Endurance for honour

James Aldridge, a progressive English writer, journalist, literary critic, historian, linguist, is well known in our country both as a literary and a public figure, war veteran, fighter for peace. The majority of his works deal with the protagonist's painful -search for values, which includes re­considering the old principles and universally accepted life maxims. "Endurance for Honour", which originally appeared in the author's only collection of short stories "Gold and Sand" (I960), is devoted to one of basic problems of man's life: what is true and what is false about such notions as Honesty, Honour, Dignity, Heroism?

The strained, resentful growl of the twin motors pushing the D H Dove up into a steep climb was a wavery echo of the last mechanical sounds he would probably ever hear. So neatly caught like this — in the cocked hat of a deserted sea, deserted desert, deserted sky — he could guess the rest.

"If I do get out of it," he said with a frivolity that did not convince him or satisfy him at all, "I'll give flying away. I've absolutely had it this time."

Somewhere under the wreckage of a perfectly good aeroplane was the only hope he might ever have of getting out of this wilderness. The only thing that puzzled him was why the strange twin-engined Dove had dipped over the desert to the north, had circled a blue hill in the desert, and then climbed off; not seeing him, not trying to see him, and perhaps not wanting to see him. Whoever was in the plane could not avoid noticing the great puff of white smoke he had sent up by setting fire to the wing fabric soaked in petrol; but if they had seen him they surely would have come nearer and circled. They looked as if they had been making an approach to land near that blue hill, but when they saw his smoke they had flown off as quickly as their twin-engines could go.

"Smugglers, no doubt," he told himself cynically.

He could afford to be cynical. He was a smuggler himself.

"Any real point to survival?" he was mumbling half-heart­edly when the plane had finally disappeared. But he knew the answer.

He had found what he was looking for in the wreckage. It was a booklet issued during the war to pilots regularly flying this route. He had originally saved it as a souvenir and brought it with him to Iraq. He thought its title a little too cheerful for its purpose; Forced landings and desert survival. An aid to walking home.

"That ought to make it easy," he decided. He looked for and found a map in the pocket of the back cover. It showed all the positions where the.R. A. F. had put down caches of emergency food, water, and other provisions in the Sinai. There ought to be at least two dumps marked between his position and the coast, if he could manage to find them, or if they were still hidden from the Bedu and not rotted by the sun.

Even so, it was going to be a game of irony and chance. What was he going to say when he arrived at the Egyptian coastguard out on the tip of Mirza Mohamed, the nearest inhabited point and his best chance of survival? Let him explain himself to the Egyptians, if he could.

"I'll look into that problem when I get there," he decided and prepared for his journey, refusing to hurry, refusing to be absorbed into weariness by the heat, refusing to consider one flutter of panic.

"I'm the original emotionless man," he said aloud, "and I intend to stay that way. All I have to do now is survive."

It seemed possible. He came from a long line of survivors: pre-Norman Englishmen, West-country family. He supposed he was the last of a long feudal line which had won its dubious honours a little further to the north of here — Palestine, where one wild son of the Alwyns had assisted the Crusaders' rempage of Antioch and Tyre.

"So it wouldn't be too much of a dirty trick of fate if I ended where they began," this Alwyn said.

The family crest said: Endurance for Honour. This was also the price of the Crusades, when claims like that were valued at the sword's edge, at the heart's centre.

He had abandoned them long ago himself. Too many proofs against them. Public-school boys, impoverished aristocrats, R. A. F. pilots, and hopeful men after wars — no such men should begin sensitive if they wanted to survive sensitive. He had been all four and he had not really survived such rough handling. He was a dried-up man.

This sort of thinking kept him going across the reddish desert right through the first day, going over his school-days calmly as he tried to forget the laden knapsack rubbing his shoulders to the bone, his shoes making blisters along the sides of his heels, and his eyes burning away to nothing in the heat.

Public school had been hell. He had neither endured it nor felt it honourable; he had allowed it to defeat him. He remembered it only as a process of persecution of the spirit, adolescent degra­dation, rude conformity ground into the soul, and...

"Etcetera, etcetera," he told himself on the second day, when it became boring to recall school-days and silly suffering. His raw heel was biting at every step now, and his face felt swollen with the sun.

