The Death of Buchan Walsh

BUCHAN called me up at a very bad time. I was in the middle of writing a story about him. I should have known better than to take a close friend as the central character of a story. I should have known. It’s easy to say now: I should have known.

Ann and I were living then near Cornwall, on a hill sloping down to the river. From my study I could see an open field, the main north-south road, some clumps of birch and maple, the Housatonic, and over against the sky four round, rock-scabbed timbered hills. The stretch of river across from us was calm and broad. Off to the right I had a fine view of the old wooden covered bridge, and I could just see the line on the water before the bridge where the quiet river broke off into rapids.

Buchan ‘s call was not a surprise—we were in fairly close touch in those days — but it was an annoyance. It was going to kill the story. He didn’t know I was writing about him, so I had a bitter little joke with myself when I answered him. “I was just thinking about you,” I said.

“You were?” Buchan’s voice sounded dull.

Come down and see me. I want to talk to you.” “You’re talking to me now.”

Come down and see me. I want you to come down and see me.”

I began to remind Buchan that I had a wife and a new baby and work to do and —

He interrupted me. “I’m in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. Come on down.”

“You re a hell of a lot of bother to your friends.”

“Can you come this afternoon?”

I gathered up all my notes and the summary I had written and the drafted passages of my story about Buchan and took them with me on the train. I knew they were no good now. I just sat there with the stuff on my lap and thought about the three weeks I had wasted and about my friend Buchan, my outrageous, hopeless friend Buchan.

I had met him in college, and I had often thought about using him in a story. There were many dabs of Buchan in my notebooks. The first was a short note I had written about two years before: that is to say, in 1938, when I was newly married and was working in New York. “Buchan Walsh called up last evening and asked if he could come and spend the night with Ann and me. I asked him what was wrong with his apartment. He said, ‘Nothing, I just want to go visiting.’ He came up about ten o’clock, had one drink, said he was tired, and disappeared into the bedroom and presumably went to sleep. He was out this morning before we were up.”

Later I had written, “As usual, Buchan is in a quandary. He can’t seem to decide whether to take a year off and travel around Europe. If I had that choice!”

Buchan decided not to go, or at any rate he defaulted the trip by not deciding anything, and I made another note in December that year. “Had lunch with Buchan. The way he orders his food fascinates me. He spends nearly five minutes giving the menu a going-over. I got the impression he was less interested in pleasing his stomach than in being certain that he would make no mistake in front of the waiter and me

—and I think the waiter was the more important of us. It was a French place, and Buchan seemed to be studying out each item of French nomenclature precisely. He finally settled for an omelet and a salad, both of which he named in full, in excellently pronounced French.”

Early in 1940 I had set out a longer sketch of Buchan, for by then I felt fairly sure I would write a story about him. “Buchan,” I wrote, “is a man of inaction. Nothing much happens to him and quite likely nothing ever will. He simply can’t make up his mind about anything. He is indecision. He is quite good-looking, and his appearance is forever inviting him into situations with which he hasn’t the desire — or the ability, for that matter—to contend. The sad part of it is that he has quite a lot of talent, both for people and for work. I remember scores of things he hasn’t been able to make up his mind about: what courses to take at college, where to live, whether to go to Europe, what job to take, and so on. He reached a decision about a career after months of anguished debate and then switched careers three times within two years. At the moment he’s working for a rayon company. His father is a successful manufacturer of hairbrushes in Toledo. Buchan used to talk about indulgence on his parents’ part as if it had been responsible for his best qualities, whereas in fact it must have been an undermining force.

“He compensated for his want of decision by having much too certain opinions. He argues loudly and with unconvincing authority about events in Europe. He is helped in this sport by a good memory. The other day I heard him arguing against the possibility of a German offensive flanking the Maginot line. It happens that I had read the dispatch to NANA by Liddell Hart on which he was basing his case (without credit) and I was amazed at the way he reeled it off almost verbatim, as if he had just thought of it all. But in spite of his arguing, he clearly sets much store by the approval of his fellows, and his arguments are not so much intended to explore disagreements as to show off a basic community of knowledge and taste. Buchan also compensates for his unsureness by extreme modesty and meticulousness in dress. He usually wears dark double-breasted suits and silk ties traversed diagonally with broad stripes of dull colors.

