IV
Andrews left the station reluctantly, shivering in the raw grey mist under which the houses of the village street and the rows of motor trucks and the few figures of French soldiers swathed in long formless coats, showed as vague dark blurs in the confused dawnlight. His body felt flushed and sticky from a night spent huddled in the warm fetid air of an overcrowded compartment. He yawned and stretched himself and stood irresolutely in the middle of the street with his pack biting into his shoulders. Out of sight, behind the dark mass, in which a few ruddy lights glowed, of the station buildings, the engine whistled and the train clanked off into the distance. Andrews listened to its faint reverberation through the mist with a sick feeling of despair. It was the train that had brought him from Paris back to his division.
As he stood shivering in the grey mist he remembered the curious despairing reluctance he used to suffer when he went back to boarding school after a holiday. How he used to go from the station to the school by the longest road possible, taking frantic account of every moment of liberty left him. Today his feet had the same leaden reluctance as when they used to all but refuse to take him up the long sandy hill to the school.
He wandered aimlessly for a while about the silent village hoping to find a cafe where he could sit for a few minutes to take a last look at himself before plunging again into the grovelling promiscuity of the army. Not a light showed. All the shutters of the shabby little brick and plaster houses were closed. With dull springless steps he walked down the road they had pointed out to him from the R. T. O.
Overhead the sky was brightening giving the mist that clung to the earth in every direction ruddy billowing outlines. The frozen road gave out a faint hard resonance under his footsteps. Occasionally the silhouette of a tree by the roadside loomed up in the mist ahead, its uppermost branches clear and ruddy with sunlight.
Andrews was telling himself that the war was over, and that in a few months he would be free in any case. What did a few months more or less matter? But the same thoughts were swept recklessly away in the blind panic that was like a stampede of wild steers within him. There was no arguing. His spirit was contorted with revolt so that his flesh twitched and dark splotches danced before his eyes. He wondered vaguely whether he had gone mad. Enormous plans kept rising up out of the tumult of his mind and dissolving suddenly like smoke in a high wind. He would run away and if they caught him, kill himself. He would start a mutiny in his company, he would lash all these men to frenzy by his words, so that they too should refuse to form into Guns, so that they should laugh when the officers got red in the face shouting orders at them, so that the whole division should march off over the frosty hills, without arms, without flags, calling all the men of all the armies to join them, to march on singing, to laugh the nightmare out of their blood. Would not some lightning flash of vision sear people's consciousness into life again? What was the good of stopping the war if the armies continued?
But that was just rhetoric. His mind was flooding itself with rhetoric that it might keep its sanity. His mind was squeezing out rhetoric like a sponge that he might not see dry madness face to face.
And all the while his hard footsteps along the frozen road beat in his ears bringing him nearer to the village where the division was quartered. He was climbing a long hill. The mist thinned about him and became brilliant with sunlight. Then he was walking in the full sun over the crest of a hill with pale blue sky above his head. Behind him and before him were mist-filled valleys and beyond other ranges of long hills, with reddish-violet patches of woodland, glowing faintly in the sunlight. In the valley at his feet he could see, in the shadow of the hill he stood on, a church tower and a few roofs rising out of the mist, as out of water.
Among the houses bugles were blowing mess-call.
The jauntiness of the brassy notes ringing up through the silence was agony to him. How long the day would be. He looked at his watch. It was seven thirty. How did they come to be having mess so late?
The mist seemed doubly cold and dark when he was buried in it again after his moment of sunlight. The sweat was chilled on his face and streaks of cold went through his clothes, soaked from the effort of carrying the pack. In the village street Andrews met a man he did not know and asked him where the office was. The man, who was chewing something, pointed silently to a house with green shutters on the opposite side of the street.
At a desk sat Chrisfield smoking a cigarette. When he jumped up Andrews noticed that he had a corporal's two stripes on his arm.
“Hello, Andy.”
They shook hands warmly.
“A' you all right now, ole boy?”
“Sure, I'm fine,” said Andrews. A sudden constraint fell upon them.
“That's good,” said Chrisfield.
“You're a corporal now. Congratulations.”
“Um hum. Made me more'n a month ago.”
They were silent. Chrisfield sat down in his chair again.
“What sort of a town is this?”
“It's a hell-hole, this dump is, a hell-hole.”
“That's nice.”
“Goin' to move soon, tell me.... Army o' Occupation. But Ah hadn't ought to have told you that.... Don't tell any of the fellers.”
“Where's the outfit quartered?”
“Ye won't know it; we've got fifteen new men. No account all of 'em. Second draft men.”
“Civilians in the town?”
“You bet.... Come with me, Andy, an Ah'll tell 'em to give you some grub at the cookshack. No... wait a minute an' you'll miss the hike.... Hikes every day since the goddam armistice. They sent out a general order telling 'em to double up on the drill.”
They heard a voice shouting orders outside and the narrow street filled up suddenly with a sound of boots beating the ground in unison. Andrews kept his back to the window. Something in his legs seemed to be tramping in time with the other legs.
