Three Soldiers (22 page)

Something made him go up to the little girl and take her hand. The child, looking up suddenly and seeing a lanky soldier with pale lean face and light, straw-colored hair escaping from under a cap too small for him, shrieked and let go the string of the balloon, which soared slowly into the air trembling a little in the faint cool wind that blew. The child wailed dismally, and Andrews, quailing under the furious glances of the nursemaids, stood before her, flushed crimson, stammering apologies, not knowing what to do. The white caps of the nursemaids bent over and ribbons fluttered about the child’s head as they tried to console her. Andrews walked away dejectedly, now and then looking up at the balloon, which soared, a black speck against the grey and topaz-colored clouds.

“Sale Américain,” he heard one nursemaid exclaim to the other.

But this was the first hour in months he had had free, the first moment of solitude; he must live; soon he would be sent back to his division. A wave of desire for furious fleshly enjoyments went through him, making him want steaming dishes of food drenched in rich, spice-flavored sauces; making him want to get drunk on strong wine; to roll on thick carpets in the arms of naked, libidinous women. He was walking down the quiet grey street of the provincial town, with its low houses with red chimney pots, and blue slate roofs and its irregular yellowish cobbles. A clock somewhere was striking four with deep booming strokes, Andrews laughed. He had to be in hospital at six.

Already he was tired; his legs ached.

The window of a pastry shop appeared invitingly before him, denuded as it was by wartime. A sign in English said: “Tea.” Walking in, he sat down in a fussy little parlor where the tables had red cloths, and a print, in pinkish and greenish colors, hung in the middle of the imitation brocade paper of each wall. Under a print of a poster bed with curtains in front of which eighteen to twenty people bowed, with the title of “Secret d’Amour,” sat three young officers, who cast cold, irritated glances at this private with a hospital badge on who invaded their tea shop. Andrews stared back at them, flaming with dull anger.

Sipping the hot, fragrant tea, he sat with a blank sheet of music paper before him, listening in spite of himself to what the officers were saying. They were talking about Ronsard. It was with irritated surprise that Andrews heard the name. What right had they to be talking about Ronsard? He knew more about Ronsard than they did. Furious, conceited phrases kept surging up in his mind. He was as sensitive, as humane, as intelligent, as well-read as they were; what right had they to the cold suspicious glance with which they had put him in his place when he had come into the room? Yet that had probably been as unconscious, as unavoidable as was his own biting envy. The thought that if one of those men should come over to him, he would have to stand up and salute and answer humbly, not from civility, but from the fear of being punished, was bitter as wormwood, filled him with a childish desire to prove his worth to them, as when older boys had ill-treated him at school and he had prayed to have the house burn down so that he might heroically save them all. There was a piano in an inner room, where in the dark the chairs, upside down, perched dismally on the table tops. He almost obeyed an impulse to go in there and start playing, by the brilliance of his playing to force these men, who thought of him as a coarse automaton, something between a man and a dog, to recognize him as an equal, a superior.

“But the war’s over. I want to start living.
Red wine, the nightingale cries to the rose,
” said one of the officers.

“What do you say we go A.W.O.L. to Paris?”

“Dangerous.”

“Well, what can they do? We are not enlisted men; they can only send us home. That’s just what I want.”

“I’ll tell you what; we’ll go to the Cochon Bleu and have a cocktail and think about it.”

“
The lion and the lizard keep their courts where
… what the devil was his name? Anyway, we’ll glory and drink deep, while Major Peabody keeps his court in Dijon to his heart’s content.”

Spurs jingled as the three officers went out. A fierce disgust took possession of John Andrews. He was ashamed of his spiteful irritation. If, when he had been playing the piano to a roomful of friends in New York, a man dressed as a laborer had shambled in, wouldn’t he have felt a moment of involuntary scorn? It was inevitable that the fortunate should hate the unfortunate because they feared them. But he was so tired of all those thoughts. Drinking down the last of his tea at a gulp, he went into the shop to ask the old woman, with little black whiskers over her bloodless lips, who sat behind the white desk at the end of the counter, if she minded his playing the piano.

