V
“So I came without,” said Andrews, laughing.
“What fun!” cried Genevieve. “But anyway they couldn't do anything to you. Chartres is so near. It's at the gates of Paris.”
They were alone in the compartment. The train had pulled out of the station and was going through suburbs where the trees were in leaf in the gardens, and fruit trees foamed above the red brick walls, among the box-like villas.
“Anyway,” said Andrews, “it was an opportunity not to be missed.”
“That must be one of the most amusing things about being a soldier, avoiding regulations. I wonder whether Damocles didn't really enjoy his sword, don't you think so?”
They laughed.
“But mother was very doubtful about my coming with you this way. She's such a dear, she wants to be very modern and liberal, but she always gets frightened at the last minute. And my aunt will think the world's end has come when we appear.”
They went through some tunnels, and when the train stopped at Sevres, had a glimpse of the Seine valley, where the blue mist made a patina over the soft pea-green of new leaves. Then the train came out on wide plains, full of the glaucous shimmer of young oats and the golden-green of fresh-sprinkled wheat fields, where the mist on the horizon was purplish. The train's shadow, blue, sped along beside them over the grass and fences.
“How beautiful it is to go out of the city this way in the early morning!... Has your aunt a piano?”
“Yes, a very old and tinkly one.”
“It would be amusing to play you all I have done at the 'Queen of Sheba.' You say the most helpful things.”
“It is that I am interested. I think you will do something some day.”
Andrews shrugged his shoulders.
They sat silent, their ears filled up by the jerking rhythm of wheels over rails, now and then looking at each other, almost furtively. Outside, fields and hedges and patches of blossom, and poplar trees faintly powdered with green, unrolled, like a scroll before them, behind the nicker of telegraph poles and the festooned wires on which the sun gave glints of red copper. Andrews discovered all at once that the coppery glint on the telegraph wires was the same as the glint in Genevieve's hair. “Berenike, Artemisia, Arsinoe,” the names lingered in his mind. So that as he looked out of the window at the long curves of the telegraph wires that seemed to rise and fall as they glided past, he could imagine her face, with its large, pale brown eyes and its small mouth and broad smooth forehead, suddenly stilled into the encaustic painting on the mummy case of some Alexandrian girl.
“Tell me,” she said, “when did you begin to write music?”
Andrews brushed the light, disordered hair off his forehead.
“Why, I think I forgot to brush my hair this morning,” he said. “You see, I was so excited by the idea of coming to Chartres with you.”
They laughed.
“But my mother taught me to play the piano when I was very small,” he went on seriously. “She and I lived alone in an old house belonging to her family in Virginia. How different all that was from anything you have ever lived. It would not be possible in Europe to be as isolated as we were in Virginia.... Mother was very unhappy. She had led a dreadfully thwarted life... that unrelieved hopeless misery that only a woman can suffer. She used to tell me stories, and I used to make up little tunes about them, and about anything. The great success,” he laughed, “was, I remember, to a dandelion.... I can remember so well the way Mother pursed up her lips as she leaned over the writing desk.... She was very tall, and as it was dark in our old sitting room, had to lean far over to see.... She used to spend hours making beautiful copies of tunes I made up. My mother is the only person who has ever really had any importance in my life.... But I lack technical training terribly.”
“Do you think it is so important?” said Genevieve, leaning towards him to make herself heard above the clatter of the train.
“Perhaps it isn't. I don't know.”
“I think it always comes sooner or later, if you feel intensely enough.”
“But it is so frightful to feel all you want to express getting away beyond you. An idea comes into your head, and you feel it grow stronger and stronger and you can't grasp it; you have no means to express it. It's like standing on a street corner and seeing a gorgeous procession go by without being able to join it, or like opening a bottle of beer and having it foam all over you without having a glass to pour it into.”
Genevieve burst out laughing.
“But you can drink from the bottle, can't you?” she said, her eyes sparkling.
“I'm trying to,” said Andrews.
“Here we are. There's the cathedral. No, it's hidden,” cried Genevieve.
They got to their feet. As they left the station, Andrews said: “But after all, it's only freedom that matters. When I'm out of the army!...”
“Yes, I suppose you are right... for you that is. The artist should be free from any sort of entanglement.”
“I don't see what difference there is between an artist and any other sort of workman,” said Andrews savagely.
“No, but look.”
