Three Soldiers

  “Yes. I even remember that he used to tell me about a fellow he knew who was called Al. … He used to tell me about how you two used to go down to the harbor and watch the big liners come in at night, all aflare with lights through the Golden Gate. And he used to tell you he’d go over to Europe in one, when he’d made his pile.”

  “That’s why Strasburg made me think of him,” broke in Al, tremendously excited. “’Cause it was so picturesque like. … But honest, I’ve tried hard to make good in this army. I’ve done everything a feller could. An’ all I did was to get into a cushy job in the regimental office. … But Dan, Gawd, he may even be an officer by this time.”

  “No, he’s not that,” said Andrews. “Look here, you ought to keep quiet with that hand of yours.”

  “Damn my hand. Oh, it’ll heal all right if I forget about it. You see, my foot slipped when they shunted a car I was just climbing into, an’ … I guess I ought to be glad I wasn’t killed. But, gee, when I think that if I hadn’t been a fool about that girl I might have been home by now. …”

  “The Chink says they’re putting up barricades on the Avenue Magenta.”

  “That means business, kid!”

  “Business nothin’,” shouted Slippery from where he and Chrisfield leaned over the dice on the tile floor in front of the window. “One tank an’ a few husky Senegalese’ll make your goddam socialists run so fast they won’t stop till they get to Dijon. … You guys ought to have more sense.” Slippery got to his feet and came over to the bed, jingling the dice in his hand. “It’ll take more’n a handful o’ socialists paid by the Boches to break the army. If it could be broke, don’t ye think people would have done it long ago?”

  “Shut up a minute. Ah thought Ah heard somethin’,” said Chrisfield suddenly, going to the window.

  They held their breath. The bed creaked as Al stirred uneasily in it.

  “No, warn’t anythin’; Ah’d thought Ah’d heard people singin’.”

  “The Internationale,” cried Al.

  “Shut up,” said Chrisfield in a low gruff voice.

  Through the silence of the room they heard steps on the stairs.

  “All right, it’s only Smiddy,” said Slippery, and he threw the dice down on the tiles again.

  The door opened slowly to let in a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a long face and long teeth.

  “Who’s the frawg?” he asked in a startled way, with one hand on the door knob.

  “All right, Smiddy; it ain’t a frawg; it’s a guy Chris knows. He’s taken his uniform off.”

  “’Lo, buddy,” said Smiddy, shaking Andrews’s hand. “Gawd, you look like a frawg.”

  “That’s good,” said Andrews.

  “There’s hell to pay,” broke out Smiddy breathlessly. “You know Gus Evans and the little black-haired guy goes ’round with him? They been picked up. I seen ’em myself with some M.P.’s at Place de la Bastille. An’ a guy I talked to under the bridge where I slep’ last night said a guy’d tole him they were goin’ to clean the A.W.O.L.’s out o’ Paris if they had to search through every house in the place.”

  “If they come here they’ll git somethin’ they ain’t lookin’ for,” muttered Chrisfield.

  “I’m goin’ down to Nice; getting too hot around here,” said Slippery. “I’ve got travel orders in my pocket now.”

  “How did you get ’em?”

  “Easy as pie,” said Slippery, lighting a cigarette and puffing affectedly towards the ceiling. “I met up with a guy, a second loot, in the Knickerbocker Bar. We gets drunk together, an’ goes on a party with two girls I know. In the morning I get up bright an’ early, and now I’ve got five thousand francs, a leave slip and a silver cigarette case, an’ Lootenant J. B. Franklin’s runnin’ around sayin’ how he was robbed by a Paris whore, or more likely keepin’ damn quiet about it. That’s my system.”

  “But, gosh darn it, I don’t see how you can go around with a guy an’ drink with him, an’ then rob him,” cried Al from the bed.

  “No different from cleaning a guy up at craps.”

  “Well?”

  “An’ suppose that feller knew that I was only a bloody private. Don’t you think he’d have turned me over to the M.P.’s like winkin’?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Al. “They’re juss like you an me, skeered to death they’ll get in wrong, but they won’t light on a feller unless they have to.”