“Although he is not, and never will be, a man of action, neither is he a man of deep thought. I doubt, in fact, that he has been bothered by a single consecutive full minute of logical thinking since he graduated from college, which was six years ago. I imagine he indulges in quite a bit of daydreaming, which may pass with him for thinking; he drops remarks which hint a vague kind of ambition for himself, in whatever line of work he happens to be dallying at any given time, but he gives no corollary conviction of being about to achieve the ambition, whatever it is.

“I’ve noticed that he’s much more alive — his mind is better integrated and his body better coördinated — when he is with women than when he is with men. Talking with men he is diffident, and much of the time he looks bored: wears an air of being in another room at some other time on some other errand of amusement. But with women he is alert, considerate, and almost witty. He is also clearly on the make. He disguises his intent thinly and so flatters and pleases most women. I doubt that he ever goes far in his flirtations, because he would never be able to make up his mind to do anything requiring organization and delicacy. I’m sorry to say that I think he’s rather parasitical in general. His father allows him enough money — about six thousand a year, I would guess — to live well. He works at his various jobs not because he likes them or because he feels any duty toward society, but simply because he feels he would be despised if he did not work, and because any addition to what his father gives him is gravy.

“I write all this about Buchan as if I thought of him with distaste, not to say disgust. Perhaps I do. And yet I like him. I enjoy being with him. I suppose it’s because he seems so helpless, in spite of his sharp mind and obvious ability. He’s extremely demanding. I remember once when I lived in town he called me up at about two in the morning and insisted that I come downtown and lend him some money, because he was stuck with a bill at a night club that refused to cash a check for him. He used to ask if I’d mind giving my laundress a couple — which usually turned out to be half a dozen — of his shirts to wash. It is curious that these encroachments on his friends’ time, energy, and privacy should be the very episodes that endear him to us. He makes it seem wonderfully kind to help him out. Therein, I suppose, lies his truly parasitic talent: he makes it seem blessed to give — specifically to Buchan Walsh. But I wonder what it is that makes such a waste of him.”

2

I HAD decided to complement Buchan, in the story, with a type almost his opposite. I based the girl of the story on a single paragraph which I had written in a notebook early in 1939. “Last night at dinner,” it said, “I was put next to a girl who took my breath away. She was an animate moral force. I guess you’d call her a career woman, though she had none of the usual masculine and domineering qualities. Her voice was sweet, soft, and soprano. Her figure was fine — didn’t make her look, as the figures of so many career women make them look, as if she were a habitual associate, if not a distant relative, of a horse. Her check was clear and looked soft. She had dressed and decorated herself becomingly. Her face was not particularly pretty, but it was mobile and expressive, and it reflected some kind of inner heat — whether of conviction or of sex I was uncertain, and therein lay a pleasing ambiguity — and altogether she was quite a thing. She seems to be on a dozen committees: for the Spanish Loyalists, against the poll tax, for this and against that. She’s on one which is called, with what seems to me fantastic politeness for this year of grace, the Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression. She knows what’s going on and she knows where she stands on everything. She’s a Park Avenue Pasionaria. She’s very sure of what’s right and what’s wrong. I guess she’s got what the psychos call a highly developed superego — a terrific conscience, not only for herself but for all mankind. I was obliged to tell Ann, as we drove home, that I thought the girl would be nifty, though possibly somewhat argumentative, in bed.”

The girl’s name escapes me now, but I still recall, with startling clarity considering how long ago it was, our conversation, or rather her monologue, that evening. She talked furiously of an alleged British plan to withdraw recognition from the Spanish Republican government on the pretext that the President, Manuel Azaña, was in Paris, and that therefore the Republican government could not be legally functioning. She talked enthusiastically of Lillian Heilman’s Little Foxes, which had just opened and which she had seen the night before. I remember that she also talked, with the same engaging fire, of a pair of shoes she had bought that morning.