“There they go,” said Chrisfield. “Loot's with 'em today.... Want some grub? If it ain't been punk since the armistice.”
The “Y” hut was empty and dark; through the grimy windowpanes could be seen fields and a leaden sky full of heavy ocherous light, in which the leafless trees and the fields full of stubble were different shades of dead, greyish brown. Andrews sat at the piano without playing. He was thinking how once he had thought to express all the cramped boredom of this life; the thwarted limbs regimented together, lashed into straight lines, the monotony of servitude. Unconsciously as he thought of it, the fingers of one hand sought a chord, which jangled in the badly-tuned piano. “God, how silly!” he muttered aloud, pulling his hands away. Suddenly he began to play snatches of things he knew, distorting them, willfully mutilating the rhythm, mixing into them snatches of ragtime. The piano jangled under his hands, filling the empty hut with clamor. He stopped suddenly, letting his fingers slide from bass to treble, and began to play in earnest.
There was a cough behind him that had an artificial, discreet ring to it. He went on playing without turning round. Then a voice said:
“Beautiful, beautiful.”
Andrews turned to find himself staring into a face of vaguely triangular shape with a wide forehead and prominent eyelids over protruding brown eyes. The man wore a Y. M. C. A. uniform which was very tight for him, so that there were creases running from each button across the front of his tunic.
“Oh, do go on playing. It's years since I heard any Debussy.”
“It wasn't Debussy.”
“Oh, wasn't it? Anyway it was just lovely. Do go on. I'll just stand here and listen.”
Andrews went on playing for a moment, made a mistake, started over, made the same mistake, banged on the keys with his fist and turned round again.
“I can't play,” he said peevishly.
“Oh, you can, my boy, you can.... Where did you learn? I would give a million dollars to play like that, if I had it.”
Andrews glared at him silently.
“You are one of the men just back from hospital, I presume.”
“Yes, worse luck.”
“Oh, I don't blame you. These French towns are the dullest places; though I just love France, don't you?” The “Y” man had a faintly whining voice.
“Anywhere's dull in the army.”
“Look, we must get to know each other real well. My name's Spencer Sheffield...Spencer B. Sheffield.... And between you and me there's not a soul in the division you can talk to. It's dreadful not to have intellectual people about one. I suppose you're from New York.”
Andrews nodded.
“Um hum, so am I. You're probably read some of my things in Vain Endeavor.... What, you've never read Vain Endeavor? I guess you didn't go round with the intellectual set.... Musical people often don't.... Of course I don't mean the Village. All anarchists and society women there....”
“I've never gone round with any set, and I never...”
“Never mind, we'll fix that when we all get back to New York. And now you just sit down at that piano and play me Debussy's 'Arabesque.'... I know you love it just as much as I do. But first what's your name?”
“Andrews.”
“Folks come from Virginia?”
“Yes.” Andrews got to his feet.
“Then you're related to the Penneltons.”
“I may be related to the Kaiser for all I know.”
“The Penneltons... that's it. You see my mother was a Miss Spencer from Spencer Falls, Virginia, and her mother was a Miss Pennelton, so you and I are cousins. Now isn't that a coincidence?”
“Distant cousins. But I must go back to the barracks.”
“Come in and see me any time,” Spencer B. Sheffield shouted after him. “You know where; back of the shack; And knock twice so I'll know it's you.”
Outside the house where he was quartered Andrews met the new top sergeant, a lean man with spectacles and a little mustache of the color and texture of a scrubbing brush.
“Here's a letter for you,” the top sergeant said. “Better look at the new K. P. list I've just posted.”
The letter was from Henslowe. Andrews read it with a smile of pleasure in the faint afternoon light, remembering Henslowe's constant drawling talk about distant places he had never been to, and the man who had eaten glass, and the day and a half in Paris.
“Andy,” the letter began, “I've got the dope at last. Courses begin in Paris February fifteenth. Apply at once to your C. O. to study somethin' at University of Paris. Any amount of lies will go. Apply all pull possible via sergeants, lieutenants and their mistresses and laundresses. Yours, Henslowe.”
His heart thumping, Andrews ran after the sergeant, passing, in his excitement, a lieutenant without saluting him.
“Look here,” snarled the lieutenant.
Andrews saluted, and stood stiffly at attention.
“Why didn't you salute me?”
“I was in a hurry, sir, and didn't see you. I was going on very urgent company business, sir.”
“Remember that just because the armistice is signed you needn't think you're out of the army; at ease.”
Andrews saluted. The lieutenant saluted, turned swiftly on his heel and walked away.
Andrews caught up to the sergeant.
“Sergeant Coffin. Can I speak to you a minute?”
“I'm in a hell of a hurry.”
“Have you heard anything about this army students' corps to send men to universities here in France? Something the Y. M. C. A.'s getting up.”
“Can't be for enlisted men. No I ain't heard a word about it. D'you want to go to school again?”
“If I get a chance. To finish my course.”
