Three Soldiers (44 page)

“For God’s sake beat it, Chris. I’m all right,” Al was saying in a weak, whining voice, his face twisted up by pain.

“What’s the matter?” cried Andrews, putting down a large bundle.

“Slippery’s seen a M.P. nosin’ around in front of the gin mill.”

“Good God!”

“They’ve beat it. … The trouble is Al’s too sick. … Honest to gawd, Ah’ll stay with you, Al.”

“No. If you know somewhere to go, beat it, Chris. I’ll stay here with Al and talk French to the M.P.’s if they come. We’ll fool ’em somehow.” Andrews felt suddenly amused and joyous.

“Honest to gawd, Andy, Ah’d stay if it warn’t that that sergeant knows,” said Chrisfield in a jerky voice.

“Beat it, Chris. There may be no time to waste.”

“So long, Andy.” Chrisfield slipped out of the door.

“It’s funny, Al,” said Andrews, sitting on the edge of the bed and unwrapping the package of food, “I’m not a damn bit scared any more. I think I’m free of the army, Al. … How’s your hand?”

“I dunno. Oh, how I wish I was in my old bunk at Coblenz. I warn’t made for buckin’ against the world this way. … If we had old Dan with us. … Funny that you know Dan. … He’d have a million ideas for gettin’ out of this fix. But I’m glad he’s not here. He’d bawl me out so, for not havin’ made good. He’s a powerful ambitious kid, is Dan.”

“But it’s not the sort of thing a man can make good in, Al,” said Andrews slowly. They were silent. There was no sound in the courtyard, only very far away the clatter of a patrol of cavalry over cobblestones. The sky had become overcast and the room was very dark. The mouldy plaster peeling off the walls had streaks of green in it. The light from the courtyard had a greenish tinge that made their faces look pale and dead, like the faces of men that have long been shut up between damp prison walls.

“And Fuselli had a girl named Mabe,” said Andrews.

“Oh, she married a guy in the Naval Reserve. They had a grand wedding,” said Al.

“At last I’ve got to you!”

John Andrews had caught sight of Geneviève on a bench at the end of the garden under an arbor of vines. Her hair flamed bright in a splotch of sun as she got to her feet. She held out both hands to him.

“How good-looking you are like that,” she cried.

He was conscious only of her hands in his hands and of her pale-brown eyes and of the bright sun-splotches and the green shadows fluttering all about them.

“So you are out of prison,” she said, “and demobilized. How wonderful! Why didn’t you write? I have been very uneasy about you. How did you find me here?”

“Your mother said you were here.”

“And how do you like it, my Poissac?”

She made a wide gesture with her hand. They stood silent a moment, side by side, looking about them. In front of the arbor was a parterre of rounded box-bushes edging beds where disorderly roses hung in clusters of pink and purple and apricot-color. And beyond it a brilliant emerald lawn full of daisies sloped down to an old grey house with, at one end, a squat round tower that had an extinguisher-shaped roof. Beyond the house were tall, lush-green poplars, through which glittered patches of silver-grey river and of yellow sand banks. From somewhere came a drowsy scent of mown grass.

“How brown you are!” she said again. “I thought I had lost you. … You might kiss me, Jean.”

The muscles of his arms tightened about her shoulders. Her hair flamed in his eyes. The wind that rustled through broad grape-leaves made a flutter of dancing light and shadow about them.

“How hot you are with the sun!” she said. “I love the smell of the sweat of your body. You must have run very hard, coming here.”

“Do you remember one night in the spring we walked home from
Pelleas and Melisande
? How I should have liked to have kissed you then, like this!” Andrews’s voice was strange, hoarse, as if he spoke with difficulty.

“There is the château très froid et très profond,” she said with a little laugh.

“And your hair.
‘Je les tiens dans les doits, je les tiens dans la bouche. … Toute ta chevelure, toute ta chevelure, Mélisande, est tombée de la tour. …’
D’you remember?”

“How wonderful you are.”

They sat side by side on the stone bench without touching each other.

“It’s silly,” burst out Andrews excitedly. “We should have faith in our own selves. We can’t live a little rag of romance without dragging in literature. We are drugged with literature so that we can never live at all, of ourselves.”

“Jean, how did you come down here? Have you been demobilized long?”

“I walked almost all the way from Paris. You see, I am very dirty.”

“How wonderful! But I’ll be quiet. You must tell me everything from the moment you left me in Chartres.”