It was my idea, that summer, to mate Buchan, or at any rate a character fashioned on his model and bearing some other name, with this girl. The story had possibilities as a story, but I think deep down I was casting about for some solution for Buchan, some way of bringing him to life, if only in my imagination.

According to my rough draft, the man and the girl met, one day in the summer of 1930, in a Madison Avenue haberdashery. The man (I shall call him Buchan for convenience) was standing at the necktie counter, trying to decide between two cravats which were alike in every way except color. The girl, who had never seen him before, was waiting for him to make up his mind so that the clerk would be free to sell her a tie.

She finally lost her patience and said: “Why don’t you buy them both?”

“No, I only need one.”

“Well, for goodness sake, make up your mind. Buy that one.”

“Do you think so?” Buchan spoke absent-mindedly at first, as if he took her voice to be that of a floorwalker or of another clerk. Slowly he turned to her after this line and, noticing her beauty, he lifted the tie to his neck and said: “Do you think so? Does this one look well on me?”

“It looks exactly the same as the other would.”

“I want it to be a prosperous tie.”

“Well, please buy one of them. I’m awfully late.”

“Buying a tie for your husband?”

He asked this insolent, exploratory question looking absolutely innocent, but she answered with a somewhat curt evasion that didn’t tell him whether she was married or not. “For my father.”

“Buy this one.” He picked up the tie on the counter, his alternate choice, and handed it to her, “All right.”

“Wait a sec. I don’t know. I think I like that one better than this.”

“Either way. Only decide.”

“I want to look rich. Does this tie make me look rich? I’m going to a luncheon to let some dull people ask me for money.”

She asked quickly: “What luncheon?”

“Oh, one of those godawful things in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf. For Spanish refugees, tomorrow. I always get a new tie for those lunches. I like to go in looking rich and get their hopes up. I eat their food and listen to the first three speeches and then I leave, just before they start hollering for the checks.”

“I’m on the committee for that lunch. Don’t you dare.”

“Wonderful! Do you think you could arrange for us to sit together?”

Surprisingly she said: “I think so.” Then came the point: “If you’ll give some money.”

“Sure I will.” He turned to the clerk. “I won’t be needing this tie.”

The luncheon set up the full counterpoint between Buchan and the girl, and opposed her scorn for his lack of convictions, of beliefs, of moral anger, and of vital energy, to his skepticism of the depth and validity of those qualities in her. Each shook the other a bit; each liked the other.

“How far back does all this fervor of yours go?” he asked. “I’ll bet five dollars you got it all just last year, and I’ll bet ten dollars you were in love when you got it.”

She smiled and said, “Almost right on both counts. But at least I have it. How can anyone live twentyodd years — how old are you, anyhow?—”

“Twenty-six.”

“— twenty-six years without believing anything?”

She said later: “Didn’t Arruze’s speech move you, or persuade you, or anything?”

“I don’t like his looks. I’ll bet he beats his wife.”

“Does that make any difference?”

“It does to me. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not just that he’s a Spanish Republican. A Pennsylvania Republican with that kind of mouth would make me feel the same way.”

“Then you do believe in something: you believe in personal integrity.”

“I believe in not beating one’s wife.”

“Well, that’s something.”

