The Pledge by Howard Fast

with the excuse that he had no notion where Legerman might be. And where was his luggage and his typewriter and his notes that Legerman had promised so faithfully to send to him?
    Exactly eleven months after Bruce had left India, his luggage arrived, care of the newspaper where he had worked.

NEW YORK CITY
Downtown

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    T HE MONTHS PASSED , and Bruce realized that whatever the writing of a book was to others, to him it was_imprisonment combined with not a little torture. Other books appeared, were reviewed and read by whatever number of people purchased them, and then disappeared to somber graves in libraries. He wrote over a hundred pages on England before the Normandy invasion, and then destroyed what he had written. The least difficult was the intensity of the battle on the European mainland, but even there his memory of battle was not what he sought, but an inner truth that might describe the unwritten horror that used war as its camouflage. He remembered Tolstoy’s dictum only too well, that every story of war and battle was a lie; but when he went to War and Peace , seeking Tolstoy’s own circumvention of that trap, he could not find it. But War and Peace was fiction, and he, Bruce Bacon, was seeking the truth — or was fiction the only place that truth could be found? He would watch his typewriter turning into the enemy, and then recall sitting at the bottom of a shellhole, in slime and mud and dirty water, taking down the names of the four soldiers there in the mud with him, that he might credit them for the stories they were telling him, and writing their names and his notes with a stub of a pencil in a damp little notebook, and then finding that he had managed one or two fine, strong phrases; and remembering this now, he would take a pencil and a legal pad and go into Central Park, and sit there on a bench, scribbling away.
    But this was a small and rather worthless remedy; all it created that was positive was a sojourn of a few hours in the fresh air and the sunshine. On the other hand, he had spent endless hours in the New York Public Library, going through the back issues of the wartime years to see how the other correspondents on the Times and the Daily News had handled their dispatches. But that was a mine that yielded no metal of any use to him; he would have to find his own way or give it up entirely.
    His romance with Sally Pringle, if one could call it that, appeared to disintegrate as the intensity of his absorption with his book increased. One day she called him with a pair of tickets for a Broadway opening, and he pleaded that he had to work that evening.
    â€œBruce, what on earth do you mean, you have to work?”
    â€œI’m trying to work out a problem.”
    â€œWhich you give yourself. It’s your own project.”
    She slammed down the telephone in disgust, but a week later, when he made his apologies and his pleas, she consented to see him again. But romance was corroding. An editor of a leading fashion magazine, a competitor of Harper’s Bazaar , told her that he had offered Bruce an in-house job for twenty thousand a year, a princely sum at the time, and Bruce had turned it down out of hand. Bruce was tall, good-looking, and much admired in circles that Sally enjoyed; but to her he appeared to be going nowhere, bound to a book which she felt would never be finished.
    Also, their dates were becoming argumentative. She could not comprehend his horror at the bombing of Hiroshima. When he recalled what he had seen in the concentration camps, she said, “No. No, I will not believe that the Germans put six million Jews to death. I know Germans. Mother and I were in Germany twice before that awful war.” In bed, she was delicious, wildly emotional and enthusiastic. Bruce realized how well they were in tune with each other’s sexual drives and needs. But they were not in love, either of them, and both of them realized that.
    The months went by, and