Three Soldiers

  “You’ll pass the day in the country?” she asked in a little wistful voice as she handed Andrews the change.

  “Yes,” he said, “how well you guessed.”

  As they went out of the door they heard her muttering, “Ôla jeunesse, la jeunesse.”

  They found a table in the sun at a café opposite the gate from which they could watch people and automobiles and carriages coming in and out. Beyond a grass-grown bit of fortifications gave an 1870 look to things.

  “How jolly it is at the Porte Maillot!” cried Andrews.

  She looked at him and laughed.

  “But how gay he is to-day.”

  “No. I always like it here. It’s the spot in Paris where you always feel well. … When you go out you have all the fun of leaving town, when you go in you have all the fun of coming back to town. … But you aren’t eating any brioches?”

  “I’ve eaten one. You eat them. You are hungry.”

  “Jeanne, I don’t think I have ever been so happy in my life. … It’s almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you. That frightful life. … How is Etienne?”

  “He is in Mayene. He’s bored.”

  “Jeanne, we must live very much, we who are free to make up for all the people who are still … bored.”

  “A lot of good it’ll do them,” she cried laughing.

  “It’s funny, Jeanne, I threw myself into the army. I was so sick of being free and not getting anywhere. Now I have learnt that life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “I mean, I don’t think I get enough out of life,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They got to their feet.

  “What do you mean?” she said slowly. “One takes what life gives, that is all, there’s no choice. … But look there’s the Malmaison train. … We must run.”

  Giggling and breathless they climbed on the trailer, squeezing themselves on the back platform where everyone was pushing and exclaiming. The car began to joggle its way through Neuilly. Their bodies were pressed together by the men and women about them. Andrews put his arm firmly round Jeanne’s waist and looked down at her pale cheek that was pressed against his chest. Her little round black straw hat with a bit of a red flower on it was just under his chin.

  “I can’t see a thing,” she gasped, still giggling.

  “I’ll describe the landscape,” said Andrews. “Why, we are crossing the Seine already.”

  “Oh, how pretty it must be!”

  An old gentleman with a pointed white beard who stood beside them laughed benevolently.

  “But don’t you think the Seine’s pretty?” Jeanne looked up at him impudently.

  “Without a doubt, without a doubt. … It was the way you said it,” said the old gentleman. … “You are going to St. Germain?” he asked Andrews.

  “No, to Malmaison.”

  “Oh, you should go to St. Germain. M. Reinach’s prehistoric museum is there. It is very beautiful. You should not go home to your country without seeing it.”

  “Are there monkeys in it?” asked Jeanne.

  “No,” said the old gentleman turning away.

  “I adore monkeys,” said Jeanne.

  The car was going along a broad empty boulevard with trees and grass plots and rows of low store-houses and little dilapidated rooming houses along either side. Many people had got out and there was plenty of room, but Andrews kept his arm round the girl’s waist. The constant contact with her body made him feel very languid.

  “How good it smells!” said Jeanne.

  “It’s the spring.”

  “I want to lie on the grass and eat violets. … Oh, how good you were to bring me out like this, Jean. You must know lots of fine ladies you could have brought out, because you are so well educated. How is it you are only an ordinary soldier?”

  “Good God! I wouldn’t be an officer.”

  “Why? It must be rather nice to be an officer.”

  “Does Etienne want to be an officer?”

  “But he’s a socialist, that’s different.”

  “Well, I suppose I must be a socialist too, but let’s talk of something else.”

  Andrews moved over to the other side of the platform. They were passing little villas with gardens on the road where yellow and pale-purple crocuses bloomed. Now and then there was a scent of violets in the moist air. The sun had disappeared under soft purplish-grey clouds. There was occasionally a rainy chill in the wind.

  Andrews suddenly thought of Geneviève Rod. Curious how vividly he remembered her face, her wide, open eyes and her way of smiling without moving her firm lips. A feeling of annoyance went through him. How silly of him to go off rudely like that! And he became very anxious to talk to her again; things he wanted to say to her came to his mind.