  “That’s a goddam lie,” cried Chrisfield. “They like ridin’ yer. A doughboy’s less’n a dawg to ’em. Ah’d shoot anyone of ’em lake Ah’d shoot a nigger.”

  Andrews was watching Chrisfield’s face; it suddenly flushed red. He was silent abruptly. His eyes met Andrews’s eyes with a flash of fear.

  “They’re all sorts of officers, like they’re all sorts of us,” Al was insisting.

  “But you damn fools, quit arguing,” cried Smiddy. “What the hell are we goin’ to do? It ain’t safe here no more, that’s how I look at it.”

  They were silent.

  At last Chrisfield said:

  “What you goin’ to do, Andy?”

  “I hardly know. I think I’ll go out to St. Germain to see a boy I know there who works on a farm to see if it’s safe to take a job there. I won’t stay in Paris. Then there’s a girl here I want to look up. I must see her.”

  Andrews broke off suddenly, and started walking back and forth across the end of the room.

  “You’d better be damn careful; they’ll probably shoot you if they catch you,” said Slippery.

  Andrews shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, I’d rather be shot than go to Leavenworth for twenty years, Gawd! I would,” cried Al.

  “How do you fellers eat here?” asked Slippery.

  “We buy stuff an’ the dawg-faced girl cooks it for us.”

  “Got anything for this noon?”

  “I’ll go see if I can buy some stuff,” said Andrews. “It’s safer for me to go out than for you.”

  “All right, here’s twenty francs,” said Slippery, handing Andrews a bill with an offhand gesture.

  Chrisfield followed Andrews down the stairs. When they reached the passage at the foot of the stairs, he put his hand on Andrews’s shoulder and whispered:

  “Say, Andy, d’you think there’s anything in that revolution business? Ah hadn’t never thought they could buck the system thataway.”

  “They did in Russia.”

  “Then we’d be free, civilians, like we all was before the draft. But that ain’t possible, Andy; that ain’t possible, Andy.”

  “We’ll see,” said Andrews, as he opened the door to the bar.

  He went up excitedly to the Chink, who sat behind the row of bottles along the bar.

  “Well, what’s happening?”

  “Where?”

  “By the Gare de l’Est, where they were putting up barricades?”

  “Barricades!” shouted a young man in a red sash who was drinking at a table. “Why, they tore down some of the iron guards round the trees, if you call that barricades. But they’re cowards. Whenever the cops charge they run. They’re dirty cowards.”

  “D’you think anything’s going to happen?”

  “What can happen when you’ve got nothing but a bunch of dirty cowards?”

  “What d’you think about it?” said Andrews, turning to the Chink. The Chink shook his head without answering. Andrews went out. When he came back he found Al and Chrisfield alone in their room. Chrisfield was walking up and down, biting his finger nails. On the wall opposite the window was a square of sunshine reflected from the opposite wall of the Court.

  “For God’s sake beat it, Chris. I’m all right,” Al was saying in a weak, whining voice, his face twisted up by pain.

  “What’s the matter?” cried Andrews, putting down a large bundle.

  “Slippery’s seen a M.P. nosin’ around in front of the gin mill.”

  “Good God!”

  “They’ve beat it. … The trouble is Al’
s too sick. … Honest to gawd, Ah’ll stay with you, Al.”

  “No. If you know somewhere to go, beat it, Chris. I’ll stay here with Al and talk French to the M.P.’s if they come. We’ll fool ’em somehow.” Andrews felt suddenly amused and joyous.

  “Honest to gawd, Andy, Ah’d stay if it warn’t that that sergeant knows,” said Chrisfield in a jerky voice.

  “Beat it, Chris. There may be no time to waste.”

  “So long, Andy.” Chrisfield slipped out of the door.

  “It’s funny, Al,” said Andrews, sitting on the edge of the bed and unwrapping the package of food, “I’m not a damn bit scared any more. I think I’m free of the army, Al. … How’s your hand?”

