Three Soldiers (40 page)

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’ld sink,” muttered the other man. “D’ye know,” he went on after a pause, “I kinder thought an edicated guy like you’ld 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 see 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 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’ ce-ment all day,” muttered Hoggenback, “to give these goddam frawgs a stadium.”

“If it weren’t that it’ld 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.

“Oh, qu’il est propre! Oh, qu’il a la peau blanche!” Women’s voices were shrilling behind the mist. A coverlet that felt soft and fuzzy against his skin was being put about him. He was very warm and torpid. But somewhere in his thoughts a black crawling thing like a spider was trying to reach him, trying to work its way through the pinkish veils of torpor. After a long while he managed to roll over, and looked about him.

“Mais reste tranquille,” came the woman’s shrill voice again.

“And the other one? Did you see the other one?” he asked in a choked whisper.

“Yes, it’s all right. I’m drying it by the stove,” came another woman’s voice, deep and growling, almost like a man’s.

“Maman’s drying your money by the stove. It’s all safe. How rich they are, these Americans!”

“And to think that I nearly threw it overboard with the trousers,” said the other woman again.

John Andrews began to look about him. He was in a dark low cabin. Behind him, in the direction of the voices, a yellow light flickered. Great dishevelled shadows of heads moved about on the ceiling. Through the close smell of the cabin came a warmth of food cooking. He could hear the soothing hiss of frying grease.

“But didn’t you see the Kid?” he asked in English, dazedly trying to pull himself together, to think coherently. Then he went on in French in a more natural voice:

“There was another one with me.”

“We saw no one. Rosaline, ask the old man,” said the older woman.

“No, he didn’t see anyone,” came the girl’s shrill voice. She walked over to the bed and pulled the coverlet round Andrews with an awkward gesture. Looking up at her, he had a glimpse of the bulge of her breasts and her large teeth that glinted in the lamplight, and very vague in the shadow, a mop of snaky, disordered hair.

“Qu’il parle bien français,” she said, beaming at him.

Heavy steps shuffled across the cabin as the older woman came up to the bed and peered in his face.

“Il va mieux,” she said, with a knowing air.

She was a broad woman with a broad flat face and a swollen body swathed in shawls. Her eyebrows were very bushy, and she had thick grey whiskers that came down to a point on either side of her mouth, as well as a few bristling hairs on her chin. Her voice was deep and growling, and seemed to come from far down inside her huge body.

Steps creaked somewhere, and the old man looked at him through spectacles placed on the end of his nose. Andrews recognized the irregular face full of red knobs and protrusions.

“Thanks very much,” he said.

All three looked at him silently for some time. Then the old man pulled a newspaper out of his pocket, unfolded it carefully, and fluttered it above Andrews’s eyes. In the scant light Andrews made out the name: “Libertaire.”

“That’s why,” said the old man, looking at Andrews fixedly, through his spectacles.

“I’m a sort of a socialist,” said Andrews.

“Socialists are good-for-nothings,” snarled the old man, every red protrusion on his face seeming to get redder.

“But I have great sympathy for anarchist comrades,” went on Andrews, feeling a certain liveliness of amusement go through him and fade again.

“Lucky you caught hold of my rope, instead of getting on to the next barge. He’d have given you up for sure. Sont des royalistes, ces salaudsla.”

“We must give him something to eat; hurry, Maman. … Don’t worry, he’ll pay, won’t you, my little American?”

Andrews nodded his head.

“All you want,” he said.

“No, if he says he’s a comrade, he shan’t pay, not a sou,” growled the old man.

“We’ll see about that,” cried the old woman, drawing her breath in with an angry whistling sound.

“It’s only that living’s so dear nowadays,” came the girl’s voice.

“Oh, I’ll pay anything I’ve got,” said Andrews peevishly, closing his eyes again.

He lay a long while on his back without moving.

A hand shoved in between his back and the pillow roused him. He sat up. Rosaline was holding a bowl of broth in front of him that steamed in his face.

“Mange ça,” she said.

