Three Soldiers (47 page)

“Well, you’re alone now, John Andrews,” he said aloud, after a half-hour, and jumped jauntily to his feet. He stretched himself and yawned. Outside the rain pattered loudly and steadily. “Let’s have a general accounting,” he said to himself. “It’ll be easily a month before I hear from old Howe in America, and longer before I hear from Henslowe, and already I’ve spent twenty francs on food. Can’t make it this way. Then, in real possessions, I have one volume of Villon, a green book on counterpoint, a map of France torn in two, and a moderately well-stocked mind.”

He put the two books on the middle of the table before him, on top of his disorderly bundle of music papers and notebooks. Then he went on, piling his possessions there as he thought of them. Three pencils, a fountain pen. Automatically he reached for his watch, but he remembered he’d given it to Al to pawn in case he didn’t decide to give himself up, and needed money. A toothbrush. A shaving set. A piece of soap. A hairbrush and a broken comb. Anything else? He groped in the musette that hung on the foot of the bed. A box of matches. A knife with one blade missing, and a mashed cigarette. Amusement growing on him every minute, he contemplated the pile. Then, in the drawer, he remembered, was a clean shirt and two pairs of soiled socks. And that was all, absolutely all. Nothing saleable there. Except Geneviève’s revolver. He pulled it out of his pocket. The candlelight flashed on the bright nickel. No, he might need that; it was too valuable to sell. He pointed it towards himself. Under the chin was said to be the best place. He wondered if he would pull the trigger when the barrel was pressed against his chin. No, when his money gave out he’d sell the revolver. An expensive death for a starving man. He sat on the edge of the bed and laughed.

Then he discovered he was very hungry. Two meals in one day; shocking! He said to himself. Whistling joyfully, like a schoolboy, he strode down the rickety stairs to order a meal of Madame Boncour.

It was with a strange start that he noticed that the tune he was whistling was:

The lindens were in bloom. From a tree beside the house great gusts of fragrance, heavy as incense, came in through the open window. Andrews lay across the table with his eyes closed and his cheek in a mass of ruled papers. He was very tired. The first movement of the “Soul and Body of John Brown” was down on paper. The village clock struck two. He got to his feet and stood a moment looking absently out of the window. It was a sultry afternoon of swollen clouds that hung low over the river. The windmill on the hilltop opposite was motionless. He seemed to hear Geneviève’s voice the last time he had seen her, so long ago. “You would have been a great composer.” He walked over to the table and turned over some sheets without looking at them. “Would have been.” He shrugged his shoulders. So you couldn’t be a great composer and a deserter too in the year 1919. Probably Geneviève was right. But he must have something to eat.

“But how late it is,” expostulated Madame Boncour, when he asked for lunch.

“I know it’s very late. I have just finished a third of the work I’m doing.

“And do you get paid a great deal, when that is finished?” asked Madame Boncour, the dimples appearing in her broad cheeks.

“Some day, perhaps.”

“You will be lonely now that the Rods have left.”

“Have they left?”

“Didn’t you know? Didn’t you go to say goodby? They’ve gone to the seashore. … But I’ll make you a little omelette.”

“Thank you.”

When Madame Boncour came back with the omelette and fried potatoes, she said to him in a mysterious voice:

“You didn’t go to see the Rods as often these last weeks.”

“No.”

Madame Boncour stood staring at him, with her red arms folded round her breasts, shaking her head.

When he got up to go upstairs again, she suddenly shouted:

“And when are you going to pay me? It’s two weeks since you have paid me.”

“But, Madame Boncour, I told you I had no money. If you wait a day or two, I’m sure to get some in the mail. It can’t be more than a day or two.”

“I’ve heard that story before.”

“I’ve even tried to get work at several farms round here.”

Madame Boncour threw back her head and laughed, showing the blackened teeth of her lower jaw.

“Look here,” she said at length, “after this week, it’s finished. You either pay me, or … And I sleep very lightly, Monsieur.” Her voice took on suddenly its usual sleek singsong tone.

