Читать книгу Mr. Smith - Louis Bromfield - Страница 3

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Two years after the end of the war, I received a telephone call from a stranger describing himself as Sergeant Burke. He asked for an appointment saying that he had with him a parcel which came from an old friend of mine. He had, he said, promised to deliver this parcel to me by hand. The old friend, he said, was someone called Wolcott Ferris from the town of Crescent City where I was born. For a moment the name lay dead and unrecognized in the echoing spaces of a rather poor and fairly overburdened memory. It was the words “Crescent City” which gave me the clue.

I told the Sergeant to drop in about five o’clock and hung up the telephone.

Then slowly, as I leaned back in my chair, the name of Wolcott Ferris became a reality and took form physically in my memory. But the form was not that of a man but of a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen years of age. I had not seen Wolcott Ferris in at least twenty-five years and I was puzzled as to why the Sergeant had referred to him as an old friend. True, he had been a friend of my boyhood, but I had not seen him since that happy period.

In my memory I saw him again, slowly at first and then clearly, on one of those expeditions which the boys of our neighborhood used to make in the early spring, into the country along flooding streams and through woods where the first anemones were beginning to show their pale blue and mauve blossoms among the fallen leaves.

He was a cheerful fellow, good-looking, and never afflicted with the pimples that were the plague of most boys during adolescence. He belonged to the same Scout troop as I did and he was good at sports. I remember that even in those days he always seemed to me one of those people who had everything on his side. He came from a family which was prosperous and even rich, a family whose history virtually followed that of the town in which we lived. People liked him, and in high school he was, if anything, plagued by the attentions of the giggling girl students. He had everything that was needed to make for a pleasant, successful, happy life.

And then I remembered that twice during the twenty-five years since I had last seen him he had written me rather friendly letters. I answered them although there wasn’t much to say except to recall the pleasant times of our boyhood. The only clue as to why he should have written to me was contained in a single sentence or two which I remember only dimly. They ran something like this, “Since we last met you have not only had a successful life but a wonderfully interesting one. I often envy you the experience of knowing so many kinds of people and of having seen so much of the world. Sometimes I feel that I would like to take up writing, but of course all that is nonsense. It is too late to begin now.”

At the time I thought, “He just thinks that through me he might meet a chorus girl or an actress.” I had had other letters from men like him who seemed to believe that I lived perpetually in a round of champagne, women, and gaiety. In both letters he had written that the next time he came to New York he would give me a ring. But he never did.

Now I was puzzled as to why he should send me a parcel to be delivered personally by a third person. Why did he not deliver it himself? Or send it by post? Or why was he sending me a parcel at all?

The answer came at five o’clock when the Sergeant appeared.

He was one of those square, heavy, muscular men who seemed ageless, with unruly black hair and blue eyes. I guessed that he was about thirty-five, but he probably looked the same at twenty-five and would look exactly the same at forty-five. He came in shyly, impressed, I think, not by prosperity or prestige, but by what such men conceive to be evidence of superior brains and education. My office is a pleasant place filled with books.

We shook hands, and with some difficulty I got his hat and the paper parcel away from him, after which he accepted my offer of a drink and sat down.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” he said. “I would have sent the package or just left it here but I kind of felt that I had to see that nothing happened to it. I kind of owed it to Captain Ferris.”

I said that I understood.

Then as if he remembered suddenly, be said, “You know he was killed in the South Pacific?”

“No,” I said, not feeling anything in particular. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You see, I liked Captain Ferris,” he said. “He was a square shooter and we got along fine. It was kind of tough going with five guys stuck on a little island and forgotten by the Army for more than two years. You know ... I guess ... what that could be like.” He grinned. “Sometimes it was hell and we wanted to kill each other.”

I gave him another drink, noticing that perhaps out of nervousness he had downed the first one in a couple of gulps. The drink seemed to dissolve a little his shyness.

