Andrews started playing Schumann. He stopped suddenly.
“Can you sing?” he said.
“No.”
“I'd like to do the Proses Lyriques.... I've never heard them.”
“I once tried to sing Le Soir,” she said.
“Wonderful. Do bring it out.”
“But, good Lord, it's too difficult.”
“What is the use of being fond of music if you aren't willing to mangle it for the sake of producing it?... I swear I'd rather hear a man picking out Aupres de ma Blonde on a trombone that Kreisler playing Paganini impeccably enough to make you ill.”
“But there is a middle ground.”
He interrupted her by starting to play again. As he played without looking at her, he felt that her eyes were fixed on him, that she was standing tensely behind him. Her hand touched his shoulder. He stopped playing.
“Oh, I am dreadfully sorry,” she said.
“Nothing. I am finished.”
“You were playing something of your own?”
“Have you ever read La Tentation de Saint Antoine?” he asked in a low voice.
“Flaubert's?”
“Yes.”
“It's not his best work. A very interesting failure though,” she said.
Andrews got up from the piano with difficulty, controlling a sudden growing irritation.
“They seem to teach everybody to say that,” he muttered.
Suddenly he realized that other people were in the room. He went up to Mme. Rod.
“You must excuse me,” he said, “I have an engagement.... Aubrey, don't let me drag you away. I am late, I've got to run.”
“You must come to see us again.”
“Thank you,” mumbled Andrews.
Genevieve Rod went with him to the door. “We must know each other better,” she said. “I like you for going off in a huff.”
Andrews flushed.
“I was badly brought up,” he said, pressing her thin cold hand. “And you French must always remember that we are barbarians.... Some are repentant barbarians.... I am not.”
She laughed, and John Andrews ran down the stairs and out into the grey-blue streets, where the lamps were blooming into primrose color. He had a confused feeling that he had made a fool of himself, which made him writhe with helpless anger. He walked with long strides through the streets of the Rive Gauche full of people going home from work, towards the little wine shop on the Quai de la Tournelle.
It was a Paris Sunday morning. Old women in black shawls were going into the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont. Each time the leather doors opened it let a little whiff of incense out into the smoky morning air. Three pigeons walked about the cobblestones, putting their coral feet one before the other with an air of importance. The pointed facade of the church and its slender tower and cupola cast a bluish shadow on the square in front of it, into which the shadows the old women trailed behind them vanished as they hobbled towards the church. The opposite side of the square and the railing of the Pantheon and its tall brownish-gray flank were flooded with dull orange-colored sunlight.
Andrews walked back and forth in front of the church, looking at the sky and the pigeons and the facade of the Library of Ste. Genevieve, and at the rare people who passed across the end of the square, noting forms and colors and small comical aspects of things with calm delight, savoring everything almost with complacency. His music, he felt, was progressing now that, undisturbed, he lived all day long in the rhythm of it; his mind and his fingers were growing supple. The hard moulds that had grown up about his spirit were softening. As he walked back and forth in front of the church waiting for Jeanne, he took an inventory of his state of mind; he was very happy.
“Eh bien?”
Jeanne had come up behind him. They ran like children hand in hand across the sunny square.
“I have not had any coffee yet,” said Andrews.
“How late you must get up!... But you can't have any till we get to the Porte Maillot, Jean.”
“Why not?”
“Because I say you can't.”
“But that's cruelty.”
“It won't be long.”
“But I am dying with hunger. I will die in your hands.”
“Can't you understand? Once we get to the Porte Maillot we'll be far from your life and my life. The day will be ours. One must not tempt fate.”
“You funny girl.”
The Metro was not crowded, Andrews and Jeanne sat opposite each other without talking. Andrews was looking at the girl's hands, limp on her lap, small overworked hands with places at the tips of the fingers where the skin was broken and scarred, with chipped uneven nails. Suddenly she caught his glance. He flushed, and she said jauntily:
“Well, we'll all be rich some day, like princes and princesses in fairy tales.” They both laughed.
