V
Andrews felt an arm put round his shoulder.
“Ah've been to hell an' gone lookin' for you, Andy,” said Chrisfield's voice in his ear, jerking him out of the reverie he walked in. He could feel in his face Chrisfield's breath, heavy with cognac.
“I'm going to Paris tomorrow, Chris,” said Andrews.
“Ah know it, boy. Ah know it. That's why I was that right smart to talk to you.... You doan want to go to Paris.... Why doan ye come up to Germany with us? Tell me they live like kings up there.”
“All right,” said Andrews, “let's go to the back room at Babette's.”
Chrisfield hung on his shoulder, walking unsteadily beside him. At the hole in the hedge Chrisfield stumbled and nearly pulled them both down. They laughed, and still laughing staggered into the dark kitchen, where they found the red-faced woman with her baby sitting beside the fire with no other light than the flicker of the rare flames that shot up from a little mass of wood embers. The baby started crying shrilly when the two soldiers stamped in. The woman got up and, talking automatically to the baby all the while, went off to get a light and wine.
Andrews looked at Chrisfield's face by the firelight. His cheeks had lost the faint childish roundness they had had when Andrews had first talked to him, sweeping up cigarette butts off the walk in front of the barracks at the training camp.
“Ah tell you, boy, you ought to come with us to Germany... nauthin' but whores in Paris.”
“The trouble is, Chris, that I don't want to live like a king, or a sergeant or a major-general.... I want to live like John Andrews.”
“What yer goin' to do in Paris, Andy?”
“Study music.”
“Ah guess some day Ah'll go into a movie show an' when they turn on the lights, who'll Ah see but ma ole frien' Andy raggin' the scales on the pyaner.”
“Something like that.... How d'you like being a corporal, Chris?”
“O, Ah doan know.” Chrisfield spat on the floor between his feet. “It's funny, ain't it? You an' me was right smart friends onct.... Guess it's bein' a non-com.”
Andrews did not answer.
Chrisfield sat silent with his eyes on the fire.
“Well, Ah got him.... Gawd, it was easy,” he said suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“Ah got him, that's all.”
“You mean...?”
Chrisfield nodded.
“Um-hum, in the Oregon forest,” he said.
Andrews said nothing. He felt suddenly very tired. He thought of men he had seen in attitudes of death.
“Ah wouldn't ha' thought it had been so easy,” said Chrisfield.
The woman came through the door at the end of the kitchen with a candle in her hand. Chrisfield stopped speaking suddenly.
“Tomorrow I'm going to Paris,” cried Andrews boisterously. “It's the end of soldiering for me.”
“Ah bet it'll be some sport in Germany, Andy.... Sarge says we'll be goin' up to Coab... what's its name?”
“Coblenz.”
Chrisfield poured a glass of wine out and drank it off, smacking his lips after it and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
“D'ye remember, Andy, we was both of us brushin' cigarette butts at that bloody trainin' camp when we first met up with each other?”
“Considerable water has run under the bridge since then.”
“Ah reckon we won't meet up again, mos' likely.”
“Hell, why not?”
They were silent again, staring at the fading embers of the fire. In the dim edge of the candlelight the woman stood with her hands on her hips, looking at them fixedly.
“Reckon a feller wouldn't know what to do with himself if he did get out of the army... now, would he, Andy?”
“So long, Chris. I'm beating it,” said Andrews in a harsh voice, jumping to his feet.
“So long, Andy, ole man.... Ah'll pay for the drinks.” Chrisfield was beckoning with his hand to the red-faced woman, who advanced slowly through the candlelight.
“Thanks, Chris.”
Andrews strode away from the door. A cold, needle-like rain was falling. He pulled up his coat collar and ran down the muddy village street towards his quarters.
VI
In the opposite corner of the compartment Andrews could see Walters hunched up in an attitude of sleep, with his cap pulled down far over his eyes. His mouth was open, and his head wagged with the jolting of the train. The shade over the light plunged the compartment in dark-blue obscurity, which made the night sky outside the window and the shapes of trees and houses, evolving and pirouetting as they glided by, seem very near. Andrews felt no desire to sleep; he had sat a long time leaning his head against the frame of the window, looking out at the fleeing shadows and the occasional little red-green lights that darted by and the glow of the stations that flared for a moment and were lost in dark silhouettes of unlighted houses and skeleton trees and black hillsides. He was thinking how all the epochs in his life seemed to have been marked out by railway rides at night. The jolting rumble of the wheels made the blood go faster through his veins; made him feel acutely the clattering of the train along the gleaming rails, spurning fields and trees and houses, piling up miles and miles between the past and future. The gusts of cold night air when he opened the window and the faint whiffs of steam and coal gas that tingled in his nostrils excited him like a smile on a strange face seen for a moment in a crowded street. He did not think of what he had left behind. He was straining his eyes eagerly through the darkness towards the vivid life he was going to live. Boredom and abasement were over. He was free to work and hear music and make friends. He drew deep breaths; warm waves of vigor seemed flowing constantly from his lungs and throat to his finger tips and down through his body and the muscles of his legs. He looked at his watch: “One.” In six hours he would be in Paris. For six hours he would sit there looking out at the fleeting shadows of the countryside, feeling in his blood the eager throb of the train, rejoicing in every mile the train carried him away from things past.