“College man, are ye? So am I. Well, I'll let you know if I get any general order about it. Can't do anything without getting a general order about it. Looks to me like it's all bushwa.”
“I guess you're right.”
The street was grey dark. Stung by a sense of impotence, surging with despairing rebelliousness, Andrews hurried back towards the buildings where the company was quartered. He would be late for mess. The grey street was deserted. From a window here and there ruddy light streamed out to make a glowing oblong on the wall of a house opposite.
“Goddam it, if ye don't believe me, you go ask the lootenant.... Look here, Toby, didn't our outfit see hotter work than any goddam engineers?”
Toby had just stepped into the cafe, a tall man with a brown bulldog face and a scar on his left cheek. He spoke rarely and solemnly with a Maine coast Yankee twang.
“I reckon so,” was all he said. He sat down on the bench beside the other man who went on bitterly:
“I guess you would reckon so.... Hell, man, you ditch diggers ain't in it.”
“Ditch diggers!” The engineer banged his fist down on the table. His lean pickled face was a furious red. “I guess we don't dig half so many ditches as the infantry does... an' when we've dug 'em we don't crawl into 'em an' stay there like goddam cottontailed jackrabbits.”
“You guys don't git near enough to the front....”
“Like goddam cottontailed jackrabbits,” shouted the pickle-faced engineer again, roaring with laughter. “Ain't that so?” He looked round the room for approval. The benches at the two long tables were filled with infantry men who looked at him angrily. Noticing suddenly that he had no support, he moderated his voice.
“The infantry's damn necessary, I'll admit that; but where'd you fellers be without us guys to string the barbed wire for you?”
“There warn't no barbed wire strung in the Oregon forest where we was, boy. What d'ye want barbed wire when you're advancin' for?”
“Look here...I'll bet you a bottle of cognac my company had more losses than yourn did.”
“Tek him up, Joe,” said Toby, suddenly showing an interest in the conversation.
“All right, it's a go.”
“We had fifteen killed and twenty wounded,” announced the engineer triumphantly.
“How badly wounded?”
“What's that to you? Hand over the cognac?”
“Like hell. We had fifteen killed and twenty wounded too, didn't we, Toby?”
“I reckon you're right,” said Toby.
“Ain't I right?” asked the other man, addressing the company generally.
“Sure, goddam right,” muttered voices.
“Well, I guess it's all off, then,” said the engineer.
“No, it ain't,” said Toby, “reckon up yer wounded. The feller who's got the worst wounded gets the cognac. Ain't that fair?”
“Sure.”
“We've had seven fellers sent home already,” said the engineer.
“We've had eight. Ain't we?”
“Sure,” growled everybody in the room.
“How bad was they?”
“Two of 'em was blind,” said Toby.
“Hell,” said the engineer, jumping to his feet as if taking a trick at poker. “We had a guy who was sent home without arms nor legs, and three fellers got t.b. from bein' gassed.”
John Andrews had been sitting in a corner of the room. He got up. Something had made him think of the man he had known in the hospital who had said that was the life to make a feller feel fit. Getting up at three o'clock in the morning, you jumped out of bed just like a cat.... He remembered how the olive-drab trousers had dangled, empty from the man's chair.
“That's nothing; one of our sergeants had to have a new nose grafted on....”
The village street was dark and deeply rutted with mud. Andrews wandered up and down aimlessly. There was only one other cafe. That would be just like this one. He couldn't go back to the desolate barn where he slept. It would be too early to go to sleep. A cold wind blew down the street and the sky was full of vague movement of dark clouds. The partly-frozen mud clotted about his feet as he walked along; he could feel the water penetrating his shoes. Opposite the Y. M. C. A. hut at the end of the street he stopped. After a moment's indecision he gave a little laugh, and walked round to the back where the door of the “Y” man's room was.
He knocked twice, half hoping there would be no reply.
Sheffield's whining high-pitched voice said: “Who is it?”
“Andrews.”
“Come right in.... You're just the man I wanted to see.” Andrews stood with his hand on the knob.
“Do sit down and make yourself right at home.”
Spencer Sheffield was sitting at a little desk in a room with walls of unplaned boards and one small window. Behind the desk were piles of cracker boxes and cardboard cases of cigarettes and in the midst of them a little opening, like that of a railway ticket office, in the wall through which the “Y” man sold his commodities to the long lines of men who would stand for hours waiting meekly in the room beyond.
Andrews was looking round for a chair.
“Oh, I just forgot. I'm sitting in the only chair,” said Spencer Sheffield, laughing, twisting his small mouth into a shape like a camel's mouth and rolling about his large protruding eyes.
“Oh, that's all right. What I wanted to ask you was: do you know anything about...?”
“Look, do come with me to my room,” interrupted Sheffield. “I've got such a nice sitting-room with an open fire, just next to Lieutenant Bleezer.... An' there we'll talk... about everything. I'm just dying to talk to somebody about the things of the spirit.”
“Do you know anything about a scheme for sending enlisted men to French universities? Men who have not finished their courses.”
