Keeper of the Flame

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Text originally published in 1942 under the same title.

© Valmy Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

KEEPER OF THE FLAME

BY

I. A. R. WYLIE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

1 4

2 15

3 25

4 40

5 50

6 61

7 77

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 108

1

SAFETY, HE DECIDED, WASN’T ALL THAT HE HAD expected it to be. Under certain conditions it might become unbearable. He wasn’t sure that it wasn’t already unbearable. He stood on the south-west corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, like a swimmer trying to make up his mind to jump into a strongly flowing river, and reminded himself that this was the exact spot he’d set his heart on that night when the bomb had nearly got him outside London’s Café Royal. He’d thought, If ever I see Times Square again I’ll kiss its dirty face. The bomb hadn’t been his first. He’d met others of all calibers, at a more respectful distance but near enough, in Madrid, Barcelona, Helsinki, Warsaw. So he had been a little over-conditioned. The scare had had no kick to it. It was quite simply a scare. And the idea of being able to look at bright lights without wanting to yell for an air warden or to hear a taxi backfire without jumping, rather wearily, out of his skin made him feel like a lunatic remembering a time when he’d been sane. Now with his face bespattered with Broadway’s bright kaleidoscope pattern of chewing gums, cigarettes, drinks and what-not, hemmed in by people who knew but didn’t believe that the heaven above them was a place which might dump hell on them at any moment, he felt—well, he didn’t quite know yet what he felt. But not in the mood to kiss Times Square or anybody.

I want to go home, he had cried out once, like a little boy, coming out of his first real sleep after a month’s bombardment. Now he was beginning to wonder where home was, whether it was a place at all, or a state of mind. This is my home town, he thought grimly. And I’m so damned lonely I could yelp.

There was a little nondescript fellow in a derby hat standing next to him, apparently almost as lost and uncertain as he was. It wouldn’t occur to either of them to speak to each other. But in Madrid, Barcelona, Helsinki, Warsaw, they would have spoken. They would have had a common language. In London the little fellow would have cocked an ironical cockney eye at the ominous sky. Think the Jerries are coming, mate? he’d have asked, just as in the old days you might have asked your neighbor his opinion on the weather. From there they would have gone on to the story of their lives.

No. He didn’t miss danger. He was tracking his state of mind to its lair. But he did miss the comradeship of danger. He missed his nameless comrades, some of whom no doubt at that very moment were being scattered to the four winds. He felt like a heel, a runaway rat.

Which was ridiculous. It wasn’t his fault (unless you could consider a passion for the truth and an infinite capacity for getting it across, a fault) that he’d been kicked out, like all good war correspondents, by the toe of the official boot. But the results were likely to be just as painful.

He lit a cigarette and the match made a tiny Aladdin’s cove of his cupped hands. Then he stepped resolutely off the sidewalk. His nerves were in a disgraceful state. He almost yelled. The little man had him by the arm and with an unexpected strength—for there was six feet two to Steven O’Malley—yanked him back from under the front wheels of an insolently indifferent taxi.

He almost got you, the little man gasped, as though the taxi-driver had been a Jerry gunning over Broadway. You ought to watch your step.

You’re right. I ought, O’Malley agreed.

Well, maybe where you come from you don’t have to. The little man’s voice took on a note of complacent pride. New York’s a dangerous place, he said.

So I observe. But I hadn’t thought of it that way.

I guess you’re a stranger.

I guess I am.

They waited together for the traffic signals to change. Across the way, high overhead, a running sequence of fiery letters spelled out the latest news. The Germans had swallowed up another country. The stock market was so and so. And then a name appeared: Robert Forrest, to be followed by one stark, conclusive word: dead.

The cigarette dropped from O’Malley’s fingers and he looked down and stamped it out carefully. Where he came from you didn’t leave lighted cigarettes around—not on dark nights. There were legends as to the heights from which they could be spotted. But the act was instinctive. He was used to death. He wouldn’t have believed that the passing of one man could matter to him. The core of his mind felt hurt. Not that he’d ever laid eyes on Forrest. Probably not one of the men and women who had come to a stop, staring up at the writing in lights which had long since passed on to some other fact of life, had ever laid eyes on him. Yet it was as though a huge stone had been tossed into a muddy, stagnant pool, sending out circle after circle of consternation.

The little man snorted as though someone had jolted the wind out of him.

My God! he said. Did you see that?

Yes, O’Malley admitted. I saw it.

Then it’s true. They wouldn’t dare! But it can’t be. Forrest—the only man we had...

Not by a long shot, O’Malley said. He twitched his big shoulders impatiently. There are at least fifty million of us, he added.

Not his sort.

Ever seen him?

I didn’t have to. The colorless voice had a ring of metal in it. Every time he spoke over the radio I’d hear him. I’d drop anything I was doing. It was like—like having everything I wanted to think and believe spoken for me, made clear to me, like seeing myself the way I’d like to be. He spoke for the lot of us.

The little man was almost eloquent in his hysterical inarticulateness. O’Malley glanced down at him curiously. The insignificant face was white. Next him a garish, over-painted girl was still staring up at the flying lights. Something infinitely bereft in her expression lent her a fleeting dignity.

I suppose, O’Malley thought aloud, it was like this when Lincoln died.

Lincoln... the little man echoed vaguely.

The signals had changed again. Like a panic-stricken rabbit he bolted across the street, leaving the scene of his shameful breakdown behind him. The little group of men and women who for a moment had been held together by a common emotion glanced at each other uneasily and broke apart. But something had happened that would leave its mark. For them, O’Malley guessed, the lights were dimmer. The heart of a gay night had died.