Walters still slept, half slipping off the seat, with his mouth open and his overcoat bundled round his head. Andrews looked out of the window, feeling in his nostrils the tingle of steam and coal gas. A phrase out of some translation of the Iliad came to his head: “Ambrosial night, Night ambrosial unending.” But better than sitting round a camp fire drinking wine and water and listening to the boastful yarns of long-haired Achaeans, was this hustling through the countryside away from the monotonous whine of past unhappiness, towards joyousness and life.
Andrews began to think of the men he had left behind. They were asleep at this time of night, in barns and barracks, or else standing on guard with cold damp feet, and cold hands which the icy rifle barrel burned when they tended it. He might go far away out of sound of the tramp of marching, away from the smell of overcrowded barracks where men slept in rows like cattle, but he would still be one of them. He would not see an officer pass him without an unconscious movement of servility, he would not hear a bugle without feeling sick with hatred. If he could only express these thwarted lives, the miserable dullness of industrialized slaughter, it might have been almost worth while—for him; for the others, it would never be worth while. “But you're talking as if you were out of the woods; you're a soldier still, John Andrews.” The words formed themselves in his mind as vividly as if he had spoken them. He smiled bitterly and settled himself again to watch silhouettes of trees and hedges and houses and hillsides fleeing against the dark sky.
When he awoke the sky was grey. The train was moving slowly, clattering loudly over switches, through a town of wet slate roofs that rose in fantastic patterns of shadow above the blue mist. Walters was smoking a cigarette.
“God! These French trains are rotten,” he said when he noticed that Andrews was awake. “The most inefficient country I ever was in anyway.”
“Inefficiency be damned,” broke in Andrews, jumping up and stretching himself. He opened the window. “The heating's too damned efficient.... I think we're near Paris.”
The cold air, with a flavor of mist in it, poured into the stuffy compartment. Every breath was joy. Andrews felt a crazy buoyancy bubbling up in him. The rumbling clatter of the train wheels sang in his ears. He threw himself on his back on the dusty blue seat and kicked his heels in the air like a colt.
“Liven up, for God's sake, man,” he shouted. “We're getting near Paris.”
“We are lucky bastards,” said Walters, grinning, with the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “I'm going to see if I can find the rest of the gang.”
Andrews, alone in the compartment, found himself singing at the top of his lungs.
As the day brightened the mist lifted off the flat linden-green fields intersected by rows of leafless poplars. Salmon-colored houses with blue roofs wore already a faintly citified air. They passed brick-kilns and clay-quarries, with reddish puddles of water in the bottom of them; crossed a jade-green river where a long file of canal boats with bright paint on their prows moved slowly. The engine whistled shrilly. They clattered through a small freight yard, and rows of suburban houses began to form, at first chaotically in broad patches of garden-land, and then in orderly ranks with streets between and shops at the corners. A dark-grey dripping wall rose up suddenly and blotted out the view. The train slowed down and went through several stations crowded with people on their way to work,—ordinary people in varied clothes with only here and there a blue or khaki uniform. Then there was more dark-grey wall, and the obscurity of wide bridges under which dusty oil lamps burned orange and red, making a gleam on the wet wall above them, and where the wheels clanged loudly. More freight yards and the train pulled slowly past other trains full of faces and silhouettes of people, to stop with a jerk in a station. And Andrews was standing on the grey cement platform, sniffing smells of lumber and merchandise and steam. His ungainly pack and blanket-roll he carried on his shoulder like a cross. He had left his rifle and cartridge belt carefully tucked out of sight under the seat.
Walters and five other men straggled along the platform towards him, carrying or dragging their packs.
There was a look of apprehension on Walters's face.
“Well, what do we do now?” he said.
“Do!” cried Andrews, and he burst out laughing.
Prostrate bodies in olive drab hid the patch of tender green grass by the roadside. The company was resting. Chrisfield sat on a stump morosely whittling at a stick with a pocket knife. Judkins was stretched out beside him.
“What the hell do they make us do this damn hikin' for, Corp?”
“Guess they're askeered we'll forgit how to walk.”
“Well, ain't it better than loafin' around yer billets all day, thinkin' an' cursin' an' wishin' ye was home?” spoke up the man who sat the other side, pounding down the tobacco in his pipe with a thick forefinger.
“It makes me sick, trampin' round this way in ranks all day with the goddam frawgs starin' at us an'...”
“They're laughin' at us, I bet,” broke in another voice.
“We'll be movin' soon to the Army o' Occupation,” said Chrisfield cheerfully. “In Germany it'll be a reglar picnic.”
“An' d'you know what that means?” burst out Judkins, sitting bolt upright. “D'you know how long the troops is goin' to stay in Germany? Fifteen years.”
“Gawd, they couldn't keep us there that long, man.”
“They can do anythin' they goddam please with us. We're the guys as is gettin' the raw end of this deal. It ain't the same with an' edicated guy like Andrews or Sergeant Coffin or them. They can suck around after 'Y' men, an' officers an' get on the inside track, an' all we can do is stand up an' salute an' say 'Yes, lootenant' an' 'No, lootenant' an' let 'em ride us all they goddam please. Ain't that gospel truth, corporal?”
“Ah guess you're right, Judkie; we gits the raw end of the stick.”
“That damn yellar dawg Andrews goes to Paris an' gets schoolin' free an' all that.”