“Oh, wouldn't that be just fine. I tell you, boy, there's nothing like the U. S. government to think of things like that.”
“But have you heard anything about it?”
“No; but I surely shall.... D'you mind switching the light off?... That's it. Now just follow me. Oh, I do need a rest. I've been working dreadfully hard since that Knights of Columbus man came down here. Isn't it hateful the way they try to run down the 'Y'?... Now we can have a nice long talk. You must tell me all about yourself.”
“But don't you really know anything about that university scheme? They say it begins February fifteenth,” Andrews said in a low voice.
“I'll ask Lieutenant Bleezer if he knows anything about it,” said Sheffield soothingly, throwing an arm around Andrews's shoulder and pushing him in the door ahead of him.
They went through a dark hall to a little room where a fire burned brilliantly in the hearth, lighting up with tongues of red and yellow a square black walnut table and two heavy armchairs with leather backs and bottoms that shone like lacquer.
“This is wonderful,” said Andrews involuntarily.
“Romantic I call it. Makes you think of Dickens, doesn't it, and Locksley Hall.”
“Yes,” said Andrews vaguely.
“Have you been in France long?” asked Andrews settling himself in one of the chairs and looking into the dancing flames of the log fire. “Will you smoke?” He handed Sheffield a crumpled cigarette.
“No, thanks, I only smoke special kinds. I have a weak heart. That's why I was rejected from the army.... Oh, but I think it was superb of you to join as a private; It was my dream to do that, to be one of the nameless marching throng.”
“I think it was damn foolish, not to say criminal,” said Andrews sullenly, still staring into the fire.
“You can't mean that. Or do you mean that you think you had abilities which would have been worth more to your country in another position?... I have many friends who felt that.”
“No.... I don't think it's right of a man to go back on himself.... I don't think butchering people ever does any good ...I have acted as if I did think it did good... out of carelessness or cowardice, one or the other; that I think bad.”
“You mustn't talk that way” said Sheffield hurriedly. “So you are a musician, are you?” He asked the question with a jaunty confidential air.
“I used to play the piano a little, if that's what you mean,” said Andrews.
“Music has never been the art I had most interest in. But many things have moved me intensely.... Debussy and those beautiful little things of Nevin's. You must know them.... Poetry has been more my field. When I was young, younger than you are, quite a lad...Oh, if we could only stay young; I am thirty-two.”
“I don't see that youth by itself is worth much. It's the most superb medium there is, though, for other things,” said Andrews. “Well, I must go,” he said. “If you do hear anything about that university scheme, you will let me know, won't you?”
“Indeed I shall, dear boy, indeed I shall.”
They shook hands in jerky dramatic fashion and Andrews stumbled down the dark hall to the door. When he stood out in the raw night air again he drew a deep breath. By the light that streamed out from a window he looked at his watch. There was time to go to the regimental sergeant-major's office before tattoo.
At the opposite end of the village street from the Y. M. C. A. hut was a cube-shaped house set a little apart from the rest in the middle of a broad lawn which the constant crossing and recrossing of a staff of cars and trains of motor trucks had turned into a muddy morass in which the wheel tracks crisscrossed in every direction. A narrow board walk led from the main road to the door. In the middle of this walk Andrews met a captain and automatically got off into the mud and saluted.
The regimental office was a large room that had once been decorated by wan and ill-drawn mural paintings in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes, but the walls had been so chipped and soiled by five years of military occupation that they were barely recognisable. Only a few bits of bare flesh and floating drapery showed here and there above the maps and notices that were tacked on the walls. At the end of the room a group of nymphs in Nile green and pastel blue could be seen emerging from under a French War Loan poster. The ceiling was adorned with an oval of flowers and little plaster cupids in low relief which had also suffered and in places showed the laths. The office was nearly empty. The littered desks and silent typewriters gave a strange air of desolation to the gutted drawing-room. Andrews walked boldly to the furthest desk, where a little red card leaning against the typewriter said “Regimental Sergeant-Major.”
Behind the desk, crouched over a heap of typewritten reports, sat a little man with scanty sandy hair, who screwed up his eyes and smiled when Andrews approached the desk.
“Well, did you fix it up for me?” he asked.
“Fix what?” said Andrews.
“Oh, I thought you were someone else.” The smile left the regimental sergeant-major's thin lips. “What do you want?”
“Why, Regimental Sergeant-Major, can you tell me anything about a scheme to send enlisted men to colleges over here? Can you tell me who to apply to?”
“According to what general orders? And who told you to come and see me about it, anyway?”
“Have you heard anything about it?”
“No, nothing definite. I'm busy now anyway. Ask one of your own non-coms to find out about it.” He crouched once more over the papers.