Take the impoverished aristocrat, he decided, now limping a course south-west by west across brown scorched hills that kicked up from the desert in painful short rises, making the going slow and exhausting.

The aristocrat was impoverished and landless and no longer useful; yet he had believed in the essentials of the caste: the gentleman who beleived the rules to mean exactly that — a gentle man. But no gentleness could survive a war, and every day of it had hurt, had ravished what was left of a young man who had tried to find a gentle way, some sensitive outline to live in. That was the day the sand blew up and found every corner between clothing and skin and began to grate unbearably.

This took him a long way over the foot-hills of the El Tih pla­teau to the first cache, which he found well marked according to the map descriptive. When he moved stones and dirt from the massive cairn the stores were mostly gone. Desert rats, ants perhaps, but certainly some desert diggers had burrowed in and helped themselves.

There was one untouched tin of foul Navy biscuits left. He put it in the rucksack to augment the rotting melting cheese he had rescued from the plane, and the few bars of chocolate which melted into liquid in the heat of every day, and re-solidified again in the freezing cold at night. He hoarded every crumb and morsel as if it stored up the value of a life force, not gold and title deeds, but gristle on the flesh to give him the energy to move.

Very valuable stuff, these mouldy biscuits.

The third day, looking for the second cache, he worried about his water supply. There was only one remaining water well between him and the sea.

He forgot his birthright for a drop of water and remembered the days over the North Weald when the last of the Spitfires, already too slow, had tried to outride the Focke-Wolfes at 27,000 feet in packs above, below, and head on. The break-away that day had turned into a shamble, and he had watched the well-organised Focke-Wolfes stay and fight it out for a change. He had made a run for it when his ammunition was gone, to be hit, to fall into the sea, to be picked up in a miracle of rescue work, and never to fly that way again. He had been too frightened, and there was no honour in that either.

The heart was simply not in it. The games and the Pilot Officers' camaraderie had cropped all sentiments into little pieces, throwing it all out and bringing in new responses defined with words like pranged and bogged it and shakydo. They had grated on his nerves. His heroism, if that's what it was, had been acci­dental and fleeting. At most he had loved the aeroplane, at worst he had been afraid of it. He had been in heaven to escape it when the war was over.

"I don't think I'm going to make it," he told himself mockingly.

His body was on the rack now. His arms were burnt fiery red, his face was untouchably raw, his legs grinding into each other along their delicate insides with sweat and sand, his lips were cracked, and his feet were shredded with sores. But he did find the well.

He dug it out with his bare hands and filled his bottles and canvas water-bag with green brackish water which weighted his rucksack heavily again.

"If I ever do see the sea again," he decided, "I'll spend the rest of my life on it, every day, wallowing in it. Mother of all men!" he said, to make sure he could still make a wry, intellectual remark.

On the fourth day he was very exhausted. He lay down a great deal of the time, preferring to move in the early morning and evening and at night. He saw the D H Dove again. It was weaving around to the north in its mysterious way, quite low, but too far away to attract. But he had the feeling that this time it was looking for him. By the time he had prepared a tamarisk brush fire it had climbed high and disappeared again.

"Up to no good," he said. "Unless Gillespie told them I was overdue and they, whoever they are, set out looking for me. But I doubt it. No honour among smugglers. Only money."

His last day seemed endless for its sunrises and sunsets; one an hour, if his brain was recording correctly. He supposed there was something wrong with his eyes, but you could not deceive the brain and it chalked them up: one sunrise and one sunset each hour; beautiful, as they must be in the desert, far away, and rosily sensitive. Very sensitive indeed.

That was very good stuff for the post-war man in him.

He had leapt out of the war on all fours — delighted with the future. But he had found this the most insensible operation of all. Wives were lovely and desirable. Good girls of good families. He had abandoned his dried-up philosophy and gone into it unprotected by the lessons of war and public school. He had forgotten that it was also a rough game on the spirit, and when you were betrayed in marriage it was more than treason, it was ultimate destruction.

Betrayal, children, and tragedy — this was the last lesson that had been learned.