“Hell, Andy waren't yellar, Judkins.”
“Well, why did he go bellyachin' around all the time like he knew more'n the lootenant did?”
“Ah reckon he did,” said Chrisfield.
“Anyway, you can't say that those guys who went to Paris did a goddam thing more'n any the rest of us did.... Gawd, I ain't even had a leave yet.”
“Well, it ain't no use crabbin'.”
“No, onct we git home an' folks know the way we've been treated, there'll be a great ole investigation. I can tell you that,” said one of the new men.
“It makes you mad, though, to have something like that put over on ye.... Think of them guys in Paris, havin' a hell of a time with wine an' women, an' we stay out here an' clean our guns an' drill.... God, I'd like to get even with some of them guys.”
The whistle blew. The patch of grass became unbroken green again as the men lined up along the side of the road.
“Fall in!” called the Sergeant.
“Atten-shun!”
“Right dress!”
“Front! God, you guys haven't got no snap in yer.... Stick yer belly in, you. You know better than to stand like that.”
“Squads, right! March! Hep, hep, hep!”
The Company tramped off along the muddy road. Their steps were all the same length. Their arms swung in the same rhythm. Their faces were cowed into the same expression, their thoughts were the same. The tramp, tramp of their steps died away along the road.
Birds were singing among the budding trees. The young grass by the roadside kept the marks of the soldiers' bodies.
Andrews, and six other men from his division, sat at a table outside the cafe opposite the Gare de l'Est. He leaned back in his chair with a cup of coffee lifted, looking across it at the stone houses with many balconies. Steam, scented of milk and coffee, rose from the cup as he sipped from it. His ears were full of a rumble of traffic and a clacking of heels as people walked briskly by along the damp pavements. For a while he did not hear what the men he was sitting with were saying. They talked and laughed, but he looked beyond their khaki uniforms and their boat-shaped caps unconsciously. He was taken up with the smell of the coffee and of the mist. A little rusty sunshine shone on the table of the cafe and on the thin varnish of wet mud that covered the asphalt pavement. Looking down the Avenue, away from the station, the houses, dark grey tending to greenish in the shadow and to violet in the sun, faded into a soft haze of distance. Dull gilt lettering glittered along black balconies. In the foreground were men and women walking briskly, their cheeks whipped a little into color by the rawness of the morning. The sky was a faintly roseate grey.
Walters was speaking:
“The first thing I want to see is the Eiffel Tower.”
“Why d'you want to see that?” said the small sergeant with a black mustache and rings round his eyes like a monkey.
“Why, man, don't you know that everything begins from the Eiffel Tower? If it weren't for the Eiffel Tower, there wouldn't be any sky-scrapers....”
“How about the Flatiron Building and Brooklyn Bridge? They were built before the Eiffel Tower, weren't they?” interrupted the man from New York.
“The Eiffel Tower's the first piece of complete girder construction in the whole world,” reiterated Walters dogmatically.
“First thing I'm going to do's go to the Folies Berd-jairs; me for the w.w.'s.”
“Better lay off the wild women, Bill,” said Walters.
“I ain't goin' to look at a woman,” said the sergeant with the black mustache. “I guess I seen enough women in my time, anyway.... The war's over, anyway.”
“You just wait, kid, till you fasten your lamps on a real Parizianne,” said a burly, unshaven man with a corporal's stripes on his arm, roaring with laughter.
Andrews lost track of the talk again, staring dreamily through half-closed eyes down the long straight street, where greens and violets and browns merged into a bluish grey monochrome at a little distance. He wanted to be alone, to wander at random through the city, to stare dreamily at people and things, to talk by chance to men and women, to sink his life into the misty sparkling life of the streets. The smell of the mist brought a memory to his mind. For a long while he groped for it, until suddenly he remembered his dinner with Henslowe and the faces of the boy and girl he had talked to on the Butte. He must find Henslowe at once. A second's fierce resentment went through him against all these people about him. Christ! He must get away from them all; his freedom had been hard enough won; he must enjoy it to the uttermost.
“Say, I'm going to stick to you, Andy.” Walters's voice broke into his reverie. “I'm going to appoint you the corps of interpreters.”
Andrews laughed.
“D'you know the way to the School Headquarters?”
“The R. T. O. said take the subway.”
“I'm going to walk,” said Andrews.
“You'll get lost, won't you?”
“No danger, worse luck,” said Andrews, getting to his feet. “I'll see you fellows at the School Headquarters, whatever those are.... So long.”
“Say, Andy, I'll wait for you there,” Walters called after him.