As they were leaving the train at the terminus, he put his arm timidly round her waist. She wore no corsets. His fingers trembled at the litheness of the flesh under her clothes. Feeling a sort of terror go through him he took away his arm.
“Now,” she said quietly as they emerged into the sunlight and the bare trees of the broad avenue, “you can have all the cafe-au-lait you want.”
“You'll have some too.”
“Why be extravagant? I've had my petit dejeuner.”
“But I'm going to be extravagant all day.... We might as well start now. I don't know exactly why, but I am very happy. We'll eat brioches.”
“But, my dear, it's only profiteers who can eat brioches now-a-days.”
“You just watch us.”
They went into a patisserie. An elderly woman with a lean yellow face and thin hair waited on them, casting envious glances up through her eyelashes as she piled the rich brown brioches on a piece of tissue paper.
“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, “O la jeunesse, la jeunesse.”
They found a table in the sun at a cafe 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 Mayence. 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 Genevieve 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 tablecloth.
“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 biere,” 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 empty 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 lane. 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 suspiciouslike, 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; 'Unns 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 unbreathable 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, with people climbing up the ivy on castle walls, and fiery kisses on balconies in the moonlight.”
“Like at the Opera 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.
They started walking again, past the Pont Neuf, towards the glare of the Place St. Michel. Three names had come into Andrews's head, “Arsinoe, Berenike, Artemisia.” For a little while he puzzled over them, and then he remembered that Genevieve Rod had the large eyes and the wide, smooth forehead and the firm little lips the women had in the portraits that were sewn on the mummy cases in the Fayum. But those patrician women of Alexandria had not had chestnut hair with a glimpse of burnished copper in it; they might have dyed it, though!
“Why are you laughing?” asked Jeanne.
“Because things are so silly.”
“Perhaps you mean people are silly,” she said, looking up at him out of the corners of her eyes.
“You're right.”
They walked in silence till they reached Andrews's door.
“You go up first and see that there's no one there,” said Jeanne in a business-like tone.
Andrews's hands were cold. He felt his heart thumping while he climbed the stairs.
The room was empty. A fire was ready to light in the small fireplace. Andrews hastily tidied up the table and kicked under the bed some soiled clothes that lay in a heap in a corner. A thought came to him: how like his performances in his room at college when he had heard that a relative was coming to see him.
He tiptoed downstairs.
“Bien. Tu peux venir, Jeanne,” he said.
She sat down rather stiffly in the straight-backed armchair beside the fire.
“How pretty the fire is,” she said.
“Jeanne, I think I'm crazily in love with you,” said Andrews in an excited voice.
“Like at the Opera Comique.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The room's nice,” she said. “Oh, but, what a big bed!”
“You're the first woman who's been up here in my time, Jeanne.... Oh, but this uniform is frightful.”
Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy. The thought drowned everything else for the moment.
“But you pulled a button off,” cried Jeanne laughing hysterically. “I'll just have to sew it on again.”
“Never mind. If you knew how I hated them.”
“What white skin you have, like a woman's. I suppose that's because you are blond,” said Jeanne.
The sound of the door being shaken vigorously woke Andrews. He got up and stood in the middle of the floor for a moment without being able to collect his wits. The shaking of the door continued, and he heard Walters's voice crying “Andy, Andy.” Andrews felt shame creeping up through him like nausea. He felt a passionate disgust towards himself and Jeanne and Walters. He had an impulse to move furtively as if he had stolen something. He went to the door and opened it a little.
“Say, Walters, old man,” he said, “I can't let you in.... I've got a girl with me. I'm sorry.... I thought you wouldn't get back till tomorrow.”
“You're kidding, aren't you?” came Walters's voice out of the dark hall.
“No.” Andrews shut the door decisively and bolted it again.
Jeanne was still asleep. Her black hair had come undone and spread over the pillow. Andrews pulled the covers up about her carefully.
Then he got into the other bed, where he lay awake a long time, staring at the ceiling.
