Chapter XV: Part FIVE: The World Outside (3)

“Good luck!” said the lame boy. Andrews heard his crutch tapping on the pavement as he went away along the quai.

“Jeanne,” said Andrews, suddenly, “you'll come home with me, won't you?”

“But you have a friend living with you.”

“He's gone to Brussels. He won't be back till tomorrow.”

“I suppose one must pay for one's dinner,” said Jeanne maliciously.

“Good God, no.” Andrews buried his face in his hands. The singsong of the river pouring through the bridges, filled his ears. He wanted desperately to cry. Bitter desire that was like hatred made his flesh tingle, made his hands ache to crush her hands in them.

“Come along,” he said gruffly.

“I didn't mean to say that,” she said in a gentle, tired voice. “You know, I'm not a very nice person.” The greenish glow of the lamp lit up the contour of one of her cheeks as she tilted her head up, and glimmered in her eyes. A soft sentimental sadness suddenly took hold of Andrews; he felt as he used to feel when, as a very small child, his mother used to tell him Br' Rabbit stories, and he would feel himself drifting helplessly on the stream of her soft voice, narrating, drifting towards something unknown and very sad, which he could not help.

They started walking again, past the Pont Neuf, towards the glare of the Place St. Michel. Three names had come into Andrews's head, “Arsinoe, Berenike, Artemisia.” For a little while he puzzled over them, and then he remembered that Genevieve Rod had the large eyes and the wide, smooth forehead and the firm little lips the women had in the portraits that were sewn on the mummy cases in the Fayum. But those patrician women of Alexandria had not had chestnut hair with a glimpse of burnished copper in it; they might have dyed it, though!

“Why are you laughing?” asked Jeanne.

“Because things are so silly.”

“Perhaps you mean people are silly,” she said, looking up at him out of the corners of her eyes.

“You're right.”

They walked in silence till they reached Andrews's door.

“You go up first and see that there's no one there,” said Jeanne in a business-like tone.

Andrews's hands were cold. He felt his heart thumping while he climbed the stairs.

The room was empty. A fire was ready to light in the small fireplace. Andrews hastily tidied up the table and kicked under the bed some soiled clothes that lay in a heap in a corner. A thought came to him: how like his performances in his room at college when he had heard that a relative was coming to see him.

He tiptoed downstairs.

“Bien. Tu peux venir, Jeanne,” he said.

She sat down rather stiffly in the straight-backed armchair beside the fire.

“How pretty the fire is,” she said.

“Jeanne, I think I'm crazily in love with you,” said Andrews in an excited voice.

“Like at the Opera Comique.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The room's nice,” she said. “Oh, but, what a big bed!”

“You're the first woman who's been up here in my time, Jeanne.... Oh, but this uniform is frightful.”

Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy. The thought drowned everything else for the moment.

“But you pulled a button off,” cried Jeanne laughing hysterically. “I'll just have to sew it on again.”

“Never mind. If you knew how I hated them.”

“What white skin you have, like a woman's. I suppose that's because you are blond,” said Jeanne.

The sound of the door being shaken vigorously woke Andrews. He got up and stood in the middle of the floor for a moment without being able to collect his wits. The shaking of the door continued, and he heard Walters's voice crying “Andy, Andy.” Andrews felt shame creeping up through him like nausea. He felt a passionate disgust towards himself and Jeanne and Walters. He had an impulse to move furtively as if he had stolen something. He went to the door and opened it a little.

“Say, Walters, old man,” he said, “I can't let you in.... I've got a girl with me. I'm sorry.... I thought you wouldn't get back till tomorrow.”

“You're kidding, aren't you?” came Walters's voice out of the dark hall.

“No.” Andrews shut the door decisively and bolted it again.

Jeanne was still asleep. Her black hair had come undone and spread over the pillow. Andrews pulled the covers up about her carefully.

Then he got into the other bed, where he lay awake a long time, staring at the ceiling.

IV

People walking along the boulevard looked curiously through the railing at the line of men in olive-drab that straggled round the edge of the courtyard. The line moved slowly, past a table where an officer and two enlisted men sat poring over big lists of names and piles of palely tinted banknotes and silver francs that glittered white. Above the men's heads a thin haze of cigarette smoke rose into the sunlight. There was a sound of voices and of feet shuffling on the gravel. The men who had been paid went off jauntily, the money jingling in their pockets.

The men at the table had red faces and tense, serious expressions. They pushed the money into the soldiers' hands with a rough jerk and pronounced the names as if they were machines clicking.

Andrews saw that one of the men at the table was Walters; he smiled and whispered “Hello” as he came up to him. Walters kept his eyes fixed on the list.

While Andrews was waiting for the man ahead of him to be paid, he heard two men in the line talking.

“Wasn't that a hell of a place? D'you remember the lad that died in the barracks one day?”

“Sure, I was in the medicks there too. There was a hell of a sergeant in that company tried to make the kid get up, and the loot came and said he'd court-martial him, an' then they found out that he'd cashed in his checks.”

“What'd 'ee die of?”

