Three Soldiers (20 page)

Cold steel-gray light filtered into the ward, drowning the yellow glow which first turned ruddy and then disappeared. Andrews began to make out the row of cots opposite him, and the dark beams of the ceiling above his head. “This house must be very old,” he said to himself, and the thought vaguely excited him. Funny that the Queen of Sheba had come to his head, it was ages since he’d thought of all that.
From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling roses to pieces from the height of her litter, all the aspects half-guessed, all the imaginings of your desire
… that was the Queen of Sheba. He whispered the words aloud, “la reine de Saba, la reine de Saba”; and, with a tremor of anticipation of the sort he used to feel when he was a small boy the night before Christmas, with a sense of new things in store for him, he pillowed his head on his arm and went quietly to sleep.

“Ain’t it juss like them frawgs te make a place like this into a hauspital?” said the orderly, standing with his feet wide apart and his hands on his hips, facing a row of cots and talking to anyone who felt well enough to listen. “Honest, I doan see why you fellers doan all cash in yer checks in this hole. … There warn’t even electric light till we put it in. … What d’you think o’ that? That shows how much the goddam frawgs care. …” The orderly was a short man with a sallow, lined face and large yellow teeth. When he smiled the horizontal lines in his forehead and the lines that ran from the sides of his nose to the ends of his mouth deepened so that his face looked as if it were made up to play a comic part in the movies.

“It’s kind of artistic, though, ain’t it?” said Applebaum, whose cot was next Andrews’s,—a skinny man with large, frightened eyes and an inordinately red face that looked as if the skin had been peeled off. “Look at the work there is on that ceiling. Must have cost some dough when it was noo.”

“Wouldn’t be bad as a dance hall with a little fixin’ up, but a hauspital; hell!”

Andrews lay, comfortable in his cot, looking into the ward out of another world. He felt no connection with the talk about him, with the men who lay silent or tossed about groaning in the rows of narrow cots that filled the Renaissance hall. In the yellow glow of the electric lights, looking beyond the orderly’s twisted face and narrow head, he could see very faintly, where the beams of the ceiling sprung from the wall, a row of half-obliterated shields supported by figures carved out of the grey stone of the wall, handed satyrs with horns and goats’ beards and deep-set eyes, little squat figures of warriors and townsmen in square hats with swords between their bent knees, naked limbs twined in scrolls of spiked acanthus leaves, all seen very faintly, so that when the electric lights swung back and forth in the wind made by the orderly’s hurried passing, they all seemed to wink and wriggle in shadowy mockery of the rows of prostrate bodies in the room beneath them. Yet they were familiar, friendly to Andrews. He kept feeling a half-formulated desire to be up there too, crowded under a beam, grimacing through heavy wreaths of pomegranates and acanthus leaves, the incarnation of old rich lusts, of clear fires that had sunk to dust ages since. He felt at home in that spacious hall, built for wide gestures and stately steps, in which all the little routine of the army seemed unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows.

Andrews was snatched out of his thoughts. Applebaum was speaking to him; he turned his head.

“How d’you loike it bein’ wounded, buddy?”

“Fine.”

“Foine, I should think it was. … Better than doin’ squads right all day.”

“Where did you get yours?”

“Ain’t got only one arm now. … I don’t give a damn. … I’ve driven my last fare, that’s all.”

“How d’you mean?”

“I used to drive a taxi.”

“That’s a pretty good job, isn’t it?”

“You bet, big money in it, if yer in right.”

“So you used to be a taxi-driver, did you?” broke in the orderly. “That’s a fine job. … When I was in the Providence Hospital half the fractures was caused by taxis. We had a little girl of six in the children’s ward had her feet cut clean off at the ankles by a taxi. Pretty yellow hair she had, too. Gangrene. … Only lasted a day. … Well, I’m going off. I guess you guys wish you was going to be where I’m goin’ to be tonight. … That’s one thing you guys are lucky in, don’t have to worry about propho.” The orderly wrinkled his face up and winked elaborately.

“Say, will you do something for me?” asked Andrews.

“Sure, if it ain’t no trouble.”

“Will you buy me a book?”

“Ain’t ye got enough with all the books at the ‘Y’?”

“No. … This is a special book,” said Andrews smiling, “a French book.”

“A French book, is it? Well, I’ll see what I can do. What’s it called?”

“By Flaubert. … Look, if you’ve got a piece of paper and a pencil, I’ll write it down.”

Andrews scrawled the title on the back of an order slip.

“There.”

“What the hell? Who’s Antoine? Gee whiz, I bet that’s hot stuff. I wish I could read French. We’ll have you breakin’ loose out o’ here an’ going down to number four, roo Villiay, if you read that kind o’ book.”