From the square where they stood, above the green blur of a little park, they could see the cathedral, creamy yellow and rust color, with the sober tower and the gaudy tower, and the great rose window between, the whole pile standing nonchalantly, knee deep in the packed roofs of the town.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it without speaking.
In the afternoon they walked down the hill towards the river, that flowed through a quarter of tottering, peak-gabled houses and mills, from which came a sound of grinding wheels. Above them, towering over gardens full of pear trees in bloom, the apse of the cathedral bulged against the pale sky. On a narrow and very ancient bridge they stopped and looked at the water, full of a shimmer of blue and green and grey from the sky and from the vivid new leaves of the willow trees along the bank.
Their senses glutted with the beauty of the day and the intricate magnificence of the cathedral, languid with all they had seen and said, they were talking of the future with quiet voices.
“It's all in forming a habit of work,” Andrews was saying. “You have to be a slave to get anything done. It's all a question of choosing your master, don't you think so?”
“Yes. I suppose all the men who have left their imprint on people's lives have been slaves in a sense,” said Genevieve slowly. “Everyone has to give up a great deal of life to live anything deeply. But it's worth, it.” She looked Andrews full in the eyes.
“Yes, I think it's worth it,” said Andrews. “But you must help me. Now I am like a man who has come up out of a dark cellar. I'm almost too dazzled by the gorgeousness of everything. But at least I am out of the cellar.”
“Look, a fish jumped,” cried Genevieve. “I wonder if we could hire a boat anywhere.... Don't you think it'd be fun to go out in a boat?”
A voice broke in on Genevieve's answer: “Let's see your pass, will you?”
Andrews turned round. A soldier with a round brown face and red cheeks stood beside him on the bridge. Andrews looked at him fixedly. A little zigzag scar above his left eye showed white on his heavily tanned skin.
“Let's see your pass,” the man said again; he had a high pitched, squeaky voice.
Andrews felt the blood thumping in his ears. “Are you an M. P.?”
“Yes.”
“Well I'm in the Sorbonne Detachment.”
“What the hell's that?” said the M. P., laughing thinly.
“What does he say?” asked Genevieve, smiling.
“Nothing. I'll have to go see the officer and explain,” said Andrews in a breathless voice. “You go back to your Aunt's and I'll come as soon as I've arranged it.”
“No, I'll come with you.”
“Please go back. It may be serious. I'll come as soon as I can,” said Andrews harshly.
She walked up the hill with swift decisive steps, without turning round.
“Tough luck, buddy,” said the M. P. “She's a good-looker. I'd like to have a half-hour with her myself.”
“Look here. I'm in the Sorbonne School Detachment in Paris, and I came down here without a pass. Is there anything I can do about it?”
“They'll fix you up, don't worry,” cried the M. P. shrilly. “You ain't a member of the General Staff in disguise, are ye? School Detachment! Gee, won't Bill Huggis laugh when he hears that? You pulled the best one yet, buddy.... But come along,” he added in a confidential tone. “If you come quiet I won't put the handcuffs on ye.”
“How do I know you're an M. P.?”
“You'll know soon enough.”
They turned down a narrow street between grey stucco walls leprous with moss and water stains.
At a chair inside the window of a small wine shop a man with a red M. P. badge sat smoking. He got up when he saw them pass and opened the door with one hand on his pistol holster.
“I got one bird, Bill,” said the man, shoving Andrews roughly in the door.
“Good for you, Handsome; is he quiet?”
“Um.” Handsome grunted.
“Sit down there. If you move you'll git a bullet in your guts.”
The M. P. stuck out a square jaw; he had a sallow skin, puffy under the eyes that were grey and lustreless.
“He says he's in some goddam School Detachment. First time that's been pulled, ain't it?”
“School Detachment. D'you mean an O. T. C?” Bill sank laughing into his chair by the window, spreading his legs out over the floor.
“Ain't that rich?” said Handsome, laughing shrilly again.
“Got any papers on ye? Ye must have some sort of papers.”
Andrews searched his pockets. He flushed.
“I ought to have a school pass.”
“You sure ought. Gee, this guy's simple,” said Bill, leaning far back in the chair and blowing smoke through his nose.
“Look at his dawg-tag, Handsome.”
The man strode over to Andrews and jerked open the top of his tunic. Andrews pulled his body away.
“I haven't got any on. I forgot to put any on this morning.”
“No tag, no insignia.”
“Yes, I have, infantry.”
“No papers.... I bet he's been out a hell of a time,” said Handsome meditatively.