He looked into her eyes, smiling. Her rusty hair was neatly combed. A bright green parrot with a scarlet splash in its wings, balanced itself un-steadily on her shoulder, looking at Andrews out of angry eyes, hard as gems.

“Il est jaloux, coco,” said Rosaline, with a shrill little giggle. Andrews took the bowl in his two hands and drank some of the scalding broth.

“It’s too hot,” he said, leaning back against the girl’s arm.

The parrot squawked out a sentence that Andrews did not understand. Andrews heard the old man’s voice answer from somewhere behind him:

“Nom de Dieu!”

The parrot squawked again.

Rosaline laughed.

“It’s the old man who taught him that,” she said. “Poor Coco, he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“What does he say?” asked Andrews.

“‘Les bourgeois à la lanterne, nom de dieu!’ It’s from a song,” said Rosaline. “Oh, qu’il est malin, ce Coco!”

Rosaline was standing with her arms folded beside the bunk. The parrot stretched out his neck and rubbed it against her cheek, closing and unclosing his gem-like eyes. The girl formed her lips into a kiss, and murmured in a drowsy voice:

“Tu m’aimes, Coco, n’est-ce pas, Coco? Bon Coco.”

“Could I have something more, I’m awfully hungry,” said Andrews.

“Oh, I was forgetting,” cried Rosaline, running off with the empty bowl.

In a moment she came back without the parrot, with the bowl in her hand full of a brown stew of potatoes and meat.

Andrews ate it mechanically, and handed back the bowl.

“Thank you,” he said, “I am going to sleep.”

He settled himself into the bunk. Rosaline drew the covers up about him and tucked them in round his shoulders. Her hand seemed to linger a moment as it brushed past his cheek. But Andrews had already sunk into a torpor again, feeling nothing but the warmth of the food within him and a great stiffness in his legs and arms.

When he woke up the light was grey instead of yellow, and a swishing sound puzzled him. He lay listening to it for a long time, wondering what it was. At last the thought came with a sudden warm spurt of joy that the barge must be moving.

He lay very quietly on his back, looking up at the faint silvery light on the ceiling of the bunk, thinking of nothing, with only a vague dread in the back of his head that someone would come to speak to him, to question him.

After a long time he began to think of Geneviève Rod. He was having a long conversation with her about his music, and in his imagination she kept telling him that he must finish the “Queen of Sheba,” and that she would show it to Monsieur Gibier, who was a great friend of a certain concert director, who might get it played. How long ago it must be since they had talked about that. A picture floated through his mind of himself and Geneviève standing shoulder to shoulder looking at the Cathedral at Chartres, which stood up nonchalantly, above the tumultuous roofs of the town, with its sober tower and its gaudy towers and the great rose windows between. Inexorably his memory carried him forward, moment by moment, over that day, until he writhed with shame and revolt. Good god! Would he have to go on all his life remembering that? “Teach him how to salute,” the officer had said, and Handsome had stepped up to him and hit him. Would he have to go on all his life remembering that?

“We tied up the uniform with some stones, and threw it overboard,” said Rosaline, jabbing him in the shoulder to draw his attention.

“That was a good idea.”

“Are you going to get up? It’s nearly time to eat. How you have slept.”

“But I haven’t anything to put on,” said Andrews, laughing, and waved a bare arm above the bedclothes.

“Wait, I’ll find something of the old man’s. Say, do all Americans have skin so white as that? Look.”

She put her brown hand, with its grimed and broken nails, on Andrews’s arm, that was white with a few silky yellow hairs.

“It’s because I’m blond,” said Andrews. “There are plenty of blond Frenchmen, aren’t there?”

Rosaline ran off giggling, and came back in a moment with a pair of corduroy trousers and a torn flannel shirt that smelt of pipe tobacco.

“That’ll do for now,” she said. “It’s warm today for April. Tonight we’ll buy you some clothes and shoes. Where are you going?”

“By God, I don’t know.”

