldiers who had passed this spot on their way to France in the years between 1914 and 1918 and did not return.
And again, in 1939, Noah thought, and on the way back, in 1940, from Dunkirk. What monument would a soldier read in Dover twenty years from now? what battles would they bring to his mind?
Noah kept walking. He had the town to himself. The road climbed up the famous cliffs out across the windswept meadows that reminded Noah, as so much of England did, of a park kept in good repair by a careful, loving and not very imaginative gardener.
He walked swiftly, swinging his arms. Now, without the rifle, without the pack, without the helmet and canteen and bayonet scabbard, walking seemed like a light and effortless movement, a joyous, spontaneous expression of the body's health on a winter morning.
When he reached the top of the cliff, the mist had disappeared and the Channel sparkled playfully, blue and glittering all the way to France. In the distance stood the cliff of Calais. Noah stopped and stared across the water. France was amazingly near-by. As he watched he could almost imagine that he saw a truck, moving slowly, along a climbing road, past a church whose steeple rose into the washed air. Probably it would be an army truck, he thought, and in it German soldiers. Perhaps on their way to church. It was a queer sensation, to look at enemy ground, even at this distance, and know that, in their glasses, they could probably see you, and all in a kind of trance-like, distance-born truce. Somehow, you could not help but feel that in a war, so long as you could see the enemy, or he you, killing should follow immediately. There was something artificial, spuriously arranged, about this peaceful observation of each other; it was an aspect of war that left you uneasy and dissatisfied. In a curious way, Noah thought, it would make it harder to kill them later.
He stood on top of the cliff, regarding the doubtful, clear coast of Europe. The town of Calais, with its docks and spires and rooftops and bare trees rising into the wartime sky, lay still in its Sunday-morning quietness, just like the town of Dover below him. He wished Roger were here with him today. Roger would have had something to say, some obscure, significant point of information about the two linked towns, twins through history, sending fishing smacks, tourists, ambassadors, soldiers, pirates, high explosive, back and forth at each other across the years. How sad that Roger had been sent to die among the palm trees and jungle moss of the Philippines. How much more fitting, if he had to die, if the bullet had reached him as he stormed the beach of the France he had loved so well, or been struck down riding into a country village near Paris, smiling, looking for the proprietor of the