“Better put the cuffs on him,” said Bill in the middle of a yawn.
“Let's wait a while. When's the loot coming?”
“Not till night.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. Ain't no train.”
“How about a side car?”
“No, I know he ain't comin',” snarled Bill.
“What d'you say we have a little liquor, Bill? Bet this bloke's got money. You'll set us up to a glass o' cognac, won't you, School Detachment?”
Andrews sat very stiff in his chair, staring at them.
“Yes,” he said, “order up what you like.”
“Keep an eye on him, Handsome. You never can tell what this quiet kind's likely to pull off on you.”
Bill Huggis strode out of the room with heavy steps. In a moment he came back swinging a bottle of cognac in his hand.
“Tole the Madame you'd pay, Skinny,” said the man as he passed Andrews's chair. Andrews nodded.
The two M. P.'s drew up to the table beside which Andrews sat. Andrews could not keep his eyes off them. Bill Huggis hummed as he pulled the cork out of the bottle.
“It's the smile that makes you happy, It's the smile that makes you sad.”
Handsome watched him, grinning.
Suddenly they both burst out laughing.
“An' the damn fool thinks he's in a school battalion,” said Handsome in his shrill voice.
“It'll be another kind of a battalion you'll be in, Skinny,” cried Bill Huggis. He stifled his laughter with a long drink from the bottle.
He smacked his lips.
“Not so goddam bad,” he said. Then he started humming again:
“It's the smile that makes you happy, It's the smile that makes you sad.”
“Have some, Skinny?” said Handsome, pushing the bottle towards Andrews.
“No, thanks,” said Andrews.
“Ye won't be gettin' good cognac where yer goin', Skinny, not by a damn sight,” growled Bill Huggis in the middle of a laugh.
“All right, I'll take a swig.” An idea had suddenly come into Andrews's head.
“Gee, the bastard kin drink cognac,” cried Handsome.
“Got enough money to buy us another bottle?”
Andrews nodded. He wiped his mouth absently with his handkerchief; he had drunk the raw cognac without tasting it.
“Get another bottle, Handsome,” said Bill Huggis carelessly. A purplish flush had appeared in the lower part of his cheeks. When the other man came back, he burst out laughing.
“The last cognac this Skinny guy from the school detachment'll get for many a day. Better drink up strong, Skinny.... They don't have that stuff down on the farm.... School Detachment; I'll be goddamned!” He leaned back in his chair, shaking with laughter.
Handsome's face was crimson. Only the zigzag scar over his eye remained white. He was swearing in a low voice as he worked the cork out of the bottle.
Andrews could not keep his eyes off the men's faces. They went from one to the other, in spite of him. Now and then, for an instant, he caught a glimpse of the yellow and brown squares of the wall paper and the bar with a few empty bottles behind it. He tried to count the bottles; “one, two, three...” but he was staring in the lustreless grey eyes of Bill Huggis, who lay back in his chair, blowing smoke out of his nose, now and then reaching for the cognac bottle, all the while humming faintly, under his breath:
“It's the smile that makes you happy, It's the smile that makes you sad.”
Handsome sat with his elbows on the table, and his chin in his beefy hands. His face was flushed crimson, but the skin was softly moulded, like a woman's.
The light in the room was beginning to grow grey.
Handsome and Bill Huggis stood up. A young officer, with clearly-marked features and a campaign hat worn a little on one side, came in, stood with his feet wide apart in the middle of the floor.
Andrews went up to him.
“I'm in the Sorbonne Detachment, Lieutenant, stationed in Paris.”
“Don't you know enough to salute?” said the officer, looking him up and down. “One of you men teach him to salute,” he said slowly.
Handsome made a step towards Andrews and hit him with his fist between the eyes. There was a flash of light and the room swung round, and there was a splitting crash as his head struck the floor. He got to his feet. The fist hit him in the same place, blinding him, the three figures and the bright oblong of the window swung round. A chair crashed down with him, and a hard rap in the back of his skull brought momentary blackness.
“That's enough, let him be,” he heard a voice far away at the end of a black tunnel.
A great weight seemed to be holding him down as he struggled to get up, blinded by tears and blood. Rending pains darted like arrows through his head. There were handcuffs on his wrists.
“Git up,” snarled a voice.
He got to his feet, faint light came through the streaming tears in his eyes. His forehead flamed as if hot coals were being pressed against it.
