London Dawn (24 page)

“Have you nothing to recite for us, Owen?”

“Of course I do, Grandfather. I don’t want to bore our guest, that’s all.”

Eva smiled as the
Pluck
smacked into another wave, white foam breaking over its bow. “You won’t bore me.”

“It’s not a German poet.”

“It doesn’t have to be a German poet to please me, Owen.”

She watched the young man with the curly dark red hair and striking blue eyes hold the pose of a pompous orator, and she laughed. He laughed too. Then his handsome young face grew serious, and he put his hands in his pockets.

I care not for the land or its shores

Its teeming cities or ravenous throngs

I look instead to where there is no end

Of sea or sky or air or light

I look to where white birds sing

And cry with a harshness that has a sweeter ring

Than all the ballads and arias of man

All the instruments played by our hands

I long to sail on waters so deep

It seemed I flew in skies spread under my feet

With fish of gold and scarlet for my birds

Reefs for mountains and coral for clouds

Jade and amethyst for what I must breathe

Pearls and sapphire for all I need see

And give me a storm that puts wind in my heart

Give me a thunder of breakers on rock

Let me open my wings like the Caspian tern

Let me burn, let me illumine, like the rays of the sun

I will have the sea and all that it gives

All that it promises and all that lives

Deep in its soul and I shall be free

To drink of its years and learn of its hours

To sail on its colors and all of its waters

With no end in sight

No ending to light

Eva’s lips had parted in surprise as Owen recited the poem with a spirit and intensity she hadn’t expected in a boy. She knew he was sixteen, but he grew older than that before her eyes until he was almost twenty like her, or even twenty-one or twenty-two or twenty-three.

She took a handful of her blond hair that had grown longer and softer, tucked it under the collar of her pea coat, and got to her feet, bracing her legs in the swell, and clapped as loudly as she could.

“Wonderful,
wunderbar
!” For all the care she had taken, the sea breeze caught her hair and tugged it loose, spreading it like a wave over her shoulders and back. She didn’t see the light that came quickly into Owen’s eyes when this happened. “That was a beautiful recitation. Now you must tell me the name of the poem and the poet.”

Owen smiled, looked down, and shook his head.

“Oh, come, my bright English sailor, how can you be shy now when you were, yes, bold as brass while you spoke all those beautiful words?”

Owen looked to the bow. “Excuse me, I must tend to a line.” He scrambled forward.

Eva hugged her arms around her chest and pouted. She appealed to Lord Preston, who was at the helm. “Grandfather, won’t you tell me?”

“Why, my dear, I’m sure I don’t know.” He turned the wheel slightly to port. “Wordsworth? Tennyson?” He snapped his fingers. “John Masefield. It’s John Masefield.”

Owen came back from the bowsprit. Eva couldn’t help but notice the water drops in his hair and the shining on his face. He laughed, and she felt as if the sea breeze had darted down her throat and swept through her veins and lungs right through to her stomach. Her fingers went to her lips.

Don’t be mad. You’re almost four years older than him.

“It isn’t Masefield,” he said.

“Then who is it?” demanded Lord Preston. “You can’t crew on my ship and not declare the poet and the poem. It’s just not done. I’ll keelhaul ye.”

“Oh, all right.” Owen put his hands in his pockets again and looked out over the starboard side and past Eva where she stood, her hair swirling in the wind like wings. “I wrote it.”

“What?” Eva stared at him. “
Das ist unmoglich
—That’s impossible.”

He tugged two crumpled pieces of paper out of a back pocket. They had been folded many times. He handed them to her.

“It has lines crossed out and other lines written on top, and there’s ink spots and all that, but I think you can still read it.”

Eva took the pieces of paper, astonishment remaining on her face, and unfolded them.

“I say, that’s capital.” Lord Preston smiled at Owen. “I can’t blame our female crewmember for her skepticism; that’s rather a lot of finesse for a young lad like yourself. But you and I have been reciting the great poems back and forth for years, so I can’t say as I’m very much surprised. She’s only been out with us half a dozen times, so she hasn’t an inkling the sort of poetry that’s lodged in our heads. What do you call what you’ve written?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Why, it’s jotted down here.” Eva looked up. “Crossed out twice and printed in large black letters one final time. I don’t understand, Owen.”

“What is it?” demanded Lord Preston.

She waited for Owen to speak. “ ‘Eva,’ ” he finally said. “I named the poem ‘Eva.’ ”

“You named the poem ‘Eva’? That’s brilliant. What a nice gesture. What do you think of that, my girl?”

Eva was still looking at Owen. “
Ich denke, es ist sehr schon
—I think it’s very beautiful. I’m touched, Grandfather.”

Owen finally met her gaze.

“So you are sixteen,” she said in a low voice that the wind and waves snatched away from Lord Preston’s ears.

“Almost seventeen.” He offered her a smile but she didn’t smile back.

“And I am almost twenty, Owen. With already a long history. And so many scars I feel I am forty or fifty. Why would you write such a poem and put my name to it? Surely you have a girl you like at school?”

“I wrote the poem first. It did not fit anyone. Except yourself.”

“How can you say that?”

“I thought about it. I even prayed about it. The words do not work for any other person. That’s all I can tell you.”

Despite herself, Eva could not keep from smiling at the beauty of his youthfulness, at the sea blue of his eyes, the windburn on his cheeks, the dark red tangle of his boyish hair.