Andrews darted down a side street. He could hardly keep from shouting aloud when he found himself alone, free, with days and days ahead of him to work and think, gradually to rid his limbs of the stiff attitudes of the automaton. The smell of the streets, and the mist, indefinably poignant, rose like incense smoke in fantastic spirals through his brain, making him hungry and dazzled, making his arms and legs feel lithe and as ready for delight as a crouching cat for a spring. His heavy shoes beat out a dance as they clattered on the wet pavements under his springy steps. He was walking very fast, stopping suddenly now and then to look at the greens and oranges and crimsons of vegetables in a push cart, to catch a vista down intricate streets, to look into the rich brown obscurity of a small wine shop where workmen stood at the counter sipping white wine. Oval, delicate faces, bearded faces of men, slightly gaunt faces of young women, red cheeks of boys, wrinkled faces of old women, whose ugliness seemed to have hidden in it, stirringly, all the beauty of youth and the tragedy of lives that had been lived; the faces of the people he passed moved him like rhythms of an orchestra. After much walking, turning always down the street which looked pleasantest, he came to an oval with a statue of a pompous personage on a ramping horse. “Place des Victoires,” he read the name, which gave him a faint tinge of amusement. He looked quizzically at the heroic features of the sun king and walked off laughing. “I suppose they did it better in those days, the grand manner,” he muttered. And his delight redoubled in rubbing shoulders with the people whose effigies would never appear astride ramping-eared horses in squares built to commemorate victories. He came out on a broad straight avenue, where there were many American officers he had to salute, and M. P.'s and shops with wide plate-glass windows, full of objects that had a shiny, expensive look. “Another case of victories,” he thought, as he went off into a side street, taking with him a glimpse of the bluish-grey pile of the Opera, with its pompous windows and its naked bronze ladies holding lamps.
He was in a narrow street full of hotels and fashionable barber shops, from which came an odor of cosmopolitan perfumery, of casinos and ballrooms and diplomatic receptions, when he noticed an American officer coming towards him, reeling a little,—a tall, elderly man with a red face and a bottle nose. He saluted.
The officer stopped still, swaying from side to side, and said in a whining voice:
“Shonny, d'you know where Henry'sh Bar is?”
“No, I don't, Major,” said Andrews, who felt himself enveloped in an odor of cocktails.
“You'll help me to find it, shonny, won't you?... It's dreadful not to be able to find it.... I've got to meet Lootenant Trevors in Henry'sh Bar.” The major steadied himself by putting a hand on Andrews' shoulder. A civilian passed them.
“Dee-donc,” shouted the major after him, “Dee-donc, Monshier, ou ay Henry'sh Bar?”
The man walked on without answering.
“Now isn't that like a frog, not to understand his own language?” said the major.
“But there's Henry's Bar, right across the street,” said Andrews suddenly.
“Bon, bon,” said the major.
They crossed the street and went in. At the bar the major, still clinging to Andrews' shoulder, whispered in his ear: “I'm A. W. O. L., shee?... Shee?.... Whole damn Air Service is A. W. O. L. Have a drink with me.... You enlisted man? Nobody cares here.... Warsh over, Sonny.... Democracy is shafe for the world.”
Andrews was just raising a champagne cocktail to his lips, looking with amusement at the crowd of American officers and civilians who crowded into the small mahogany barroom, when a voice behind him drawled out:
“I'll be damned!”
Andrews turned and saw Henslowe's brown face and small silky mustache. He abandoned his major to his fate.
“God, I'm glad to see you.... I was afraid you hadn't been able to work it.”...Said Henslowe slowly, stuttering a little.
“I'm about crazy, Henny, with delight. I just got in a couple of hours ago....” Laughing, interrupting each other, they chattered in broken sentences.
“But how in the name of everything did you get here?”
“With the major?” said Andrews, laughing.
“What the devil?”
“Yes; that major,” whispered Andrews in his friend's ear, “rather the worse for wear, asked me to lead him to Henry's Bar and just fed me a cocktail in the memory of Democracy, late defunct.... But what are you doing here? It's not exactly... exotic.”
“I came to see a man who was going to tell me how I could get to Rumania with the Red Cross.... But that can wait.... Let's get out of here. God, I was afraid you hadn't made it.”
“I had to crawl on my belly and lick people's boots to do it.... God, it was low!... But here I am.”
They were out in the street again, walking and gesticulating.
“But 'Libertad, Libertad, allons, ma femme!' as Walt Whitman would have said,” shouted Andrews.
“It's one grand and glorious feeling.... I've been here three days. My section's gone home; God bless them.”
“But what do you have to do?”
“Do? Nothing,” cried Henslowe. “Not a blooming bloody goddam thing! In fact, it's no use trying... the whole thing is such a mess you couldn't do anything if you wanted to.”
“I want to go and talk to people at the Schola Cantorum.”
“There'll be time for that. You'll never make anything out of music if you get serious-minded about it.”
“Then, last but not least, I've got to get some money from somewhere.”
“Now you're talking!” Henslowe pulled a burnt leather pocket book out of the inside of his tunic. “Monaco,” he said, tapping the pocket book, which was engraved with a pattern of dull red flowers. He pursed up his lips and pulled out some hundred franc notes, which he pushed into Andrews's hand.
“Give me one of them,” said Andrews.
“All or none.... They last about five minutes each.”
“But it's so damn much to pay back.”
“Pay it back—heavens!... Here take it and stop your talking. I probably won't have it again, so you'd better make hay this time. I warn you it'll be spent by the end of the week.”
“All right. I'm dead with hunger.”
“Let's sit down on the Boulevard and think about where we'll have lunch to celebrate Miss Libertad.... But let's not call her that, sounds like Liverpool, Andy, a horrid place.”
“How about Freiheit?” said Andrews, as they sat down in basket chairs in the reddish yellow sunlight.
“Treasonable... off with your head.”
“But think of it, man,” said Andrews, “the butchery's over, and you and I and everybody else will soon be human beings again. Human; all too human!”
