Three Soldiers (23 page)

“Damn,” said a voice, and the figure darted through a grimy glass door that bore the sign: “Buvette.” Andrews followed absent-mindedly.

“I’m sorry I ran into you. … I thought you were an M.P., that’s why I beat it.” When he spoke, the man, an American private, turned and looked searchingly in Andrews’s face. He had very red cheeks and an impudent little brown mustache. He spoke slowly with a faint Bostonian drawl.

“That’s nothing,” said Andrews.

“Let’s have a drink,” said the other man. “I’m A.W.O.L. Where are you going?”

“To some place near Bar-le-Duc, back to my Division. Been in hospital.”

“Long?”

“Since October.”

“Gee. … Have some Curaçao. It’ll do you good. You look pale. … My name’s Henslowe. Ambulance with the French Army.”

They sat down at an unwashed marble table where the soot from the trains made a pattern sticking to the rings left by wine and liqueur glasses.

“I’m going to Paris,” said Henslowe. “My leave expired three days ago. I’m going to Paris and get taken ill with peritonitis or double pneumonia, or maybe I’ll have a cardiac lesion. … The army’s a bore.”

“Hospital isn’t any better,” said Andrews with a sigh. “Though I shall never forget the delight with which I realized I was wounded and out of it. I thought I was bad enough to be sent home.”

“Why, I wouldn’t have missed a minute of the war. … But now that it’s over … Hell! Travel is the password now. I’ve just had two weeks in the Pyrénées. Nimes, Arles, Les Baux, Carcassonne, Perpignan, Lourdes, Gavarnie, Toulouse! What do you think of that for a trip? … What were you in?”

“Infantry.”

“Must have been hell.”

“Been! It is.”

“Why don’t you come to Paris with me?”

“I don’t want to be picked up,” stammered Andrews.

“Not a chance. … I know the ropes. … All you have to do is keep away from the Olympia and the railway stations, walk fast and keep your shoes shined … and you’ve got wits, haven’t you?”

“Not many. … Let’s drink a bottle of wine. Isn’t there anything to eat to be got here?”

“Not a damn thing, and I daren’t go out of the station on account of the M.P. at the gate. … There’ll be a diner on the Marseilles express.”

“But I can’t go to Paris.”

“Sure. … Look, how do you call yourself?”

“John Andrews.”

“Well, John Andrews, all I can say is that you’ve let ’em get your goat. Don’t give in. Have a good time, in spite of ’em. To hell with ’em.” He brought the bottle down so hard on the table that it broke and the purple wine flowed over the dirty marble and dripped gleaming on the floor.

Some French soldiers who stood in a group round the bar turned round.

“V’là un gars qui gaspille le bon vin,” said a tall red-faced man, with long sloping whiskers.

“Pour vingt sous j’mangerai la bouteille,” cried a little man lurching forward and leaning drunkenly over the table.

“Done,” said Henslowe. “Say, Andrews, he says he’ll eat the bottle for a franc.”

He placed a shining silver franc on the table beside the remnants of the broken bottle. The man seized the neck of the bottle in a black, claw-like hand and gave it a preparatory flourish. He was a cadaverous little man, incredibly dirty, with mustaches and beard of a moth-eaten tow- color, and a purple flush on his cheeks. His uniform was clotted with mud. When the others crowded round him and tried to dissuade him, he said: “M’en fous, c’est mon métier,” and rolled his eyes so that the whites flashed in the dim light like the eyes of dead codfish.

“Why, he’s really going to do it,” cried Henslowe.

The man’s teeth flashed and crunched down on the jagged edge of the glass. There was a terrific crackling noise. He flourished the bottle-end again.

“My God, he’s eating it,” cried Henslowe, roaring with laughter, “and you’re afraid to go to Paris.”

An engine rumbled into the station, with a great hiss of escaping steam.

“Gee, that’s the Paris train! Tiens!” He pressed the franc into the man’s dirt-crusted hand.

“Come along, Andrews.”

As they left the buvette they heard again the crunching crackling noise as the man bit another piece off the bottle.