Andrews was walking towards the door, flushing with annoyance, when he saw that the man at the desk by the window was jerking his head in a peculiar manner, just in the direction of the regimental sergeant-major and then towards the door. Andrews smiled at him and nodded. Outside the door, where an orderly sat on a short bench reading a torn Saturday Evening Post, Andrews waited. The hall was part of what must have been a ballroom, for it had a much-scarred hardwood floor and big spaces of bare plaster framed by gilt-and lavender-colored mouldings, which had probably held tapestries. The partition of unplaned boards that formed other offices cut off the major part of a highly decorated ceiling where cupids with crimson-daubed bottoms swam in all attitudes in a sea of pink-and blue-and lavender-colored clouds, wreathing themselves coyly in heavy garlands of waxy hothouse flowers, while cornucopias spilling out squashy fruits gave Andrews a feeling of distinct insecurity as he looked up from below.
“Say are you a Kappa Mu?”
Andrews looked down suddenly and saw in front of him the man who had signalled to him in the regimental sergeant-major's office.
“Are you a Kappa Mu?” he asked again.
“No, not that I know of,” stammered Andrews puzzled.
“What school did you go to?”
“Harvard.”
“Harvard.... Guess we haven't got a chapter there.... I'm from North Western. Anyway you want to go to school in France here if you can. So do I.”
“Don't you want to come and have a drink?”
The man frowned, pulled his overseas cap down over his forehead, where the hair grew very low, and looked about him mysteriously. “Yes,” he said.
They splashed together down the muddy village street. “We've got thirteen minutes before tattoo.... My name's Walters, what's yours?” He spoke in a low voice in short staccato phrases.
“Andrews.”
“Andrews, you've got to keep this dark. If everybody finds out about it we're through. It's a shame you're not a Kappa Mu, but college men have got to stick together, that's the way I look at it.”
“Oh, I'll keep it dark enough,” said Andrews.
“It's too good to be true. The general order isn't out yet, but I've seen a preliminary circular. What school d'you want to go to?”
“Sorbonne, Paris.”
“That's the stuff. D'you know the back room at Baboon's?”
Walters turned suddenly to the left up an alley, and broke through a hole in a hawthorn hedge.
“A guy's got to keep his eyes and ears open if he wants to get anywhere in this army,” he said.
As they ducked in the back door of a cottage, Andrews caught a glimpse of the billowy line of a tile roof against the lighter darkness of the sky. They sat down on a bench built into a chimney where a few sticks made a splutter of flames.
“Monsieur desire?” A red-faced girl with a baby in her arms came up to them.
“That's Babette; Baboon I call her,” said Walters with a laugh.
“Chocolat,” said Walters.
“That'll suit me all right. It's my treat, remember.”
“I'm not forgetting it. Now let's get to business. What you do is this. You write an application. I'll make that out for you on the typewriter tomorrow and you meet me here at eight tomorrow night and I'll give it to you.... You sign it at once and hand it in to your sergeant. See?”
“This'll just be a preliminary application; when the order's out you'll have to make another.”
The woman, this time without the baby, appeared out of the darkness of the room with a candle and two cracked bowls from which steam rose, faint primrose-color in the candle light. Walters drank his bowl down at a gulp, grunted and went on talking.
“Give me a cigarette, will you?... You'll have to make it out darn soon too, because once the order's out every son of a gun in the division'll be making out to be a college man. How did you get your tip?”
“From a fellow in Paris.”
“You've been to Paris, have you?” said Walters admiringly. “Is it the way they say it is? Gee, these French are immoral. Look at this woman here. She'll sleep with a feller soon as not. Got a baby too!”
“But who do the applications go in to?”
“To the colonel, or whoever he appoints to handle it. You a Catholic?”
“No.”
“Neither am I. That's the hell of it. The regimental sergeant-major is.”
“Well?”
“I guess you haven't noticed the way things run up at divisional headquarters. It's a regular cathedral. Isn't a mason in it.... But I must beat it.... Better pretend you don't know me if you meet me on the street; see?”
“All right.”
Walters hurried out of the door. Andrews sat alone looking at the flutter of little flames about the pile of sticks on the hearth, while he sipped chocolate from the warm bowl held between the palms of both hands.
He remembered a speech out of some very bad romantic play he had heard when he was very small.
“About your head I fling... the curse of Rome.”
He started to laugh, sliding back and forth on the smooth bench which had been polished by the breeches of generations warming their feet at the fire. The red-faced woman stood with her hands on her hips looking at him in astonishment, while he laughed and laughed.
“Mais quelle gaite, quelle gaite,” she kept saying.