3

THAT was as far as my rough draft went when Buchan called. My summary of the rest of the story went on: “During the luncheon they made a date which perpetuated their conflict — and their attraction. In their developing relationship, he took a passive, though definitely male, role; she was the feminine agitator. He enjoyed lingering a long time over dinner, just talking, while she pressed always for a concert, a play, a movie. He liked to sit at home taking passes at her, which she methodically rejected. In their arguments his memory and wide reading always stalemated her emotional vigor, and the stalemate would produce a kind of vindictiveness in both of them. Once she criticized his conservative, uniform-like clothes; he had the sense to know that she had criticized his personality, which was, he realized, as rigid as one of his blue suits. He was annoyed with her for this and yet grateful. He soon felt, and stabbed at, her real vulnerability: whereas she was undeniably sincere in her many worthy activities, she had a weakness for a set of habitual comforts and luxuries (aisle seats at the theater, Grand Marnier after dinner, Shalimar behind the ears, dresses from Bendel) which were paradoxical in her, not to say hypocritical, considering the causes for which she spent so much time. His pointing out this incompatibility angered her — and made her like him more than ever (especially since he also catered to her hedonism). Gradually, through a number of rubs like these, they quarreled themselves into love.

“Under subtle pressure from her, he proposed to her, and they were married. They seemed, for a long time, very happy. His suits grew more somber and well pressed; her committee meetings more frequent. They seemed to be giving way very well to each other’s habits, without either one relaxing his or her own — quite the contrary: they indulged their respective ways. He put on a little weight; she managed to avoid pregnancy, which would have interfered with her campaigning for the third term. Their friends all considered the marriage a great success.

“But one night they had a horrible blowup, in the course of which they uncovered only one agreement, and that was repugnant — namely, that their principal common interest, sex, was not proving as variously rewarding as they had planned. They also faced the facts that, no kidding, he really did not believe in her virtuous activities and that she despised him for not having any moral or political program whatsoever.”

At that time I was full of the Connecticut countryside. Ann and I had always been suited to each other, but it was not until we had run away from the city that we began to consider ourselves happy. That spring I had bought a canoe, and had spent a lot of time on the Housatonic. I had worked up gradually to the rapids that began at the covered bridge, and the very first time, I had mastered the stretch without spilling into the turbulent and cold (though, I must admit, not specially dangerous) water. It was this triumph, really, that had given me the impulse to write the story about Buchan, because, by some strange transference, my physical success had refreshed my intellectual self-confidence — and I imagined some such cross-play might help a man like Buchan.

And so, in my notes for the story, “ they took stock, the day after their wild argument, and found themselves so alarmed at the sudden eruption that they decided to take a week’s vacation. They went to Kent. There, toward the middle of the week, Buchan learned about a company that rented canoes and trucked them up the Housatonic to whatever point the renter might choose, depending on how long a run, ending back at Kent, he wanted to take. Buchan persuaded his wife to spend a day on the river with him, though she had never been in a canoe before.

“They started their run up around Lime Rock, on a warm, clear morning. They drifted lazily with the current. They stopped for a swim and a picnic lunch at a stretch where the rude shoulders of the Connecticut hills drew back from the table of the riverlevel, an open place under the sky. Then, going on, they came in sight of the covered bridge. Their admiration of the old wooden frame was shattered by the sudden first step-down of the rapids.

“Buchan’s wife, up front, in clear view of every rock and drop, was panic-struck, Buchan himself felt a reckless pleasure, and with natural timing and balance, compensating not only for the river’s jostling but also for his wife’s jerks and shouts and starts, got the canoe through to the quiet water beyond. His composure was tremendous — and it was unexpected to him and amazing, penetrating even through her terror, to her.”

In the great American literary tradition, I had deferred putting an end on the story — the working out of the exact dimensions of the new relationship — until I could consult my agent and find out what magazine she thought she might persuade to buy it. Now, on the train to New York, I knew there would never be an end — to that story.

4

I MET Buchan at the University Club at seven o’clock. We went to Tim Costello’s and stood at the bar.

If I had been worried by Buchan when I started the story, I was shocked now. This was partly because my hopeful picture of him, strengthened and renewed at the end of my fiction, was so sharply at variance with the picture I saw beside me. All his rigid elegance had crumbled. He wore the usual clothes, but now they did not seem neat on him. He needed a shave and his fingernails were dirty. He had called me all the way down from the country, and yet he was so absorbed in himself that he hardly seemed aware of my presence. He seemed to talk to himself rather than to me, and sometimes he ignored my questions.