Andrews followed Henslowe across the steam-filled platform to the door of a first-class carriage. They climbed in. Henslowe immediately pulled down the black cloth over the half globe of the light. The compartment was empty. He threw himself down with a sigh of comfort on the soft buff-colored cushions of the seat.

“But what on earth?” stammered Andrews.

“M’en fous, c’est mon métier,” interrupted Henslowe.

The train pulled out of the station.

Henslowe poured wine from a brown earthen crock into the glasses, where it shimmered a bright thin red, the color of currants. Andrews leaned back in his chair and looked through half-closed eyes at the table with its white cloth and little burnt umber loaves of bread, and out of the window at the square dimly lit by lemon-yellow gas lamps and at the dark gables of the little houses that huddled round it.

At a table against the wall opposite a lame boy, with white beardless face and gentle violet-colored eyes, sat very close to the bareheaded girl who was with him and who never took her eyes off his face, leaning on his crutch all the while. A stove hummed faintly in the middle of the room, and from the half-open kitchen door came ruddy light and the sound of something frying. On the wall, in brownish colors that seemed to have taken warmth from all the rich scents of food they had absorbed since the day of their painting, were scenes of the Butte as it was fancied to have once been, with windmills and wide fields.

“I want to travel,” Henslowe was saying, dragging out his words drowsily. “Abyssinia, Patagonia, Turkestan, the Caucasus, anywhere and everywhere. What do you say you and I go out to New Zealand and raise sheep?”

“But why not stay here? There can’t be anywhere as wonderful as this.”

“Then I’ll put off starting for New Guinea for a week. But hell, I’d go crazy staying anywhere after this. It’s got into my blood … all this murder. It’s made a wanderer of me, that’s what it’s done. I’m an adventurer.”

“God, I wish it had made me into anything so interesting.”

“Tie a rock on to your scruples and throw ’em off the Pont Neuf and set out. … O boy, this is the golden age for living by your wits.”

“You’re not out of the army yet.”

“I should worry. … I’ll join the Red Cross.”

“How?”

“I’ve got a tip about it.”

A girl with oval face and faint black down on her upper lip brought them soup, a thick greenish colored soup, that steamed richly into their faces.

“If you tell me how I can get out of the army you’ll probably save my life,” said Andrews seriously.

“There are two ways … Oh, but let me tell you later. Let’s talk about something worth while … So you write music do you?”

Andrews nodded.

An omelet lay between them, pale golden-yellow with flecks of green; a few amber bubbles of burnt butter still clustered round the edges.

“Talk about tone-poems,” said Henslowe.

“But, if you are an adventurer and have no scruples, how is it you are still a private?”

Henslowe took a gulp of wine and laughed uproariously.

“That’s the joke.”

They ate in silence for a little while. They could hear the couple opposite them talking in low soft voices. The stove purred, and from the kitchen came a sound of something being beaten in a bowl. Andrews leaned back in his chair.

“This is so wonderfully quiet and mellow,” he said. … “It is so easy to forget that there’s any joy at all in life.”

“Rot … It’s a circus parade.”

“Have you ever seen anything drearier than a circus parade? One of those jokes that aren’t funny.”

“Justine, encore du vin,” called Henslowe.

“So you know her name?”

“I live here. … The Butte is the boss on the middle of the shield. It’s the axle of the wheel. That’s why it’s so quiet, like the centre of a cyclone, of a vast whirling rotary circus parade!”

Justine, with her red hands that had washed so many dishes off which other people had dined well, put down between them a scarlet langouste, of which claws and feelers sprawled over the table-cloth that already had a few purplish stains of wine. The sauce was yellow and fluffy like the breast of a canary bird.

“D’you know,” said Andrews suddenly talking fast and excitedly while he brushed the straggling yellow hair off his forehead, “I’d almost be willing to be shot at the end of a year if I could live up here all that time with a piano and a million sheets of music paper … It would be worth it.”

