Three Soldiers (38 page)

Then he thought of the Major’s office that morning, and of his own skinny figure in the mirrors, repeated endlessly, standing helpless and humble before the shining mahogany desk. Even out here in these fields where the wet earth seemed to heave with the sprouting of new growth, he was not free. In those office buildings, with white marble halls full of the clank of officers’ heels, in index cards and piles of typewritten papers, his real self, which they had power to kill if they wanted to, was in his name and his number, on lists with millions of other names and other numbers. This sentient body of his, full of possibilities and hopes and desires, was only a pale ghost that depended on the other self, that suffered for it and cringed for it. He could not drive out of his head the picture of himself, skinny, in an ill-fitting uniform, repeated endlessly in the two mirrors of the Major’s white-painted office.

All of a sudden, through bare poplar trees, he saw the Seine.

He hurried along the road, splashing now and then in a shining puddle, until he came to a landing place. The river was very wide, silvery, streaked with pale-green and violet, and straw-color from the evening sky. Opposite were bare poplars and behind them clusters of buff-colored houses climbing up a green hill to a church, all repeated upside down in the color-streaked river. The river was very full, and welled up above its banks, the way the water stands up above the rim of a glass filled too full. From the water came an indefinable rustling, flowing sound that rose and fell with quiet rhythm in Andrews’s ears.

Andrews forgot everything in the great wave of music that rose impetuously through him, poured with the hot blood through his veins, with the streaked colors of the river and the sky through his eyes, with the rhythm of the flowing river through his ears.

“So I came without,” said Andrews, laughing.

“What fun!” cried Geneviève. “But anyway they couldn’t do anything to you. Chartres is so near. It’s at the gates of Paris.”

They were alone in the compartment. The train had pulled out of the station and was going through suburbs where the trees were in leaf in the gardens, and fruit trees foamed above the red brick walls, among the box-like villas.

“Anyway,” said Andrews, “it was an opportunity not to be missed.”

“That must be one of the most amusing things about being a soldier, avoiding regulations. I wonder whether Damocles didn’t really enjoy his sword, don’t you think so?”

They laughed.

“But mother was very doubtful about my coming with you this way. She’s such a dear, she wants to be very modern and liberal, but she always gets frightened at the last minute. And my aunt will think the world’s end has come when we appear.”

They went through some tunnels, and when the train stopped at Sèvres, had a glimpse of the Seine valley, where the blue mist made a patina over the soft pea-green of new leaves. Then the train came out on wide plains, full of the glaucous shimmer of young oats and the golden-green of fresh-sprinkled wheat fields, where the mist on the horizon was purplish. The train’s shadow, blue, sped along beside them over the grass and fences.

“How beautiful it is to go out of the city this way in the early morning! … Has your aunt a piano?”

“Yes, a very old and tinkly one.”

“It would be amusing to play you all I have done at the ‘Queen of Sheba.’ You say the most helpful things.”

“It is that I am interested. I think you will do something some day.”

Andrews shrugged his shoulders.

They sat silent, their ears filled up by the jerking rhythm of wheels over rails, now and then looking at each other, almost furtively. Outside, fields and hedges and patches of blossom, and poplar trees faintly powdered with green, unrolled, like a scroll before them, behind the flicker of telegraph poles and the festooned wires on which the sun gave glints of red copper. Andrews discovered all at once that the coppery glint on the telegraph wires was the same as the glint in Geneviève’s hair.

“Berenike, Artemisia, Arsinoë,” the names lingered in his mind. So that as he looked out of the window at the long curves of the telegraph wires that seemed to rise and fall as they glided past, he could imagine her face, with its large, pale brown eyes and its small mouth and broad smooth forehead, suddenly stilled into the encaustic painting on the mummy case of some Alexandrian girl.

“Tell me,” she said, “when did you begin to write music?”

Andrews brushed the light, disordered hair off his forehead.

“Why, I think I forgot to brush my hair this morning,” he said. “You see, I was so excited by the idea of coming to Chartres with you.”

They laughed.