“No more than eighteen wars going,” muttered Henslowe.
“I haven't seen any papers for an age.... How do you mean?”
“People are fighting to beat the cats everywhere except on the' western front,” said Henslowe. “But that's where I come in. The Red Cross sends supply trains to keep them at it.... I'm going to Russia if I can work it.”
“But what about the Sorbonne?”
“The Sorbonne can go to Ballyhack.”
“But, Henny, I'm going to croak on your hands if you don't take me somewhere to get some food.”
“Do you want a solemn place with red plush or with salmon pink brocade?”
“Why have a solemn place at all?”
“Because solemnity and good food go together. It's only a religious restaurant that has a proper devotion to the belly. O, I know, we'll go over to Brooklyn.”
“Where?”
“To the Rive Gauche. I know a man who insists on calling it Brooklyn. Awfully funny man... never been sober in his life. You must meet him.”
“Oh, I want to.... It's a dog's age since I met anyone new, except you. I can't live without having a variegated crowd about, can you?”
“You've got that right on this boulevard. Serbs, French, English, Americans, Australians, Rumanians, Tcheco-Slovaks; God, is there any uniform that isn't here?... I tell you, Andy, the war's been a great thing for the people who knew how to take advantage of it. Just look at their puttees.”
“I guess they'll know how to make a good thing of the Peace too.”
“Oh, that's going to be the best yet.... Come along. Let's be little devils and take a taxi.”
“This certainly is the main street of Cosmopolis.”
They threaded their way through the crowd, full of uniforms and glitter and bright colors, that moved in two streams up and down the wide sidewalk between the cafes and the boles of the bare trees. They climbed into a taxi, and lurched fast through streets where, in the misty sunlight, grey-green and grey-violet mingled with blues and pale lights as the colors mingle in a pigeon's breast feathers. They passed the leafless gardens of the Tuileries on one side, and the great inner Courts of the Louvre, with their purple mansard roofs and their high chimneys on the other, and saw for a second the river, dull jade green, and the plane trees splotched with brown and cream color along the quais, before they were lost in the narrow brownish-grey streets of the old quarters.
“This is Paris; that was Cosmopolis,” said Henslowe.
“I'm not particular, just at present,” cried Andrews gaily.
The square in front of the Odeon was a splash of white and the collonade a blur of darkness as the cab swerved round the corner and along the edge of the Luxembourg, where, through the black iron fence, many brown and reddish colors in the intricate patterns of leafless twigs opened here and there on statues and balustrades and vistas of misty distances. The cab stopped with a jerk.
“This is the Place des Medicis,” said Henslowe.
At the end of a slanting street looking very flat, through the haze, was the dome of the Pantheon. In the middle of the square between the yellow trams and the green low busses, was a quiet pool, where the shadow of horizontals of the house fronts was reflected.
They sat beside the window looking out at the square.
Henslowe ordered.
“Remember how sentimental history books used to talk about prisoners who were let out after years in dungeons, not being able to stand it, and going back to their cells?”
“D'you like sole meuniere?”
“Anything, or rather everything! But take it from me, that's all rubbish. Honestly I don't think I've ever been happier in my life.... D'you know, Henslowe, there's something in you that is afraid to be happy.”
“Don't be morbid.... There's only one real evil in the world: being somewhere without being able to get away;... I ordered beer. This is the only place in Paris where it's fit to drink.”
“And I'm going to every blooming concert...Colonne-Lamoureux on Sunday, I know that.... The only evil in the world is not to be able to hear music or to make it.... These oysters are fit for Lucullus.”
“Why not say fit for John Andrews and Bob Henslowe, damn it?... Why the ghosts of poor old dead Romans should be dragged in every time a man eats an oyster, I don't see. We're as fine specimens as they were. I swear I shan't let any old turned-toclay Lucullus outlive me, even if I've never eaten a lamprey.”
“And why should you eat a lamp—chimney, Bob?” came a hoarse voice beside them.
Andrews looked up into a round, white face with large grey eyes hidden behind thick steel-rimmed spectacles. Except for the eyes, the face had a vaguely Chinese air.
“Hello, Heinz! Mr. Andrews, Mr. Heineman,” said Henslowe.
“Glad to meet you,” said Heineman in a jovially hoarse voice. “You guys seem to be overeating, to reckon by the way things are piled up on the table.” Through the hoarseness Andrews could detect a faint Yankee tang in Heineman's voice.
“You'd better sit down and help us,” said Henslowe.
“Sure....D'you know my name for this guy?” He turned to Andrews.... “Sinbad!”
“Sinbad was in bad in Tokio and Rome, In bad in TrinidadAnd twice as bad at home.”
He sang the words loudly, waving a bread stick to keep time.
“Shut up, Heinz, or you'll get us run out of here the way you got us run out of the Olympia that night.”
They both laughed.
“An' d'you remember Monsieur Le Guy with his coat?
“Do I? God!” They laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks. Heineman took off his glasses and wiped them. He turned to Andrews.
“Oh, Paris is the best yet. First absurdity: the Peace Conference and its nine hundred and ninety-nine branches. Second absurdity: spies. Third: American officers A.W.O.L. Fourth: The seven sisters sworn to slay.” He broke out laughing again, his chunky body rolling about on the chair.
“What are they?”
