Chapter XIV: Part FIVE: The World Outside (2)

“Cosne sure is a hell of a hole.... I guess you saw a lot of fighting. God! you must have been glad not to be in the goddam medics.”

“I don't know that I'm glad I saw fighting.... Oh, yes, I suppose I am.”

“You see, I had it a hell of a time before they found out. Courtmartial was damn stiff... after the armistice too.... Oh, God! why can't they let a feller go home?”

A woman in a bright blue hat passed them. Andrews caught a glimpse of a white over-powdered face; her hips trembled like jelly under the blue skirt with each hard clack of her high heels on the pavement.

“Gee, that looks like Jenny.... I'm glad she didn't see me....” Fuselli laughed. “Ought to 'a seen her one night last week. We were so dead drunk we just couldn't move.”

“Isn't that bad for what's the matter with you?”

“I don't give a damn now; what's the use?”

“But God; man!” Andrews stopped himself suddenly. Then he said in a different voice, “What outfit are you in now?”

“I'm on the permanent K.P. here,” Fuselli jerked his thumb towards the door of the building. “Not a bad job, off two days a week; no drill, good eats.... At least you get all you want.... But it surely has been hell emptying ash cans and shovelling coal an' now all they've done is dry me up.”

“But you'll be goin' home soon now, won't you? They can't discharge you till they cure you.”

“Damned if I know.... Some guys say a guy never can be cured....”

“Don't you find K.P. work pretty damn dull?”

“No worse than anything else. What are you doin' in Paris?”

“School detachment.”

“What's that?”

“Men who wanted to study in the university, who managed to work it.”

“Gee, I'm glad I ain't goin' to school again.”

“Well, so long, Fuselli.”

“So long, Andrews.”

Fuselli turned and slouched back to the group of men at the door. Andrews hurried away. As he turned the corner he had a glimpse of Fuselli with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed leaning against the wall behind the door of the barracks.

III

The darkness, where the rain fell through the vague halos of light round the street lamps, glittered with streaks of pale gold. Andrews's ears were full of the sound of racing gutters and spattering waterspouts, and of the hard unceasing beat of the rain on the pavements. It was after closing time. The corrugated shutters were drawn down, in front of cafe windows. Andrews's cap was wet; water trickled down his forehead and the sides of his nose, running into his eyes. His feet were soaked and he could feel the wet patches growing on his knees where they received the water running off his overcoat. The street stretched wide and dark ahead of him, with an occasional glimmer of greenish reflection from a lamp. As he walked, splashing with long strides through the rain, he noticed that he was keeping pace with a woman under an umbrella, a slender person who was hurrying with small resolute steps up the boulevard. When he saw her, a mad hope flamed suddenly through him. He remembered a vulgar little theatre and the crude light of a spot light. Through the paint and powder a girl's golden-brown skin had shone with a firm brilliance that made him think of wide sun-scorched uplands, and dancing figures on Greek vases. Since he had seen her two nights ago, he had thought of nothing else. He had feverishly found out her name. “Naya Selikoff!” A mad hope flared through him that this girl he was walking beside was the girl whose slender limbs moved in an endless frieze through his thoughts. He peered at her with eyes blurred with rain. What an ass he was! Of course it couldn't be; it was too early. She was on the stage at this minute. Other hungry eyes were staring at her slenderness, other hands were twitching to stroke her golden-brown skin. Walking under the steady downpour that stung his face and ears and sent a tiny cold trickle down his back, he felt a sudden dizziness of desire come over him. His hands, thrust to the bottom of his coat pockets, clutched convulsively. He felt that he would die, that his pounding blood vessels would burst. The bead curtains of rain rustled and tinkled about him, awakening his nerves, making his skin flash and tingle. In the gurgle of water in gutters and water spouts he could imagine he heard orchestras droning libidinous music. The feverish excitement of his senses began to create frenzied rhythms in his ears:

“O ce pauvre poilu! Qu'il doit etre mouille” said a small tremulous voice beside him.

He turned.

The girl was offering him part of her umbrella.

“O c'est un Americain!” she said again, still speaking as if to herself.

“Mais ca ne vaut pas la peine.”