“But this is a place to come back to. Imagine coming back here after the highlands of Thibet, where you’ld nearly got drowned and scalped and had made love to the daughter of an Afghan chief … who had red lips smeared with loukoumi so that the sweet taste stayed in your mouth.” Henslowe stroked softly his little brown mustache.

“But what’s the use of just seeing and feeling things if you can’t express them?”

“What’s the use of living at all? For the fun of it, man; damn ends.”

“But the only profound fun I ever have is that …” Andrews’s voice broke. “O God, I would give up every joy in the world if I could turn out one page that I felt was adequate. … D’you know it’s years since I’ve talked to anybody?”

They both stared silently out of the window at the fog that was packed tightly against it like cotton wool, only softer, and a greenish-gold color.

“The M.P.’s sure won’t get us tonight,” said Henslowe, banging his fist jauntily on the table. “I’ve a great mind to go to Rue St. Anne and leave my card on the Provost Marshal. … God damn! D’you remember that man who took the bite out of our wine-bottle … He didn’t give a hoot in hell, did he? Talk about expression. Why don’t you express that? I think that’s the turning point of your career. That’s what made you come to Paris; you can’t deny it.”

They both laughed loudly rolling about on their chairs. Andrews caught glints of contagion in the pale violet eyes of the lame boy and in the dark eyes of the girl.

“Let’s tell them about it,” he said still laughing, with his face, bloodless after the months in hospital, suddenly flushed.

“Salut,” said Henslowe turning round and elevating his glass. “Nous rions parceque nous sommes gris de vin gris.” Then he told them about the man who ate glass. He got to his feet and recounted slowly in his drawling voice, with gestures. Justine stood by with a dish full of stuffed tomatoes of which the red skins showed vaguely through a mantle of dark brown sauce. When she smiled her cheeks puffed out and gave her face a little of the look of a white cat’s.

“And you live here?” asked Andrews after they had all laughed.

“Always. It is not often that I go down to town. … It’s so difficult. … I have a withered leg.” He smiled brilliantly like a child telling about a new toy.

“And you?”

“How could I be anywhere else?” answered the girl. “It’s a misfortune, but there it is.” She tapped with the crutch on the floor, making a sound like someone walking with it. The boy laughed and tightened his arm round her shoulder.

“I should like to live here,” said Andrews simply.

“Why don’t you?”

“But don’t you see he’s a soldier,” whispered the girl hurriedly.

A frown wrinkled the boy’s forehead.

“Well, it wasn’t by choice, I suppose,” he said.

Andrews was silent. Unaccountable shame took possession of him before these people who had never been soldiers, who would never be soldiers.

“The Greeks used to say,” he said bitterly, using a phrase that had been a long time on his mind, “that when a man became a slave, on the first day he lost one-half of his virtue.”

“When a man becomes a slave,” repeated the lame boy softly, “on the first day he loses one-half of his virtue.”

“What’s the use of virtue? It is love you need,” said the girl.

“I’ve eaten your tomato, friend Andrews,” said Henslowe. “Justine will get us some more.” He poured out the last of the wine that half filled each of the glasses with its thin sparkle, the color of red currants.

Outside the fog had blotted everything out in even darkness which grew vaguely yellow and red near the sparsely scattered street lamps. Andrews and Henslowe felt their way blindly down the long gleaming flights of steps that led from the quiet darkness of the Butte towards the confused lights and noises of more crowded streets. The fog caught in their throats and tingled in their noses and brushed against their cheeks like moist hands.

“Why did we go away from that restaurant? I’d like to have talked to those people some more,” said Andrews.

“We haven’t had any coffee either. … But, man, we’re in Paris. We’re not going to be here long. We can’t afford to stay all the time in one place. … It’s nearly closing time already. …”

“The boy was a painter. He said he lived by making toys; he whittles out wooden elephants and camels for Noah’s Arks. … Did you hear that?”

They were walking fast down a straight, sloping street. Below them already appeared the golden glare of a boulevard.

Andrews went on talking, almost to himself.

