The Young Lions

Noah gri

Hope touched the flowers. "I carry it around with me," she said, "all the time, these days. In my handbag. To remind me…"

Noah walked slowly over to the door. There was an iron key in the lock. He turned it. The clumsy noise of the primitive tumblers screeched through the room. "There," he said, "I've been thinking about doing this for seven months. Locking a door."

Suddenly Hope ducked her head. But she brought it up again quickly, and Noah saw she was holding a small box in her hands. "Here," she said, "I brought you something."

Noah took the box in his hands. He thought of the ten dollars for the gift, and the note at the bottom of his barracks bag, the ragged slip of paper with the sardonic "Tough" on it. As he opened the box, he made himself forget the ten dollars. That could wait until Monday.

There were chocolate cookies in the box.

"Taste them," Hope said. "I'm happy to say I didn't make them myself. I got my mother to bake them and send them on to me."

Noah bit into one of the cookies and they tasted like home. He ate another one. "It was a wonderful idea," he said.

"Take them off," Hope said fiercely. "Take off those damned clothes."

The next morning they went out for breakfast late. After breakfast they strolled through the few streets of the small town. People were coming home from church and children in their best clothes were walking in restless, bored dignity among the faded flower-beds. You never saw children in camp, and it gave a homely and pleasant air to the morning.

A drunken soldier walked with severe attention to his feet, along the sidewalk, glowering at the churchgoers fiercely, as though daring them to criticize his piety or his right to be drunk before noon on a Sunday morning. When he reached Hope and Noah, he saluted grandly, and said, "Sssh. Don't tell the MPs," and marched sternly ahead.

"Man yesterday," Noah said, "on the bus, saw your picture."

"What was the report?" Hope picked softly at his arm with her fingertips. "Negative or positive?"

"'A garden,' he said, 'a garden on a morning in May.'"

Hope chuckled. "This Army," she said, "will never win the war with men like that."

"He also said, 'By God, I'm going to get married myself, before they shoot me.'"

Hope chuckled again and then grew sober thinking about the last two words. But she didn't say anything. She could only stay one week and there was not time to be wasted talking about matters like that.

"Will you be able to come in every night?" she asked.

Noah nodded. "If I have to bribe every MP in the area," he said. "Friday night I may not be able to manage it, but every other night…" He looked around regretfully at the shabby, mean town, dusty in the sun, with the ten saloons lining the streets in neon gaudiness. "It's too bad you don't have a better place to spend the week…"

"Nonsense," Hope said. "I'm crazy about this town. It reminds me of the Riviera."

"You ever been on the Riviera?"

"No."

Noah squinted across the railroad tracks where the Negro section sweltered, privies and unpainted board among the rutted roads. "You're right," he said. "It reminds me of the Riviera, too."

"You ever been to the Riviera?"

"No."

They gri

"How long do you think?"

He knew what she was talking about, but he asked, "How long what?"

"How long is it going to last? The war…"

A small Negro child was sitting in the dust, gravely caressing a rooster. Noah squinted at him. The rooster seemed to doze, half hypnotized by the movement of the gentle black hands.

"Not long," Noah said. "Not long at all. That's what everybody says."

"You wouldn't lie to your wife, would you?"

"Not a chance," Noah said. "I know a sergeant at Regimental Headquarters, and he says they don't think we'll ever get a chance to fight at all, our division. He says the Colonel's sore as can be because the Colonel is bucking for BG."

"What's BG?"

"Brigadier-General."

"Am I very stupid, not knowing?"

Noah chuckled. "Yop," he said. "I'm crazy about stupid women."

"I'm so glad," Hope said. "I'm delighted." They turned round without signalling each other, as though they had simultaneous lines to the same reservoir of impulses, and started walking back towards the rooming house. "I hope the son of a bitch never makes it," Hope said dreamily, after a while.

"Makes what?" Noah asked, puzzled.

"BG."

They walked in silence for a minute.

"I have a great idea," Hope said.

"What?"

"Let's go back to our room and lock the door." She gri

There was a knock on the door and the landlady's voice clanged through the peeling wood. "Mrs Ackerman, Mrs Ackerman, I would like to see you for a moment, please."

Hope frowned at the door, then shrugged her shoulders. "I'll be right there," she called.

She turned to Noah. "You stay right where you are," she said.

"I'll be back in a minute."

She kissed his ear, then unlocked the door and went out. Noah lay back on the bed, staring through mild, half-closed eyes up at the stained ceiling. He dozed, with the Sunday afternoon coming to a warm, drowsy close outside the window, with a locomotive whistle sounding somewhere far off and lonely soldiers' voices singing, "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know," on the street below. Drowsily, he knew he'd heard that song before. Then he remembered Roger and that Roger was dead. But before he could think much about it, he fell asleep.

He was awakened by the slow closing of the door. He opened his eyes a slit, smiling gently as he saw Hope standing above him.

"Noah," she said, "you have to get up."

"Later," he said. "Much later. Come on down here."

"No," she said, and her voice was flat. "You've got to get up now."

He sat up. "What's the matter?"

"The landlady," Hope said. "The landlady says we have to get out right away."

Noah shook his head to clear it because he knew he was not getting this straight. "Now," he said, "let's hear it again."

"The landlady says we have to get out."

"Darling," Noah said patiently, "you must have gotten it a little mixed up."

"It's not mixed up." Hope's face was strained and tense. "It's absolutely straight. We have to get out."

"Why? Didn't you take this room for the week?"

"Yes," said Hope, "I took it for a week. But the landlady says I got it under false pretences. She said she didn't realize we were Jews."

Noah stood up and slowly went over to the bureau. He looked at his smiling picture under the jonquils. The jonquils were getting dry and crackly around the edges.

"She said," Hope went on, "that she suspected from the name, but that I didn't look Jewish. Then when she saw you she began to wonder. Then she asked me and I said, of course we were Jewish."

"Poor Hope," Noah said softly. "I apologize."

"None of that," Hope said. "I never want to hear anything like that from you again. Don't you ever apologize to me for anything."

"All right," Noah said. He touched the flowers vaguely, with a drifting small movement of his fingers. The jonquils felt tender and dead. "I suppose we ought to pack," he said.

"Yes," said Hope. She got out her bag and put it on the bed and opened it. "It's nothing personal," Hope said. "It's a rule of the house, the landlady said."

"I'm glad to know it's nothing personal," Noah said.