Afterwards the drift became easier: not into dissolution, but back to the simple dried-up philosophy of emotionless man. It sufficed to keep the edges rough enough for where adventure took him. In fact he had looked for the roughest edges to go on rubbing this lack of feeling into himself. He had sought insensibility. He had found Gillespie in Iraq flying gold into Egypt, and Egyptian pounds out of it; gold into Greece and drachmas out of it; money where it was needed and gold where it was needed more. It had been half-legal in Iraq because they had taken off a fair piece of interest for being the clearing house. But not in Egypt. Too many wealthy man trying to get their money abroad illegally. And at the moment he was in Egypt.

Considering his predicament, therefore, a lack of feeling was all right. The family requirements of endurance with honour were not needed. He had long ago drowned them for ever anyway.

But he was caught. He stumbled down the El Tih plateau and reached the Red Sea road, still on his feet but almost delirious, having endured and survived. But it remained to be seen whether there was a current value for honour.

What was his name? "Peter Alwyn."

It was no use deceiving them. What had he been doing? Where had he come from? Impossible to lie, better not to deceive. They knew anyway. He had been flying from Iraq to the Qena mountains of Egypt.

"What for?"

"Hard to say," he told them. "I simply fly on course, land, take off and return."

"Yes, we know that already, Mr. Alwyn," the Egyptian frontier corps Colonel told him. "But what were you carrying into, or flying out of Egypt?"

"Can I say I don't know?" he suggested, still burned out of energy and resistance.

The* Colonel smiled and shook his head. "I'm afraid not."

"Did you find my plane?" he asked.

"Yes. In fact we had a mysterious radio message that we must look for your plane. Perhaps it came from your friends, who would sooner that you were caught than die in the desert? You must be thankful."

Alwyn bowed his head gratefully in acknowledgment.

"Was that your D H Dove that was flying about?" he asked the Colonel.

"No. We have two Austers and a Gemini, not any Doves at all."

"Must be a rival company in the same business," Alwyn told himself and supposed he was foolish for mentioning it, but he was softening down in a camp bed with cool walls, dressed sores, and a water jug and a polite Colonel who questioned him delicately. There was nothing much left to say.

"Of course you were smuggling," the Colonel told him.

"Not really," Alwyn said. "I was giving people a lift in and out, at cut rates. That's all."

"Not good enough!" the Colonel laughed. "Spying, perhaps?"

"Not a chance," Alwyn shrugged calmly, drily now, knowing he was going to be beaten in this, and not liking the Colonel's tolerance. "Definitely not spying."

"I know you weren't spying," the Colonel said, amused. ⁴T know quite well that you were smuggling..."

"You may think you know," Alwyn said, "but you don't really know."

"I'm afraid I do," the Colonel said, swishing away the flies from the bed and sighing. "You were smuggling hasheesh. Opium..."

"Hasheesh? Drugs? Oh no! Not me, Colonel. I'm sorry..." "But we know you were." "You know no such thing."

"We have found, near your wrecked plane, a veritable hoard of hasheesh, stored very nicely in a little cave in a blue hillside quite near your smashed plane. It was bad luck, Mr. Alwyn, but too obvious."

"That's what that D H Dove was doing," Alwyn snarled at himself. "Hasheesh, and tons of it, no doubt. Get out of this one, old chap. Let us see the emotionless man survive this."

"That was nothing to do with me," he said. "I can swear to that."

The Colonel shook his head sadly. "No use swearing," he said. "We can tolerate most things, even smuggling, but not hasheesh. You know that hundreds of kilos of it are smuggled into Egypt every year, and that we usually shoot an Egyptian if we catch him doing it. What are we to do with you, Mr. Alwyn?"

"I don't know. But I wasn't smuggling hasheesh."

"Can you prove it?"

"I don't know if I can or not, but I can tell you the truth." "Go ahead..."

Force and morality were neatly balanced again. Had he endured simply to betray this last shred of an old character to a crime which would remove all sensibilities, all pretences of sentiment and delicacy, and for ever this time? Smuggling hasheesh?

"I won't admit to smuggling hasheesh," he said. "I might admit to smuggling money."