Andrews broke away and ran upstairs to his room.

“I must fly the coop tonight,” he said to himself. But suppose then letters came with money the next day. He writhed in indecision all the afternoon.

That evening he took a long walk. In passing the Rods’ house he saw that the shutters were closed. It gave him a sort of relief to know that Geneviève no longer lived near him. His solitude was complete, now.

And why, instead of writing music that would have been worth while if he hadn’t been a deserter, he kept asking himself, hadn’t he tried long ago to act, to make a gesture, however feeble, however forlorn, for other people’s freedom? Half by accident he had managed to free himself from the treadmill. Couldn’t he have helped others? If he only had his life to live over again. No; he had not lived up to the name of John Brown.

It was dark when he got back to the village. He had decided to wait one more day.

The next morning he started working on the second movement. The lack of a piano made it very difficult to get ahead, yet he said to himself that he should put down what he could, as it would be long before he found leisure again.

One night he had blown out his candle and stood at the window watching the glint of the moon on the river. He heard a soft heavy step on the landing outside his room. A floorboard creaked, and the key turned in the lock. The step was heard again on the stairs. John Andrews laughed aloud. The window was only twenty feet from the ground, and there was a trellis. He got into bed contentedly. He must sleep well, for tomorrow night he would slip out of the window and make for Bordeaux.

Another morning. A brisk wind blew, fluttering Andrews’s papers as he worked. Outside the river was streaked blue and silver and slate-colored. The windmill’s arms waved fast against the piled clouds. The scent of the lindens came only intermittently on the sharp wind. In spite of himself, the tune of “John Brown’s Body” had crept in among his ideas. Andrews sat with a pencil at his lips, whistling softly, while in the back of his mind a vast chorus seemed singing:

If one could only find freedom by marching for it, came the thought. All at once he became rigid, his hands clutched the table edge.

There was an American voice under his window:

“D’you think she’s kiddin’ us, Charley?”

Andrews was blinded, falling from a dizzy height. God, could things repeat themselves like that? Would everything be repeated? And he seemed to hear voices whisper in his ears: “One of you men teach him how to salute.”

He jumped to his feet and pulled open the drawer. It was empty. The woman had taken the revolver. “It’s all planned, then. She knew,” he said aloud in a low voice.

He became suddenly calm.

A man in a boat was passing down the river. The boat was painted bright green; the man wore a curious jacket of burnt-brown color, and held a fishing pole.

Andrews sat in his chair again. The boat was out of sight now, but there was the windmill turning, turning against the piled white clouds.

There were steps on the stairs.

Two swallows, twittering, curved past the window, very near, so that Andrews could make out the markings on their wings and the way they folded their legs against their pale-grey bellies.

There was a knock.

“Come in,” said Andrews firmly.

“I beg yer pardon,” said a soldier with his hat, that had a band, in his hand. “Are you the American?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the woman down there said she thought your papers wasn’t in very good order.” The man stammered with embarrassment.

Their eyes met.

“No, I’m a deserter,” said Andrews.

The M.P. snatched for his whistle and blew it hard. There was an answering whistle from outside the window.

“Get your stuff together.”

“I have nothing.”

“All right, walk downstairs slowly in front of me.”

Outside the windmill was turning, turning, against the piled white clouds of the sky.

Andrews turned his eyes towards the door. The M.P. closed the door after them, and followed on his heels down the steps.

On John Andrews’s writing table the brisk wind rustled among the broad sheets of paper. First one sheet, then another, blew off the table, until the floor was littered with them.

¹
Excerpted from “A Group of Books Worth Reading” by Heywood Broun published in
The Bookman
, December 1921, pp. 393–94. Brooklyn-born Heywood Broun (1888–1939) was a popular columnist for
The Tribune
and
The World
, and the author of dozens of short stories, articles and essays for, among others,
Harper’s
, The
Bookman
, and
The American Mercury
. He was also a passionate and outspoken advocate for the under-dog, believing that journalists could effectively fight for justice with the power of the pen. In 1933, he founded the American Newspaper Guild.