He had told me in the taxi that his trouble was being in love. I had laughed at him.

Then, with an uneasiness of which I myself could see the nonsense, I had asked the girl’s name. Margaret Tomlinson. I had never heard the name before and I was sure it was not the girl I had met that night at dinner — not the girl with whom I had thrown Buchan in the story. I had found myself relieved at this discovery and I had laughed again. However, when we talked at Tim’s, I began to be very pleased with my literary judgment and with my analysis of Buchan. From what he told me, the girl he had actually chosen was almost exactly like the girl he had chosen in my story.

“She’s eating me up,” Buchan said. “I’ve lost nearly twenty pounds. I don’t know what it is that attracts me to her, unless it’s just physical. I want to work her over all the time. But I don ’t know — she’s so damn triumphant. She always feels good about the future of the world and she always makes me feel bad. She’s a committee woman and she’s going to repair everything singlehanded. She’s trying to repair me, too, that’s the trouble, she ‘s got a Committee for the Moral Rehabilitation of Buchan Walsh, she wants to repair me — but she won’t even let herself go. I’m all mixed up, I don’t know what the hell to do.”

“Did you ever know what to do?”

My first selfish flush of complacency was soon erased by a realization of my obvious errors in judgment about Buchan. I had been disastrously wrong about the effect on him of an efficient and conscienceridden woman. I had pictured a tightening process, a good impact at first; and yet in fact Miss Tomlinson had brought about a serious disintegration of his personality. I had been dreadfully off the mark on his way of speaking: in my sketches for the story I had made his speeches articulate, succinct, and almost narrative. Actually he spoke repetitively, vaguely, without direction; nevertheless very much to the point.

I said: “You care an awful lot about what people think of you, don’t you?”

Buchan seemed not to have listened. “My father must have been an awful guy,” he said. His father had died a few weeks before. “He used to tell me, the way fathers talk, he used to say, ‘You’ve got to look out for your own skin, son, you’ve got to take care of yourself. No one else is going to do it for you.’ I suppose he was O.K. in some ways — he made a hell of a lot of money and he was happy, at least I guess he was — but I’m just beginning to realize things.”

I said, “Do you remember one time, oh, a long time ago, you called us up and asked if you could spend the night? Why did you do that?”

Buchan looked at me. “Sure,” he said, “I remember. I just wanted to visit somebody. That’s the trouble nowadays. You’ve got to call up to make a date, you’ve got to make arrangements ‘way ahead, you’ve got to see what’s coming, you’ve got to plan for a war and think about unemployment next year. What the hell, it’s getting so a lonely guy can’t think about tonight, what’ll I do tonight?”

It took some time for the weight of the word “lonely” to lift itself out of that rambling protest, and it was quite a bit later in the conversation that I asked, “Why do you think you’re lonely?”

“Marg says it’s because I don’t want to get involved in anything unselfish. She says the only way to have real friends is to share danger with them. She sees danger in everything and it makes her godawful happy when she and her fellow committee members overcome some of it. She’s right. I’m no use to anybody, so why should they be any use to me? I’m lonely because I have no drive, I’m not working for anything.”

I was getting an idea. I suggested that Buchan bring Miss Tomlinson up to spend a week-end with us. I pictured to him the possibility, during a lazy and peaceful stay in the Housatonic countryside, of shaking down perspectives. A long walk in the hills, a picnic, a dip in the cold river might, I suggested, straighten them out with each other, or at least begin the process. I did not mention a canoe ride, though my compulsion was beginning to form.

I asked, “Have you thought about marrying her?”

“She’s suggested it,” he said.

“Well, maybe a week-end like that might help you to decide.”

I had to use quite a lot of persuasion before he finally accepted.

5

THEY came up on Friday afternoon. Ann noticed that I noticed that Miss Tomlinson was nice to look at; Ann spoke later about the gleam in my eye. The girl was bright and saucy on the surface, and yet she was obviously deeply serious. Buchan looked like a second-rate Hamlet, melancholy and disheveled.