IV
People walking along the boulevard looked curiously through the railing at the line of men in olive-drab that straggled round the edge of the courtyard. The line moved slowly, past a table where an officer and two enlisted men sat poring over big lists of names and piles of palely tinted banknotes and silver francs that glittered white. Above the men's heads a thin haze of cigarette smoke rose into the sunlight. There was a sound of voices and of feet shuffling on the gravel. The men who had been paid went off jauntily, the money jingling in their pockets.
The men at the table had red faces and tense, serious expressions. They pushed the money into the soldiers' hands with a rough jerk and pronounced the names as if they were machines clicking.
Andrews saw that one of the men at the table was Walters; he smiled and whispered “Hello” as he came up to him. Walters kept his eyes fixed on the list.
While Andrews was waiting for the man ahead of him to be paid, he heard two men in the line talking.
“Wasn't that a hell of a place? D'you remember the lad that died in the barracks one day?”
“Sure, I was in the medicks there too. There was a hell of a sergeant in that company tried to make the kid get up, and the loot came and said he'd court-martial him, an' then they found out that he'd cashed in his checks.”
“What'd 'ee die of?”
“Heart failure, I guess. I dunno, though, he never did take to the life.”
“No. That place Cosne was enough to make any guy cash in his checks.”
Andrews got his money. As he was walking away, he strolled up to the two men he had heard talking.
“Were you fellows in Cosne?”
“Sure.”
“Did you know a fellow named Fuselli?”
“I dunno....”
“Sure, you do,” said the other man. “You remember Dan Fuselli, the little wop thought he was goin' to be corporal.”
“He had another think comin'.” They both laughed.
Andrews walked off, vaguely angry. There were many soldiers on the Boulevard Montparnasse. He turned into a side street, feeling suddenly furtive and humble, as if he would hear any minute the harsh voice of a sergeant shouting orders at him.
The silver in his breeches pocket jingled with every step.
Andrews leaned on the balustrade of the balcony, looking down into the square in front of the Opera Comique. He was dizzy with the beauty of the music he had been hearing. He had a sense somewhere in the distances of his mind of the great rhythm of the sea. People chattered all about him on the wide, crowded balcony, but he was only conscious of the blue-grey mistiness of the night where the lights made patterns in green-gold and red-gold. And compelling his attention from everything else, the rhythm swept through him like sea waves.
“I thought you'd be here,” said Genevieve Rod in a quiet voice beside him.
Andrews felt strangely tongue-tied.
“It's nice to see you,” he blurted out, after looking at her silently for a moment.
“Of course you love Pelleas.”
“It is the first time I've heard it.”
“Why haven't you been to see us? It's two weeks.... We've been expecting you.”
“I didn't know...Oh, I'll certainly come. I don't know anyone at present I can talk music to.”
“You know me.”
“Anyone else, I should have said.”
“Are you working?”
“Yes.... But this hinders frightfully.” Andrews yanked at the front of his tunic. “Still, I expect to be free very soon. I'm putting in an application for discharge.”
“I suppose you will feel you can do so much better.... You will be much stronger now that you have done your duty.”
“No... by no means.”
“Tell me, what was that you played at our house?”
“'The Three Green Riders on Wild Asses,'” said Andrews smiling.
“What do you mean?”
“It's a prelude to the 'Queen of Sheba,'” said Andrews. “If you didn't think the same as M. Emile Faguet and everyone else about St. Antoine, I'd tell you what I mean.”
“That was very silly of me.... But if you pick up all the silly things people say accidentally... well, you must be angry most of the time.”
In the dim light he could not see her eyes. There was a little glow on the curve of her cheek coming from under the dark of her hat to her rather pointed chin. Behind it he could see other faces of men and women crowded on the balcony talking, lit up crudely by the gold glare that came out through the French windows from the lobby.
“I have always been tremendously fascinated by the place in La Tentation where the Queen of Sheba visited Antoine, that's all,” said Andrews gruffly.
“Is that the first thing you've done? It made me think a little of Borodine.”
“The first that's at all pretentious. It's probably just a steal from everything I've ever heard.”
