The Young Lions

CHAPTER NINE

THE clashing sound of a lawn-mower awoke Michael. He lay for a moment in the strange bed, remembering where he was, remembering what had happened yesterday, smelling the clipped fragrance of the California grass. "Probably," the movie writer on the edge of the swimming-pool at Palm Springs had said yesterday afternoon, "probably ten guys are home writing it now. The butler comes into the garden with the tea and he says, 'Lemon or cream?' and the little nine-year-old girl comes in, carrying her doll, and says, 'Daddy, please fix the radio. I can't get the fu

It was silly, Michael thought, but more true than not. Large events seemed to a

Michael himself had been playing te

Michael had meant to stay in Palm Springs another three days, but after the te

The noise of the mower came in at the french window that opened on to the small lawn. Michael turned and looked at the machine and the gardener. The gardener was a small fifty-year-old Japanese, bent and thin with his years of tending other people's grass and flower-beds. He plodded after the machine mechanically, his thin, wiry arms straining against the handle.

Michael couldn't help gri

Michael got out of bed and went to the window, buttoning his pyjama top. It was a clear, golden morning, with the tiny crispness that is Southern California's luxurious substitute for winter. The green of the lawn looked very green and the small red and yellow dahlias along the border shone like gleaming bright buttons against it. The gardener kept everything in sharp definite lines out of some precise sense of Oriental design.

"Good morning," Michael said. He didn't know the man's name. He didn't know any Japanese names. Yes – one. Sessue Hayakawa, the old movie star. What was good old Sessue Hayakawa doing this morning?

The gardener stopped the lawn-mower and came slowly up from his sombre dream to stare at Michael.

"Yes, Sir," he said. His voice was flat and high, and there was no welcome in it. His little dark eyes, set among the brown wrinkles, looked, Michael thought, lost and pleading. Michael wanted to say something comforting and civilized to this ageing, labouring, exile who had overnight found himself in a land of enemies, charged with the guilt of a vile attack three thousand miles away.

"It's too bad," Michael said, "isn't it?"

The gardener looked blankly at him, as though he had not understood at all.

"I mean," said Michael, "about the war."

The man shrugged. "Not too bad," he said. "Everybody say, 'naughty Japan, goddamn Japan'. But not too bad. Before, England wants, she take. America wants, she take. Now Japan wants." He stared coldly at Michael, direct and challenging.

"She take."

He turned, and turned the mower with him, and started across the lawn slowly, with the cut grass flying in a fragrant green spray around his ankles. Michael watched him for a moment, the bent humble back, the surprisingly powerful legs, bare up to the knee in torn shorts, the creased, sun-worn neck rising out of the colourless sweaty shirt.

Michael reflected. Perhaps a good citizen, in time of war, should report utterances like this to the proper authorities. Perhaps this aged Japanese gardener in his ragged clothes was really a full commander in the Japanese Navy, cleverly awaiting the arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro Harbour before showing his hand. Michael gri

He closed the french windows and went in and shaved. While he was shaving he tried to plan what he would do from now on. He had come to California with Thomas Cahoon, who was trying to cast a play. They were conferring about revisions with the author, too, Milton Sleeper, who could only work at night on the play, because he worked during the day for Warner Brothers as a scenario writer. "Art," Cahoon had said, acidly, "is in great shape in the twentieth century. Goethe worked all day on a play, and Chekhov and Ibsen, but Milton Sleeper can only give it his evenings."

Somehow, Michael thought, as he scraped at his face, when your country goes to war, you should be galvanized into some vast and furious action. You should pick up a gun, board a naval vessel, climb into a bomber for a five-thousand-mile flight, parachute into the enemy's capital…

But Cahoon needed him to put the play on. And, there was no escaping this fact, Michael needed the money. If he went into the Army now, his mother and father would probably starve, and there was Laura's alimony… Cahoon was giving him a percentage of the play this time, too. It was a small percentage, but if it was a hit it would mean that money would be coming in for a year or two. Perhaps the war would be short and the money would last it out. And if it was a tremendous smash, say, like Abie's Irish Rose or Tobacco Road, the war could stretch on indefinitely. It was a dreadful thing to think of, though – a war that ran as long as Tobacco Road.

Too bad he didn't have the money now, though. It would have been so satisfactory to go to the nearest Army post after hearing the news on the radio and enlist. It would have been a solid, unequivocal gesture which you could look back at with pride all your life. But there were only six hundred dollars in the bank, and the income-tax people were bothering him about his return in 1939, and Laura had been unpredictably greedy about the divorce settlement. He had to give her eighty dollars a week for her whole life, unless she got married, and she had taken all the cash he had in his account in New York. He wondered what happened to alimony when you joined the Army.