“I’ll tell you about Chartres later,” said Andrews gruffly. “It has been superb, one of the biggest weeks in my life, walking all day under the sun, with the road like a white ribbon in the sun over the hills and along river banks, where there were yellow irises blooming, and through woods full of blackbirds, and with the dust in a little white cloud round my feet, and all the time walking towards you, walking towards you.”

“And
la Reine de Saba,
how is it coming?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long time since I thought of it. … You have been here long?”

“Hardly a week. But what are you going to do?”

“I have a room overlooking the river in a house owned by a very fat woman with a very red face and a tuft of hair on her chin. …”

“Madame Boncour.”

“Of course. You must know everybody. … It’s so small.”

“And you’re going to stay here a long time?”

“Almost forever, and work, and talk to you; may I use your piano now and then?”

“How wonderful!”

Geneviève Rod jumped to her feet. Then she stood looking at him, leaning against one of the twisted stems of the vines, so that the broad leaves fluttered about her face. A white cloud, bright as silver, covered the sun, so that the hairy young leaves and the wind-blown grass of the lawn took on a silvery sheen. Two white butterflies fluttered for a second about the arbor.

“You must always dress like that,” she said after a while.

Andrews laughed.

“A little cleaner, I hope,” he said. “But there can’t be much change. I have no other clothes and ridiculously little money.”

“Who cares for money?” cried Geneviève. Andrews fancied he detected a slight affectation in her tone, but he drove the idea from his mind immediately.

“I wonder if there is a farm round here where I could get work.”

“But you couldn’t do the work of a farm labourer,” cried Geneviève, laughing.

“You just watch me.”

“It’ll spoil your hands for the piano.”

“I don’t care about that; but all that’s later, much later. Before anything else I must finish a thing I am working on. There is a theme that came to me when I was first in the army, when I was washing windows at the training camp.”

“How funny you are, Jean! Oh, it’s lovely to have you about again. But you’re awfully solemn today. Perhaps it’s because I made you kiss me.”

“But, Geneviève, it’s not in one day that you can unbend a slave’s back, but with you, in this wonderful place … Oh, I’ve never seen such sappy richness of vegetation! And think of it, a week’s walking first across those grey rolling uplands, and then at Blois down into the haze of richness of the Loire. … D’you know Vendôme? I came by a funny little town from Vendôme to Blois. You see, my feet. … And what wonderful cold baths I’ve had on the sand banks of the Loire. … No, after a while the rhythm of legs all being made the same length on drill fields, the hopeless caged dullness will be buried deep in me by the gorgeousness of this world of yours!”

He got to his feet and crushed a leaf softly between his fingers.

“You see, the little grapes are already forming. … Look up there,” she said as she brushed the leaves aside just above his head. “These grapes here are the earliest; but I must show you my domain, and my cousins and the hen yard and everything.”

She took his hand and pulled him out of the arbor. They ran like children, hand in hand, round the box-bordered paths.

“What I mean is this,” he stammered, following her across the lawn. “If I could once manage to express all that misery in music, I could shove it far down into my memory. I should be free to live my own existence, in the midst of this carnival of summer.”

At the house she turned to him. “You see the very battered ladies over the door,” she said. “They are said to be by a pupil of Jean Goujon.”

“They fit wonderfully in the landscape, don’t they? Did I ever tell you about the sculptures in the hospital where I was when I was wounded?”

“No, but I want you to look at the house now. See, that’s the tower; all that’s left of the old building. I live there, and right under the roof there’s a haunted room I used to be terribly afraid of. I’m still afraid of it. … You see this Henri Quatre part of the house was just a fourth of the house as planned. This lawn would have been the court. We dug up foundations where the roses are. There are all sorts of traditions as to why the house was never finished.”

“You must tell me them.”

“I shall later; but now you must come and meet my aunt and my cousins.”

“Please, not just now, Geneviève. … I don’t feel like talking to anyone except you. I have so much to talk to you about.”

“But it’s nearly lunch time, Jean. We can have all that after lunch.”

“No, I can’t talk to anyone else now. I must go and clean myself up a little anyway.”

“Just as you like. … But you must come this afternoon and play to us. Two or three people are coming to tea. … It would be very sweet of you, if you’ld play to us, Jean.”

“But can’t you understand? I can’t see you with other people now.”

“Just as you like,” said Geneviève, flushing, her hand on the iron latch of the door.

