He didn’t need the book. She wrote on a piece of paper the rate for the rooms; she could have made it anything she wished. He told himself that, housed again, static, dismayed, and relieved, while she nagged at him about his soiled clothes, examining and mending them, prowling furiously among his things and cleaning his room furiously (Angelo lived on the floor above him) while she jabbed French words and phrases into his mouth and made him repeat them. Maybe I can get away some night, he told himself. Maybe I can escape after she is asleep and find an attic on the other side of town; knowing that he would not, knowing that already he had given up, surrendered to her; that, like being tried for a crime, no man ever escapes the same fate twice.
And so soon (the next day he went to the American Express Co. and left his new address) his mind was saying only Paris. Paris. The Louvre, Cluny, the Salon, besides the city itself: the same skyline and cobbles, the same kindlooking marbles thighed as though for breeding—all that merry sophisticated coldblooded dying city to which Cezanne was dragged now and then like a reluctant cow, where Manet and Monet fought points of color and line; where Matisse and Picasso still painted: tomorrow he would join a class. That night he opened the box of paints for the first time. Yet, looking at them, he paused again. The tubes lay in serried immaculate rows, blunt, solid, torpedolike, latent. There is so much in them, he thought. There is everything in them. They can do anything; thinking of Hals and Rembrandt; all the tall deathless giants of old time, so that he turned his head suddenly, as though they were in the room, filling it, making it seem smaller than a hencoop, watching him, so that he closed the box again with quiet and aghast dismay. Not yet, he told himself. I am not worthy yet. But I can serve. I will serve. I want to serve, suffer too, if necessary.
The next day he bought watercolors and paper (for the first time since reaching Europe he showed no timorousness nor helplessness in dealing with foreign shopkeepers) and he and Angelo went to Meudon. He did not know where he was going; he merely saw a blue hill and pointed it out to the taxi driver. They spent seven days there while he painted his landscape. He destroyed three of them before he was satisfied, telling himself while his muscles cramped and his eyes blurred with weariness, I want it to be hard. I want it to be cruel, taking something out of me each time. I want never to be completely satisfied with any of them, so that I shall always paint again. So when he returned to the Rue Servandoni, with the finished picture in the new portfolio, on that first night when he looked at the tall waiting spectres, he was humble still but no longer aghast.
So now I have something to show him, he thinks, nursing his now lukewarm beer, while beside him Angelo’s pursed sound has become continuous. Now, when I have found who is the best master in Paris, when I go to him and say Teach me to paint, I shall not go emptyhanded; thinking And then fame. And then Myrtle while twilight mounts Montparnasse gravely beneath the year turning reluctant as a young bride to the old lean body of death. It is then that he feels the first lazy, implacable waking of his entrails.
7
Angelo’s pursed sound has become continuous: an open and bland urbanity, until he sees that his patron has risen, the portfolio under his arm. “We eat-a, eh?” he says, who in three weeks has learned both of French and English, while Elmer has not yet learned how to ask where the Louvre and the Salon are. Then he indicates Elmer’s beer. “No feeneesh?”
“I’ve got to go,” Elmer says; there is upon his face that rapt, inturned expression of a dyspeptic, as though he is listening to his insides, which is exactly what Elmer is doing; already he moves away. At once a waiter appears; Elmer still with that rapt, not exactly concerned expression but without any lost motion, gives the waiter a banknote and goes on; it is Angelo who stays the waiter and gets change and leaves a European tip which the waiter snatches up with contempt and says something to Angelo in French; for reply and since his patron is going on, walking a little faster than ordinary, Angelo merely takes time to reverse his sound of approbation by breathing outward through his pursed lips instead of inward.
And now musical with motion Michel also, though it is in the Place de l’Observatoire that Angelo overtakes his patron, where even then he still has to trot to keep up. Angelo looks about, his single eyebrow lifted. “No eat-a now?” he says.
“No,” Elmer says. “The hotel.”
“Otel?” Angelo says. “Eat-a first, eh?”
“No!” Elmer says. His tone is fretted, though not yet harried and not yet desperate. “Hotel. I’ve got to retire.”