“But my mother taught me to play the piano when I was very small,” he went on seriously. “She and I lived alone in an old house belonging to her family in Virginia. How different all that was from anything you have ever lived. It would not be possible in Europe to be as isolated as we were in Virginia. … Mother was very unhappy. She had led a dreadfully thwarted life … that unrelieved hopeless misery that only a woman can suffer. She used to tell me stories, and I used to make up little tunes about them, and about anything. The great success,” he laughed, “was, I remember, to a dandelion. … I can remember so well the way Mother pursed up her lips as she leaned over the writing desk. … She was very tall, and as it was dark in our old sitting room, had to lean far over to see. … She used to spend hours making beautiful copies of tunes I made up. My mother is the only person who has ever really had any importance in my life. … But I lack technical training terribly.”

“Do you think it is so important?” said Geneviève, leaning towards him to make herself heard above the clatter of the train.

“Perhaps it isn’t. I don’t know.”

“I think it always comes sooner or later, if you feel intensely enough.”

“But it is so frightful to feel all you want to express getting away beyond you. An idea comes into your head, and you feel it grow stronger and stronger and you can’t grasp it; you have no means to express it. It’s like standing on a street corner and seeing a gorgeous procession go by without being able to join it, or like opening a bottle of beer and having it foam all over you without having a glass to pour it into.”

Geneviève burst out laughing.

“But you can drink from the bottle, can’t you?” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“I’m trying to,” said Andrews.

“Here we are. There’s the cathedral. No, it’s hidden,” cried Geneviève.

They got to their feet. As they left the station, Andrews said:

“But after all, it’s only freedom that matters. When I’m out of the army! … ”

“Yes, I suppose you are right … for you that is. The artist should be free from any sort of entanglement.”

“I don’t see what difference there is between an artist and any other sort of workman,” said Andrews savagely.

“No, but look.”

From the square where they stood, above the green blur of a little park, they could see the cathedral, creamy yellow and rust color, with the sober tower and the gaudy tower, and the great rose window between, the whole pile standing nonchalantly, knee deep in the packed roofs of the town.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it without speaking.

In the afternoon they walked down the hill towards the river, that flowed through a quarter of tottering, peak-gabled houses and mills, from which came a sound of grinding wheels. Above them, towering over gardens full of pear trees in bloom, the apse of the cathedral bulged against the pale sky. On a narrow and very ancient bridge they stopped and looked at the water, full of a shimmer of blue and green and grey from the sky and from the vivid new leaves of the willow trees along the bank.

Their senses glutted with the beauty of the day and the intricate magnificence of the cathedral, languid with all they had seen and said, they were talking of the future with quiet voices.

“It’s all in forming a habit of work,” Andrews was saying. “You have to be a slave to get anything done. It’s all a question of choosing your master, don’t you think so?”

“Yes. I suppose all the men who have left their imprint on people’s lives have been slaves in a sense,” said Geneviève slowly. “Everyone has to give up a great deal of life to live anything deeply. But it’s worth it.” She looked Andrews full in the eyes.

“Yes, I think it’s worth it,” said Andrews. “But you must help me. Now I am like a man who has come up out of a dark cellar. I’m almost too dazzled by the gorgeousness of everything. But at least I am out of the cellar.”

“Look, a fish jumped,” cried Geneviève.

“I wonder if we could hire a boat anywhere. … Don’t you think it’ld be fun to go out in a boat?”

A voice broke in on Geneviève’s answer:

“Let’s see your pass, will you?”

Andrews turned round. A soldier with a round brown face and red cheeks stood beside him on the bridge. Andrews looked at him fixedly. A little zigzag scar above his left eye showed white on his heavily tanned skin.

“Let’s see your pass,” the man said again; he had a high pitched, squeaky voice.

Andrews felt the blood thumping in his ears.

“Are you an M.P.?”

“Yes.”

“Well I’m in the Sorbonne Detachment.”

“What the hell’s that?” said the M.P., laughing thinly.

“What does he say?” asked Geneviève, smiling.

“Nothing. I’ll have to go see the officer and explain,” said Andrews in a breathless voice. “You go back to your Aunt’s and I’ll come as soon as I’ve arranged it.”

“No, I’ll come with you.”

“Please go back. It may be serious. I’ll come as soon as I can,” said Andrews harshly.

She walked up the hill with swift decisive steps, without turning round.

“Tough luck, buddy,” said the M.P. “She’s a good-looker. I’d like to have a half-hour with her myself.”