  “Well, are you asleep?” said Jeanne tugging at his arm. “Here we are.”

  Andrews flushed furiously.

  “Oh, how nice it is here, how nice it is here!” Jeanne was saying.

  “Why, it is eleven o’clock,” said Andrews.

  “We must see the palace before lunch,” cried Jeanne, and she started running up a lane of linden trees, where the fat buds were just bursting into little crinkling fans of green. New grass was sprouting in the wet ditches on either side. Andrews ran after her, his feet pounding hard in the moist gravel road. When he caught up to her he threw his arms round her recklessly and kissed her panting mouth. She broke away from him and strode demurely arranging her hat.

  “Monster,” she said, “I trimmed this hat specially to come out with you and you do your best to wreck it.”

  “Poor little hat,” said Andrews, “but it is so beautiful today, and you are very lovely, Jeanne.”

  “The great Napoleon must have said that to the Empress Josephine and you know what he did to her,” said Jeanne almost solemnly.

  “But she must have been awfully bored with him long before.”

  “No,” said Jeanne, “that’s how women are.”

  They went through big iron gates into the palace grounds.

  Later they sat at a table in the garden of a little restaurant. The sun, very pale, had just showed itself, making the knives and forks and the white wine in their glasses gleam faintly. Lunch had not come yet. They sat looking at each other silently. Andrews felt weary and melancholy. He could think of nothing to say. Jeanne was playing with some tiny white daisies with pink tips to their petals, arranging them in circles and crosses on the table-cloth.

  “Aren’t they slow?” said Andrews.

  “But it’s nice here, isn’t it?” Jeanne smiled brilliantly. “But how glum he looks now.” She threw some daisies at him. Then, after a pause, she added mockingly: “It’s hunger, my dear. Good Lord, how dependent men are on food!”

  Andrews drank down his wine at a gulp. He felt that if he could only make an effort he could lift off the stifling melancholy that was settling down on him like a weight that kept growing heavier.

  A man in khaki, with his face and neck scarlet, staggered into the garden dragging beside him a mud-encrusted bicycle. He sank into an iron chair, letting the bicycle fall with a clatter at his feet.

  “Hi, hi,” he called in a hoarse voice.

  A waiter appeared and contemplated him suspiciously. The man in khaki had hair as red as his face, which was glistening with sweat. His shirt was torn, and he had no coat. His breeches and puttees were invisible for mud.

  “Gimme a beer,” croaked the man in khaki.

  The waiter shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

  “Il demande une bière,” said Andrews.

  “Mais Monsieur. …”

  “I’ll pay. Get it for him.”

  The waiter disappeared.

  “Thankee, Yank,” roared the man in khaki.

  The waiter brought a tall narrow yellow glass. The man in khaki took it from his hand, drank it down at a draught and handed back the em
pty glass. Then he spat, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, got with difficulty to his feet and shambled towards Andrews’s table.

  “Oi presoom the loidy and you don’t mind, Yank, if Oi parley wi’ yez a bit. Do yez?”

  “No, come along; where did you come from?”

  The man in khaki dragged an iron chair behind him to a spot near the table. Before sitting down he bobbed his head in the direction of Jeanne with an air of solemnity tugging at the same time at a lock of his red hair. After some fumbling he got a red-bordered handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face with it, leaving a long black smudge of machine oil on his forehead.

  “Oi’m a bearer of important secret messages, Yank,” he said, leaning back in the little iron chair. “Oi’m a despatch-rider.”

  “You look all in.”