In the deserted tea room, among the dismal upturned chairs, his crassened fingers moved stiffly over the keys. He forgot everything else. Locked doors in his mind were swinging wide, revealing forgotten sumptuous halls of his imagination. The Queen of Sheba, grotesque as a satyr, white and flaming with worlds of desire, as the great implacable Aphrodite, stood with her hand on his shoulder sending shivers of warm sweetness rippling through his body, while her voice intoned in his ears all the inexhaustible voluptuousness of life.

An asthmatic clock struck somewhere in the obscurity of the room. “Seven!” John Andrews paid, said good-bye to the old woman with the mustache, and hurried out into the street. “Like Cinderella at the ball,” he thought. As he went towards the hospital, down faintly lighted streets, his steps got slower and slower. “Why go back?” a voice kept saying inside him. “Anything is better than that.” Better throw himself in the river, even, than go back. He could see the olive-drab clothes in a heap among the dry bullrushes on the river bank. … He thought of himself crashing naked through the film of ice into water black as Chinese lacquer. And when he climbed out numb and panting on the other side, wouldn’t he be able to take up life again as if he had just been born? How strong he would be if he could begin life a second time! How madly, how joyously he would live now that there was no more war. … He had reached the door of the hospital. Furious shudders of disgust went through him.

He was standing dumbly humble while a sergeant bawled him out for being late.

Andrews stared for a long while at the line of shields that supported the dark ceiling beams on the wall opposite his cot. The emblems had been erased and the grey stone figures that crowded under the shields,—the satyr with his shaggy goat’s legs, the townsman with his square hat, the warrior with the sword between his legs,—had been clipped and scratched long ago in other wars. In the strong afternoon light they were so dilapidated he could hardly make them out. He wondered how they had seemed so vivid to him when he had lain in his cot, comforted by their comradeship, while his healing wounds itched and tingled. Still he glanced tenderly at the grey stone figures as he left the ward.

Downstairs in the office where the atmosphere was stuffy with a smell of varnish and dusty papers and cigarette smoke, he waited a long time, shifting his weight restlessly from one foot to the other.

“What do you want?” said a red-haired sergeant, without looking up from the pile of papers on his desk.

“Waiting for travel orders.”

“Aren’t you the guy I told to come back at three?”

“It is three.”

“H’m!” The sergeant kept his eyes fixed on the papers, which rustled as he moved them from one pile to another. In the end of the room a typewriter clicked slowly and jerkily. Andrews could see the dark back of a head between bored shoulders in a woolen shirt leaning over the machine. Beside the cylindrical black stove against the wall a man with large mustaches and the complicated stripes of a hospital sergeant was reading a novel in a red cover. After a long silence the red-headed sergeant looked up from his papers and said suddenly:

“Ted.”

The man at the typewriter turned slowly round, showing a large red face and blue eyes.

“We-ell,” he drawled.

“Go in an’ see if the loot has signed them papers yet.”

The man got up, stretched himself deliberately, and slouched out through a door beside the stove. The red-haired sergeant leaned back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette.

“Hell,” he said, yawning.

The man with the mustache beside the stove let the book slip from his knees to the floor, and yawned too.

“This goddam armistice sure does take the ambition out of a feller,” he said.

“Hell of a note,” said the red-haired sergeant. “D’you know that they had my name in for an O.T.C.? Hell of a note goin’ home without a Sam Brown.”

The other man came back and sank down into his chair in front of the typewriter again. The slow, jerky clicking recommenced.

Andrews made a scraping noise with his foot on the ground.

“Well, what about that travel order?” said the red-haired sergeant.

“Loot’s out,” said the other man, still typewriting.

“Well, didn’t he leave it on his desk?” shouted the red-haired sergeant angrily.

“Couldn’t find it.”