“Mais oui, mais oui.”

He stepped under the umbrella beside her.

“But you must let me hold it.”

“Bien.”

As he took the umbrella he caught her eye. He stopped still in his tracks.

“But you're the girl at the Rat qui Danse.”

“And you were at the next table with the man who sang?”

“How amusing!”

“Et celui-la! O il etait rigolo....” She burst out laughing; her head, encased in a little round black hat, bobbed up and down under the umbrella. Andrews laughed too. Crossing the Boulevard St. Germain, a taxi nearly ran them down and splashed a great wave of mud over them. She clutched his arm and then stood roaring with laughter.

“O quelle horreur! Quelle horreur!” she kept exclaiming.

Andrews laughed and laughed.

“But hold the umbrella over us.... You're letting the rain in on my best hat,” she said again.

“Your name is Jeanne,” said Andrews.

“Impertinent! You heard my brother call me that.... He went back to the front that night, poor little chap.... He's only nineteen ... he's very clever.... O, how happy I am now that the war's over.”

“You are older than he?”

“Two years.... I am the head of the family.... It is a dignified position.”

“Have you always lived in Paris?”

“No, we are from Laon.... It's the war.”

“Refugees?”

“Don't call us that.... We work.”

Andrews laughed.

“Are you going far?” she asked peering in his face.

“No, I live up here.... My name is the same as yours.”

“Jean? How funny!”

“Where are you going?”

“Rue Descartes.... Behind St. Etienne.”

“I live near you.”

“But you mustn't come. The concierge is a tigress.... Etienne calls her Mme. Clemenceau.”

“Who? The saint?”

“No, you silly--my brother. He is a socialist. He's a typesetter at l'Humanite.”

“Really? I often read l'Humanite.”

“Poor boy, he used to swear he'd never go in the army. He thought of going to America.”

“That wouldn't do him any good now,” said Andrews bitterly. “What do you do?”

“I?” a gruff bitterness came into her voice. “Why should I tell you? I work at a dressmaker's.”

“Like Louise?”

“You've heard Louise? Oh, how I cried.”

“Why did it make you sad?”

“Oh, I don't know.... But I'm learning stenography.... But here we are!”

The great bulk of the Pantheon stood up dimly through the rain beside them. In front the tower of St. Etienne-du-Mont was just visible. The rain roared about them.

“Oh, how wet I am!” said Jeanne.

“Look, they are giving Louise day after tomorrow at the Opera Comique.... Won't you come; with me?”

“No, I should cry too much.”

“I'll cry too.”

“But it's not...”

“Cest l'armistice,” interrupted Andrews.

They both laughed!

“All right! Meet me at the cafe at the end of the Boul' Mich' at a quarter past seven.... But you probably won't come.”

“I swear I will,” cried Andrews eagerly.

“We'll see!” She darted away down the street beside St. Etienne-du-Mont. Andrews was left alone amid the seethe of the rain and the tumultuous gurgle of water-spouts. He felt calm and tired.

When he got to his room, he found he had no matches in his pocket. No light came from the window through which he could hear the hissing clamor of the rain in the court. He stumbled over a chair.

“Are you drunk?” came Walters's voice swathed in bedclothes. “There are matches on the table.”

“But where the hell's the table?”

At last his hand, groping over the table, closed on the matchbox.

The match's red and white flicker dazzled him. He blinked his eyes; the lashes were still full of raindrops. When he had lit a candle and set it amongst the music papers upon the table, he tore off his dripping clothes.

“I just met the most charming girl, Walters,” Andrews stood naked beside the pile of his clothes, rubbing himself with a towel. “Gee! I was wet.... But she was the most charming person I've met since I've been in Paris.”

“I thought you said you let the girls alone.”

“Whores, I must have said.”

“Well! Any girl you could pick up on the street....”

“Nonsense!”

“I guess they are all that way in this damned country.... God, it will do me good to see a nice sweet wholesome American girl.”

Andrews did not answer. He blew out the light and got into bed.

“But I've got a new job,” Walters went on. “I'm working in the school detachment office.”

“Why the hell do that? You came here to take courses in the Sorbonne, didn't you?”