“We’re going to Havre for cargo.” She put both hands to her head and began rearranging her straggling rusty-colored hair. “Oh, my hair,” she said, “it’s the water, you know. You can’t keep respectable-looking on these filthy barges. Say, American, why don’t you stay with us a while? You can help the old man run the boat.”

He found suddenly that her eyes were looking into his with trembling eagerness.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said carelessly. “I wonder if it’s safe to go on deck.”

She turned away from him petulantly and led the way up the ladder.

“Oh, v’là le camarade,” cried the old man who was leaning with all his might against the long tiller of the barge. “Come and help me.”

The barge was the last of a string of four that were describing a wide curve in the midst of a reach of silvery river full of glittering patches of pale, pea-green lavender, hemmed in on either side by frail blue roots of poplars. The sky was a mottled luminous grey with occasional patches, the color of robins’ eggs. Andrews breathed in the dank smell of the river and leaned against the tiller when he was told to, answering the old man’s curt questions.

He stayed with the tiller when the rest of them went down to the cabin to eat. The pale colors and the swishing sound of the water and the blue-green banks slipping by and unfolding on either hand, were as soothing as his deep sleep had been. Yet they seemed only a veil covering other realities, where men stood interminably in line and marched with legs made all the same length on the drill field, and wore the same clothes and cringed before the same hierarchy of polished belts and polished puttees and stiff-visored caps, that had its homes in vast offices crammed with index cards and card catalogues; a world full of the tramp of marching, where cold voices kept saying:—“Teach him how to salute.” Like a bird in a net, Andrews’s mind struggled to free itself from the obsession.

Then he thought of his table in his room in Paris, with its piled sheets of ruled paper, and he felt he wanted nothing in the world except to work. It would not matter what happened to him if he could only have time to weave into designs the tangled skein of music that seethed through him as the blood seethed through his veins.

There he stood, leaning against the long tiller, watching the blue-green poplars glide by, here and there reflected in the etched silver mirror of the river, feeling the moist river wind flutter his ragged shirt, thinking of nothing.

After a while the old man came up out of the cabin, his face purplish, puffing clouds of smoke out of his pipe.

“All right, young fellow, go down and eat,” he said.

Andrews lay flat on his belly on the deck, with his chin resting on the back of his two hands. The barge was tied up along the river bank among many other barges. Beside him, a small fuzzy dog barked furiously at a yellow mongrel on the shore. It was nearly dark, and through the pearly mist of the river came red oblongs of light from the taverns along the bank. A slip of a new moon, shrouded in haze, was setting behind the poplar trees. Amid the round of despairing thoughts, the memory of the Kid intruded itself. He had sold a Ford for five hundred francs, and gone on a party with a man who’d stolen an ammunition train, and he wanted to write for the Italian movies. No war could down people like that. Andrews smiled, looking into the black water. Funny, the Kid was dead, probably, and he, John Andrews, was alive and free. And he lay there moping, still whimpering over old wrongs. “For God’s sake be a man!” he said to himself. He got to his feet.

At the cabin door, Rosaline was playing with the parrot.

“Give me a kiss, Coco,” she was saying in a drowsy voice, “just a little kiss. Just a little kiss for Rosaline, poor little Rosaline.”

The parrot, which Andrews could hardly see in the dusk, leaned towards her, fluttering his feathers, making little clucking noises.

Rosaline caught sight of Andrews.

“Oh, I thought you’d gone to have a drink with the old man,” she cried.

“No. I stayed here.”

“D’you like it, this life?”

Rosaline put the parrot back on his perch, where he swayed from side to side, squawking in protest: “Les bourgeois à la lanterne, nom de dieu!”

They both laughed.

“Oh, it must be a wonderful life. This barge seems like heaven after the army.”

“But they pay you well, you Americans.”

“Seven francs a day.”

“That’s luxury, that.”

“And be ordered around all day long!”

“But you have no expenses. … It’s clear gain. … You men are funny. The old man’s like that too. … It’s nice here all by ourselves, isn’t it, Jean?”