Friday evening was stiff all around. Saturday it rained the whole day, and the house seemed too small for the four of us. I had primed Ann, and we managed to keep Miss Tomlinson off the kind of conversation that would make Buchan feel worse. Ann talked about her garden and the ducks and the baby; I talked about college and village characters and, inevitably, about the thrills of canoeing on the river.

Miss Tomlinson turned out, after all, not exactly like the girl of my story. She did have the same force and conscience, but she was all of a piece. She did not have the vulnerabilities I had given the girl in the story, and I realized that the materialism and hedonism were weaknesses of Buchan’s which I had, in my optimism for him, given to the girl. Miss Tomlinson was not as well off as my girl; though she was now earning a good salary working for a broadcasting company, she did not have any such expensive tastes as I had imagined for Buchan’s girl in my notes. If Miss Tomlinson had a fault, it was a dogmatic turn of mind, a positiveness which had obviously long since overwhelmed Buchan’s false assurance in discussion. This quality in her made me keep right on calling her Miss Tomlinson.

Buchan was, much of that rainy day, silent. When we talked about my plans for repairs to the house and barn, it was not long before Miss Tomlinson had crystallized some of the plans for the barn and actually put us all to work. It was a good enough way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Later, over drinks and dinner, we were tired and friendly. Buchan opened up wonderfully. He was very funny about his current boss, a Mr. Poynton; and once or twice he teased Miss Tomlinson. She was playful and more yielding than she had been during the day. Buchan himself brought up a discussion of the war—we were then in the last few days of the “phony war,” just before the breakthrough into the Lowlands — and he did well. When Ann and I went to bed, our visitors said they were not very tired; they would stay up and talk a while.

To my delight, Sunday came up bright and warm. I withheld my scheme until midmorning, when Buchan and I took a walk up the dirt road toward the hills behind us.

“Do you see what I meant about Marg?” he asked,

I said I thought she was charming.

“Sure, so was Circe charming. If I could just get in control —”

Then I made my suggestion. I asked whether Buchan had ever done any canoeing. He said he had done a bit at camp as a boy. Then I told him how I thought a run down a stretch of the river might affect his relationship with Miss Tomlinson. At first he laughed at the idea. I must say I don’t blame him now, but I’d been working on the story so long that I was able to be quite eloquent and more convincing, I dare say, than I ought to have been. I actually used some phrases I had planned to use in the story. Before long he began to come round, and at lunch he proposed the ride. I had told him all about the rapids, and had passed on to him a few pointers as to the easy ways through. He did not tell Miss Tomlinson about the rapids; they were to come as a surprise. She thought an afternoon on the river would be splendid.

About three o’clock I got out the car and hitched on the low-slung trailer which I had fixed up with jigs to hold the canoe. My heart sank when Buchan came out of the house dressed in a basque shirt and a pair of gray flannel shorts. His arms and legs were terribly thin, and he looked good for nothing but scaring crows. He seemed cheerful and game, however. Miss Tomlinson, in a play dress of Ann’s, looked formidably happy.

We drove down to the main road and went north about a mile. I cut in towards the river by a private driveway the use of which I had negotiated. We put the canoe in the water. I told Buchan I’d meet them at a landing about four miles down the river in an hour and a half, and they shoved off. I was delighted at the confidence with which Buchan handled his paddle.

I drove home and waited. I’m sure I was far more nervous than Buchan. 1 tried reading a few pages of The Possessed, but I couldn’t concentrate. I went out and pulled up crab grass from the lawn back of the house. I didn’t want to stay in sight of the river.

1 had been home about half an hour when I heard a commotion at the front of the house — shouting and a door slamming. I made out Miss Tomlinson’s voice, calling my name. I had just started for the back door when she came out.

She was wet. Her hair was plastered down on either side of her face. She must have run the half mile up from the river. She was pale and wild.

