Three Soldiers (33 page)

On the marble table beside Andrews were some pieces of crisp bread with butter on them, a saucer of damson jam and a bowl with coffee and hot milk from which the steam rose in a faint spiral. His tunic was un-buttoned and he rested his head on his two hands, staring through his fingers at a thick pile of ruled paper full of hastily drawn signs, some in ink and some in pencil, where now and then he made a mark with a pencil. At the other edge of the pile of papers were two books, one yellow and one white with coffee stains on it.

The fire roared and the cat slept and the old brown man stirred and stirred, rarely stopping for a moment to lift the glass to his lips. Occasionally the scratching of sleet upon the windows became audible, or there was a distant sound of dish pans through the door in the back.

The sallow-faced clock that hung above the mirror that backed the bar, jerked out one jingly strike, a half hour. Andrews did not look up. The cat still slept in front of the stove which roared with a gentle singsong. The old brown man still stirred the yellow liquid in his glass. The clock was ticking uphill towards the hour.

Andrews’s hands were cold. There was a nervous flutter in his wrists and in his chest. Inside of him was a great rift of light, infinitely vast and infinitely distant. Through it sounds poured from somewhere, so that he trembled with them to his finger tips, sounds modulated into rhythms that washed back and forth and crossed each other like sea waves in a cove, sounds clotted into harmonies.

Behind everything the Queen of Sheba, out of Flaubert, held her fantastic hand with its long, gilded finger nails on his shoulder; and he was leaning forward over the brink of life. But the image was vague, like a shadow cast on the brilliance of his mind.

The clock struck four.

The white fluffy ball of the cat unrolled very slowly. Its eyes were very round and yellow. It put first one leg and then the other out before it on the tiled floor, spreading wide the pinkey-grey claws. Its tail rose up behind it straight as the mast of a ship. With slow processional steps the cat walked towards the door.

The old brown man drank down the yellow liquid and smacked his lips twice, loudly, meditatively.

Andrews raised his head, his blue eyes looking straight before him without seeing anything. Dropping the pencil, he leaned back against the wall and stretched his arms out. Taking the coffee bowl between his two hands, he drank a little. It was cold. He piled some jam on a piece of bread and ate it, licking a little off his fingers afterwards. Then he looked towards the old brown man and said:

“On est bien ici, n’est ce pas, Monsieur Morue?”

“Oui, on est bien ici,” said the old brown man in a voice so gruff it seemed to rattle. Very slowly he got to his feet.

“Good. I am going to the barge,” he said. Then he called, “Chipette!”

“Oui, m’sieu.”

A little girl in a black apron with her hair in two tight pigtails that stood out behind her tiny bullet head as she ran, came through the door from the back part of the house.

“There, give that to your mother,” said the old brown man, putting some coppers in her hand.

“Oui, m’sieu.”

“You’ld better stay here where it’s warm,” said Andrews yawning.

“I have to work. It’s only soldiers don’t have to work,” rattled the old brown man.

When the door opened a gust of raw air circled about the wine shop, and a roar of wind and hiss of sleet came from the slush-covered quai outside. The cat took refuge beside the stove, with its back up and its tail waving. The door closed and the old brown man’s silhouette, slanted against the wind, crossed the grey oblong of the window.

Andrews settled down to work again.

“But you work a lot a lot, don’t you; M’sieu Jean?” said Chipette, putting her chin on the table beside the books and looking up into his eyes with little eyes like black beads.

“I wonder if I do.”

“When I’m grown up I shan’t work a bit. I’ll drive round in a carriage.”

Andrews laughed. Chipette looked at him for a minute and then went into the other room carrying away the empty coffee bowl.

In front of the stove the cat sat on its haunches, licking a paw rhythmically with a pink curling tongue like a rose petal.

Andrews whistled a few bars, staring at the cat.

“What d’you think of that, Minet? That’s la reine de Saba … la reine de Saba.”