“Sure. I go to most of them now. But in this army I like to be in the middle of things, see? Just so they can't put anything over on me.”

“There's something in that.”

“There's a damn lot in it, boy. The only way is to keep in right and not let the man higher up forget you.... Why, we may start fighting again. These damn Germans ain't showin' the right spirit at all... after all the President's done for them. I expect to get my sergeantcy out of it anyway.”

“Well, I'm going to sleep,” said Andrews sulkily.

John Andrews sat at a table outside the cafe de Rohan. The sun had just set on a ruddy afternoon, flooding everything with violet-blue light and cold greenish shadow. The sky was bright lilac color, streaked with a few amber clouds. The lights were on in all the windows of the Magazin du Louvre opposite, so that the windows seemed bits of polished glass in the afterglow. In the colonnade of the Palais Royal the shadows were deepening and growing colder. A steady stream of people poured in and out of the Metro. Green buses stuffed with people kept passing. The roar of the traffic and the clatter of footsteps and the grumble of voices swirled like dance music about Andrews's head. He noticed all at once that the rabbit man stood in front of him, a rabbit dangling forgotten at the end of its rubber tube.

“Et ca va bien? le commerce,” said Andrews.

“Quietly, quietly,” said the rabbit man, distractedly making the rabbit turn a somersault at his feet. Andrews watched the people going into the Metro.

“The gentleman amuses himself in Paris?” asked the rabbit man timidly.

“Oh, yes; and you?”

“Quietly,” the rabbit man smiled. “Women are very beautiful at this hour of the evening,” he said again in his very timid tone.

“There is nothing more beautiful than this moment of the evening... in Paris.”

“Or Parisian women.” The eyes of the rabbit man glittered. “Excuse me, sir,” he went on. “I must try and sell some rabbits.”

“Au revoir,” said Andrews holding out his hand.

The rabbit man shook it with sudden vigor and went off, making a rabbit hop before him along the curbstone. He was hidden by the swiftly moving crowds.

In the square, flaring violet arclights were flickering on, lighting up their net-covered globes that hung like harsh moons above the pavement.

Henslowe sat down on a chair beside Andrews.

“How's Sinbad?”

“Sinbad, old boy, is functioning.... Aren't you frozen?”

“How do you mean, Henslowe?”

“Overheated, you chump, sitting out here in polar weather.”

“No, but I mean.... How are you functioning?” said Andrews laughing.

“I'm going to Poland tomorrow.”

“How?”

“As guard on a Red Cross supply train. I think you might make it if you want to come, if we beat it right over to the Red Cross before Major Smithers goes. Or we might take him out to dinner.”

“But, Henny, I'm staying.”

“Why the hell stay in this hole?”

“I like it. I'm getting a better course in orchestration than I imagined existed, and I met a girl the other day, and I'm crazy over Paris.”

“If you go and get entangled, I swear I'll beat your head in with a Polish shillaughly.... Of course you've met a girl--so have I--lots. We can meet some more in Poland and dance polonaises with them.”

“No, but this girl's charming.... You've seen her. She's the girl who was with the poilu at the Rat qui Danse the first night I was in Paris. We went to Louise together.”

“Must have been a grand sentimental party.... I swear.... I may run after a Jane now and again but I never let them interfere with the business of existence,” muttered Henslowe crossly.

They were both silent.

“You'll be as bad as Heinz with his Moki and the lion cub named Bubu.... By the way, it's dead.... Well, where shall we have dinner?”

“I'm dining with Jeanne.... I'm going to meet her in half an hour.... I'm awfully sorry, Henny. We might all dine together.”

“A fat chance! No, I'll have to go and find that ass Aubrey, and hear all about the Peace Conference.... Heinz can't leave Moki because she's having hysterics on account of Bubu. I'll probably be driven to going to see Berthe in the end.... You're a nice one.”

“We'll have a grand seeing-off party for you tomorrow, Henny.”

“Look! I forgot! You're to meet Aubrey at the Crillon at five tomorrow, and he's going to take you to see Genevieve Rod?”

“Who the hell's Genevieve Rod?”