“He’s dead!” she gasped. “Come quickly, he’s dead!” Sobs and heavy breathing choked her. In the midst of this hysterical demonstration I suddenly remembered, for some reason, Buchan’s phrase, “she’s so damn triumphant.” She said, “Hurry, for godsake!”

We ran around the house to the car. I slammed the car down the hill to the main road. She pointed to the right and when we got to the turnoff to the covered bridge she had me turn there.

I couldn’t get a coherent story from her. She kept crying and jabbering about how horrible Buchan looked. She did get out the fact that the canoe had tipped over, which was obvious, and said that she had pulled him ashore somehow and that he wasn’t breathing, he was dead.

6

I PULLED the car to the side of the road just before the bridge. Miss Tomlinson scrambled out and ran off to the right, down the bank. I followed her.

We hadn’t run far when I saw Buchan. He was sitting on a rock on the edge of the river, not fifty yards below the bridge, with his feet in the water and his head in his hands. When we came closer we saw that he had been vomiting and was still spitting.

Miss Tomlinson, showing a gentleness that I shouldn’t have expected from her, ran to him and threw her arms around him and began to make him thoroughly uncomfortable with her clumsy, ecstatic caresses. She seemed genuinely surprised and relieved to see him alive.

Buchan turned a pair of watery eyes up toward me, and said, “That was a great idea of yours.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Then I asked, “What happened?”

“Oh Christ,” Buchan said, “little Miss Pocahontas here stood up. I guess I hit my head on a rock. I just now came to.”

Miss Tomlinson began crying again.

I had my hands full getting that pair up to the car. When we reached home, Ann and I put Buchan to bed and gave Miss Tomlinson a big slug of brandy. We called our doctor and he came a couple of hours later and decided that Buchan might have a slight concussion and ought to stay in bed two or three days.

Miss Tomlinson was noble and called her office to say that she was sick and wouldn’t be in for a couple of days. She nursed Buchan with both efficiency and tenderness, I must say. The shock lifted Buchan right out of his depression and he became gay and unself-conscious as I had not seen him since college. A new strain of sobriety began to show itself, too.

On Tuesday afternoon, while Miss Tomlinson was napping, he said to me, “You know, it’s funny, Marg believing I was dead, and well, more or less being dead for a while — that’s all made me think things over. She certainly has been right all along. I’ve got to pull my weight better than I did.”

At this first sign of what I had so long imagined, I was filled with perverse disgust and a sense of ridiculousness. “Oh hell,” I said, “you sound like a reformed drunk.”

Buchan looked at me with grave eyes and said, “No, really, I mean it.”

“Nuts,” I said. “You know damn well if we got in the war, you’d sit by with your fine bored air and watch all the damn fools run off to get shot at.”

“This time I mean it.”

I laughed and changed the subject.

Of course he didn’t mean it. His euphoria gradually faded, and with it his earnestness. He and Miss Tomlinson did fall in love as a result of the accident, or perhaps as a result of her caring for him in bed for four days. But he never did marry her. I guess he couldn’t make up his mind — she couldn’t even make up his mind — and things dragged along between them for over a year and the war came and Miss Tomlinson went into the WAC. If it hadn’t been for the war, they might have married.

Buchan was drafted late in 1942. About a year ago I heard he had been killed in Germany. His mother wrote me asking if I could find out how he died. Just the other day I finally tracked down his sergeant.

The sergeant says they found Buchan’s body, and four others from his platoon, the morning after a night reconnaissance. He told me that Buchan, who was a corporal, had taken a squad out that night. At one point Buchan called the sergeant by walkie-talkie and said: “They’ve begun to drop mortars on us. Shall we come back or go through with the mission?”

The sergeant says he answered: “What the hell, Buck, have I got infra-red eyes? I can’t see what you’re doing. You’ll have to decide for yourself.”

He didn’t hear from Buchan for about ten minutes. Then he heard one sentence. Buchan had thought things over for ten minutes and he said one sentence: “I guess we’ll just stay here.”