The cat curled into a ball again with great deliberation and went to sleep.

Andrews began thinking of Jeanne and the thought gave him a sense of quiet well-being. Strolling with her in the evening through the streets full of men and women walking significantly together sent a languid calm through his jangling nerves which he had never known in his life before. It excited him to be with her, but very suavely, so that he forgot that his limbs were swathed stiffly in an uncomfortable uniform, so that his feverish desire seemed to fly out of him until with her body beside him, he seemed to drift effortlessly in the stream of the lives of all the people he passed, so languid from the quiet loves that streamed up about him that the hard walls of his personality seemed to have melted entirely into the mistiness of twilight streets. And for a moment as he thought of it a scent of flowers, heavy with pollen, and sprouting grass and damp moss and swelling sap, seemed to tingle in his nostrils. Sometimes, swimming in the ocean on a rough day, he had felt that same reckless exhilaration when, towards the shore, a huge seething wave had caught him up and sped him forward on its crest. Sitting quietly in the empty wine shop that grey afternoon, he felt his blood grumble and swell in his veins as the new life was grumbling and swelling in the sticky buds of the trees, in the tender green quick under their rough bark, in the little furry animals of the woods and in the sweet-smelling cattle that tramped into mud the lush meadows. In the premonition of spring was a resistless wave of force that carried him and all of them with it tumultuously.

The clock struck five.

Andrews jumped to his feet and still struggling into his overcoat darted out of the door.

A raw wind blew on the square. The river was a muddy grey-green, swollen and rapid. A hoarse triumphant roaring came from it. The sleet had stopped; but the pavements were covered with slush and in the gutters were large puddles which the wind ruffled. Everything,—houses, bridges, river and sky,—was in shades of cold grey-green, broken by one jagged ochre-colored rift across the sky against which the bulk of Notre Dame and the slender spire of the crossing rose dark and purplish. Andrews walked with long strides, splashing through the puddles, until, opposite the low building of the Morgue, he caught a crowded green bus.

Outside the Hotel Crillon were many limousines, painted olive-drab, with numbers in white letters on the doors; the drivers, men with their olive-drab coat collars turned up round their red faces, stood in groups under the portico. Andrews passed the sentry and went through the revolving doors into the lobby, which was vividly familiar. It had the smell he remembered having smelt in the lobbies of New York hôtels,—a smell of cigar smoke and furniture polish. On one side a door led to a big dining room where many men and women were having tea, from which came a smell of pastry and rich food. On the expanse of red carpet in front of him officers and civilians stood in groups talking in low voices. There was a sound of jingling spurs and jingling dishes from the restaurant, and near where Andrews stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, sprawled in a leather chair a fat man with a black felt hat over his eyes and a large watch chain dangling limply over his bulbous paunch. He cleared his throat occasionally with a rasping noise and spat loudly into the spittoon beside him.

At last Andrews caught sight of Aubrey, who was dapper with white cheeks and tortoise shell glasses.

“Come along,” he said, seizing Andrews by the arm.

“You are late.” Then, he went on, whispering in Andrews’s ear as they went out through the revolving doors: “Great things happened in the Conference today. … I can tell you that, old man.”

They crossed the bridge towards the portico of the Chamber of Deputies with its high pediment and its grey columns. Down the river they could see faintly the Eiffel Tower with a drift of mist athwart it, like a section of spider web spun between the city and the clouds.

“Do we have to go to see these people, Aubrey?”

“Yes, you can’t back out now. Geneviève Rod wants to know about American music.”

“But what on earth can I tell her about American music?”

“Wasn’t there a man named MacDowell who went mad or something?”

Andrews laughed.

“But you know I haven’t any social graces. … I suppose I’ll have to say I think Foch is a little tin god.”

“You needn’t say anything if you don’t want to. … They’re very advanced, anyway.”

“Oh, rats!”

