Three Soldiers (28 page)

Andrews, and six other men from his division, sat at a table outside the café 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 café 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 skyscrapers. …”

“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 Berdjairs; 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’s 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’s 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’ld 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 cafés 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 Odéon 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 Places des Médicis,” said Henslowe.