  “Not a bit of it. Oi just had a little hold up, that’s all, in a woodland lake. Some buggers tried to do me in.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Oi guess they had a little information … that’s all. Oi’m carryin’ important messages from our headquarters in Rouen to your president. Oi was goin’ through a bloody thicket past this side. Oi don’t know how you pronounce the bloody town. … Oi was on my bike making about thoity for the road was all a-murk when Oi saw four buggers standing acrost the road … lookter me suspicious-like, so Oi jus’ jammed the juice into the boike and made for the middle ’un. He dodged all right. Then they started shootin’ and a bloody bullet buggered the boike. … It was bein’ born with a caul that saved me. … Oi picked myself up outer the ditch an lost ’em in the woods. Then Oi got to another bloody town and commandeered this old sweatin’ machine. … How many kills is there to Paris, Yank?”

  “Fifteen or sixteen, I think,”

  “What’s he saying, Jean?”

  “Some men tried to stop him on the road. He’s a despatch rider.”

  “Isn’t he ugly? Is he English?”

  “Irish.”

  “You bet you, miss; Hirlanday; that’s me. … You picked a good looker this toime, Yank. But wait till Oi git to Paree. Oi clane up a good hundre’ pound on this job in bonuses. What part d’ye come from, Yank?”

  “Virginia. I live in New York.”

  “Oi been in Detroit; goin’ back there to git in the automoebile business soon as Oi clane up a few more bonuses. Europe’s dead an stinkin’, Yank. Ain’t no place for a young fellow. It’s dead an stinkin’, that’s what it is.”

  “It’s pleasanter to live here than in America. … Say, d’you often get held up that way?”

  “Ain’t happened to me before, but it has to pals o’ moine.”

  “Who d’you think it was?

  “Oi dunno; ’Uns or some of these bloody secret agents round the Peace Conference. … But Oi got to go; that despatch won’t keep.”

  “All right. The beer’s on me.”

  “Thank ye, Yank.” The man got to his feet, shook hands with Andrews and Jeanne, jumped on the bicycle and rode out of the garden to the road, threading his way through the iron chairs and tables.

  “Wasn’t he a funny customer?” cried Andrews, laughing. “What a wonderful joke things are!”

  The waiter arrived with the omelette that began their lunch.

  “Gives you an idea of how the old lava’s bubbling in the volcano. There’s nowhere on earth a man can dance so well as on a volcano.”

  “But don’t talk that way,” said Jeanne laying down her knife and fork. “It’s terrible. We will waste our youth to no purpose. Our fathers enjoyed themselves when they were young. … And if there had been no war we should have been so happy, Etienne and I. My father was a small manufacturer of soap and perfumery. Etienne would have had a splendid situation. I should never have had to work. We had a nice house. I should have been married. …”

  “But this way, Jeanne, haven’t you more freedom?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. Later she burst out:

  “But what’s the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people. Oh, life was so sweet in France before the war.”

  “In that case it’s not worth living,” said Andrews in a savage voice, holding himself in.

  They went on eating silently. The sky became overcast. A few drops splashed on the table-cloth.

  “We’ll have to take coffee inside,” said Andrews.

  “And you think it is funny that people shoot at a man on a motorcycle going through a wood. All that seems to me terrible, terrible,” said Jeanne.

  “Look out. Here comes the rain!”

  They ran into the restaurant through the first hissing sheet of the shower and sat at a table near a window watching the rain drops dance and flicker on the green iron tables. A scent of wet earth and the mushroom-like odor of sodden leaves came in borne on damp gusts through the open door. A waiter closed the glass doors and bolted them.

  “He wants to keep out the spring. He can’t,” said Andrews.

  They smiled at each other over their coffee cups. They were in sympathy again.