“Three of them have sworn to slay Sinbad, and four of them have sworn to slay me.... But that's too complicated to tell at lunch time.... Eighth: there are the lady relievers, Sinbad's specialty. Ninth: there's Sinbad....”
“Shut up, Heinz, you're getting me maudlin,” spluttered Henslowe.
“O Sinbad was in bad all around,” chanted Heineman. “But no one's given me anything to drink,” he said suddenly in a petulant voice. “Garcon, une bouteille de Macon, pour un Cadet de Gascogne.... What's the next? It ends with vergogne. You've seen the play, haven't you? Greatest play going.... Seen it twice sober and seven other times.”
“Cyrano de Bergerac?”
“That's it. Nous sommes les Cadets de Gasgogne, rhymes with ivrogne and sans vergogne.... You see I work in the Red Cross.... You know Sinbad, old Peterson's a brick.... I'm supposed to be taking photographs of tubercular children at this minute.... The noblest of my professions is that of artistic photographer.... Borrowed the photographs from the rickets man. So I have nothing to do for three months and five hundred francs travelling expenses. Oh, children, my only prayer is 'give us this day our red worker's permit' and the Red Cross does the rest.” Heineman laughed till the glasses rang on the table. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a rueful air.
“So now I call the Red Cross the Cadets!” cried Heineman, his voice a thin shriek from laughter.
Andrews was drinking his coffee in little sips, looking out of the window at the people that passed. An old woman with a stand of flowers sat on a small cane chair at the corner. The pink and yellow and blue-violet shades of the flowers seemed to intensify the misty straw color and azured grey of the wintry sun and shadow of the streets. A girl in a tight-fitting black dress and black hat stopped at the stand to buy a bunch of pale yellow daisies, and then walked slowly past the window of the restaurant in the direction of the gardens. Her ivory face and slender body and her very dark eyes sent a sudden flush through Andrews's whole frame as he looked at her. The black erect figure disappeared in the gate of the gardens.
Andrews got to his feet suddenly.
“I've got to go,” he said in a strange voice.... “I just remember a man was waiting for me at the School Headquarters.”
“Let him wait.”
“Why, you haven't had a liqueur yet,” cried Heineman.
“No... but where can I meet you people later?”
“Cafe de Rohan at five... opposite the Palais Royal.”
“You'll never find it.”
“Yes I will,” said Andrews.
“Palais Royal metro station,” they shouted after him as he dashed out of the door.
He hurried into the gardens. Many people sat on benches in the frail sunlight. Children in bright-colored clothes ran about chasing hoops. A woman paraded a bunch of toy balloons in carmine and green and purple, like a huge bunch of parti-colored grapes inverted above her head. Andrews walked up and down the alleys, scanning faces. The girl had disappeared. He leaned against a grey balustrade and looked down into the empty pond where traces of the explosion of a Bertha still subsisted. He was telling himself that he was a fool. That even if he had found her he could not have spoken to her; just because he was free for a day or two from the army he needn't think the age of gold had come back to earth. Smiling at the thought, he walked across the gardens, wandered through some streets of old houses in grey and white stucco with slate mansard roofs and fantastic complications of chimney-pots till he came out in front of a church with a new classic facade of huge columns that seemed toppling by their own weight.
He asked a woman selling newspapers what the church's name was. “Mais, Monsieur, c'est Saint Sulpice,” said the woman in a surprised tone.
Saint Sulpice. Manon's songs came to his head, and the sentimental melancholy of eighteenth century Paris with its gambling houses in the Palais Royal where people dishonored themselves in the presence of their stern Catonian fathers, and its billets doux written at little gilt tables, and its coaches lumbering in covered with mud from the provinces through the Porte d'Orleans and the Porte de Versailles; the Paris of Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques, with its muddy streets and its ordinaries where one ate bisques and larded pullets and souffles; a Paris full of mouldy gilt magnificence, full of pompous ennui of the past and insane hope of the future.
He walked down a narrow, smoky street full of antique shops and old bookshops and came out unexpectedly on the river opposite the statue of Voltaire. The name on the corner was quai Malaquais. Andrews crossed and looked down for a long time at the river. Opposite, behind a lace-work of leafless trees, were the purplish roofs of the Louvre with their high peaks and their ranks and ranks of chimneys; behind him the old houses of the quai and the wing, topped by a balustrade with great grey stone urns of a domed building of which he did not know the name. Barges were coming upstream, the dense green water spuming under their blunt bows, towed by a little black tugboat with its chimney bent back to pass under the bridges. The tug gave a thin shrill whistle. Andrews started walking downstream. He crossed by the bridge at the corner of the Louvre, turned his back on the arch Napoleon built to receive the famous horses from St. Marc's,—a pinkish pastry-like affair—and walked through the Tuileries which were full of people strolling about or sitting in the sun, of doll-like children and nursemaids with elaborate white caps, of fluffy little dogs straining at the ends of leashes. Suddenly a peaceful sleepiness came over him. He sat down in the sun on a bench, watching, hardly seeing them, the people who passed to and fro casting long shadows. Voices and laughter came very softly to his ears above the distant stridency of traffic. From far away he heard for a few moments notes of a military band playing a march. The shadows of the trees were faint blue-grey in the ruddy yellow gravel. Shadows of people kept passing and repassing across them. He felt very languid and happy.