“Has it got pictures?” asked Applebaum.

“One feller did break out o’ here a month ago. … Couldn’t stand it any longer, I guess. Well, his wound opened an’ he had a hemorrhage, an’ now he’s planted out in the back lot. … But I’m goin’. Goodnight.”

The orderly bustled to the end of the ward and disappeared.

The lights went out, except for the bulb over the nurse’s desk at the end, beside the ornate doorway, with its wreathed pinnacles carved out of the grey stone, which could be seen above the white canvas screen that hid the door.

“What’s that book about, buddy?” asked Applebaum, twisting his head at the end of his lean neck so as to look Andrews full in the face.

“Oh, it’s about a man who wants everything so badly that he decides there’s nothing worth wanting.”

“I guess youse had a college edication,” said Applebaum sarcastically.

Andrews laughed.

“Well, I was goin’ to tell youse about when I used to drive a taxi. I was makin’ big money when I enlisted. Was you drafted?”

“Yes.”

“Well, so was I. I doan think nauthin o’ them guys that are so stuck up ’cause they enlisted, d’you?”

“Not a hell of a lot.”

“Don’t yer?” came a voice from the other side of Andrews,—a thin voice that stuttered. “W-w-well, all I can say is, it’ld have sss-spoiled my business if I hadn’t enlisted. No, sir, nobody can say I didn’t enlist.”

“Well, that’s your look-out,” said Applebaum.

“You’re goddam right, it was.”

“Well, ain’t your business spoiled anyway?”

“No, sir. I can pick it right up where I left off. I’ve got an established reputation.”

“What at?”

“I’m an undertaker by profession; my dad was before me.”

“Gee, you were right at home!” said Andrews.

“You haven’t any right to say that, young feller,” said the undertaker angrily. “I’m a humane man. I won’t never be at home in this dirty butchery.”

The nurse was walking by their cots.

“How can you say such dreadful things?” she said. “But lights are out. You boys have got to keep quiet. … And you,” she plucked at the undertaker’s bedclothes, “just remember what the Huns did in Belgium. … Poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like I am.”

Andrews closed his eyes. The ward was quiet except for the rasping sound of the snores and heavy breathing of the shattered men all about him. “And I thought she was the Queen of Sheba,” he said to himself, making a grimace in the dark. Then he began to think of the music he had intended to write about the Queen of Sheba before he had stripped his life off in the bare room where they had measured him and made a soldier of him. Standing in the dark in the desert of his despair, he would hear the sound of a caravan in the distance, tinkle of bridles, rasping of horns, braying of donkeys, and the throaty voices of men singing the songs of desolate roads. He would look up, and before him he would see, astride their foaming wild asses, the three green horsemen motionless, pointing at him with their long forefingers. Then the music would burst in a sudden hot whirlwind about him, full of flutes and kettledrums and braying horns and whining bagpipes, and torches would flare red and yellow, making a tent of light about him, on the edges of which would crowd the sumpter mules and the brown mule drivers, and the gaudily caparisoned camels, and the elephants glistening with jewelled harness. Naked slaves would bend their gleaming backs before him as they laid out a carpet at his feet; and, through the flare of torch-light, the Queen of Sheba would advance towards him, covered with emeralds and dull-gold ornaments, with a monkey hopping behind holding up the end of her long train. She would put her hand with its slim fantastic nails on his shoulder; and, looking into her eyes, he would suddenly feel within reach all the fiery imaginings of his desire.

Oh, if he could only be free to work. All the months he had wasted in his life seemed to be marching like a procession of ghosts before his eyes. And he lay in his cot, staring with wide open eyes at the ceiling, hoping desperately that his wounds would be long in healing.

Applebaum sat on the edge of his cot, dressed in a clean new uniform, of which the left sleeve hung empty, still showing the creases in which it had been folded.

“So you really are going,” said Andrews, rolling his head over on his pillow to look at him.

“You bet your pants I am, Andy. … An’ so could you, poifectly well, if you’ld talk it up to ’em a little.”

“Oh, I wish to God I could. Not that I want to go home, now, but … if I could get out of uniform.”

“I don’t blame ye a bit, Kid; well, next time, we’ll know better. … Local Board Chairman’s going to be my job.”

Andrews laughed.

“If I wasn’t a sucker …”

“You weren’t the only wewe-one,” came the undertaker’s stuttering voice from behind Andrews.

“Hell, I thought you enlisted, undertaker.”

“Well, I did, by God. But I didn’t think it was going to be like this. …”

“What did ye think it was going to be, a picnic?”