“No, it's good. I suppose you had it in your head all through those dreadful and glorious days at the front.... Is it for piano or orchestra?”
“All that's finished is for piano. I hope to orchestrate it eventually.... Oh, but it's really silly to talk this way. I don't know enough.... I need years of hard work before I can do anything.... And I have wasted so much time.... That is the most frightful thing. One has so few years of youth!”
“There's the bell, we must scuttle back to our seats. Till the next intermission.” She slipped through the glass doors and disappeared. Andrews went back to his seat very excited, full of unquiet exultation. The first strains of the orchestra were pain, he felt them so acutely.
After the last act they walked in silence down a dark street, hurrying to get away from the crowds of the Boulevards.
When they reached the Avenue de l'Opera, she said: “Did you say you were going to stay in France?”
“Yes, indeed, if I can. I am going tomorrow to put in an application for discharge in France.”
“What will you do then?”
“I shall have to find a job of some sort that will let me study at the Schola Cantorum. But I have enough money to last a little while.”
“You are courageous.”
“I forgot to ask you if you would rather take the Metro.”
“No; let's walk.”
They went under the arch of the Louvre. The air was full of a fine wet mist, so that every street lamp was surrounded by a blur of light.
“My blood is full of the music of Debussy,” said Genevieve Rod, spreading out her arms.
“It's no use trying to say what one feels about it. Words aren't much good, anyway, are they?”
“That depends.”
They walked silently along the quais. The mist was so thick they could not see the Seine, but whenever they came near a bridge they could hear the water rustling through the arches.
“France is stifling,” said Andrews, all of a sudden. “It stifles you very slowly, with beautiful silk bands.... America beats your brains out with a policeman's billy.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, letting pique chill her voice.
“You know so much in France. You have made the world so neat....”
“But you seem to want to stay here,” she said with a laugh.
“It's that there's nowhere else. There is nowhere except Paris where one can find out things about music, particularly.... But I am one of those people who was not made to be contented.”
“Only sheep are contented.”
“I think I have been happier this month in Paris than ever before in my life. It seems six, so much has happened in it.”
“Poissac is where I am happiest.”
“Where is that?”
“We have a country house there, very old and very tumbledown. They say that Rabelais used to come to the village. But our house is from later, from the time of Henri Quatre. Poissac is not far from Tours. An ugly name, isn't it? But to me it is very beautiful. The house has orchards all round it, and yellow roses with flushed centers poke themselves in my window, and there is a little tower like Montaigne's.”
“When I get out of the army, I shall go somewhere in the country and work and work.”
“Music should be made in the country, when the sap is rising in the trees.”
“'D'apres nature,' as the rabbit man said.”
“Who's the rabbit man?”
“A very pleasant person,” said Andrews, bubbling with laughter. “You shall meet him some day. He sells little stuffed rabbits that jump, outside the Cafe de Rohan.”
“Here we are.... Thank you for coming home with me.”
“But how soon. Are you sure it is the house? We can't have got there as soon as this.”
“Yes, it's my house,” said Genevieve Rod laughing. She held out her hand to him and he shook it eagerly. The latchkey clicked in the door.
“Why don't you have a cup of tea with us here tomorrow?” she said.
“With pleasure.”
The big varnished door with its knocker in the shape of a ring closed behind her. Andrews walked away with a light step, feeling jolly and exhilarated.
As he walked down the mist-filled quai towards the Place St. Michel, his ears were filled with the lisping gurgle of the river past the piers of the bridges.
Walters was asleep. On the table in his room was a card from Jeanne. Andrews read the card holding it close to the candle.
“How long it is since I saw you!” it read. “I shall pass the Cafe de Rohan Wednesday at seven, along the pavement opposite the Magazin du Louvre.”
It was a card of Malmaison.