“Prisoner, attention!” shouted the officer's voice. “March!”
Automatically, Andrews lifted one foot and then the other. He felt in his face the cool air of the street. On either side of him were the hard steps of the M. P.'s. Within him a nightmare voice was shrieking, shrieking.
I
The uncovered garbage cans clattered as they were thrown one by one into the truck. Dust, and a smell of putrid things, hung in the air about the men as they worked. A guard stood by with his legs wide apart, and his rifle-butt on the pavement between them. The early mist hung low, hiding the upper windows of the hospital. From the door beside which the garbage cans were ranged came a thick odor of carbolic. The last garbage can rattled into place on the truck, the four prisoners and the guard clambered on, finding room as best they could among the cans, from which dripped bloody bandages, ashes, and bits of decaying food, and the truck rumbled off towards the incinerator, through the streets of Paris that sparkled with the gaiety of early morning.
The prisoners wore no tunics; their shirts and breeches had dark stains of grease and dirt; on their hands were torn canvas gloves. The guard was a sheepish, pink-faced youth, who kept grinning apologetically, and had trouble keeping his balance when the truck went round corners.
“How many days do they keep a guy on this job, Happy?” asked a boy with mild blue eyes and a creamy complexion, and reddish curly hair.
“Damned if I know, kid; as long as they please, I guess,” said the bull-necked man next him, who had a lined prize fighter's face, with a heavy protruding jaw.
Then, after looking at the boy for a minute, with his face twisted into an astonished sort of grin, he went on: “Say, kid, how in hell did you git here? Robbin' the cradle, Oi call it, to send you here, kid.”
“I stole a Ford,” the boy answered cheerfully.
“Like hell you did!”
“Sold it for five hundred francs.”
Happy laughed, and caught hold of an ash can to keep from being thrown out of the jolting truck.
“Kin ye beat that, guard?” he cried. “Ain't that somethin'?”
The guard sniggered.
“Didn't send me to Leavenworth 'cause I was so young,” went on the kid placidly.
“How old are you, kid?” asked Andrews, who was leaning against the driver's seat.
“Seventeen,” said the boy, blushing and casting his eyes down.
“He must have lied like hell to git in this goddam army,” boomed the deep voice of the truck driver, who had leaned over to spit s long squirt of tobacco juice.
The truck driver jammed the brakes on. The garbage cans banged against each other.
The Kid cried out in pain: “Hold your horses, can't you? You nearly broke my leg.”
The truck driver was swearing in a long string of words.
“Goddam these dreamin', skygazin' sons of French bastards. Why don't they get out of your way? Git out an' crank her up, Happy.”
“Guess a feller'd be lucky if he'd break his leg or somethin'; don't you think so, Skinny?” said the fourth prisoner in a low voice.
“It'll take mor'n a broken leg to git you out o' this labor battalion, Hoggenback. Won't it, guard?” said Happy, as he climbed on again.
The truck jolted away, trailing a haze of cinder dust and a sour stench of garbage behind it. Andrews noticed all at once that they were going down the quais along the river. Notre Dame was rosy in the misty sunlight, the color of lilacs in full bloom. He looked at it fixedly a moment, and then looked away. He felt very far from it, like a man looking at the stars from the bottom of a pit.
“My mate, he's gone to Leavenworth for five years,” said the Kid when they had been silent some time listening to the rattle of the garbage cans as the trucks jolted over the cobbles.
“Helped yer steal the Ford, did he?” asked Happy.
“Ford nothin'! He sold an ammunition train. He was a railroad man. He was a mason, that's why he only got five years.”
“I guess five years in Leavenworth's enough for anybody,” muttered Hoggenback, scowling. He was a square-shouldered dark man, who always hung his head when he worked.
“We didn't meet up till we got to Paris; we was on a hell of a party together at the Olympia. That's where they picked us up. Took us to the Bastille. Ever been in the Bastille?”
“I have,” said Hoggenback.
“Ain't no joke, is it?”
“Christ!” said Hoggenback. His face flushed a furious red. He turned away and looked at the civilians walking briskly along the early morning streets, at the waiters in shirt sleeves swabbing off the cafe tables, at the women pushing handcarts full of bright-colored vegetables over the cobblestones.
“I guess they ain't nobody gone through what we guys go through with,” said Happy. “It'd be better if the ole war was still a' goin', to my way o' thinkin'. They'd chuck us into the trenches then. Ain't so low as this.”