“Darned if I know. But Aubrey said you'd got to come. She is an intellectual, so Aubrey says.”

“That's the last thing I want to meet.”

“Well, you can't help yourself. So long!”

Andrews sat a while more at the table outside the cafe. A cold wind was blowing. The sky was blue-black and the ashen white arc lamps cast a mortuary light over everything. In the Colonnade of the Palais Royal the shadows were harsh and inky. In the square the people were gradually thinning. The lights in the Magazin du Louvre had gone out. From the cafe behind him, a faint smell of fresh-cooked food began to saturate the cold air of the street.

Then he saw Jeanne advancing across the ash-grey pavement of the square, slim and black under the arc lights. He ran to meet her.

The cylindrical stove in the middle of the floor roared softly. In front of it the white cat was rolled into a fluffy ball in which ears and nose made tiny splashes of pink like those at the tips of the petals of certain white roses. One side of the stove at the table against the window, sat an old brown man with a bright red stain on each cheek bone, who wore formless corduroy clothes, the color of his skin. Holding the small spoon in a knotted hand he was stirring slowly and continuously a liquid that was yellow and steamed in a glass. Behind him was the window with sleet beating against it in the leaden light of a wintry afternoon. The other side of the stove was a zinc bar with yellow bottles and green bottles and a water spigot with a neck like a giraffe's that rose out of the bar beside a varnished wood pillar that made the decoration of the corner, with a terra cotta pot of ferns on top of it. From where Andrews sat on the padded bench at the back of the room the fern fronds made a black lacework against the lefthand side of the window, while against the other was the brown silhouette of the old man's head, and the slant of his cap. The stove hid the door and the white cat, round and symmetrical, formed the center of the visible universe. 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 unbuttoned 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 s 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'd 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 hotels,--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. Genevieve 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.”

“Genevieve 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 Genevieve Rod hastily, then she went on with a laugh: “But I forget..... Monsieur Andreffs.... 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 Genevieve 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 vermilion. “Tout ca,” said Genevieve, 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.

Genevieve 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 Genevieve 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 Proses Lyriques.... I've never heard them.”

“I once tried to sing Le 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 Aupres de ma Blonde on a trombone that Kreisler playing Paganini impeccably enough to make you ill.”

“But there is a middle ground.”

He interrupted her by starting to play again. As he played without looking at her, he felt that her eyes were fixed on him, that she was standing tensely behind him. Her hand touched his shoulder. He stopped playing.

“Oh, I am dreadfully sorry,” she said.

“Nothing. I am finished.”

“You were playing something of your own?”

“Have you ever read La Tentation de Saint Antoine?” he asked in a low voice.

“Flaubert's?”

“Yes.”

“It's not his best work. A very interesting failure though,” she said.

Andrews got up from the piano with difficulty, controlling a sudden growing irritation.

“They seem to teach everybody to say that,” he muttered.

Suddenly he realized that other people were in the room. He went up to Mme. Rod.

“You must excuse me,” he said, “I have an engagement.... Aubrey, don't let me drag you away. I am late, I've got to run.”

“You must come to see us again.”

“Thank you,” mumbled Andrews.

Genevieve Rod went with him to the door. “We must know each other better,” she said. “I like you for going off in a huff.”

Andrews flushed.

“I was badly brought up,” he said, pressing her thin cold hand. “And you French must always remember that we are barbarians.... Some are repentant barbarians.... I am not.”

She laughed, and John Andrews ran down the stairs and out into the grey-blue streets, where the lamps were blooming into primrose color. He had a confused feeling that he had made a fool of himself, which made him writhe with helpless anger. He walked with long strides through the streets of the Rive Gauche full of people going home from work, towards the little wine shop on the Quai de la Tournelle.

It was a Paris Sunday morning. Old women in black shawls were going into the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont. Each time the leather doors opened it let a little whiff of incense out into the smoky morning air. Three pigeons walked about the cobblestones, putting their coral feet one before the other with an air of importance. The pointed facade of the church and its slender tower and cupola cast a bluish shadow on the square in front of it, into which the shadows the old women trailed behind them vanished as they hobbled towards the church. The opposite side of the square and the railing of the Pantheon and its tall brownish-gray flank were flooded with dull orange-colored sunlight.