He said, “When he was killed it was kind of like losing a brother. I’d got to count on him. It was worse too because he wasn’t killed in combat.”

“How was he killed?”

“Well, nobody really knows. But he was shot one night by a sentry who said he thought the Captain was a Jap trying to infilter the camp. This here particular sentry had a grudge against the Captain, and the rest of us always thought the sonofabitch did it on purpose.” He sighed suddenly and went on, “But you couldn’t prove anything so the sonofabitch got off free. He was lousy white trash from down South some place ... you know the kind ... Ku-Kluxer and nigger hater.”

Then he turned to the table where I had put the parcel, picked it up, and gave it to me as if merely leaving it behind in my possession wasn’t enough. He had to put it into my hands. The presentation had the quality of a ritual.

“The Captain was always writin’,” he said. “Sometimes he wrote all night like he had to get something finished. This is it. After he was killed I found it in his hut addressed to me sayin’ that if anything ever happened to him would I see that it was delivered personally to you. I just wrapped it up and brought it along with me. I carted it around with me till I got back to the States and out of the lousy Army ...”

“You never read it?” I asked.

“No. I’m not much on readin’ if there’s anything else to do. I kinda got into the habit in the South Pacific because you had to read or go crazy but once I got out of there I didn’t have no more time for readin’.”

That was all he knew and all he told me, save that he had gone into the Army at twenty-four and had become a top sergeant and that after the war he got out of the Army as soon as possible.

“I used to like the Army,” he said, “But it soured on me. The next time they get me into the ... thing, it’ll have to be with ropes.”

There wasn’t anything more to talk about. The Sergeant seemed to have no remarkable conversational gifts and we had nothing in common save a joint acquaintance with a dead man I had not seen in twenty-five years and even then the man he knew was not the boy I had known. So after an awkward silence or two, the Sergeant stood up and said, “Thanks for the drink and the time. It’s a weight off me to get the package safe to you. I almost lost it a couple of times knockin’ around. But it was like ... what do you call it? ... a mission. The Captain seemed so wrapped up in it.” His square solid face seemed to soften a little. “He was a funny guy. He could laugh or drink or tell a dirty story and there wasn’t nothin’ high hat about him. But he always seemed kind of sad. I guess he thought too much.” Then he grinned. “It’s something I try to avoid as much as possible.”

“Better leave your name and address,” I said. “I might want to get in touch with you.”

I gave him a pencil and pad of paper, and, clumsily, as if they were not used to spelling or writing, the hamlike hands wrote out a name and address. Then he handed it to me, saying, “I haven’t got no address at the moment. I’m just knocking around looking up old girl friends.” He laughed. “Makin’ up for lost time. I got a lot of scrounging to do to get caught up with what I missed during them lousy two years with no women around but dirty fuzzy-wuzzies. But you can always reach me care of my mother in Roxbury.”

Then we shook hands again and he went away and I opened the parcel. It contained two or three hundred pages of manuscript, some written in longhand and some by typewriter. The paper was of all kinds and descriptions and was discolored and stained by the tropical sun and perhaps by salt fog. I started reading it, and when dinnertime came I had my dinner brought into the office and went on reading. I finished about two in the morning, and on the last page, typed as a sort of P.S., I found a note addressed to me.

It read,

“If you think this could be published I’d like it. It might help some other poor bastard with the same disease as mine ... rotting from the core outward, you might say. W.F.”

And then another thought occurred to me. The Sergeant had said that Ferris’ death had not been cleared up, that it had never been established either as accident or murder. If the Sergeant had bothered to open and read the manuscript he would have found a third possibility which seemed the true solution.... Ferris may well have gone out with the express purpose of being shot by a sentry. Perhaps his end may have been a confusion of all three—of accident, murder, and suicide. It seemed planned that way.... Perhaps for the sake of his extraordinary wife and his unfortunate children....

In any case, I did think the manuscript worth getting published and here it is. I have called it “Mr. Smith.” Perhaps you will understand why.

L. B.