  “I dunno. Oh, how I wish I was in my old bunk at Coblenz. I warn’t made for buckin’ against the world this way. … If we had old Dan with us. … Funny that you know Dan. … He’d have a million ideas for gettin’ out of this fix. But I’m glad he’s not here. He’d bawl me out so, for not havin’ made good. He’s a powerful ambitious kid, is Dan.”

  “But it’s not the sort of thing a man can make good in, Al,” said Andrews slowly. They were silent. There was no sound in the courtyard, only very far away the clatter of a patrol of cavalry over cobblestones. The sky had become overcast and the room was very dark. The mouldy plaster peeling off the walls had streaks of green in it. The light from the courtyard had a greenish tinge that made their faces look pale and dead, like the faces of men that have long been shut up between damp prison walls.

  “And Fuselli had a girl named Mabe,” said Andrews.

  “Oh, she married a guy in the Naval Reserve. They had a grand wedding,” said Al.

  IV

  “At last I’ve got to you!”

  John Andrews had caught sight of Geneviève on a bench at the end of the garden under an arbor of vines. Her hair flamed bright in a splotch of sun as she got to her feet. She held out both hands to him.

  “How good-looking you are like that,” she cried.

  He was conscious only of her hands in his hands and of her pale-brown eyes and of the bright sun-splotches and the green shadows fluttering all about them.

  “So you are out of prison,” she said, “and demobilized. How wonderful! Why didn’t you write? I have been very uneasy about you. How did you find me here?”

  “Your mother said you were here.”

  “And how do you like it, my Poissac?”

  She made a wide gesture with her hand. They stood silent a moment, side by side, looking about them. In front of the arbor was a parterre of rounded box-bushes edging beds where disorderly roses hung in clusters of pink and purple and apricot-color. And beyond it a brilliant emerald lawn full of daisies sloped down to an old grey house with, at one end, a squat round tower that had an extinguisher-shaped roof. Beyond the house were tall, lush-green poplars, through which glittered patches of silver-grey river and of yellow sand banks. From somewhere came a drowsy scent of mown grass.

  “How brown you are!” she said again. “I thought I had lost you. … You might kiss me, Jean.”

  The muscles of his arms tightened about her shoulders. Her hair flamed in his eyes. The wind that rustled through broad grape-leaves made a flutter of dancing light and shadow about them.

  “How hot you are with the sun!” she said. “I love the smell of the sweat of your body. You must have run very hard, coming here.”

  “Do you remember one night in the spring we walked home from Pelleas and Melisande? How I should have liked to have kissed you then, like this!” Andrews’s voice was strange, hoarse, as if he spoke with difficulty.

  “There is the château très froid et très profond,” she said with a little laugh.

  “And your hair. ‘Je les tiens dans les doits, je les tiens dans la bouche. … Toute ta chevelure, toute ta chevelure, Mélisande, est tombée de la tour. …’ D’you remember?”

  “How wonderful you are.”

  They sat side by side on the stone bench without touching each other.

  “It’s silly,” burst out Andrews excitedly. “We should have faith in our own selves. We can’t live a little rag of romance without dragging in literature. We are drugged with literature so that we can never live at all, of ourselves.”

  “Jean, how did you come down here? Have you been demobilized long?”

  “I walked almost all the way from Paris. You see, I am very dirty.”

  “How wonderful! But I’ll be quiet. You must tell me everything from the moment you left me in Chartres.”

  “I’ll tell you about Chartres later,” said Andrews gruffly. “It has been superb, one of the biggest weeks in my life, walking all day under the sun, with the road like a white ribbon in the sun over the hills and along river banks, where there were yellow irises blooming, and through woods full of blackbirds, and with the dust in a little white cloud round my feet, and all the time walking towards you, walking towards you.”

  “And la Reine de Saba, how is it coming?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a long time since I thought of it. … You have been here long?”

  “Hardly a week. But what are you going to do?”