Andrews walked back and forth in front of the church, looking at the sky and the pigeons and the facade of the Library of Ste. Genevieve, and at the rare people who passed across the end of the square, noting forms and colors and small comical aspects of things with calm delight, savoring everything almost with complacency. His music, he felt, was progressing now that, undisturbed, he lived all day long in the rhythm of it; his mind and his fingers were growing supple. The hard moulds that had grown up about his spirit were softening. As he walked back and forth in front of the church waiting for Jeanne, he took an inventory of his state of mind; he was very happy.

“Eh bien?”

Jeanne had come up behind him. They ran like children hand in hand across the sunny square.

“I have not had any coffee yet,” said Andrews.

“How late you must get up!... But you can't have any till we get to the Porte Maillot, Jean.”

“Why not?”

“Because I say you can't.”

“But that's cruelty.”

“It won't be long.”

“But I am dying with hunger. I will die in your hands.”

“Can't you understand? Once we get to the Porte Maillot we'll be far from your life and my life. The day will be ours. One must not tempt fate.”

“You funny girl.”

The Metro was not crowded, Andrews and Jeanne sat opposite each other without talking. Andrews was looking at the girl's hands, limp on her lap, small overworked hands with places at the tips of the fingers where the skin was broken and scarred, with chipped uneven nails. Suddenly she caught his glance. He flushed, and she said jauntily:

“Well, we'll all be rich some day, like princes and princesses in fairy tales.” They both laughed.

As they were leaving the train at the terminus, he put his arm timidly round her waist. She wore no corsets. His fingers trembled at the litheness of the flesh under her clothes. Feeling a sort of terror go through him he took away his arm.

“Now,” she said quietly as they emerged into the sunlight and the bare trees of the broad avenue, “you can have all the cafe-au-lait you want.”

“You'll have some too.”

“Why be extravagant? I've had my petit dejeuner.”

“But I'm going to be extravagant all day.... We might as well start now. I don't know exactly why, but I am very happy. We'll eat brioches.”

“But, my dear, it's only profiteers who can eat brioches now-a-days.”

“You just watch us.”

They went into a patisserie. An elderly woman with a lean yellow face and thin hair waited on them, casting envious glances up through her eyelashes as she piled the rich brown brioches on a piece of tissue paper.

“You'll pass the day in the country?” she asked in a little wistful voice as she handed Andrews the change.

“Yes,” he said, “how well you guessed.”

As they went out of the door they heard her muttering, “O la jeunesse, la jeunesse.”

They found a table in the sun at a cafe opposite the gate from which they could watch people and automobiles and carriages coming in and out. Beyond, a grass-grown bit of fortifications gave an 1870 look to things.

“How jolly it is at the Porte Maillot!” cried Andrews.

She looked at him and laughed.

“But how gay he is to-day.”

“No. I always like it here. It's the spot in Paris where you always feel well.... When you go out you have all the fun of leaving town, when you go in you have all the fun of coming back to town.... But you aren't eating any brioches?”

“I've eaten one. You eat them. You are hungry.”

“Jeanne, I don't think I have ever been so happy in my life.... It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you. That frightful life.... How is Etienne?”

“He is in Mayence. He's bored.”

“Jeanne, we must live very much, we who are free to make up for all the people who are still... bored.”

“A lot of good it'll do them,” she cried laughing.

“It's funny, Jeanne, I threw myself into the army. I was so sick of being free and not getting anywhere. Now I have learnt that life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.”

She looked at him blankly.

“I mean, I don't think I get enough out of life,” he said. “Let's go.”

They got to their feet.

“What do you mean?” she said slowly. “One takes what life gives, that is all, there's no choice.... But look, there's the Malmaison train.... We must run.”

Giggling and breathless they climbed on the trailer, squeezing themselves on the back platform where everyone was pushing and exclaiming. The car began to joggle its way through Neuilly. Their bodies were pressed together by the men and women about them. Andrews put his arm firmly round Jeanne's waist and looked down at her pale cheek that was pressed against his chest. Her little round black straw hat with a bit of a red flower on it was just under his chin.