“Can’t I come to see you tomorrow morning? Then I shall feel more like meeting people, after talking to you a long while. You see, I …” He paused with his eyes on the ground. Then he burst out in a low, passionate voice: “Oh, if I could only get it out of my mind … those tramping feet, those voices shouting orders.”

His hand trembled when he put it in Geneviève’s hand. She looked in his eyes calmly with her wide brown eyes.

“How strange you are today, Jean! Anyway, come back early tomorrow.”

She went in the door. He walked round the house, through the carriage gate, and went off with long strides down the road along the river that led under linden trees to the village.

Thoughts swarmed teasingly through his head, like wasps about a rotting fruit. So at last he had seen Geneviève, and had held her in his arms and kissed her. And that was all. His plans for the future had never gone beyond that point. He hardly knew what he had expected, but in all the sunny days of walking, in all the furtive days in Paris, he had thought of nothing else. He would see Geneviève and tell her all about himself; he would unroll his life like a scroll before her eyes. Together they would piece together the future. A sudden terror took possession of him. She had failed him. Floods of denial seethed through his mind. It was that he had expected so much; he had expected her to understand him without explanation, instinctively. He had told her nothing. He had not even told her he was a deserter. What was it that had kept him from telling her? Puzzle as he would, he could not formulate it. Only, far within him, the certainty lay like an icy weight: she had failed him. He was alone. What a fool he had been to build his whole life on a chance of sympathy? No. It was rather this morbid playing at phrases that was at fault. He was like a touchy old maid, thinking imaginary results. “Take life at its face value,” he kept telling himself. They loved each other anyway, somehow; it did not matter how. And he was free to work. Wasn’t that enough?

But how could he wait until tomorrow to see her, to tell her everything, to break down all the silly little barriers between them, so that they might look directly into each other’s lives?

The road turned inland from the river between garden walls at the entrance to the village. Through half-open doors Andrews got glimpses of neatly-cultivated kitchen-gardens and orchards where silver-leaved boughs swayed against the sky. Then the road swerved again into the village, crowded into a narrow paved street by the white and cream-colored houses with green or grey shutters and pale, red-tiled roofs. At the end, stained golden with lichen, the mauve-grey tower of the church held up its bells against the sky in a belfry of broad pointed arches. In front of the church Andrews turned down a little lane towards the river again, to come out in a moment on a quay shaded by skinny acacia trees. On the corner house, a ramshackle house with roofs and gables projecting in all directions, was a sign: “Rendezvous de la Marine.” The room he stepped into was so low, Andrews had to stoop under the heavy brown beams as he crossed it. Stairs went up from a door behind a worn billiard table in the corner. Mme. Boncour stood between Andrews and the stairs. She was a flabby, elderly woman with round eyes and a round, very red face and a curious smirk about the lips.

“Monsieur payera un petit peu d’advance, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur?”

“All right,” said Andrews, reaching for his pocketbook. “Shall I pay you a week in advance?”

The woman smiled broadly.

“Si Monsieur désire. … It’s that life is so dear nowadays. Poor people like us can barely get along.”

“I know that only too well,” said Andrews.

“Monsieur est étranger …” began the woman in a wheedling tone, when she had received the money.

“Yes. I was only demobilized a short time ago.”

“Aha! Monsieur est démobilisé. Monsieur remplira la petite feuille pour la police, n’est-ce pas?”

The woman brought from behind her back a hand that held a narrow printed slip.

“All right. I’ll fill it out now,” said Andrews, his heart thumping. Without thinking what he was doing, he put the paper on the edge of the billiard table and wrote: “John Brown, aged 23. Chicago, Ill., EtatsUnis. Musician. Holder of passport No. 1,432,286.”

“Merci, Monsieur. A bientôt, Monsieur. Au revoir, Monsieur.”

The woman’s singing voice followed him up the rickety stairs to his room. It was only when he had closed the door that he remembered that he had put down for a passport number his army number. “And why did I write John Brown as a name?” he asked himself.

He heard the song so vividly that he thought for an instant someone must be standing beside him singing it. He went to the window and ran his hand through his hair. Outside the Loire rambled in great loops towards the blue distance, silvery reach upon silvery reach, with here and there the broad gleam of a sand bank. Opposite were poplars and fields patched in various greens rising to hills tufted with dense shadowy groves. On the bare summit of the highest hill a windmill waved lazy arms against the marbled sky.