Suddenly he started up; he had been dozing. He asked an old man with a beautifully pointed white beard the way to rue du Faubourg St. Honore.
After losing his way a couple of times, he walked listlessly up some marble steps where a great many men in khaki were talking. Leaning against the doorpost was Walters. As he drew near Andrews heard him saying to the man next to him:
“Why, the Eiffel tower was the first piece of complete girder construction ever built.... That's the first thing a feller who's wide awake ought to see.”
“Tell me the Opery's the grandest thing to look at,” said the man next it.
“If there's wine an' women there, me for it.”
“An' don't forget the song.”
“But that isn't interesting like the Eiffel tower is,” persisted Walters.
“Say, Walters, I hope you haven't been waiting for me,” stammered Andrews.
“No, I've been waiting in line to see the guy about courses.... I want to start this thing right.”
“I guess I'll see them tomorrow,” said Andrews.
“Say have you done anything about a room, Andy? Let's you and me be bunkies.”
“All right.... But maybe you won't want to room where I do, Walters.”
“Where's that? In the Latin Quarter?... You bet. I want to see some French life while I am about it.”
“Well, it's too late to get a room to-day.”
“I'm going to the 'Y' tonight anyway.”
“I'll get a fellow I know to put me up.... Then tomorrow, we'll see. Well, so long,” said Andrews, moving away.
“Wait. I'm coming with you.... We'll walk around town together.”
“All right,” said Andrews.
The rabbit was rather formless, very fluffy and had a glance of madness in its pink eye with a black center. It hopped like a sparrow along the pavement, emitting a rubber tube from its back, which went up to a bulb in a man's hand which the man pressed to make the rabbit hop. Yet the rabbit had an air of organic completeness. Andrews laughed inordinately when he first saw it. The vendor, who had a basket full of other such rabbits on his arm, saw Andrews laughing and drew timidly near to the table; he had a pink face with little, sensitive lips rather like a real rabbit's, and large frightened eyes of a wan brown.
“Do you make them yourself?” asked Andrews, smiling.
The man dropped his rabbit on the table with a negligent air.
“Oh, oui, Monsieur, d'apres la nature.”
He made the rabbit turn a somersault by suddenly pressing the bulb hard. Andrews laughed and the rabbit man laughed.
“Think of a big strong man making his living that way,” said Walters, disgusted.
“I do it all... de matiere premiere au profit de l'accapareur,” said the rabbit man.
“Hello, Andy... late as hell.... I'm sorry,” said Henslowe, dropping down into a chair beside them. Andrews introduced Walters, the rabbit man took off his hat, bowed to the company and went off, making the rabbit hop before him along the edge of the curbstone.
“What's happened to Heineman?”
“Here he comes now,” said Henslowe.
An open cab had driven up to the curb in front of the cafe. In it sat Heineman with a broad grin on his face and beside him a woman in a salmon-colored dress, ermine furs and an emerald-green hat. The cab drove off and Heineman, still grinning, walked up to the table.
“Where's the lion cub?” asked Henslowe.
“They say it's got pneumonia.”
“Mr. Heineman. Mr. Walters.”
The grin left Heineman's face; he said: “How do you do?” curtly, cast a furious glance at Andrews and settled himself in a chair.
The sun had set. The sky was full of lilac and bright purple and carmine. Among the deep blue shadows lights were coming on, primrose-colored street lamps, violet arc lights, ruddy sheets of light poured out of shop windows.
“Let's go inside. I'm cold as hell,” said Heineman crossly, and they filed in through the revolving door, followed by a waiter with their drinks.
“I've been in the Red Cross all afternoon, Andy.... I think I am going to work that Roumania business.... Want to come?” said Henslowe in Andrews' ear.
“If I can get hold of a piano and some lessons and the concerts keep up you won't be able to get me away from Paris with wild horses. No, sir, I want to see what Paris is like.... It's going to my head so it'll be weeks before I know what I think about it.”
“Don't think about it.... Drink,” growled Heineman, scowling savagely.
“That's two things I'm going to keep away from in Paris; drink and women.... And you can't have one without the other,” said Walters.
“True enough.... You sure do need them both,” said Heineman.
Andrews was not listening to their talk; twirling the stem of his glass of vermouth in his fingers, he was thinking of the Queen of Sheba slipping down from off the shoulders of her elephant, glistening fantastically with jewels in the light of crackling, resinous torches. Music was seeping up through his mind as the water seeps into a hole dug in the sand of the seashore. He could feel all through his body the tension of rhythms and phrases taking form, not quite to be seized as yet, still hovering on the borderland of consciousness. “From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling roses to pieces from the height of her litter....All the imaginings of your desire....” He thought of the girl with skin like old ivory he had seen in the Place de Medicis. The Queen of Sheba's face was like that now in his imaginings, quiet and inscrutable. A sudden cymbal-clanging of joy made his heart thump hard. He was free now of the imaginings of his desire, to loll all day at cafe tables watching the tables move in changing patterns before him, to fill his mind and body with a reverberation of all the rhythms of men and women moving in the frieze of life before his eyes; no more like wooden automatons knowing only the motions of the drill manual, but supple and varied, full of force and tragedy.
“For Heaven's sake let's beat it from here.... Gives me a pain this place does.” Heineman beat his fist on the table.
“All right,” said Andrews, getting up with a yawn.