“Look lively,” shouted the truck driver, as the truck stopped in a dirty yard full of cinder piles. “Ain't got all day. Five more loads to get yet.”
The guard stood by with angry face and stiff limbs; for he feared there were officers about, and the prisoners started unloading the garbage cans; their nostrils were full of the stench of putrescence; between their lips was a gritty taste of cinders.
The air in the dark mess shack was thick with steam from the kitchen at one end. The men filed past the counter, holding out their mess kits, into which the K. P.'s splashed the food. Occasionally someone stopped to ask for a larger helping in an ingratiating voice. They ate packed together at long tables of roughly planed boards, stained from the constant spilling of grease and coffee and still wet from a perfunctory scrubbing. Andrews sat at the end of a bench, near the door through which came the glimmer of twilight, eating slowly, surprised at the relish with which he ate the greasy food, and at the exhausted contentment that had come over him almost in spite of himself. Hoggenback sat opposite him.
“Funny,” he said to Hoggenback, “it's not really as bad as I thought it would be.”
“What d'you mean, this labor battalion? Hell, a feller can put up with anything; that's one thing you learn in the army.”
“I guess people would rather put up with things than make an effort to change them.”
“You're goddam right. Got a butt?”
Andrews handed him a cigarette. They got to their feet and walked out into the twilight, holding their mess kits in front of them. As they were washing their mess kits in a tub of greasy water, where bits of food floated in a thick scum, Hoggenback suddenly said in a low voice:
“But it all piles up, Buddy; some day there'll be an accountin'. D'you believe in religion?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I come of folks as done their own accountin'. My father an' my gran'father before him. A feller can't eat his bile day after day, day after day.”
“I'm afraid he can, Hoggenback,” broke in Andrews. They walked towards the barracks.
“Goddam it, no,” cried Hoggenback aloud. “There comes a point where you can't eat yer bile any more, where it don't do no good to cuss. Then you runs amuck.” Hanging his head he went slowly into the barracks.
Andrews leaned against the outside of the building, staring up at the sky. He was trying desperately to think, to pull together a few threads of his life in this moment of respite from the nightmare. In five minutes the bugle would din in his ears, and he would be driven into the barracks. A tune came to his head that he played with eagerly for a moment, and then, as memory came to him, tried to efface with a shudder of disgust.
“There's the smile that makes you happy,There's the smile that makes you sad.”
It was almost dark. Two men walked slowly by in front of him.
“Sarge, may I speak to you?” came a voice in a whisper.
The sergeant grunted.
“I think there's two guys trying to break loose out of here.”
“Who? If you're wrong it'll be the worse for you, remember that.”
“Surley an' Watson. I heard 'em talkin' about it behind the latrine.”
“Damn fools.”
“They was sayin' they'd rather be dead than keep up this life.”
“They did, did they?”
“Don't talk so loud, Sarge. It wouldn't do for any of the fellers to know I was talkin' to yer. Say, Sarge...” the voice became whining, “don't you think I've nearly served my time down here?”
“What do I know about that? 'Tain't my job.”
“But, Sarge, I used to be company clerk with my old outfit. Don't ye need a guy round the office?” Andrews strode past them into the barracks. Dull fury possessed him. He took off his clothes and got silently into his blankets.
Hoggenback and Happy were talking beside his bunk.
“Never you mind,” said Hoggenback, “somebody'll get that guy sooner or later.”
“Git him, nauthin'! The fellers in that camp was so damn skeered they jumped if you snapped yer fingers at 'em. It's the discipline. I'm tellin' yer, it gits a feller in the end,” said Happy.
Andrews lay without speaking, listening to their talk, aching in every muscle from the crushing work of the day.
“They court-martialled that guy, a feller told me,” went on Hoggenback. “An' what d'ye think they did to him? Retired on half pay. He was a major.”
“Gawd, if I iver git out o' this army, I'll be so goddam glad,” began Happy. Hoggenback interrupted:
“That you'll forgit all about the raw deal they gave you, an' tell everybody how fine ye liked it.”
Andrews felt the mocking notes of the bugle outside stabbing his ears. A non-com's voice roared: “Quiet,” from the end of the building, and the lights went out. Already Andrews could hear the deep breathing of men asleep. He lay awake, staring into the darkness, his body throbbing with the monotonous rhythms of the work of the day. He seemed still to hear the sickening whine in the man's voice as he talked to the sergeant outside in the twilight. “And shall I be reduced to that?” he was asking himself.