“Rittire?” Angelo says.
“Cabinet,” Elmer says.
“Ah,” Angelo says; “cabinet.” He glances up at his patron’s concerned, at once very alert and yet inwardlooking face; he grasps Elmer by the elbow and begins to run. They run for several steps before Elmer can jerk free; his face is now downright alarmed.
“Goddamn it, let go!” He cries.
“True,” Angelo says in Italian. “In your situation, running is not what a man wants. I forgot. Slow and easy does it, though not too slow. Coraggio,” he says, “we come to her soon.” And presently the pay station is in sight. “Voila!” Angelo says. Again he takes his patron’s arm, though not running; again Elmer frees his arm, drawing away; again Angelo indicates the station, his single eyebrow high on his skull, his eyes melting, concerned, inquiring; again he reverses his sound of approbation, indicating the station with his thumb.
“No!” Elmer says. His voice is desperate now, his expression desperate yet determined. “Hotel!” In the Garden, where Elmer walks with long harried strides and Angelo trots beside him, twilight is gray and unsibilant among the trees; in the long dissolving arras people are already moving toward the gates. They pass swiftly the carven figures in the autumntinged dusk, pass the bronze ones in solemn nowformless gleams secretive and brooding; both trotting now, they pass Verlaine in stone, and Chopin, that sick feminine man like snow rotting under a dead moon; already the moon of death stands overhead, pleasant and affable and bloodless as a procuress. Elmer enters the Rue Vaugirard, trotting with that harried care, as though he carries dynamite; it is Angelo who restrains him until there is a gap in the traffic.
Then he is in the Rue Servandoni. He is running now, down the cobbled slope. He is no longer thinking What will people think of me It is as though he now carries life, volition, all, cradled dark and sightless in his pelvic girdle, with just enough of his intelligence remaining to tell him when he reaches the door. And there, just emerging, hatless, is his landlady.
“Ah, Monsieur Odge,” she says. “I just this moment search for you. You have visitors; the female millionaires American Monson wait you in your chamber.”
“Yes,” Elmer says, swerving to run past her, not even aware that he is speaking to her in English. “In a minute I will—” Then he pauses; he glares at her with his harried desperate face. “Mohsong?” he says. “Mohsong?” then: “Monson! Monson!” Clutching the portfolio he jerks his wild glare upward toward his window, then back to the landlady, who looks at him in astonishment. “Keep them there!” he shouts at her with savage ferocity. “Do you hear? Keep them there! Dont let them get away. In a minute I will—” But already he has turned, running toward the opposite side of the court. Still galloping, the portfolio under his arm, he rushes up the dark stairs while somewhere in his desperate mind thinking goes quietly There will be somebody already in it. I know there will thinking with desperate despair that he is to lose Myrtle twice because of his body: once because of his back which would not let him dance, and now because of his bowels which will give her to think that he is running away. But the cabinet is empty; his very sigh of relief is the echo of his downwardsighing trousers about his legs, thinking Thank God. Thank God. Myrtle. Myrtle. Then this too flees; he seems to see his life supine before the secret implacable eyeless life of his own entrails like an immolation, saying like Samuel of old: Here I am. Here I am. Then they release him. He wakes again and reaches his hand toward the niche where scraps of newspaper ar
e kept and he becomes utterly immobile while time seems to rush past him with a sound almost like that of a shell.
He whirls; he looks at the empty niche, surrounded by the derisive whistling of that dark wind as though it were the wind which had blown the niche empty. He does not laugh; his bowels too have emptied themselves for haste. He claps his hand to his breast pocket; he becomes immobile again with his arm crossing his breast as though in salute; then with a dreadful urgency he searches through all his pockets, producing two broken bits of crayon, a dollar watch, a few coins, his room key, the tobacco tin (worn silver smooth now) containing the needles and thread and such which the cook had given him ten years ago in Canada. That is all. And so his hands cease. Imbued for the moment with a furious life and need of their own, they die; and he sits for a moment looking quietly at the portfolio on the floor beside him; again, as when he watched them fondle the handgrenade on board the transport in 1916, he watches them take up the portfolio and open it and take out the picture. But only for the moment, because again haste descends upon him and he no longer watches his hands at all, thinking Myrtle. Myrtle. Myrtle.