The Colonel nodded. "I suppose that would be a point of honour with you. Money, not drugs."

"I suppose it would be."

"And is it the truth?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

"All right, Mr. Alwyn," the Colonel said, getting up, satisfied, yet looking down at the victim with an English and rueful air. "I shall save your honour. Г11 believe you. In any case you'll go to prison. ..."

Alwyn shrugged. "If I must."

"But did it ever occur to you," the Colonel went on thought­fully, "that what you were smuggling — money — corrupts the the soul? Whereas hasheesh simply destroys the body..."

^uIt "hadn't occured to me that way," Alwyn admitted. "I haven't been in touch with the soul lately."

"Think it over," the Colonel told him as he left.

He said he would, but there was no need to think it over at all. The obvious was already true. The Colonel may have decorated it with a nice touch of irony, but he had already discovered it himself.

"No such thing as the emotioneless man," he told himself, looking at his bandaged feet. "A little pain, a little shame... poof, and he's gone." He almost winced. "I suppose I'll have to start all over again from that, in prison or out of it."

Knowing it, he lay back and felt grateful that his real require­ments of endurance for honour had only begun.

* * *

Peter Alwyn is the type of a protagonist, often adhered to by Hemingway and, later by James Aldridge.

Rough and tough at first sight he proves to be inwardly insecure and vulnerable. The story shows this confrontation and interdependence of the outward and the inward.

The title words are several times repeated in the text. What new meaning is added to them by each case and what is the final meaning of the title when you return to it having finished the story?

Alongside with "honour" and "endurance", the word "sensitive (-ity)" is also repeated. What can you say about its semantic movement in the story and the significance of all these repetitions for the understanding of the author's viewpoint?

SOURCES OF PUBLICATIONS

Hemingway E. Cat in the Rain.— In: The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Pan Books, 1957.

Mansfield K. The Stranger.— In: The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London, Faber and Faber, 1961.

Caldwell E. Daughter.— In: The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell. N. Y., The New American Library, 1956.

Faulkner W. Carcassonne.— In: Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Random House, 1950.

Parker D. The Last Tea.— In: The Portable Dorothy Parker. N. Y., Alfred Knopf, 1972.

Oates J. C. The Man That Turned into a Statue.— In: Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories. Fawcett Crest Books, 1972.

. Bradbury R. The One Who Waits.— In: The Machineries of Joy. Bantam Books, 1965.

Updike J. Separating.— In: Too Far to Go (The Maple Stories). Fawcett Crest Books, 1979.

Doctorow E. L. The Water Works.— In: Lives of the Poets. N. Y., Random House, 1984.

Cheever J. Reunion.— In: The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. N. Y., Harper and Row, 1964.

Greene Gr. I Spy.— In: Nineteen Stories. London, Heinemann, 1956.

Anderson Sh. Mother.— In: Winesburg, Ohio. N. Y., The Viking Press, 1966.

Joyce J. The Boarding House.— In: Short Story: A Thematic Anthology. N. Y., Ch. Scribner's Sons, 1971.

Spark M. You Should Have Seen the Mess.—In: Collected Stories I. London, MacMillan, 1967.

Fitzgerald Sc. The Smilers.— In: The Price Was High. Pan Books, 1979.

Lawson H. The Ghostly Door.— In: Impressions on a Continent: A Collection of Australian Short Stories. Sydney, London, Heine­mann, 1957.

Hughes L. Stories About Simple.— In: Black Voices. N. Y., Mentor Books, 1967.

Wright R. The Man Who Saw the Flood.™ In: Eight Men. N. Y., Alfred Knopf, 1961.

Walker A. Strong Horse Tea.— In: Black and White: Stories of American Life. N. Y., Pocket Books, 1971.

O'Connor Fl. An Exile in the East.™ In: The Best American Short Stories. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

Frame J. The Bath.— In: New Zealand Short Stories. London, Melbourne, N. Y., Oxford University Press, 1975.

Salinger J. D, A Perfect Day for Bananafish.— In: Nine Stories. N. Y., 1978.

Aldridge J. Endurance for Honour.— In: Gold and Sand. London, 1960.

ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ

Предисловие