“I can't see a thing,” she gasped, still giggling.

“I'll describe the landscape,” said Andrews. “Why, we are crossing the Seine already.”

“Oh, how pretty it must be!”

An old gentleman with a pointed white beard who stood beside them laughed benevolently.

“But don't you think the Seine's pretty?” Jeanne looked up at him impudently.

“Without a doubt, without a doubt.... It was the way you said it,” said the old gentleman.... “You are going to St. Germain?” he asked Andrews.

“No, to Malmaison.”

“Oh, you should go to St. Germain. M. Reinach's prehistoric museum is there. It is very beautiful. You should not go home to your country without seeing it.”

“Are there monkeys in it?” asked Jeanne.

“No,” said the old gentleman turning away.

“I adore monkeys,” said Jeanne.

The car was going along a broad empty boulevard with trees and grass plots and rows of low store-houses and little dilapidated rooming houses along either side. Many people had got out and there was plenty of room, but Andrews kept his arm round the girl's waist. The constant contact with her body made him feel very languid.

“How good it smells!” said Jeanne.

“It's the spring.”

“I want to lie on the grass and eat violets.... Oh, how good you were to bring me out like this, Jean. You must know lots of fine ladies you could have brought out, because you are so well educated. How is it you are only an ordinary soldier?”

“Good God! I wouldn't be an officer.”

“Why? It must be rather nice to be an officer.”

“Does Etienne want to be an officer?”

“But he's a socialist, that's different.”

“Well, I suppose I must be a socialist too, but let's talk of something else.”

Andrews moved over to the other side of the platform. They were passing little villas with gardens on the road where yellow and pale-purple crocuses bloomed. Now and then there was a scent of violets in the moist air. The sun had disappeared under soft purplish-grey clouds. There was occasionally a rainy chill in the wind.

Andrews suddenly thought of Genevieve Rod. Curious how vividly he remembered her face, her wide, open eyes and her way of smiling without moving her firm lips. A feeling of annoyance went through him. How silly of him to go off rudely like that! And he became very anxious to talk to her again; things he wanted to say to her came to his mind.

“Well, are you asleep?” said Jeanne tugging at his arm. “Here we are.”

Andrews flushed furiously.

“Oh, how nice it is here, how nice it is here!” Jeanne was saying.

“Why, it is eleven o'clock,” said Andrews.

“We must see the palace before lunch,” cried Jeanne, and she started running up a lane of linden trees, where the fat buds were just bursting into little crinkling fans of green. New grass was sprouting in the wet ditches on either side. Andrews ran after her, his feet pounding hard in the moist gravel road. When he caught up to her he threw his arms round her recklessly and kissed her panting mouth. She broke away from him and strode demurely arranging her hat.

“Monster,” she said, “I trimmed this hat specially to come out with you and you do your best to wreck it.”

“Poor little hat,” said Andrews, “but it is so beautiful today, and you are very lovely, Jeanne.”

“The great Napoleon must have said that to the Empress Josephine and you know what he did to her,” said Jeanne almost solemnly.

“But she must have been awfully bored with him long before.”

“No,” said Jeanne, “that's how women are.”

They went through big iron gates into the palace grounds.

Later they sat at a table in the garden of a little restaurant. The sun, very pale, had just showed itself, making the knives and forks and the white wine in their glasses gleam faintly. Lunch had not come yet. They sat looking at each other silently. Andrews felt weary and melancholy. He could think of nothing to say. Jeanne was playing with some tiny white daisies with pink tips to their petals, arranging them in circles and crosses on the tablecloth.

“Aren't they slow?” said Andrews.

“But it's nice here, isn't it?” Jeanne smiled brilliantly. “But how glum he looks now.” She threw some daisies at him. Then, after a pause, she added mockingly: “It's hunger, my dear. Good Lord, how dependent men are on food!”

Andrews drank down his wine at a gulp. He felt that if he could only make an effort he could lift off the stifling melancholy that was settling down on him like a weight that kept growing heavier.

A man in khaki, with his face and neck scarlet, staggered into the garden dragging beside him a mud-encrusted bicycle. He sank into an iron chair, letting the bicycle fall with a clatter at his feet.