“Hell, I doan care about that, or gettin’ gassed, and smashed up, or anythin’, but I thought we was goin’ to put things to rights by comin’ over here. … Look here, I had a lively business in the undertaking way, like my father had had before me. … We did all the swellest work in Tilletsville. …”

“Where?” interrupted Applebaum, laughing.

“Tilletsville; don’t you know any geography?”

“Go ahead, tell us about Tilletsville,” said Andrews soothingly.

“Why, when Senator Wallace d-d-deceased there, who d’you think had charge of embalming the body and taking it to the station an’ seeing everything was done fitting? We did. … And I was going to be married to a dandy girl, and I knowed I had enough pull to get fixed up, somehow, or to get a commission even, but there I went like a sucker an’ enlisted in the infantry, too. … But, hell, everybody was saying that we was going to fight to make the world safe for democracy, and that, if a feller didn’t go, no one’ld trade with him any more.”

He started coughing suddenly and seemed unable to stop. At last he said weakly, in a thin little voice between coughs:

“Well, here I am. There ain’t nothing to do about it.”

“Democracy. … That’s democracy, ain’t it: we eat stinkin’ goolash an’ that there fat ‘Y’ woman goes out with Colonels eatin’ chawklate soufflay. … Poifect democracy! … But I tell you what: it don’t do to be the goat.”

“But there’s so damn many more goats than anything else,” said Andrews.

“There’s a sucker born every minute, as Barnum said. You learn that drivin’ a taxicab, if ye don’t larn nothin’ else. … No, sir, I’m goin’ into politics. I’ve got good connections up Hundred and Twenty-fif ’ street way. … You see, I’ve got an aunt, Mrs. Sallie Schultz, owns a hotel on a Hundred and Tirty-tird street. Heard of Jim O’Ryan, ain’t yer? Well, he’s a good friend o’ hers; see? Bein’ as they’re both Catholics … But I’m goin’ out this afternoon, see what the town’s like … an ole Ford says the skirts are just peaches an’ cream.”

“He juss s-s-says that to torment a feller,” stuttered the undertaker.

“I wish I were going with you,” said Andrews.

“You’ll get well plenty soon enough, Andy, and get yourself marked Class A, and get given a gun, an—‘Over the top, boys!’… to see if the Fritzies won’t make a better shot next time. … Talk about suckers! You’re the most poifect sucker I ever met. … What did you want to tell the loot your legs didn’t hurt bad for? They’ll have you out o’ here before you know it. … Well, I’m goin’ out to see what the mamzelles look like.”

Applebaum, the uniform hanging in folds about his skinny body, swaggered to the door, followed by the envious glances of the whole ward.

“Gee, guess he thinks he’s goin’ to get to be president,” said the undertaker bitterly.

“He probably will,” said Andrews.

He settled himself in his bed again, sinking back into the dull contemplation of the teasing, smarting pain where the torn ligaments of his thighs were slowly knitting themselves together. He tried desperately to forget the pain; there was so much he wanted to think out. If he could only lie perfectly quiet, and piece together the frayed ends of thoughts that kept flickering to the surface of his mind. He counted up the days he had been in the hospital; fifteen! Could it be that long? And he had not thought of anything yet. Soon, as Applebaum said, they’d be putting him in Class A and sending him back to the treadmill, and he would not have reconquered his courage, his dominion over himself. What a coward he had been anyway, to submit. The man beside him kept coughing. Andrews stared for a moment at the silhouette of the yellow face on the pillow, with its pointed nose and small greedy eyes. He thought of the swell undertaking establishment, of the black gloves and long faces and soft tactful voices. That man and his father before him lived by pretending things they didn’t feel, by swathing reality with all manner of crêpe and trumpery. For those people, no one ever died, they passed away, they deceased. Still, there had to be undertakers. There was no more stain about that than about any other trade. And it was so as not to spoil his trade that the undertaker had enlisted, and to make the world safe for democracy, too. The phrase came to Andrews’s mind amid an avalanche of popular tunes, of visions of patriotic numbers on the vaudeville stage. He remembered the great flags waving triumphantly over Fifth Avenue, and the crowds dutifully cheering. But those were valid reasons for the undertaker; but for him, John Andrews, were they valid reasons? No. He had no trade, he had not been driven into the army by the force of public opinion, he had not been carried away by any wave of blind confidence in the phrases of bought propagandists. He had not had the strength to live. The thought came to him of all those who, down the long tragedy of history, had given themselves smilingly for the integrity of their thoughts. He had not had the courage to move a muscle for his freedom, but he had been fairly cheerful about risking his life as a soldier, in a cause he believed useless. What right had a man to exist who was too cowardly to stand up for what he thought and felt, for his whole makeup, for everything that made him an individual apart from his fellows, and not a slave to stand cap in hand waiting for someone of stronger will to tell him to act?