“Heart failure, I guess. I dunno, though, he never did take to the life.”

“No. That place Cosne was enough to make any guy cash in his checks.”

Andrews got his money. As he was walking away, he strolled up to the two men he had heard talking.

“Were you fellows in Cosne?”

“Sure.”

“Did you know a fellow named Fuselli?”

“I dunno....”

“Sure, you do,” said the other man. “You remember Dan Fuselli, the little wop thought he was goin' to be corporal.”

“He had another think comin'.” They both laughed.

Andrews walked off, vaguely angry. There were many soldiers on the Boulevard Montparnasse. He turned into a side street, feeling suddenly furtive and humble, as if he would hear any minute the harsh voice of a sergeant shouting orders at him.

The silver in his breeches pocket jingled with every step.

Andrews leaned on the balustrade of the balcony, looking down into the square in front of the Opera Comique. He was dizzy with the beauty of the music he had been hearing. He had a sense somewhere in the distances of his mind of the great rhythm of the sea. People chattered all about him on the wide, crowded balcony, but he was only conscious of the blue-grey mistiness of the night where the lights made patterns in green-gold and red-gold. And compelling his attention from everything else, the rhythm swept through him like sea waves.

“I thought you'd be here,” said Genevieve Rod in a quiet voice beside him.

Andrews felt strangely tongue-tied.

“It's nice to see you,” he blurted out, after looking at her silently for a moment.

“Of course you love Pelleas.”

“It is the first time I've heard it.”

“Why haven't you been to see us? It's two weeks.... We've been expecting you.”

“I didn't know...Oh, I'll certainly come. I don't know anyone at present I can talk music to.”

“You know me.”

“Anyone else, I should have said.”

“Are you working?”

“Yes.... But this hinders frightfully.” Andrews yanked at the front of his tunic. “Still, I expect to be free very soon. I'm putting in an application for discharge.”

“I suppose you will feel you can do so much better.... You will be much stronger now that you have done your duty.”

“No... by no means.”

“Tell me, what was that you played at our house?”

“'The Three Green Riders on Wild Asses,'” said Andrews smiling.

“What do you mean?”

“It's a prelude to the 'Queen of Sheba,'” said Andrews. “If you didn't think the same as M. Emile Faguet and everyone else about St. Antoine, I'd tell you what I mean.”

“That was very silly of me.... But if you pick up all the silly things people say accidentally... well, you must be angry most of the time.”

In the dim light he could not see her eyes. There was a little glow on the curve of her cheek coming from under the dark of her hat to her rather pointed chin. Behind it he could see other faces of men and women crowded on the balcony talking, lit up crudely by the gold glare that came out through the French windows from the lobby.

“I have always been tremendously fascinated by the place in La Tentation where the Queen of Sheba visited Antoine, that's all,” said Andrews gruffly.

“Is that the first thing you've done? It made me think a little of Borodine.”

“The first that's at all pretentious. It's probably just a steal from everything I've ever heard.”

“No, it's good. I suppose you had it in your head all through those dreadful and glorious days at the front.... Is it for piano or orchestra?”

“All that's finished is for piano. I hope to orchestrate it eventually.... Oh, but it's really silly to talk this way. I don't know enough.... I need years of hard work before I can do anything.... And I have wasted so much time.... That is the most frightful thing. One has so few years of youth!”

“There's the bell, we must scuttle back to our seats. Till the next intermission.” She slipped through the glass doors and disappeared. Andrews went back to his seat very excited, full of unquiet exultation. The first strains of the orchestra were pain, he felt them so acutely.

After the last act they walked in silence down a dark street, hurrying to get away from the crowds of the Boulevards.

When they reached the Avenue de l'Opera, she said: “Did you say you were going to stay in France?”

“Yes, indeed, if I can. I am going tomorrow to put in an application for discharge in France.”

“What will you do then?”

“I shall have to find a job of some sort that will let me study at the Schola Cantorum. But I have enough money to last a little while.”

“You are courageous.”

“I forgot to ask you if you would rather take the Metro.”

“No; let's walk.”

They went under the arch of the Louvre. The air was full of a fine wet mist, so that every street lamp was surrounded by a blur of light.

“My blood is full of the music of Debussy,” said Genevieve Rod, spreading out her arms.

“It's no use trying to say what one feels about it. Words aren't much good, anyway, are they?”

“That depends.”

They walked silently along the quais. The mist was so thick they could not see the Seine, but whenever they came near a bridge they could hear the water rustling through the arches.

“France is stifling,” said Andrews, all of a sudden. “It stifles you very slowly, with beautiful silk bands.... America beats your brains out with a policeman's billy.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, letting pique chill her voice.

“You know so much in France. You have made the world so neat....”

“But you seem to want to stay here,” she said with a laugh.

“It's that there's nowhere else. There is nowhere except Paris where one can find out things about music, particularly.... But I am one of those people who was not made to be contented.”

“Only sheep are contented.”

“I think I have been happier this month in Paris than ever before in my life. It seems six, so much has happened in it.”