  When the rain stopped they walked across wet fields by a foot path full of little clear puddles that reflected the blue sky and the white- and amber-tinged clouds where the shadows were light purplish-grey. They walked slowly arm in arm, pressing their bodies together. They were very tired, they did not know why and stopped often to rest leaning against the damp boles of trees. Beside a pond pale blue and amber and silver from the reflected sky, they found under a big beech tree a patch of wild violets, which Jeanne picked greedily, mixing them with the little crimson-tipped daisies in the tight bouquet. At the suburban railway station, they sat silent, side by side on a bench, sniffing the flowers now and then, so sunk in languid weariness that they could hardly summon strength to climb into a seat on top of a third class coach, which was crowded with people coming home from a day in the country. Everybody had violets and crocuses and twigs with buds on them. In people’s stiff, citified clothes lingered a smell of wet fields and sprouting woods. All the girls shrieked and threw their arms round the men when the train went through a tunnel or under a bridge. Whatever happened, everybody laughed. When the train arrived in the station, it was almost with reluctance that they left it, as if they felt that from that moment their work-a-day lives began again. Andrews and Jeanne walked down the platform without touching each other. Their fingers were stained and sticky from touching buds and crushing young sappy leaves and grass stalks. The air of the city seemed dense and unbreatheable after the scented moisture of the fields.

  They dined at a little restaurant on the Quai Voltaire and afterwards walked slowly towards the Place St. Michel, feeling the wine and the warmth of the food sending new vigor into their tired bodies. Andrews had his arm round her shoulder and they talked in low intimate voices, hardly moving their lips, looking long at the men and women they saw sitting twined in each other’s arms on benches, at the couples of boys and girls that kept passing them, talking slowly and quietly, as they were, bodies pressed together as theirs were.

  “How many lovers there are,” said Andrews.

  “Are we lovers?” asked Jeanne with a curious little laugh.

  “I wonder. … Have you ever been crazily in love, Jeanne?”

  “I don’t know. There was a boy in Laon named Marcelin. But I was a little fool then. The last news of him was from Verdun.”

  “Have you had many … like I am?”

  “How sentimental we are,” she cried laughing.

  “No. I wanted to know. I know so little of life,” said Andrews.

  “I have amused myself, as best I could,” said Jeanne in a serious tone. “But I am not frivolous. … There have been very few men I have liked. … So I have had few friends … do you want to call them lovers? But lovers are what married women have on the stage. … All that sort of thing is very silly.”

  “Not so very long ago,” said Andrews, “I used to dream of being romantically in love, wit
h people climbing up the ivy on castle walls, and fiery kisses on balconies in the moonlight.”

  “Like at the Opéra Comique,” cried Jeanne laughing.

  “That was all very silly. But even now, I want so much more of life than life can give.”

  They leaned over the parapet and listened to the hurrying swish of the river, now soft and now loud, where the reflections of the lights on the opposite bank writhed like golden snakes.

  Andrews noticed that there was someone beside them. The faint, greenish glow from the lamp on the quai enabled him to recognize the lame boy he had talked to months ago on the Butte.

  “I wonder if you’ll remember me,” he said.

  “You are the American who was in the Restaurant, Place du Terte, I don’t remember when, but it was long ago.”

  They shook hands.

  “But you are alone,” said Andrews.

  “Yes, I am always alone,” said the lame boy firmly. He held out his hand again.

  “Au revoir,” said Andrews.

  “Good luck!” said the lame boy. Andrews heard his crutch tapping on the pavement as he went away along the quai.

  “Jeanne,” said Andrews, suddenly, “you’ll come home with me, won’t you?”

  “But you have a friend living with you.”

  “He’s gone to Brussels. He won’t be back till tomorrow.”

  “I suppose one must pay for one’s dinner,” said Jeanne maliciously.

  “Good God, no.” Andrews buried his face in his hands. The singsong of the river pouring through the bridges filled his ears. He wanted desperately to cry. Bitter desire that was like hatred made his flesh tingle, made his hands ache to crush her hands in them.

  “Come along,” he said gruffly.

  “I didn’t mean to say that,” she said in a gentle, tired voice. “You know, I’m not a very nice person.” The greenish glow of the lamp lit up the contour of one of her cheeks as she tilted her head up, and glimmered in her eyes. A soft sentimental sadness suddenly took hold of Andrews; he felt as he used to feel when, as a very small child, his mother used to tell him Br’ Rabbit stories, and he would feel himself drifting helplessly on the stream of her soft voice, narrating, drifting towards something unknown and very sad, which he could not help.