“Hi, hi,” he called in a hoarse voice.

A waiter appeared and contemplated him suspiciously. The man in khaki had hair as red as his face, which was glistening with sweat. His shirt was torn, and he had no coat. His breeches and puttees were invisible for mud.

“Gimme a beer,” croaked the man in khaki.

The waiter shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

“Il demande une biere,” said Andrews.

“Mais Monsieur....”

“I'll pay. Get it for him.”

The waiter disappeared.

“Thankee, Yank,” roared the man in khaki.

The waiter brought a tall narrow yellow glass. The man in khaki took it from his hand, drank it down at a draught and handed back the empty glass. Then he spat, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, got with difficulty to his feet and shambled towards Andrews's table.

“Oi presoom the loidy and you don't mind, Yank, if Oi parley wi' yez a bit. Do yez?”

“No, come along; where did you come from?”

The man in khaki dragged an iron chair behind him to a spot near the table. Before sitting down he bobbed his head in the direction of Jeanne with an air of solemnity tugging at the same time at a lock of his red hair. After some fumbling he got a red-bordered handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face with it, leaving a long black smudge of machine oil on his forehead.

“Oi'm a bearer of important secret messages, Yank,” he said, leaning back in the little iron chair. “Oi'm a despatch-rider.”

“You look all in.”

“Not a bit of it. Oi just had a little hold up, that's all, in a woodland lane. Some buggers tried to do me in.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Oi guess they had a little information... that's all. Oi'm carryin' important messages from our headquarters in Rouen to your president. Oi was goin' through a bloody thicket past this side. Oi don't know how you pronounce the bloody town.... Oi was on my bike making about thoity for the road was all a-murk when Oi saw four buggers standing acrost the road... lookter me suspiciouslike, so Oi jus' jammed the juice into the boike and made for the middle 'un. He dodged all right. Then they started shootin' and a bloody bullet buggered the boike.... It was bein' born with a caul that saved me.... Oi picked myself up outer the ditch an lost 'em in the woods. Then Oi got to another bloody town and commandeered this old sweatin' machine.... How many kills is there to Paris, Yank?”

“Fifteen or sixteen, I think.”

“What's he saying, Jean?”

“Some men tried to stop him on the road. He's a despatch-rider.”

“Isn't he ugly? Is he English?”

“Irish.”

“You bet you, miss; Hirlanday; that's me.... You picked a good looker this toime, Yank. But wait till Oi git to Paree. Oi clane up a good hundre' pound on this job in bonuses. What part d'ye come from, Yank?”

“Virginia. I live in New York.”

“Oi been in Detroit; goin' back there to git in the automoebile business soon as Oi clane up a few more bonuses. Europe's dead an stinkin', Yank. Ain't no place for a young fellow. It's dead an stinkin', that's what it is.”

“It's pleasanter to live here than in America.... Say, d'you often get held up that way?”

“Ain't happened to me before, but it has to pals o' moine.”

“Who d'you think it was?

“Oi dunno; 'Unns or some of these bloody secret agents round the Peace Conference.... But Oi got to go; that despatch won't keep.”

“All right. The beer's on me.”

“Thank ye, Yank.” The man got to his feet, shook hands with Andrews and Jeanne, jumped on the bicycle and rode out of the garden to the road, threading his way through the iron chairs and tables.

“Wasn't he a funny customer?” cried Andrews, laughing. “What a wonderful joke things are!”

The waiter arrived with the omelette that began their lunch.

“Gives you an idea of how the old lava's bubbling in the volcano. There's nowhere on earth a man can dance so well as on a volcano.”

“But don't talk that way,” said Jeanne laying down her knife and fork. “It's terrible. We will waste our youth to no purpose. Our fathers enjoyed themselves when they were young.... And if there had been no war we should have been so happy, Etienne and I. My father was a small manufacturer of soap and perfumery. Etienne would have had a splendid situation. I should never have had to work. We had a nice house. I should have been married....”

“But this way, Jeanne, haven't you more freedom?”

She shrugged her shoulders. Later she burst out: “But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people. Oh, life was so sweet in France before the war.”