Andrews was leaving the latrine when he heard a voice call softly, “Skinny.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Come here, I want to talk to you.” It was the Kid's voice. There was no light in the ill-smelling shack that served for a latrine. Outside they could hear the guard humming softly to himself as he went back and forth before the barracks door.
“Let's you and me be buddies, Skinny.”
“Sure,” said Andrews.
“Say, what d'you think the chance is o' cuttin' loose?”
“Pretty damn poor,” said Andrews.
“Couldn't you just make a noise like a hoop an' roll away?”
They giggled softly.
Andrews put his hand on the boy's arm.
“But, Kid, it's too risky. I got in this fix by taking a risk. I don't feel like beginning over again, and if they catch you, it's desertion. Leavenworth for twenty years, or life. That'd be the end of everything.”
“Well, what the hell's this?”
“Oh, I don't know; they've got to let us out some day.”
“Sh... sh....”
Kid put his hand suddenly over Andrews's mouth. They stood rigid, so that they could hear their hearts pounding.
Outside there was a brisk step on the gravel. The sentry halted and saluted. The steps faded into the distance, and the sentry's humming began again.
“They put two fellers in the jug for a month for talking like we are.... In solitary,” whispered Kid.
“But, Kid, I haven't got the guts to try anything now.”
“Sure you have, Skinny. You an' me's got more guts than all the rest of 'em put together. God, if people had guts, you couldn't treat 'em like they were curs. Look, if I can ever get out o' this, I've got a hunch I can make a good thing writing movie scenarios. I want to get on in the world, Skinny.”
“But, Kid, you won't be able to go back to the States.”
“I don't care. New Rochelle's not the whole world. They got the movies in Italy, ain't they?”
“Sure. Let's go to bed.”
“All right. Look, you an' me are buddies from now on, Skinny.”
Andrews felt the Kid's hand press his arm.
In his dark, airless bunk, in the lowest of three tiers, Andrews lay awake a long time, listening to the snores and the heavy breathing about him. Thoughts fluttered restlessly in his head, but in his blank hopelessness he could only frown and bite his lips, and roll his head from side to side on the rolled-up tunic he used for a pillow, listening with desperate attention to the heavy breathing of the men who slept above him and beside him.
When he fell asleep he dreamed that he was alone with Genevieve Rod in the concert hall of the Schola Cantorum, and that he was trying desperately hard to play some tune for her on the violin, a tune he kept forgetting, and in the agony of trying to remember, the tears streamed down his cheeks. Then he had his arms round Genevieve's shoulders and was kissing her, kissing her, until he found that it was a wooden board he was kissing, a wooden board on which was painted a face with broad forehead and great pale brown eyes, and small tight lips, and all the while a boy who seemed to be both Chrisfield and the Kid kept telling him to run or the M.P.'s would get him. Then he sat frozen in icy terror with a bottle in his hand, while a frightful voice behind him sang very loud:
“There's the smile that makes you happy,There's the smile that makes you sad.”
The bugle woke him, and he sat up with such a start that he hit his head hard against the bunk above him. He lay back cringing from the pain like a child. But he had to hurry desperately to get his clothes on in time for roll call. It was with a feeling of relief that he found that mess was not ready, and that men were waiting in line outside the kitchen shack, stamping their feet and clattering their mess kits as they moved about through the chilly twilight of the spring morning. Andrews found he was standing behind Hoggenback.
“How's she comin', Skinny?” whispered Hoggenback, in his low mysterious voice.
“Oh, we're all in the same boat,” said Andrews with a laugh.
“Wish it'd sink,” muttered the other man. “D'ye know,” he went on after a pause, “I kinder thought an edicated guy like you'd be able to keep out of a mess like this. I wasn't brought up without edication, but I guess I didn't have enough.”
“I guess most of 'em can; I don't sec that it's much to the point. A man suffers as much if he doesn't know how to read and write as if he had a college education.”
“I dunno, Skinny. A feller who's led a rough life can put up with an awful lot. The thing is, Skinny, I might have had a commission if I hadn't been so damned impatient.... I'm a lumberman by trade, and my dad's cleaned up a pretty thing in war contracts jus' a short time ago. He could have got me in the engineers if I hadn't gone off an' enlisted.”
“Why did you?”
“I was restless-like. I guess I wanted to see the world. I didn't care about the goddam war, but I wanted to see what things was like over here.”