The straw under him rustled faintly with every sleepy movement Andrews made in his blankets. In a minute the bugle was going to blow and he was going to jump out of his blankets, throw on his clothes and fall into line for roll call in the black mud of the village street. It couldn't be that only a month had gone by since he had got back from hospital. No, he had spent a lifetime in this village being dragged out of his warm blankets every morning by the bugle, shivering as he stood in line for roll call, shuffling in a line that moved slowly past the cookshack, shuffling along in another line to throw what was left of his food into garbage cans, to wash his mess kit in the greasy water a hundred other men had washed their mess kits in; lining up to drill, to march on along muddy roads, splattered by the endless trains of motor trucks; lining up twice more for mess, and at last being forced by another bugle into his blankets again to sleep heavily while a smell hung in his nostrils of sweating woolen clothing and breathed-out air and dusty blankets. In a minute the bugle was going to blow, to snatch him out of even these miserable thoughts, and throw him into an automaton under other men's orders. Childish spiteful desires surged into his mind. If the bugler would only die. He could picture him, a little man with a broad face and putty-colored cheeks, a small rusty mustache and bow-legs lying like a calf on a marble slab in a butcher's shop on top of his blankets. What nonsense! There were other buglers. He wondered how many buglers there were in the army. He could picture them all, in dirty little villages, in stone barracks, in towns, in great camps that served the country for miles with rows of black warehouses and narrow barrack buildings standing with their feet a little apart; giving their little brass bugles a preliminary tap before putting out their cheeks and blowing in them and stealing a million and a half (or was it two million or three million) lives, and throwing the warm sentient bodies into coarse automatons who must be kept busy, lest they grow restive, till killing time began again.
The bugle blew with the last jaunty notes, a stir went through the barn.
Corporal Chrisfield stood on the ladder that led up from the yard, his head on a level with the floor shouting:
“Shake it up, fellers! If a guy's late to roll call, it's K. P. for a week.”
As Andrews, while buttoning his tunic, passed him on the ladder, he whispered:
“Tell me we're going to see service again, Andy... Army o' Occupation.”
While he stood stiffly at attention waiting to answer when the sergeant called his name, Andrews's mind was whirling in crazy circles of anxiety. What if they should leave before the General Order came on the University plan? The application would certainly be lost in the confusion of moving the Division, and he would be condemned to keep up this life for more dreary weeks and months. Would any years of work and happiness in some future existence make up for the humiliating agony of this servitude?
“Dismissed!”
He ran up the ladder to fetch his mess kit and in a few minutes was in line again in the rutted village street where the grey houses were just forming outlines as light crept slowly into the leaden sky, while a faint odor of bacon and coffee came to him, making him eager for food, eager to drown his thoughts in the heaviness of swiftly-eaten greasy food and in the warmth of watery coffee gulped down out of a tin-curved cup. He was telling himself desperately that he must do something—that he must make an effort to save himself, that he must fight against the deadening routine that numbed him.
Later, while he was sweeping the rough board floor of the company's quarters, the theme came to him which had come to him long ago, in a former incarnation it seemed, when he was smearing windows with soap from a gritty sponge along the endless side of the barracks in the training camp. Time and time again in the past year he had thought of it, and dreamed of weaving it into a fabric of sound which would express the trudging monotony of days bowed under the yoke. “Under the Yoke”; that would be a title for it. He imagined the sharp tap of the conductor's baton, the silence of a crowded hall, the first notes rasping bitterly upon the tense ears of men and women. But as he tried to concentrate his mind on the music, other things intruded upon it, blurred it. He kept feeling the rhythm of the Queen of Sheba slipping from the shoulders of her gaudily caparisoned elephant, advancing towards him through the torchlight, putting her hand, fantastic with rings and long gilded fingernails, upon his shoulders so that ripples of delight, at all the voluptuous images of his desire, went through his whole body, making it quiver like a flame with yearning for unimaginable things. It all muddled into fantastic gibberish—into sounds of horns and trombones and double basses blown off key while a piccolo shrilled the first bars of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
He had stopped sweeping and looked about him dazedly. He was alone. Outside, he heard a sharp voice call “Atten-shun!” He ran down the ladder and fell in at the end of the line under the angry glare of the lieutenant's small eyes, which were placed very close together on either side of a lean nose, black and hard, like the eyes of a crab.
The company marched off through the mud to the drill field.
After retreat Andrews knocked at the door at the back of the Y. M. C. A., but as there was no reply, he strode off with a long, determined stride to Sheffield's room.
In the moment that elapsed between his knock and an answer, he could feel his heart thumping. A little sweat broke out on his temples.
“Why, what's the matter, boy? You look all wrought up,” said Sheffield, holding the door half open, and blocking, with his lean form, entrance to the room.
“May I come in? I want to talk to you,” said Andrews.
“Oh, I suppose it'll be all right.... You see I have an officer with me...” then there was a flutter in Sheffield's voice. “Oh, do come in”; he went on, with sudden enthusiasm. “Lieutenant Bleezer is fond of music too.... Lieutenant, this is the boy I was telling you about. We must get him to play for us. If he had the opportunities, I am sure he'd be a famous musician.”
Lieutenant Bleezer was a dark youth with a hooked nose and pincenez. His tunic was unbuttoned and he held a cigar in his hand. He smiled in an evident attempt to put this enlisted man at his ease.
“Yes, I am very fond of music, modern music,” he said, leaning against the mantelpiece. “Are you a musician by profession?”
“Not exactly... nearly.” Andrews thrust his hands into the bottoms of his trouser pockets and looked from one to the other with a certain defiance.
“I suppose you've played in some orchestra? How is it you are not in the regimental band?”
“No, except the Pierian.”
“The Pierian? Were you at Harvard?”
Andrews nodded.
“So was I.”