And now the hour, the moment, has come. Within the Garden, beyond the dusk and the slow gateward throng, the hidden bugle begins. Out of the secret dusk the grave brazen notes come, overtaking the people, passing the caped policemen at the gates, and about the city dying where beneath the waxing and bloodless moon evening has found itself. Yet still within the formal twilight of the trees the bugle sounds, measured, arrogant, and sad.
With Caution and Dispatch
1
The general, flanked by his A.D.C. and the aerodrome colonel and adjutant and a few wives and several who were not wives, stood in the windy sun and read aloud the paper whose contents they had already known since yesterday:
“… squadron on this date of blank March 1918, will depart and proceed, forthwith and under arms and with caution and dispatch, to destination known henceforth as zero.”
Then he folded the paper away and looked at them—the three flight-commanders at attention, behind them the Squadron—the young men gathered from the flung corners of the Empire (and including Sartoris, the Mississippian, who had not been a Briton since a hundred and forty-two years)—and behind them in turn, the line of waiting aeroplanes dull and ungleaming in the intermittent sun across which the general’s voice still came, telling again the old stale tale: Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton and here a spot which is forever England. Then the voice was in actual retrograde in a long limbo filled with horses—Fontenoy and Agincourt and Crécy and the Black Prince—and Sartoris whispering to his neighbor from the side of his rigid mouth: “What nigger is that? He’s talking about Jack Johnson.”
But at last the general was done with that too. He faced them—an old man, a kindly man doubtless, certainly in no way as martial and splendid as the Horse Guards Captain A.D.C. all blood and steel in his red hatband and tabs and brassard and the wisps and loops of lapidary-like burnished chain at his shoulders and armpits where that old chain mail of Crécy and Agincourt had been blown off him in the long intervening years by a hard and constant wind, leaving only that wispy residuum. “Goodbye and goodluck, and give them hell,” the general said. He took the flight-commanders’ salute. The three flight-commanders turned. Britt, the senior, with his M.C. and his Mons Star and his D.F.C. and his Gallipoli ribbon (so that he was gaudier above the left pocket than even the Guards captain), roved his hard eyes from face to face along the Squadron and spoke as he could speak: in that voice cold and precise as a surgeon’s knife, which never failed to reach any ear it was intended for and no further, certainly not back to the general:
“For gad’s sake try to keep formation until we reach the Channel. At least try to look like something to the taxpayers while we are over England. If you should straggle and land behind their lines, what do you do?”
“Burn the crate,” someone said.
“If you have time; it doesn’t really matter. But if you crash anywhere behind our lines, in France or England either, what had you better do, by gad?” This time a dozen voices answered.
“Get the clock.”
“Right,” Britt said. “Let’s get along.”
The band was playing now, though it was soon drowned by engines. They took off in turn and climbed to a thousand feet and formed echelon of flights, Britt leading with B flight, of which Sartoris was number three. Britt paraded them back across the aerodrome in a shallow dive. They passed, quite low, to the fluttering of feminine handkerchiefs; Sartoris could see the steady rising and falling of the drummer’s arm and the shifting glints of brass among the horns as if the sound they made were about to become visible and then audible. But it did not; the engines drummed again and they climbed on away toward the east and south.
It was a drowsy, hazy day of early spring. At five thousand feet greening England slid slowly beneath them, neat and quilted, the aeroplanes shifting slightly and constantly, rising and falling within their own close integration, within their own loud drone. In no time at all, it seemed to Sartoris, the flat unglinting gleam of the Channel lay before them and the cloudbank beyond it which was France; there was an aerodrome just beneath them. Then Britt was signalling. He was going to loop in formation: salute and farewell to home; naturally it would have occurred to someone to play horse for a while since there was nothing urgent in France—only a Hun break-through over the collapsed Fifth Army and General Haig with our backs to the wall and believing in the justice and sanctity of our cause. They were looping; they were over the top of the loop, upside down. There was a Camel right side up and heading directly toward Sartoris and about ten feet away; it would be one out of A flight whose position was just behind him. He had lost altitude; he had fallen out of the loop without knowing it. But he hadn’t; Britt’s Camel was just off his right wing, where it should have been.