“So you may be sixteen, Owen, but in your soul you are far older than I am. What am I going to do? Am I getting to know the younger man or the older man?”

He shrugged and tried another smile. “Both, I suppose. Is that quite unpleasant for you?”

“It’s not unpleasant at all.” She returned his smile. “May I keep this?”

“Of course.”

She looked at the waves that were curling near their bow. “I have a proposal for you. Let us stay friends.
Ja
, I know the eager young man with the soul of a thirty-year-old does not want to hear that. But I’m not finished. Read the poem to me again, from memory, like today. Read it to me after you have turned eighteen. Let us see what kind of man you are then. That’s not too long to wait, is it? Recite the poem when we are in the Channel here and we will know.
Ja
? All right.”

Owen looked down again, his face glum. “Whatever you say.”

She leaned over quickly and placed a kiss on his cheek. And patted one side of his face. “Do not be sad, Owen. You are a very special young man. Thank you for being a healing for me.”

She folded the poem and put it in the pocket of her pea coat.

“Let us see what happens in nineteen forty,” she said. “That is not so very far away, is it?”

“Nonsense.” Lord Preston noisily cleared his throat.

Eva and Owen were both startled, turning their heads quickly to look at him.

“The man does not always have to be older than the woman. Where is that written?” Lord Preston passed the spokes of the wheel through his hands. “Still, nineteen forty is a good idea. I will pray for the two of you, and we shall see where nineteen forty finds us. Eh?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Owen.

Eva smiled. “Yes, Grandfather.”

Two months later, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stood outside his offices at 10 Downing Street and spoke to the crowds gathered there. It was October 1. He had just returned from Germany the day before, where he had signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. This had resolved the crisis over Czechoslovakia to his satisfaction—Hitler would get the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia would never be touched. Chamberlain was also happy about a peace treaty with Germany he had signed.

“My good friends,” he said, “for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

“Good man,” American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt cabled from Washington.

As Chamberlain spoke, Nazi troops were marching over the border into Czechoslovakia and claiming the Sudetenland for Germany, a right Chamberlain had granted with his signing of the Munich Agreement. Lord Preston’s friend Winston Churchill spared no words when he attacked Chamberlain in the House of Commons for giving in to Hitler’s demands over the Sudetenland. “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

He glanced at Lord Preston at his seat, nodded, and fixed his harsh gaze on Chamberlain once more. “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year
unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Charles was ecstatic about Hitler’s occupation of large sections of Czechoslovakia. But when Jewish shops and synagogues and houses were burned and looted in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland on November 9 and 10, and close to one hundred Jews killed, he was more subdued. Watching newsreels of the destruction, he said to his mother, “I do not care for the Jews. But neither do I care for civil disorder in Germany either. Surely there is a better way of dealing with the Jewish problem than this.”

Eva merely said, “The longer I am in England, and the longer I live with this family, the less of a Nazi I am becoming and the more I love the things the Nazis hate.”

In March 1939, German soldiers marched from the Sudetenland into the remainder of Czechoslovakia and seized it for Nazi Germany. Part of Czechoslovakia became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, part of it became the Slovak Republic, and the greater part became one with the Third Reich.

“I am betrayed,” Chamberlain said to Lord Preston in private. “Hitler has gone back on his word. You will work with the government and myself to prepare our nation and Empire for war. It will not be long before Herr Hitler makes another demand. My sense of it is that it will be Poland. There are already Nazi rumbles about claiming Danzig and a section of Poland so that Germany is no longer divided from its province of East Prussia. I believe we must sign an agreement of some sort guaranteeing Polish sovereignty. You have family in the RAF and the Royal Navy, do you not?”

“Yes, Prime Minister,” Lord Preston responded. “And the army.”

“You are the very man to have at my side. The Cabinet will take note of your advice since you have so many serving in a military capacity.”

“I shall do whatever you ask of me.”

“Good, good, very good.” Chamberlain’s eyes suddenly grew dark. “But what do you think, Lord Preston? Do we have much time? Hitler has played us for the fool so long, I worry we will not be ready should he strike a harder blow at Europe and Great Britain.”

“We will do our best, Prime Minister. I’m sure we will be up to the task just as we were twenty years ago.”

But to his wife Lord Preston confided, “I don’t wish to distress you, my dear, but we are fallen upon hard times. I believe, as the prime minster
does, that Herr Hitler will not cease with his demands and that one day those demands will bring us into a state of war.”

“Oh, surely not, William.” Lady Preston put down her hairbrush. “No one wants nineteen fourteen again, not ourselves and certainly not the Germans. Good will must prevail, good will and calmer heads.”

Lord Preston stood looking out the window at the gray sweep of spring rain over Kensington Gate and the city of London. “Good will is unraveling all across Europe, Elizabeth. And as for calmer heads, why, there are none, except those who have, with a steady hand and a steady eye, begun to make preparations for armed conflict. A catastrophe is descending upon us, and I confess it drives me to my knees, my dear. It drives me to my knees and obliterates all thoughts of happiness and joy from my heart.”

6

May, 1939

The Hartmann Chalet, Pura, Switzerland

“With the takeover of Czechoslovakia by the Germans and the conquest of Albania by Italy, much has changed, and quickly. You appreciate that, I’m sure, Professor Hartmann.” The man tapped a cigarette against his silver cigarette holder.