“Isn't that a coincidence?” said Sheffield. “I'm so glad I just insisted on your coming in.”
“What year were you?” asked Lieutenant Bleezer, with a faint change of tone, drawing a finger along his scant black moustache.
“Fifteen.”
“I haven't graduated yet,” said the lieutenant with a laugh.
“What I wanted to ask you, Mr. Sheffield....”
“Oh, my boy; my boy, you know you've known me long enough to call me Spence,” broke in Sheffield.
“I want to know,” went on Andrews speaking slowly, “can you help me to get put on the list to be sent to the University of Paris?... I know that a list has been made out, although the General Order has not come yet. I am disliked by most of the noncoms and I don't see how I can get on without somebody's help...I simply can't go this life any longer.” Andrews closed his lips firmly and looked at the ground, his face flushing.
“Well, a man of your attainments certainly ought to go,” said Lieutenant Bleezer, with a faint tremor of hesitation in his voice. “I'm going to Oxford myself.”
“Trust me, my boy,” said Sheffield. “I'll fix it up for you, I promise. Let's shake hands on it.” He seized Andrews's hand and pressed it warmly in a moist palm. “If it's within human power, within human power,” he added.
“Well, I must go,” said Lieutenant Bleezer, suddenly striding to the door. “I promised the Marquise I'd drop in. Good-bye.... Take a cigar, won't you?” He held out three cigars in the direction of Andrews.
“No, thank you.”
“Oh, don't you think the old aristocracy of France is just too wonderful? Lieutenant Bleezer goes almost every evening to call on the Marquise de Rompemouville. He says she is just too spirituelle for words.... He often meets the Commanding Officer there.”
Andrews had dropped into a chair and sat with his face buried in his hands, looking through his fingers at the fire, where a few white fingers of flame were clutching intermittently at a grey beech log. His mind was searching desperately for expedients.
He got to his feet and shouted shrilly:
“I can't go this life any more, do you hear that? No possible future is worth all this. If I can get to Paris, all right. If not, I'll desert and damn the consequences.”
“But I've already promised I'll do all I can....”
“Well, do it now,” interrupted Andrews brutally.
“All right, I'll go and see the colonel and tell him what a great musician you are.”
“Let's go together, now.”
“But that'll look queer, dear boy.”
“I don't give a damn, come along.... You can talk to him. You seem to be thick with all the officers.”
“You must wait till I tidy up,” said Sheffield.
“All right.”
Andrews strode up and down in the mud in front of the house, snapping his fingers with impatience, until Sheffield came out, then they walked off in silence.
“Now wait outside a minute,” whispered Sheffield when they came to the white house with bare grapevines over the front, where the colonel lived.
After a wait, Andrews found himself at the door of a brilliantly-lighted drawing room. There was a dense smell of cigar smoke. The colonel, an elderly man with a benevolent beard, stood before him with a coffee cup in his hand. Andrews saluted punctiliously.
“They tell me you are quite a pianist.... Sorry I didn't know it before,” said the colonel in a kindly tone. “You want to go to Paris to study under this new scheme?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What a shame I didn't know before. The list of the men going is all made out.... Of course perhaps at the last minute... if somebody else doesn't go... your name can go in.”
The colonel smiled graciously and turned back into the room.
“Thank you, Colonel,” said Andrews, saluting.
Without a word to Sheffield, he strode off down the dark village street towards his quarters.
Andrews stood on the broad village street, where the mud was nearly dry, and a wind streaked with warmth ruffled the few puddles; he was looking into the window of the cafe to see if there was anyone he knew inside from whom he could borrow money for a drink. It was two months since he had had any pay, and his pockets were empty. The sun had just set on a premature spring afternoon, flooding the sky and the grey houses and the tumultuous tiled roofs with warm violet light. The faint premonition of the stirring of life in the cold earth, that came to Andrews with every breath he drew of the sparkling wind, stung his dull boredom to fury. It was the first of March, he was telling himself over and over again. The fifteenth of February, he had expected to be in Paris, free, or half-free; at least able to work. It was the first of March and here he was still helpless, still tied to the monotonous wheel of routine, incapable of any real effort, spending his spare time wandering like a lost dog up and down this muddy street, from the Y. M. C. A. hut at one end of the village to the church and the fountain in the middle, and to the Divisional Headquarters at the other end, then back again, looking listlessly into windows, staring in people's faces without seeing them. He had given up all hope of being sent to Paris. He had given up thinking about it or about anything; the same dull irritation of despair droned constantly in his head, grinding round and round like a broken phonograph record.
After looking a long while in the window of the cafe of the Braves Allies, he walked a little down the street and stood in the same position staring into the Repos du Poilu, where a large sign “American spoken” blocked up half the window. Two officers passed. His hand snapped up to the salute automatically, like a mechanical signal. It was nearly dark. After a while he began to feel serious coolness in the wind, shivered and started to wander aimlessly down the street.