“In that case it's not worth living,” said Andrews in a savage voice, holding himself in.

They went on eating silently. The sky became overcast. A few drops splashed on the table-cloth.

“We'll have to take coffee inside,” said Andrews.

“And you think it is funny that people shoot at a man on a motorcycle going through a wood. All that seems to me terrible, terrible,” said Jeanne.

“Look out. Here comes the rain!”

They ran into the restaurant through the first hissing sheet of the shower and sat at a table near a window watching the rain drops dance and flicker on the green iron tables. A scent of wet earth and the mushroom-like odor of sodden leaves came in borne on damp gusts through the open door. A waiter closed the glass doors and bolted them.

“He wants to keep out the spring. He can't,” said Andrews.

They smiled at each other over their coffee cups. They were in sympathy again.

When the rain stopped they walked across wet fields by a foot path full of little clear puddles that reflected the blue sky and the white-and amber-tinged clouds where the shadows were light purplish-grey. They walked slowly arm in arm, pressing their bodies together. They were very tired, they did not know why and stopped often to rest leaning against the damp boles of trees. Beside a pond pale blue and amber and silver from the reflected sky, they found under a big beech tree a patch of wild violets, which Jeanne picked greedily, mixing them with the little crimson-tipped daisies in the tight bouquet. At the suburban railway station, they sat silent, side by side on a bench, sniffing the flowers now and then, so sunk in languid weariness that they could hardly summon strength to climb into a seat on top of a third class coach, which was crowded with people coming home from a day in the country. Everybody had violets and crocuses and twigs with buds on them. In people's stiff, citified clothes lingered a smell of wet fields and sprouting woods. All the girls shrieked and threw their arms round the men when the train went through a tunnel or under a bridge. Whatever happened, everybody laughed. When the train arrived in the station, it was almost with reluctance that they left it, as if they felt that from that moment their work-a-day lives began again. Andrews and Jeanne walked down the platform without touching each other. Their fingers were stained and sticky from touching buds and crushing young sappy leaves and grass stalks. The air of the city seemed dense and unbreathable after the scented moisture of the fields.

They dined at a little restaurant on the Quai Voltaire and afterwards walked slowly towards the Place St. Michel, feeling the wine and the warmth of the food sending new vigor into their tired bodies. Andrews had his arm round her shoulder and they talked in low intimate voices, hardly moving their lips, looking long at the men and women they saw sitting twined in each other's arms on benches, at the couples of boys and girls that kept passing them, talking slowly and quietly, as they were, bodies pressed together as theirs were.

“How many lovers there are,” said Andrews.

“Are we lovers?” asked Jeanne with a curious little laugh.

“I wonder.... Have you ever been crazily in love, Jeanne?”

“I don't know. There was a boy in Laon named Marcelin. But I was a little fool then. The last news of him was from Verdun.”

“Have you had many... like I am?”

“How sentimental we are,” she cried laughing.

“No. I wanted to know. I know so little of life,” said Andrews.

“I have amused myself, as best I could,” said Jeanne in a serious tone. “But I am not frivolous.... There have been very few men I have liked.... So I have had few friends... do you want to call them lovers? But lovers are what married women have on the stage.... All that sort of thing is very silly.”

“Not so very long ago,” said Andrews, “I used to dream of being romantically in love, with people climbing up the ivy on castle walls, and fiery kisses on balconies in the moonlight.”

“Like at the Opera Comique,” cried Jeanne laughing.

“That was all very silly. But even now, I want so much more of life than life can give.”

They leaned over the parapet and listened to the hurrying swish of the river, now soft and now loud, where the reflections of the lights on the opposite bank writhed like golden snakes.

Andrews noticed that there was someone beside them. The faint, greenish glow from the lamp on the quai enabled him to recognize the lame boy he had talked to months ago on the Butte.

“I wonder if you'll remember me,” he said.

“You are the American who was in the Restaurant, Place du Terte, I don't remember when, but it was long ago.”

They shook hands.

“But you are alone,” said Andrews.

“Yes, I am always alone,” said the lame boy firmly. He held out his hand again.

“Au revoir,” said Andrews.