Andrews flushed. Bitter melancholy throbbed through him. He walked languidly to the window and looked out into the dark court. A window below his spilled a warm golden haze into the misty night, through which he could make out vaguely some pots of ferns standing on the wet flagstones. From somewhere came a dense smell of hyacinths. Fragments of thought slipped one after another through his mind. He thought of himself washing windows long ago at training camp, and remembered the way the gritty sponge scraped his hands. He could not help feeling shame when he thought of those days. “Well, that's all over now,” he told himself. He wondered, in a half-irritated way, about Genevieve Rod. What sort of a person was she? Her face, with its wide eyes and pointed chin and the reddish-chestnut hair, unpretentiously coiled above the white forehead, was very vivid in his mind, though when he tried to remember what it was like in profile, he could not. She had thin hands, with long fingers that ought to play the piano well. When she grew old would she be yellow-toothed and jolly, like her mother? He could not think of her old; she was too vigorous; there was too much malice in her passionately-restrained gestures. The memory of her faded, and there came to his mind Jeanne's overworked little hands, with callous places, and the tips of the fingers grimy and scarred from needlework. But the smell of hyacinths that came up from the mist-filled courtyard was like a sponge wiping all impressions from his brain. The dense sweet smell in the damp air made him feel languid and melancholy.
He took off his clothes slowly and got into bed. The smell of the hyacinths came to him very faintly, so that he did not know whether or not he was imagining it.
The major's office was a large white-painted room, with elaborate mouldings and mirrors in all four walls, so that while Andrews waited, cap in hand, to go up to the desk, he could see the small round major with his pink face and bald head repeated to infinity in two directions in the grey brilliance of the mirrors.
“What do you want?” said the major, looking up from some papers he was signing.
Andrews stepped up to the desk. On both sides of the room a skinny figure in olive-drab, repeated endlessly, stepped up to endless mahogany desks, which faded into each other in an endless dusty perspective.
“Would you mind O.K.-ing this application for discharge, Major?”
“How many dependents?” muttered the major through his teeth, poring over the application.
“None. It's for discharge in France to study music.”
“Won't do. You need an affidavit that you can support yourself, that you have enough money to continue your studies. You want to study music, eh? D'you think you've got talent? Needs a very great deal of talent to study music.”
“Yes, sir.... But is there anything else I need except the affidavit?”
“No.... It'll go through in short order. We're glad to release men.... We're glad to release any man with a good military record.... Williams!”
“Yes, sir.”
A sergeant came over from a small table by the door.
“Show this man what he needs to do to get discharged in France.”
Andrews saluted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the figures in the mirror, saluting down an endless corridor.
When he got out on the street in front of the great white building where the major's office was, a morose feeling of helplessness came over him. There were many automobiles of different sizes and shapes, limousines, runabouts, touring cars, lined up along the curb, all painted olive-drab and neatly stenciled with numbers in white. Now and then a personage came out of the white marble building, puttees and Sam Browne belt gleaming, and darted into an automobile, or a noisy motorcycle stopped with a jerk in front of the wide door to let out an officer in goggles and mud-splattered trench coat, who disappeared immediately through revolving doors. Andrews could imagine him striding along halls, where from every door came an imperious clicking of typewriters, where papers were piled high on yellow varnished desks, where sallow-faced clerks in uniform loafed in rooms, where the four walls were covered from floor to ceiling with card catalogues. And every day they were adding to the paper, piling up more little drawers with index cards. It seemed to Andrews that the shiny white marble building would have to burst with all the paper stored up within it, and would flood the broad avenue with avalanches of index cards.
“Button yer coat,” snarled a voice in his ear.
Andrews looked up suddenly. An M. P. with a raw-looking face in which was a long sharp nose, had come up to him.
Andrews buttoned up his overcoat and said nothing.
“Ye can't hang around here this way,” the M. P. called after him.
Andrews flushed and walked away without turning his head. He was stinging with humiliation; an angry voice inside him kept telling him that he was a coward, that he should make some futile gesture of protest. Grotesque pictures of revolt flamed through his mind, until he remembered that when he was very small, the same tumultuous pride had seethed and ached in him whenever he had been reproved by an older person. Helpless despair fluttered about within him like a bird beating against the wires of a cage. Was there no outlet, no gesture of expression, would he have to go on this way day after day, swallowing the bitter gall of indignation, that every new symbol of his slavery brought to his lips?