“Well, you've seen,” said Andrews, smiling.
“In the neck,” said Hoggenback, as he pushed out his cup for coffee.
In the truck that was taking them to work, Andrews and the Kid sat side by side on the jouncing backboard and tried to talk above the rumble of the exhaust.
“Like Paris?” asked the Kid.
“Not this way,” said Andrews.
“Say, one of the guys said you could parlay French real well. I want you to teach me. A guy's got to know languages to get along in this country.”
“But you must know some.”
“Bedroom French,” said the Kid, laughing.
“Well?”
“But if I want to write a movie scenario for an Eytalian firm, I can't just write 'voulay-vous couchezavecmoa' over and over again.”
“But you'll have to learn Italian, Kid.”
“I'm goin' to. Say, ain't they taking us a hell of a ways today, Skinny?”
“We're goin' to Passy Wharf to unload rock,” said somebody in a grumbling voice.
“No, it's a cement... cement for the stadium we're presentin' the French Nation. Ain't you read in the 'Stars and Stripes' about it?”
“I'd present 'em with a swift kick, and a hell of a lot of other people, too.”
“So we have to sweat unloadin' cement all day,” muttered Hoggenback, “to give these goddam frawgs a stadium.”
“If it weren't that it'd be somethin' else.”
“But, ain't we got folks at home to work for?” cried Hoggenback. “Mightn't all this sweat be doin' some good for us? Building a stadium! My gawd!”
“Pile out there.... Quick!” rasped a voice from the driver's seat.
Through the haze of choking white dust, Andrews got now and then a glimpse of the grey-green river, with its tugboats sporting their white cockades of steam and their long trailing plumes of smoke, and its blunt-nosed barges and its bridges, where people walked jauntily back and forth, going about their business, going where they wanted to go. The bags of cement were very heavy, and the unaccustomed work sent racking pains through his back. The biting dust stung under his finger nails, and in his mouth and eyes. All the morning a sort of refrain went through his head: “People have spent their lives... doing only this. People have spent their lives doing only this.” As he crossed and recrossed the narrow plank from the barge to the shore, he looked at the black water speeding seawards and took extraordinary care not to let his foot slip. He did not know why, for one-half of him was thinking how wonderful it would be to drown, to forget in eternal black silence the hopeless struggle. Once he saw the Kid standing before the sergeant in charge in an attitude of complete exhaustion, and caught a glint of his blue eyes as he looked up appealingly, looking like a child begging out of a spanking. The sight amused him, and he said to himself: “If I had pink cheeks and cupid's bow lips, I might be able to go through life on my blue eyes”; and he pictured the Kid, a fat, cherubic old man, stepping out of a white limousine, the way people do in the movies, and looking about him with those same mild blue eyes. But soon he forgot everything in the agony of the heavy cement bags bearing down on his back and hips.
In the truck on the way back to the mess the Kid, looking fresh and smiling among the sweating men, like ghosts from the white dust, talking hoarsely above the clatter of the truck, sidled up very close to Andrews.
“D'you like swimmin', Skinny?”
“Yes. I'd give a lot to get some of this cement dust off me,” said Andrews, without interest.
“I once won a boy's swimmin' race at Coney,” said the Kid. Andrews did not answer.
“Were you in the swimmin' team or anything like that, Skinny, when you went to school?”
“No.... It would be wonderful to be in the water, though. I used to swim way out in Chesapeake Bay at night when the water was phosphorescent.”
Andrews suddenly found the Kid's blue eyes, bright as flames from excitement, staring into his.
“God, I'm an ass,” he muttered.
He felt the Kid's fist punch him softly in the back. “Sergeant said they was goin' to work us late as hell tonight,” the Kid was saying aloud to the men round him.
“I'll be dead if they do,” muttered Hoggenback.
“An' you a lumberjack!”
“It ain't that. I could carry their bloody bags two at a time if I wanted ter. A feller gets so goddam mad, that's all; so goddam mad. Don't he, Skinny?” Hoggenback turned to Andrews and smiled.
Andrews nodded his head.
After the first two or three bags Andrews carried in the afternoon, it seemed as if every one would be the last he could possibly lift. His back and thighs throbbed with exhaustion; his face and the tips of his fingers felt raw from the biting cement dust.
When the river began to grow purple with evening, he noticed that two civilians, young men with buff-colored coats and canes, were watching the gang at work.