Henslowe and Andrews walked off, leaving Walters to follow them with Heineman.
“We're going to dine at Le Rat qui Danse,” said Henslowe, “an awfully funny place.... We just have time to walk there comfortably with an appetite.”
They followed the long dimly-lighted Rue de Richelieu to the Boulevards, where they drifted a little while with the crowd. The glaring lights seemed to powder the air with gold. Cafes and the tables outside were crowded. There was an odor of vermouth and coffee and perfume and cigarette smoke mixed with the fumes of burnt gasoline from taxicabs.
“Isn't this mad?” said Andrews.
“It's always carnival at seven on the Grands Boulevards.”
They started climbing the steep streets to Montmartre. At a corner they passed a hard-faced girl with rouge-smeared lips and overpowdered cheeks, laughing on the arm of an American soldier, who had a sallow face and dull-green eyes that glittered in the slanting light of a street-lamp.
“Hello, Stein,” said Andrews.
“Who's that?”
“A fellow from our division, got here with me this morning.”
“He's got curious lips for a Jew,” said Henslowe.
At the fork of two slanting streets, they went into a restaurant that had small windows pasted over with red paper, through which the light came dimly. Inside were crowded oak tables and oak wainscoting with a shelf round the top, on which were shell-cans, a couple of skulls, several cracked majolica plates and a number of stuffed rats. The only people there were a fat woman and a man with long grey hair and beard who sat talking earnestly over two small glasses in the center of the room. A husky-looking waitress with a Dutch cap and apron hovered near the inner door from which came a great smell of fish frying in olive oil.
“The cook here's from Marseilles,” said Henslowe, as they settled themselves at a table for four.
“I wonder if the rest of them lost the way,” said Andrews.
“More likely old Heinz stopped to have a drink,” said Henslowe. “Let's have some hors d'oeuvre while we are waiting.”
The waitress brought a collection of boat-shaped plates of red salads and yellow salads and green salads and two little wooden tubs with herrings and anchovies.
Henslowe stopped her as she was going, saying: “Rien de plus?”
The waitress contemplated the array with a tragic air, her arms folded over her ample bosom. “Que voulez-vous, Monsieur, c'est l'armistice.”
“The greatest fake about all this war business is the peace. I tell you, not till the hors d'oeuvre has been restored to its proper abundance and variety will I admit that the war's over.”
The waitress tittered.
“Things aren't what they used to be,” she said, going back to the kitchen.
Heineman burst into the restaurant at that moment, slamming the door behind him so that the glass rang, and the fat woman and the hairy man started violently in their chairs. He tumbled into a place, grinning broadly.
“And what have you done to Walters?”
Heineman wiped his glasses meticulously.
“Oh, he died of drinking raspberry shrub,” he said.... “Dee-dong peteet du ving de Bourgogne,” he shouted towards the waitress in his nasal French. Then he added: “Le Guy is coming in a minute, I just met him.”
The restaurant was gradually filling up with men and women of very various costumes, with a good sprinkling of Americans in uniform and out.
“God I hate people who don't drink,” cried Heineman, pouring out wine. “A man who don't drink just cumbers the earth.”
“How are you going to take it in America when they have prohibition?”
“Don't talk about it; here's le Guy. I wouldn't have him know I belong to a nation that prohibits good liquor.... Monsieur le Guy, Monsieur Henslowe et Monsieur Andrews,” he continued getting up ceremoniously. A little man with twirled mustaches and a small vandyke beard sat down at the fourth place. He had a faintly red nose and little twinkling eyes.
“How glad I am,” he said, exposing his starched cuffs with a curious gesture, “to have some one to dine with! When one begins to get old loneliness is impossible. It is only youth that dares think.... Afterwards one has only one thing to think about: old age.”
“There's always work,” said Andrews.
“Slavery. Any work is slavery. What is the use of freeing your intellect if you sell yourself again to the first bidder?”
“Rot!” said Heineman, pouring out from a new bottle.
Andrews had begun to notice the girl who sat at the next table, in front of a pale young soldier in French-blue who resembled her extraordinarily. She had high cheek bones and a forehead in which the modelling of the skull showed through the transparent, faintly-olive skin. Her heavy chestnut hair was coiled carelessly at the back of her head. She spoke very quietly, and pressed her lips together when she smiled. She ate quickly and neatly, like a cat.
The restaurant had gradually filled up with people. The waitress and the patron, a fat man with a wide red sash coiled tightly round his waist, moved with difficulty among the crowded tables. A woman at a table in the corner, with dead white skin and drugged staring eyes, kept laughing hoarsely, leaning her head, in a hat with bedraggled white plumes, against the wall. There was a constant jingle of plates and glasses, and an oily fume of food and women's clothes and wine.
“D'you want to know what I really did with your friend?” said Heineman, leaning towards Andrews.
“I hope you didn't push him into the Seine.”
“It was damn impolite.... But hell, it was damn impolite of him not to drink.... No use wasting time with a man who don't drink. I took him into a cafe and asked him to wait while I telephoned. I guess he's still waiting. One of the whoreiest cafes on the whole Boulevard Clichy.” Heineman laughed uproariously and started explaining it in nasal French to M. le Guy.
Andrews flushed with annoyance for a moment, but soon started laughing. Heineman had started singing again.