He was walking in an agitated way across the Jardin des Tuileries, full of little children and women with dogs on leashes and nursemaids with starched white caps, when he met Genevieve Rod and her mother. Genevieve was dressed in pearl grey, with an elegance a little too fashionable to please Andrews. Mme. Rod wore black. In front of them a black and tan terrier ran from one side to the other, on nervous little legs that trembled like steel springs.
“Isn't it lovely this morning?” cried Genevieve.
“I didn't know you had a dog.”
“Oh, we never go out without Santo, a protection to two lone women, you know,” said Mme. Rod, laughing. “Viens, Santo, dis bonjour au Monsieur.”
“He usually lives at Poissac,” said Genevieve.
The little dog barked furiously at Andrews, a shrill bark like a child squalling.
“He knows he ought to be suspicious of soldiers.... I imagine most soldiers would change with him if they had a chance.... Viens Santo, viens Santo.... Will you change lives with me, Santo?”
“You look as if you'd been quarrelling with somebody,” said Genevieve Rod lightly.
“I have, with myself.... I'm going to write a book on slave psychology. It would be very amusing,” said Andrews in a gruff, breathless voice.
“But we must hurry, dear, or we'll be late to the tailor's,” said Mme. Rod. She held out her black-gloved hand to Andrews.
“We'll be in at tea time this afternoon. You might play me some more of the 'Queen of Sheba,'” said Genevieve.
“I'm afraid I shan't be able to, but you never can tell.... Thank you.”
He was relieved to have left them. He had been afraid he would burst out into some childish tirade. What a shame old Henslowe hadn't come back yet. He could have poured out all his despair to him; he had often enough before; and Henslowe was out of the army now. Wearily Andrews decided that he would have to start scheming and intriguing again as he had schemed and intrigued to come to Paris in the first place. He thought of the white marble building and the officers with shiny puttees going in and out, and the typewriters clicking in every room, and the understanding of his helplessness before all that complication made him shiver.
An idea came to him. He ran down the steps of a metro station. Aubrey would know someone at the Crillon who could help him.
But when the train reached the Concorde station, he could not summon the will power to get out. He felt a harsh repugnance to any effort. What was the use of humiliating himself and begging favors of people? It was hopeless anyway. In a fierce burst of pride a voice inside of him was shouting that he, John Andrews, should have no shame, that he should force people to do things for him, that he, who lived more acutely than the rest, suffering more pain and more joy, who had the power to express his pain and his joy so that it would impose itself on others, should force his will on those around him. “More of the psychology of slavery,” said Andrews to himself, suddenly smashing the soap-bubble of his egoism.
The train had reached the Porte Maillot.
Andrews stood in the sunny boulevard in front of the metro station, where the plane trees were showing tiny gold-brown leaves, sniffing the smell of a flower-stall in front of which a woman stood, with a deft abstracted gesture tying up bunch after bunch of violets. He felt a desire to be out in the country, to be away from houses and people. There was a line of men and women buying tickets for St. Germain; still indecisive, he joined it, and at last, almost without intending it, found himself jolting through Neuilly in the green trailer of the electric car, that waggled like a duck's tail when the car went fast.
He remembered his last trip on that same car with Jeanne, and wished mournfully that he might have fallen in love with her, that he might have forgotten himself and the army and everything in crazy, romantic love.
When he got off the car at St. Germain, he had stopped formulating his thoughts; soggy despair throbbed in him like an infected wound.
He sat for a while at the cafe opposite the Chateau looking at the light red walls and the strong stone-bordered windows and the jaunty turrets and chimneys that rose above the classic balustrade with its big urns on the edge of the roof. The park, through the tall iron railings, was full of russet and pale lines, all mist of new leaves. Had they really lived more vividly, the people of the Renaissance? Andrews could almost see men with plumed hats and short cloaks and elaborate brocaded tunics swaggering with a hand at the sword hilt, about the quiet square in front of the gate of the Chateau. And he thought of the great, sudden wind of freedom that had blown out of Italy, before which dogmas and slaveries had crumbled to dust. In contrast, the world today seemed pitifully arid. Men seemed to have shrunk in stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper in slavery. Whichever won, tyranny from above, or spontaneous organization from below, there could be no individuals.