It’s time I got back to work, O’Malley thought. Then he asked himself, What work? and wondered if what he felt was, for the first time, real, sickening panic.

Anyhow he didn’t like the feeling. When he thought of himself at all it was of a fellow, not hardened, but just plain hard, almost invulnerable. He had faced down the worst that human beings could do to each other, and the worst that Fate could do to them when it took a hand. Though he knew he might one day be properly scared, he had been pretty sure he could not be broken. He had come to count on himself to see things through. Now he discovered that he was dodging them. Actually, he had to goad himself through the familiar, dingy doors of the one place, which, in his exile, had meant home to him. Nothing had changed. Nothing, it seemed, had happened. Perhaps that was the trouble. In five years he had expected something to happen. A lot had happened to him. But the table which the Recorder’s hierarchy regarded as their special feeding ground was where it had always been. He foresaw the same indelible inkstain on the same tablecloth. There were the same faces bunched together in the easy exchange of fraternal gossip in the fraternal lingo. There was a legend that the New York Recorder’s Big Boss kicked out his staff at least once every fifty years. Jane was there, her nice face a trifle thinner, her short hair that had had gray in it ever since Steven could remember, looking as though she combed it with a rake, and smoking as though she’d never left off. Fred Ridges, as usual, sat on one side of her, evidently still as stubbornly and hopelessly crazy about her. But she’d kept O’Malley’s place on her other side. He might have gone to answer a telephone call and she was waiting for him to come back. He took his time getting to it, feeling like a schoolboy who has inadvertently won a prize for good conduct. They wouldn’t resent it. Jane would be prouder than Lucifer, but it would confirm their suspicion of his difference. Even Jane, who had pretended humorously to be mad about him and had got him his first chance on the Recorder, had been wont to cock a quizzical eyebrow at him. A cub reporter who, in the intervals of chasing fires and trudging after funerals, had managed to write a best-seller and become a critics’ pet was obviously destined to grow up into a lone wolf. They wouldn’t resent that, either. But underneath their rough-and-ready friendliness they would be shy with him, as men are shy with time-bombs that may go off at any moment with incalculable results. And he knew now, disgustedly, that he was going to be ill-at-ease with them. Well, at least Forrest’s death would give them common ground to stand on till they got their bearings.

Jane Harding caught sight of him. She looked for an instant much younger.

Our Prize Baby! she exclaimed, in ribald ecstasy. Our blue-ribbon steeplechaser come home to the old stable!

And to the same old war horses, he retorted affectionately.

The five of them went diligently through the whole routine of welcome. Fred Ridges slapped him on the back. Jane Harding pulled him down into his place in their warm midst. They were trying to assure him and themselves that there’d been no break, that what had happened in those five years made no difference. Suppose he had gone free-lancing into wars that in their complacent estimation wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans (and which had proved to be so many superefficient volcanoes) and had come back the New York Recorder’s ace-correspondent? He was still Steve O’Malley, and this was still little old New York, the hub of the universe and, whatever the universe might be up to, revolving nicely.

Our own George Washington, Ridges said, who couldn’t cable a lie.

...and got kicked for it, Jane added grimly. That was true enough. Kicked politely but firmly out of every capital in Europe. It had taken months for the respective censors to get wise to his varying technique of bean-spilling. But they were wise to it now. He could never go back. The knowledge gave him an odd, disconcerting twinge of homesickness. He felt Jane’s eyes on him and turned rather defiantly to meet them. For all their brown softness they were shrewd, relentless eyes, like those of a hunting-dog. Years ago Steve had given up trying to pull the wool over them. And in the pleasant but curiously worn and battered face they had grown, if anything, a little shrewder.

No more worlds to conquer, Steve? she asked quite gently.

No more hot water to scramble out of, Steven amended.

You might, she suggested, fall in love.

That was an old joke and almost as good as his getting himself nearly killed on Times Square after having dodged the worst varieties of blitz. He made an old-time tug at a lock of her unruly hair in a schoolboyish attempt to re-establish a relationship that was still a bit off center. Was it because he’d run for his life, cringed to the earth like a whipped cur and seen what a bloody mess a single second could make of a hero that he felt incurably different? Superior, are you? Steve jeered silently at his reflection in the mirror opposite, adding, out of a glum self-disgust, You great black hulk!

He sounded, to his own consternation, a shade too hearty.

I guess I’ll dodge that one, he said. I’ve had luck so far.

But it wasn’t luck, unless having been born with a sort of good-humored intolerance of women (except Jane who ran a column of world news seen from a woman’s angle and didn’t count) and the emotional tail spins they invoked, could be called luck. He might crash eventually—maybe he’d crashed already—but not that way. There had been a broad-shouldered Finnish girl whom he had liked plenty. She had kept a whole sector of the Mannerheim Line in supplies, bringing them up in an incredible old truck over a ghastly road. A bomber had got her in the end. What was left of her—and Steven had had a moment’s luminous conviction that it was by no means all of her—had died contentedly in his arms. Perhaps he had loved her. Like Jane, she was a good soldier. But being in love was another kettle of fish. He thanked his stars, and himself, that he had never so much as simmered in it.

Tough guy! Jane darted at him with malicious precision.

Well, it’s a queer business, Ridges said, speaking out of their secret preoccupation. "Our Steve comes back to us out of hell without so much as a singed whisker, and Forrest drives from his New