“What a wonderful life that would be to live up here in a small room that would overlook the great rosy grey expanse of the city, to have some absurd work like that to live on, and to spend all your spare time working and going to concerts. … A quiet mellow existence. … Think of my life beside it. Slaving in that iron, metallic, brazen New York to write ineptitudes about music in the Sunday paper. God! And this.”

They were sitting down at a table in a noisy café, full of yellow light flashing in eyes and on glasses and bottles, of red lips crushed against the thin hard rims of glasses.

“Wouldn’t you like to just rip it off?” Andrews jerked at his tunic with both hands where it bulged out over his chest. “Oh, I’d like to make the buttons fly all over the café, smashing the liqueur glasses, snapping in the faces of all those dandified French officers who look so proud of themselves that they survived long enough to be victorious.”

“The coffee’s famous here,” said Henslowe. “The only place I ever had it better was at a bistro in Nice on this last permission.”

“Somewhere else again!”

“That’s it. … For ever and ever, somewhere else! Let’s have some prunelle. Before the war prunelle.”

The waiter was a solemn man, with a beard cut like a prime minis-ter’s. He came with the bottle held out before him, religiously lifted. His lips pursed with an air of intense application, while he poured the white glinting liquid into the glasses. When he had finished he held the bottle upside down with a tragic gesture; not a drop came out.

“It is the end of the good old times,” he said.

“Damnation to the good old times,” said Henslowe. “Here’s to the good old new roughhousy circus parades.”

“I wonder how many people they are good for, those circus parades of yours,” said Andrews.

“Where are you going to spend the night?” said Henslowe.

“I don’t know. … I suppose I can find a hotel or something.”

“Why don’t you come with me and see Berthe; she probably has friends.”

“I want to wander about alone, not that I scorn Berthe’s friends,” said Andrews. … “But I am so greedy for solitude.”

John Andrews was walking alone down streets full of drifting fog. Now and then a taxi dashed past him and clattered off into the obscurity. Scattered groups of people, their footsteps hollow in the muffling fog, floated about him. He did not care which way he walked, but went on and on, crossing large crowded avenues where the lights embroidered patterns of gold and orange on the fog, rolling in wide deserted squares, diving into narrow streets where other steps sounded sharply for a second now and then and faded leaving nothing in his ears when he stopped still to listen but the city’s distant muffled breathing. At last he came out along the river, where the fog was densest and coldest and where he could hear faintly the sound of water gurgling past the piers of bridges. The glow of the lights glared and dimmed, glared and dimmed, as he walked along, and sometimes he could make out the bare branches of trees blurred across the halos of the lamps. The fog caressed him sooth-ingly and shadows kept flicking past him, giving him glimpses of smooth curves of cheeks and glints of eyes bright from the mist and darkness. Friendly, familiar people seemed to fill the fog just out of his sight. The muffled murmur of the city stirred him like the sound of the voices of friends.

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 imagining of your desire. …

The murmur of life about him kept forming itself into long modulated sentences in his ears,—sentences that gave him by their form a sense of quiet well-being as if he were looking at a low relief of people dancing, carved out of Parian in some workshop in Attica.

Once he stopped and leaned for a long while against the moisture-beaded stem of a street-lamp. Two shadows defined, as they strolled towards him, into the forms of a pale boy and a bareheaded girl, walking tightly laced in each other’s arms. The boy limped a little and his violet eyes were contracted to wistfulness. John Andrews was suddenly filled with throbbing expectation, as if those two would come up to him and put their hands on his arms and make some revelation of vast import to his life. But when they reached the full glow of the lamp, Andrews saw that he was mistaken. They were not the boy and girl he had talked to on the Butte.

He walked off hurriedly and plunged again into tortuous streets, where he strode over the cobblestone pavements, stopping now and then to peer through the window of a shop at the light in the rear where a group of people sat quietly about a table under a light, or into a bar where a tired little boy with heavy eyelids and sleeves rolled up from thin grey arms was washing glasses, or an old woman, a shapeless bundle of black clothes, was swabbing the floor. From doorways he heard talking and soft laughs. Upper windows sent yellow rays of light across the fog.