“They says they's newspaper reporters, writing up how fast the army's being demobilized,” said one man in an awed voice.
“They come to the right place.”
“Tell 'em we're leavin' for home now. Loadin' our barracks bags on the steamer.”
The newspaper men were giving out cigarettes. Several men grouped round them. One shouted out:
“We're the guys does the light work. Blackjack Pershing's own pet labor battalion.”
“They like us so well they just can't let us go.”
“Damn jackasses,” muttered Hoggenback, as, with his eyes to the ground, he passed Andrews. “I could tell 'em some things'd make their goddam ears buzz.”
“Why don't you?”
“What the hell's the use? I ain't got the edication to talk up to guys like that.”
The sergeant, a short, red-faced man with a mustache clipped very short, went up to the group round the newspaper men.
“Come on, fellers, we've got a hell of a lot of this cement to get in before it rains,” he said in a kindly voice; “the sooner we get it in, the sooner we get off.”
“Listen to that bastard, ain't he juss too sweet for pie when there's company?” muttered Hoggenback on his way from the barge with a bag of cement.
The Kid brushed past Andrews without looking at him.
“Do what I do, Skinny,” he said.
Andrews did not turn round, but his heart started thumping very fast. A dull sort of terror took possession of him. He tried desperately to summon his will power, to keep from cringing, but he kept remembering the way the room had swung round when the M.P. had hit him, and heard again the cold voice of the lieutenant saying: “One of you men teach him how to salute.” Time dragged out interminably.
At last, coming back to the edge of the wharf, Andrews saw that there were no more bags in the barge. He sat down on the plank, too exhausted to think. Blue-grey dusk was closing down on everything. The Passy bridge stood out, purple against a great crimson afterglow.
The Kid sat down beside him, and threw an arm trembling with excitement round his shoulders.
“The guard's lookin' the other way. They won't miss us till they get to the truck.... Come on, Skinny,” he said in a low, quiet voice.
Holding on to the plank, he let himself down into the speeding water. Andrews slipped after him, hardly knowing what he was doing. The icy water closing about his body made him suddenly feel awake and vigorous. As he was swept by the big rudder of the barge, he caught hold of the Kid, who was holding on to a rope. They worked their way without speaking round to the outer side of the rudder. The swift river tugging savagely at them made it hard to hold on.
“Now they can't see us,” said the Kid between clenched teeth. “Can you work your shoes an' pants off?”'
Andrews started struggling with one boot, the Kid helping to hold him up with his free hand.
“Mine are off,” he said. “I was all fixed.” He laughed, though his teeth were chattering.
“All right. I've broken the laces,” said Andrews.
“Can you swim under water?”
Andrews nodded.
“We want to make for that bunch of barges the other side of the bridge. The barge people'll hide us.”
“How d'ye know they will?”
The Kid had disappeared.
Andrews hesitated a moment, then let go his hold and started swimming with the current for all his might.
At first he felt strong and exultant, but very soon he began to feel the icy grip of the water bearing him down; his arms and legs seemed to stiffen. More than against the water, he was struggling against paralysis within him, so that he thought that every moment his limbs would go rigid. He came to the surface and gasped for air. He had a second's glimpse of figures, tiny like toy soldiers, gesticulating wildly on the deck of the barge. The report of a rifle snapped through the air. He dove again, without thinking, as if his body were working independently of his mind.
The next time he came up, his eyes were blurred from the cold. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. The shadow of the bridge was just above him. He turned on his back for a second. There were lights on the bridge. A current swept him past one barge and then another. Certainty possessed him that he was going to be drowned. A voice seemed to sob in his ears grotesquely: “And so John Andrews was drowned in the Seine, drowned in the Seine, in the Seine.”
Then he was kicking and fighting in a furious rage against the coils about him that wanted to drag him down and away. The black side of a barge was slipping up stream beside him with lightning speed. How fast those barges go, he thought. Then suddenly he found that he had hold of a rope, that his shoulders were banging against the bow of a small boat, while in front of him, against the dull purple sky, towered the rudder of the barge. A strong warm hand grasped his shoulder from behind, and he was being drawn up and up, over the bow of the boat that hurt his numbed body like blows, out of the clutching coils of the water.
“Hide me, I'm a deserter,” he said over and over again in French. A brown and red face with a bristly white beard, a bulbous, mullioned sort of face, hovered over him in the middle of a pinkish mist.