He ruddered outward and pushed forward on the stick. He would stall now for sure, and he did; he was spinning, he had missed the other Camel somehow and he felt its slipstream as he passed through it. He closed the throttle and stopped the spin and slapped the throttle open again, climbing, frightened and raging. The squadron was below him now, the gap still carefully intact where he should have been between Britt and Atkinson at number five. Then Britt was pulling away, climbing too. “All right,” Sartoris said. “If that’s what you want.” Only if Britt could have been the one which almost rammed him. He did not know who it had been; he had not had time to read the letter or number. I was too close, he thought, to see anything as big as a letter or a number. I would have to look at it head-on from five inches, find the one with a twisted pin in one of the boss bolt-heads or something. He dived at Britt, who turned sharply away. He turned too, to get onto Britt’s tail. But he never got Britt into his Aldis because Britt was gone, he was too good for him; Sartoris did not even need to look back to know that Britt was now on his tail. They looped twice in one anothers’ slipstream as if they were bolted together. He was probably right on the back of my goggle-strap for a whole belt, Sartoris thought.
The altimeter had never quite caught up with him but it said about seven thousand feet when he stalled deliberately at the top of the third loop and just before he spun he saw Britt pass him, already rolling into an Immelman turn. He spun for what he thought was about a thousand feet and dived out; with the engine full out he dived on and then zoomed terrifically, still climbing on after the Camel began to shudder and labor. Two thousand feet below him, the squadron was completing another sedate circle; either Sibleigh or Tate, the other flight commanders, had moved up into Britt’s place. Five hundred feet below him Britt was circling too, looking up and jabbing violently downward with his arm. “Certainly,” Sartoris said. He put his nose straight down. When he passed Britt, he was doing a hundred and sixty; when he dived across Tate’s or Sibleigh’s nose or whoever it was leading now, he was at terminal velocity; the engine was making a terrific racket; if the Camel just held together, he wou
ld have enough speed to zoom back two thousand feet and maybe even loop the squadron a time or two. Then his pressure gauge blew out. He came out of the dive, already working the hand-pump, but nothing happened; he switched the valve to the gravity tank but still nothing happened, the propeller merely continued to flop over in the wind of its own creation. He was less than two thousand feet now and he remembered the aerodrome which had been somewhere beneath them when Britt decided to loop and he found it, less than two miles away. But it was upwind, so in a silence containing now only the whistling of wires, he turned his back upon it. Then he heard Britt coming up behind him; he made the dud engine signal as Britt passed. Now he had found a field—an oblong of sprouting grain bounded on both sides by hedgerows, at one end a copse, at the other a low stone wall, lying right for the wind. Britt passed him again, shaking his fist. “I didn’t do it,” Sartoris said. “Come look at the gauge and the valve if you dont believe me.” He made the last turn, upwind; he would come in over the wall. The field was all right; anyone who had had as much as forty hours on Camels could land one in it, but not even Sibleigh, who was the best Camel pilot he had ever seen, could have flown it out again. He was coming in just right, overshooting just exactly enough. He fishtailed a little, still overshooting just exactly enough to have the extra height and speed if he should need it; he cut the switch and used another feather’s weight of rudder, raising the nose a hair’s breadth, already beginning to get his tail down as the wall passed under him, getting the tail down a little more toward the mazy green. He was making a beautiful landing. He was making the best landing he had ever made; he was making the best dead-stick Camel landing he had ever seen. He had made it, the stick back to his stomach; he was on the ground. He was already reaching for the catch of his safety-belt when the Camel rolled into the moist depression which he had not even seen and stood slowly up on its nose. While he stood beside it, stanching the blood from his nose where one of the gun-butts had struck him, Britt roared past again, shaking his fist, and went streaking off hopping hedges toward where the aerodrome lay.