They were going up a brown-carpeted stair that had engravings on the landings, where there was a faint smell of stale food and dustpans. At the top landing Aubrey rang the bell at a varnished door. In a moment a girl opened it. She had a cigarette in her hand, her face was pale under a mass of reddish-chestnut hair, her eyes very large, a pale brown, as large as the eyes of women in those paintings of Artemisias and Berenikes found in tombs in the Fayum. She wore a plain black dress.

“Enfin!” she said, and held out her hand to Aubrey.

“There’s my friend Andrews.” She held out her hand to him absently, still looking at Aubrey.

“Does he speak French? … Good. … This way.”

They went into a large room with a piano where an elderly woman, with grey hair and yellow teeth and the same large eyes as her daughter, stood before the fireplace.

“Maman … enfin ils arrivent, ces messieurs.”

“Geneviève was afraid you weren’t coming,” Mme. Rod said to Andrews, smiling. “Monsieur Aubrey gave us such a picture of your playing that we have been excited all day. … We adore music.”

“I wish I could do something more to the point with it than adore it,” said Geneviève Rod hastily, then she went on with a laugh: “But I forget. … Monsieur Andrews. … Monsieur Ronsard.” She made a gesture with her hand from Andrews to a young Frenchman in a cut-away coat, with small mustaches and a very tight vest, who bowed towards Andrews.

“Now we’ll have tea,” said Geneviève Rod. “Everybody talks sense until they’ve had tea. … It’s only after tea that anyone is ever amusing.” She pulled open some curtains that covered the door into the adjoining room.

“I understand why Sarah Bernhardt is so fond of curtains,” she said. “They give an air of drama to existence. … There is nothing more heroic than curtains.”

She sat at the head of an oak table where were china platters with vari-colored pastries, an old pewter kettle under which an alcohol lamp burned, a Dresden china teapot in pale yellows and greens, and cups and saucers and plates with a double-headed eagle design in dull vermillion.

“Tout ça,” said Geneviève, waving her hand across the table, “c’est Boche. … But we haven’t any others, so they’ll have to do.”

The older woman, who sat beside her, whispered something in her ear and laughed.

Geneviève put on a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles and starting pouring out tea.

“Debussy once drank out of that cup. … It’s cracked,” she said, handing a cup to John Andrews. “Do you know anything of Moussorgski’s you can play to us after tea?”

“I can’t play anything any more. … Ask me three months from now.”

“Oh, yes, but nobody expects you to do any tricks with it. You can certainly make it intelligible. That’s all I want.”

“I have my doubts.”

Andrews sipped his tea slowly, looking now and then at Geneviève Rod who had suddenly begun talking very fast to Ronsard. She held a cigarette between the fingers of a long thin hand. Her large pale-brown eyes kept their startled look of having just opened on the world; a little smile appeared and disappeared maliciously in the curve of her cheek away from her small firm lips. The older woman beside her kept looking round the table with a jolly air of hospitality, and showing her yellow teeth in a smile.

Afterwards they went back to the sitting room and Andrews sat down at the piano. The girl sat very straight on a little chair beside the piano. Andrews ran his fingers up and down the keys.

“Did you say you knew Debussy?” he said suddenly.

“I? No; but he used to come to see my father when I was a little girl. … I have been brought up in the middle of music. … That shows how silly it is to be a woman. There is no music in my head. Of course I am sensitive to it, but so are the tables and chairs in this apartment, after all they’ve heard.”

Andrews started playing Schumann. He stopped suddenly.

“Can you sing?” he said.

“No.”

“I’d like to do the
Croses Lyriques.
… I’ve never heard them.”

“I once tried to sing
de Soir,
” she said.

“Wonderful. Do bring it out.”

“But, good Lord, it’s too difficult.”

“What is the use of being fond of music if you aren’t willing to mangle it for the sake of producing it? … I swear I’d rather hear a man picking out
Auprès de ma Blonde
on a trombone than Kreisler playing Paganini impeccably enough to make you ill.”