  “I have a room overlooking the river in a house owned by a very fat woman with a very red face and a tuft of hair on her chin. …”

  “Madame Boncour.”

  “Of course. You must know everybody. … It’s so small.”

  “And you’re going to stay here a long time?”

  “Almost forever, and work, and talk to you; may I use your piano now and then?”

  “How wonderful!”

  Geneviève Rod jumped to her feet. Then she stood looking at him, leaning against one of the twisted stems of the vines, so that the broad leaves fluttered about her face. A white cloud, bright as silver, covered the sun, so that the hairy young leaves and the wind-blown grass of the lawn took on a silvery sheen. Two white butterflies fluttered for a second about the arbor.

  “You must always dress like that,” she said after a while.

  Andrews laughed.

  “A little cleaner, I hope,” he said. “But there can’t be much change. I have no other clothes and ridiculously little money.”

  “Who cares for money?” cried Geneviève. Andrews fancied he detected a slight affectation in her tone, but he drove the idea from his mind immediately.

  “I wonder if there is a farm round here where I could get work.”

  “But you couldn’t do the work of a farm labourer,” cried Geneviève, laughing.

  “You just watch me.”

  “It’ll spoil your hands for the piano.”

  “I don’t care about that; but all that’s later, much later. Before anything else I must finish a thing I am working on. There is a theme that came to me when I was first in the army, when I was washing windows at the training camp.”

  “How funny you are, Jean! Oh, it’s lovely to have you about again. But you’re awfully solemn today. Perhaps it’s because I made you kiss me.”

  “But, Geneviève, it’s not in one day that you can unbend a slave’s back, but with you, in this wonderful place … Oh, I’ve never seen such sappy richness of vegetation! And think of it, a week’s walking first across those grey rolling uplands, and then at Blois down into the haze of richness of the Loire. … D’you know Vendôme? I came by a funny little town from Vendôme to Blois. You see, my feet. … And what wonderful cold baths I’ve had on the sand banks of the Loire. … No, after a while the rhythm of legs all being made the same length on drill fields, the hopeless caged dullness will be buried deep in me by the gorgeousness of this world of yours!”

  He got to his feet and crushed a leaf softly between his fingers.

  “You see, the little grapes are already forming. … Look up there,” she said as she brushed the leaves aside just above his head. “These grapes here are the earliest; but I must show you my domain, and my cousins and the hen yard and everything.”

  She took his hand and pulled him out of the arbor. They ran
like children, hand in hand, round the box-bordered paths.

  “What I mean is this,” he stammered, following her across the lawn. “If I could once manage to express all that misery in music, I could shove it far down into my memory. I should be free to live my own existence, in the midst of this carnival of summer.”

  At the house she turned to him. “You see the very battered ladies over the door,” she said. “They are said to be by a pupil of Jean Goujon.”

  “They fit wonderfully in the landscape, don’t they? Did I ever tell you about the sculptures in the hospital where I was when I was wounded?”

  “No, but I want you to look at the house now. See, that’s the tower; all that’s left of the old building. I live there, and right under the roof there’s a haunted room I used to be terribly afraid of. I’m still afraid of it. … You see this Henri Quatre part of the house was just a fourth of the house as planned. This lawn would have been the court. We dug up foundations where the roses are. There are all sorts of traditions as to why the house was never finished.”

  “You must tell me them.”

  “I shall later; but now you must come and meet my aunt and my cousins.”

  “Please, not just now, Geneviève. … I don’t feel like talking to anyone except you. I have so much to talk to you about.”

  “But it’s nearly lunch time, Jean. We can have all that after lunch.”

  “No, I can’t talk to anyone else now. I must go and clean myself up a little anyway.”

  “Just as you like. … But you must come this afternoon and play to us. Two or three people are coming to tea. … It would be very sweet of you, if you’ld play to us, Jean.”

  “But can’t you understand? I can’t see you with other people now.”

  “Just as you like,” said Geneviève, flushing, her hand on the iron latch of the door.