“I suppose I’ve got to go look for it. … God!” The red-haired sergeant stamped out of the room. A moment later he came back with a bunch of papers in his hand.

“Your name Jones?” he snapped to Andrews.

“No.”

“Snivisky?”

“No. … Andrews, John.”

“Why the hell couldn’t you say so?”

The man with the mustaches beside the stove got to his feet suddenly. An alert, smiling expression came over his face.

“Good afternoon, Captain Higginsworth,” he said cheerfully.

An oval man with a cigar slanting out of his broad mouth came into the room. When he talked the cigar wobbled in his mouth. He wore greenish kid gloves, very tight for his large hands, and his puttees shone with a dark lustre like mahogany.

The red-haired sergeant turned round and half-saluted.

“Goin’ to another swell party, Captain?” he asked.

The Captain grinned.

“Say, have you boys got any Red Cross cigarettes? I ain’t only got cigars, an’ you can’t hand a cigar to a lady, can you?” The Captain grinned again. An appreciative giggle went round.

“Will a couple of packages do you? Because I’ve got some here,” said the red-haired sergeant reaching in the drawer of his desk.

“Fine.” The captain slipped them into his pocket and swaggered out doing up the buttons of his buff-colored coat.

The sergeant settled himself at his desk again with an important smile.

“Did you find the travel order?” asked Andrews timidly. “I’m supposed to take the train at four-two.”

“Can’t make it. … Did you say your name was Anderson?”

“Andrews. … John Andrews.”

“Here it is. … Why didn’t you come earlier?”

The sharp air of the ruddy winter evening, sparkling in John Andrews’s nostrils, vastly refreshing after the stale odors of the hospital, gave him a sense of liberation. Walking with rapid steps through the grey streets of the town, where in windows lamps already glowed orange, he kept telling himself that another epoch was closed. It was with relief that he felt that he would never see the hospital again or any of the people in it. He thought of Chrisfield. It was weeks and weeks since Chrisfield had come to his mind at all. Now it was with a sudden clench of affection that the Indiana boy’s face rose up before him. An oval, heavily-tanned face with a little of childish roundness about it yet, with black eyebrows and long black eyelashes. But he did not even know if Chrisfield were still alive. Furious joy took possession of him. He, John Andrews, was alive; what did it matter if everyone he knew died? There were jollier companions than ever he had known, to be found in the world, cleverer people to talk to, more vigorous people to learn from. The cold air circulated through his nose and lungs; his arms felt strong and supple; he could feel the muscles of his legs stretch and contract as he walked, while his feet beat jauntily on the irregular cobble stones of the street. The waiting room at the station was cold and stuffy, full of a smell of breathed air and unclean uniforms. French soldiers wrapped in their long blue coats, slept on the benches or stood about in groups, eating bread and drinking from their canteens. A gas lamp in the center gave dingy light. Andrews settled himself in a corner with despairing resignation. He had five hours to wait for a train, and already his legs ached and he had a side feeling of exhaustion. The exhilaration of leaving the hospital and walking free through wine-tinted streets in the sparkling evening air gave way gradually to despair. His life would continue to be this slavery of unclean bodies packed together in places where the air had been breathed over and over, cogs in the great slow-moving Juggernaut of armies. What did it matter if the fighting had stopped? The armies would go on grinding out lives with lives, crushing flesh with flesh. Would he ever again stand free and solitary to live out joyous hours which would make up for all the boredom of the treadmill? He had no hope. His life would continue like this dingy, ill-smelling waiting room where men in uniform slept in the fetid air until they should be ordered out to march or to stand in motionless rows, endlessly, futilely, like toy soldiers a child has forgotten in an attic.

Andrews got up suddenly and went out on the empty platform. A cold wind blew. Somewhere out in the freight yards an engine puffed loudly, and clouds of white steam drifted through the faintly lighted station. He was walking up and down with his chin sunk into his coat and his hands in his pockets, when somebody ran into him.