He went through the gates into the park, laid out with a few flower beds where pansies bloomed; through the dark ranks of elm trunks, was brilliant sky, with here and there a moss-green statue standing out against it. At the head of an alley he came out on a terrace. Beyond the strong curves of the pattern of the iron balustrade was an expanse of country, pale green, falling to blue towards the horizon, patched with pink and slate-colored houses and carved with railway tracks. At his feet the Seine shone like a curved sword blade.
He walked with long strides along the terrace, and followed a road that turned into the forest, forgetting the monotonous tread mill of his thoughts, in the flush that the fast walking sent through his whole body, in the rustling silence of the woods, where the moss on the north side of the boles of the trees was emerald, and where the sky was soft grey through a lavender lacework of branches. The green gnarled woods made him think of the first act of Pelleas. With his tunic unbuttoned and his shirt open at the neck and his hands stuck deep in his pockets, he went along whistling like a school boy.
After an hour he came out of the woods on a highroad, where he found himself walking beside a two-wheeled cart, that kept pace with him exactly, try as he would to get ahead of it. After a while, a boy leaned out:
“Hey, l'Americain, vous voulez monter?”
“Where are you going?”
“Conflans-Ste.-Honorine.”
“Where's that?”
The boy flourished his whip vaguely towards the horse's head.
“All right,” said Andrews.
“These are potatoes,” said the boy, “make yourself comfortable.'' Andrews offered him a cigarette, which he took with muddy fingers. He had a broad face, red cheeks and chunky features. Reddish-brown hair escaped spikily from under a mud-spattered beret.
“Where did you say you were going?”
“Conflans-Ste.-Honorine. Silly all these saints, aren't they?”
Andrews laughed.
“Where are you going?” the boy asked.
“I don't know. I was taking a walk.”
The boy leaned over to Andrews and whispered in his car: “Deserter?”
“No.... I had a day off and wanted to see the country.”
“I just thought, if you were a deserter, I might be able to help you. Must be silly to be a soldier. Dirty life.... But you like the country. So do I. You can't call this country. I'm not from this part; I'm from Brittany. There we have real country. It's stifling near Paris here, so many people, so many houses.”
“It seems mighty fine to me.”
“That's because you're a soldier, better than barracks, hein? Dirty life that. I'll never be a soldier. I'm going into the navy. Merchant marine, and then if I have to do service I'll do it on the sea.”
“I suppose it is pleasanter.”
“There's more freedom. And the sea.... We Bretons, you know, we all die of the sea or of liquor.”
They laughed.
“Have you been long in this part of the country?” asked Andrews.
“Six months. It's very dull, this farming work. I'm head of a gang in a fruit orchard, but not for long. I have a brother shipped on a sailing vessel. When he comes back to Bordeaux, I'll ship on the same boat.”
“Where to?”
“South America, Peru; how should I know?”
“I'd like to ship on a sailing vessel,” said Andrews.
“You would? It seems very fine to me to travel, and see new countries. And perhaps I shall stay over there.”
“Where?”
“How should I know? If I like it, that is.... Life is very bad in Europe.”
“It is stifling, I suppose,” said Andrews slowly, “all these nations, all these hatreds, but still... it is very beautiful. Life is very ugly in America.”
“Let's have something to drink. There's a bistro!”
The boy jumped down from the cart and tied the horse to a tree. They went into a small wine shop with a counter and one square oak table.
“But won't you be late?” said Andrews.
“I don't care. I like talking, don't you?”
“Yes, indeed.”
They ordered wine of an old woman in a green apron, who had three yellow teeth that protruded from her mouth when she spoke.
“I haven't had anything to eat,” said Andrews.