“Look here. I’m in the Sorbonne School Detachment in Paris, and I came down here without a pass. Is there anything I can do about it?”

“They’ll fix you up, don’t worry,” cried the M.P. shrilly. “You ain’t a member of the General Staff in disguise, are ye? School Detachment! Gee, won’t Bill Huggis laugh when he hears that? You pulled the best one yet, buddy. … But come along,” he added in a confidential tone. “If you come quiet I won’t put the handcuffs on ye.”

“How do I know you’re an M.P.?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

They turned down a narrow street between grey stucco walls leprous with moss and water stains.

At a chair inside the window of a small wine shop a man with a red M.P. badge sat smoking. He got up when he saw them pass and opened the door with one hand on his pistol holster.

“I got one bird, Bill,” said the man, shoving Andrews roughly in the door.

“Good for you, Handsome; is he quiet?”

“Um.” Handsome grunted.

“Sit down there. If you move you’ll git a bullet in your guts.” The M.P. stuck out a square jaw; he had a sallow skin, puffy under the eyes that were grey and lustreless.

“He says he’s in some goddam School Detachment. First time that’s been pulled, ain’t it?”

“School Detachment. D’you mean an O.T.C?” Bill sank laughing into his chair by the window, spreading his legs out over the floor.

“Ain’t that rich?” said Handsome, laughing shrilly again.

“Got any papers on ye? Ye must have some sort of papers.”

Andrews searched his pockets. He flushed.

“I ought to have a school pass.”

“You sure ought. Gee, this guy’s simple,” said Bill, leaning far back in the chair and blowing smoke through his nose.

“Look at his dawg-tag, Handsome.”

The man strode over to Andrews and jerked open the top of his tunic. Andrews pulled his body away.

“I haven’t got any on. I forgot to put any on this morning.”

“No tag, no insignia.”

“Yes, I have, infantry.”

“No papers. … I bet he’s been out a hell of a time,” said Handsome meditatively.

“Better put the cuffs on him,” said Bill in the middle of a yawn.

“Let’s wait a while. When’s the loot coming?”

“Not till night.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. Ain’t no train.”

“How about a side car?”

“No, I know he ain’t comin’,” snarled Bill.

“What d’you say we have a little liquor, Bill? Bet this bloke’s got money. You’ll set us up to a glass o’ cognac, won’t you, School Detachment?”

Andrews sat very stiff in his chair, staring at them.

“Yes,” he said, “order up what you like.”

“Keep an eye on him, Handsome. You never can tell what this quiet kind’s likely to pull off on you.”

Bill Huggis strode out of the room with heavy steps. In a moment he came back swinging a bottle of cognac in his hand.

“Tole the Madame you’d pay, Skinny,” said the man as he passed Andrews’s chair. Andrews nodded.

The two M.P.’s drew up to the table beside which Andrews sat. Andrews could not keep his eyes off them. Bill Huggis hummed as he pulled the cork out of the bottle.

Handsome watched him, grinning.

Suddenly they both burst out laughing.

“An’ the damn fool thinks he’s in a school battalion,” said Handsome in his shrill voice.

“It’ll be another kind of a battalion you’ll be in, Skinny,” cried Bill Huggis. He stifled his laughter with a long drink from the bottle.

He smacked his lips.

“Not so goddam bad,” he said. Then he started humming again:

“Have some, Skinny?” said Handsome, pushing the bottle towards Andrews.

“No, thanks,” said Andrews.

“Ye won’t be gettin’ good cognac where yer goin’, Skinny, not by a damn sight,” growled Bill Huggis in the middle of a laugh.

“All right, I’ll take a swig.” An idea had suddenly come into Andrews’s head.

“Gee, the bastard kin drink cognac,” cried Handsome.

“Got enough money to buy us another bottle?”

Andrews nodded. He wiped his mouth absently with his handkerchief; he had drunk the raw cognac without tasting it.

“Get another bottle, Handsome,” said Bill Huggis carelessly. A purplish flush had appeared in the lower part of his cheeks. When the other man came back, he burst out laughing.

“The last cognac this Skinny guy from the school detachment’ll git for many a day. Better drink up strong, Skinny. … They don’t have that stuff down on the farm. … School Detachment; I’ll be goddamned!” He leaned back in his chair, shaking with laughter.