He recognised Walters coming towards him and was going to pass him without speaking when Walters bumped into him, muttered in his ear “Come to Baboon's,” and hurried off with his swift business-like stride. Andrews, stood irresolutely for a while with his head bent, then went with unresilient steps up the alley, through the hole in the hedge and into Babette's kitchen. There was no fire. He stared morosely at the grey ashes until he heard Walters's voice beside him:
“I've got you all fixed up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mean... are you asleep, Andrews? They've cut a name off the school list, that's all. Now if you shake a leg and somebody doesn't get in ahead of you, you'll be in Paris before you know it.”
“That's damn decent of you to come and tell me.”
“Here's your application,” said Walters, drawing a paper out of his pocket. “Take it to the colonel; get him to O. K. it and then rush it up to the sergeant-major's office yourself. They are making out travel orders now. So long.”
Walters had vanished. Andrews was alone again, staring at the grey ashes. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and hurried off towards headquarters. In the anteroom to the colonel's office he waited a long while, looking at his boots that were thickly coated with mud. “Those boots will make a bad impression; those boots will make a bad impression,” a voice was saying over and over again inside of him. A lieutenant was also waiting to see the colonel, a young man with pink cheeks and a milky-white forehead, who held his hat in one hand with a pair of khaki-colored kid gloves, and kept passing a hand over his light well-brushed hair. Andrews felt dirty and ill-smelling in his badly-fitting uniform. The sight of this perfect young man in his whipcord breeches, with his manicured nails and immaculately polished puttees exasperated him. He would have liked to fight him, to prove that he was the better man, to outwit him, to make him forget his rank and his important air.... The lieutenant had gone in to see the colonel. Andrews found himself reading a chart of some sort tacked up on the wall. There were names and dates and figures, but he could not make out what it was about.
“All right! Go ahead,” whispered the orderly to him; and he was standing with his cap in his hand before the colonel who was looking at him severely, fingering the papers he had on the desk with a heavily veined hand.
Andrews saluted. The colonel made an impatient gesture.
“May I speak to you, Colonel, about the school scheme?”
“I suppose you've got permission from somebody to come to me.”
“No, sir.” Andrews's mind was struggling to find something to say.
“Well, you'd better go and get it.”
“But, Colonel, there isn't time; the travel orders are being made out at this minute. I've heard that there's been a name crossed out on the list.”
“Too late.”
“But, Colonel, you don't know how important it is. I am a musician by trade; if I can't get into practice again before being demobilized, I shan't be able to get a job.... I have a mother and an old aunt dependent on me. My family has seen better days, you see, sir. It's only by being high up in my profession that I can earn enough to give them what they are accustomed to. And a man in your position in the world, Colonel, must know what even a few months of study in Paris mean to a pianist.”
The colonel smiled.
“Let's see your application,” he said.
Andrews handed it to him with a trembling hand. The colonel made a few marks on one corner with a pencil.
“Now if you can get that to the sergeant-major in time to have your name included in the orders, well and good.”
Andrews saluted, and hurried out. A sudden feeling of nausea had come over him. He was hardly able to control a mad desire to tear the paper up. “The sons of bitches... the sons of bitches,” he muttered to himself. Still he ran all the way to the square, isolated building where the regimental office was.
He stopped panting in front of the desk that bore the little red card, Regimental Sergeant-Major. The regimental sergeant-major looked up at him enquiringly.
“Here's an application for School at the Sorbonne, Sergeant. Colonel Wilkins told me to run up to you with it, said he was very anxious to have it go in at once.”
“Too late,” said the regimental sergeant-major.
“But the colonel said it had to go in.”
“Can't help it.... Too late,” said the regimental sergeant-major.
Andrews felt the room and the men in their olive-drab shirt sleeves at the typewriters and the three nymphs creeping from behind the French War Loan poster whirl round his head. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him:
“Is the name Andrews, John, Sarge?”
“How the hell should I know?” said the regimental sergeant-major.
“Because I've got it in the orders already.... I don't know how it got in.” The voice was Walters's voice, staccatto and businesslike.
“Well, then, why d'you want to bother me about it? Give me that paper.” The regimental sergeant-major jerked the paper out of Andrews's hand and looked at it savagely.
“All right, you leave tomorrow. A copy of the orders'll go to your company in the morning,” growled the regimental sergeant-major.
Andrews looked hard at Walters as he went out, but got no glance in return. When he stood in the air again, disgust surged up within him, bitterer than before. The fury of his humiliation made tears start in his eyes. He walked away from the village down the main road, splashing carelessly through the puddles, slipping in the wet clay of the ditches. Something within him, like the voice of a wounded man swearing, was whining in his head long strings of filthy names. After walking a long while he stopped suddenly with his fists clenched. It was completely dark, the sky was faintly marbled by a moon behind the clouds. On both sides of the road rose the tall grey skeletons of poplars. When the sound of his footsteps stopped, he heard a faint lisp of running water. Standing still in the middle of the road, he felt his feelings gradually relax. He said aloud in a low voice several times: “You are a damn fool, John Andrews,” and started walking slowly and thoughtfully back to the village.