“Wait a minute.” The boy ran out to the cart and came back with a canvas bag, from which he took half a loaf of bread and some cheese.
“My name's Marcel,” the boy said when they had sat for a while sipping wine.
“Mine is Jean...Jean Andre.”
“I have a brother named Jean, and my father's name is Andre. That's pleasant, isn't it?”
“But it must be a splendid job, working in a fruit orchard,” said Andrews, munching bread and cheese.
“It's well paid; but you get tired of being in one place all the time. It's not as it is in Brittany....” Marcel paused. He sat, rocking a little on the stool, holding on to the seat between his legs. A curious brilliance came into his grey eyes. “There,” he went on in a soft voice, “it is so quiet in the fields, and from every hill you look at the sea.... I like that, don't you?” he turned to Andrews, with a smile.
“You are lucky to be free,” said Andrews bitterly. He felt as if he would burst into tears.
“But you will be demobilized soon; the butchery is over. You will go home to your family. That will be good, hein?”
“I wonder. It's not far enough away. Restless!”
“What do you expect?”
A fine rain was falling. They climbed in on the potato sacks and the horse started a jog trot; its lanky brown shanks glistened a little from the rain.
“Do you come out this way often?” asked Marcel.
“I shall. It's the nicest place near Paris.”
“Some Sunday you must come and I'll take you round. The Castle is very fine. And then there is Malmaison, where the great Emperor lived with the Empress Josephine.”
Andrews suddenly remembered Jeanne's card. This was Wednesday. He pictured her dark figure among the crowd of the pavement in front of the Cafe de Rohan. Of course it had to be that way. Despair, so helpless as to be almost sweet, came over him.
“And girls,” he said suddenly to Marcel, “are they pretty round here?”
Marcel shrugged his shoulders.
“It's not women that we lack, if a fellow has money,” he said.
Andrews felt a sense of shame, he did not exactly know why.
“My brother writes that in South America the women are very brown and very passionate,” added Marcel with a wistful smile. “But travelling and reading books, that's what I like.... But look, if you want to take the train back to Paris....” Marcel pulled up the horse to a standstill. “If you want to take the train, cross that field by the foot path and keep right along the road to the left till you come to the river. There's a ferryman. The town's Herblay, and there's a station.... And any Sunday before noon I'll be at 3 rue des Eveques, Reuil. You must come and we'll take a walk together.”
They shook hands, and Andrews strode off across the wet fields. Something strangely sweet and wistful that he could not analyse lingered in his mind from Marcel's talk. Somewhere, beyond everything, he was conscious of the great free rhythm of the sea.
Then he thought of the Major's office that morning, and of his own skinny figure in the mirrors, repeated endlessly, standing helpless and humble before the shining mahogany desk. Even out here in these fields where the wet earth seemed to heave with the sprouting of new growth, he was not free. In those office buildings, with white marble halls full of the clank of officers' heels, in index cards and piles of typewritten papers, his real self, which they had power to kill if they wanted to, was in his name and his number, on lists with millions of other names and other numbers. This sentient body of his, full of possibilities and hopes and desires, was only a pale ghost that depended on the other self, that suffered for it and cringed for it. He could not drive out of his head the picture of himself, skinny, in an illfitting uniform, repeated endlessly in the two mirrors of the Major's white-painted office.
All of a sudden, through bare poplar trees, he saw the Seine.
He hurried along the road, splashing now and then in a shining puddle, until he came to a landing place. The river was very wide, silvery, streaked with pale-green and violet, and straw-color from the evening sky. Opposite were bare poplars and behind them clusters of buff-colored houses climbing up a green hill to a church, all repeated upside down in the color-streaked river. The river was very full, and welled up above its banks, the way the water stands up above the rim of a glass filled too full. From the water came an indefinable rustling, flowing sound that rose and fell with quiet rhythm in Andrews's ears.
Andrews forgot everything in the great wave of music that rose impetuously through him, poured with the hot blood through his veins, with the streaked colors of the river and the sky through his eyes, with the rhythm of the flowing river through his ears.