“Poissac is where I am happiest.”

“Where is that?”

“We have a country house there, very old and very tumbledown. They say that Rabelais used to come to the village. But our house is from later, from the time of Henri Quatre. Poissac is not far from Tours. An ugly name, isn't it? But to me it is very beautiful. The house has orchards all round it, and yellow roses with flushed centers poke themselves in my window, and there is a little tower like Montaigne's.”

“When I get out of the army, I shall go somewhere in the country and work and work.”

“Music should be made in the country, when the sap is rising in the trees.”

“'D'apres nature,' as the rabbit man said.”

“Who's the rabbit man?”

“A very pleasant person,” said Andrews, bubbling with laughter. “You shall meet him some day. He sells little stuffed rabbits that jump, outside the Cafe de Rohan.”

“Here we are.... Thank you for coming home with me.”

“But how soon. Are you sure it is the house? We can't have got there as soon as this.”

“Yes, it's my house,” said Genevieve Rod laughing. She held out her hand to him and he shook it eagerly. The latchkey clicked in the door.

“Why don't you have a cup of tea with us here tomorrow?” she said.

“With pleasure.”

The big varnished door with its knocker in the shape of a ring closed behind her. Andrews walked away with a light step, feeling jolly and exhilarated.

As he walked down the mist-filled quai towards the Place St. Michel, his ears were filled with the lisping gurgle of the river past the piers of the bridges.

Walters was asleep. On the table in his room was a card from Jeanne. Andrews read the card holding it close to the candle.

“How long it is since I saw you!” it read. “I shall pass the Cafe de Rohan Wednesday at seven, along the pavement opposite the Magazin du Louvre.”

It was a card of Malmaison.

Andrews flushed. Bitter melancholy throbbed through him. He walked languidly to the window and looked out into the dark court. A window below his spilled a warm golden haze into the misty night, through which he could make out vaguely some pots of ferns standing on the wet flagstones. From somewhere came a dense smell of hyacinths. Fragments of thought slipped one after another through his mind. He thought of himself washing windows long ago at training camp, and remembered the way the gritty sponge scraped his hands. He could not help feeling shame when he thought of those days. “Well, that's all over now,” he told himself. He wondered, in a half-irritated way, about Genevieve Rod. What sort of a person was she? Her face, with its wide eyes and pointed chin and the reddish-chestnut hair, unpretentiously coiled above the white forehead, was very vivid in his mind, though when he tried to remember what it was like in profile, he could not. She had thin hands, with long fingers that ought to play the piano well. When she grew old would she be yellow-toothed and jolly, like her mother? He could not think of her old; she was too vigorous; there was too much malice in her passionately-restrained gestures. The memory of her faded, and there came to his mind Jeanne's overworked little hands, with callous places, and the tips of the fingers grimy and scarred from needlework. But the smell of hyacinths that came up from the mist-filled courtyard was like a sponge wiping all impressions from his brain. The dense sweet smell in the damp air made him feel languid and melancholy.

He took off his clothes slowly and got into bed. The smell of the hyacinths came to him very faintly, so that he did not know whether or not he was imagining it.

The major's office was a large white-painted room, with elaborate mouldings and mirrors in all four walls, so that while Andrews waited, cap in hand, to go up to the desk, he could see the small round major with his pink face and bald head repeated to infinity in two directions in the grey brilliance of the mirrors.

“What do you want?” said the major, looking up from some papers he was signing.

Andrews stepped up to the desk. On both sides of the room a skinny figure in olive-drab, repeated endlessly, stepped up to endless mahogany desks, which faded into each other in an endless dusty perspective.

“Would you mind O.K.-ing this application for discharge, Major?”

“How many dependents?” muttered the major through his teeth, poring over the application.

“None. It's for discharge in France to study music.”

“Won't do. You need an affidavit that you can support yourself, that you have enough money to continue your studies. You want to study music, eh? D'you think you've got talent? Needs a very great deal of talent to study music.”

“Yes, sir.... But is there anything else I need except the affidavit?”

“No.... It'll go through in short order. We're glad to release men.... We're glad to release any man with a good military record.... Williams!”

“Yes, sir.”

A sergeant came over from a small table by the door.

“Show this man what he needs to do to get discharged in France.”

Andrews saluted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the figures in the mirror, saluting down an endless corridor.

When he got out on the street in front of the great white building where the major's office was, a morose feeling of helplessness came over him. There were many automobiles of different sizes and shapes, limousines, runabouts, touring cars, lined up along the curb, all painted olive-drab and neatly stenciled with numbers in white. Now and then a personage came out of the white marble building, puttees and Sam Browne belt gleaming, and darted into an automobile, or a noisy motorcycle stopped with a jerk in front of the wide door to let out an officer in goggles and mud-splattered trench coat, who disappeared immediately through revolving doors. Andrews could imagine him striding along halls, where from every door came an imperious clicking of typewriters, where papers were piled high on yellow varnished desks, where sallow-faced clerks in uniform loafed in rooms, where the four walls were covered from floor to ceiling with card catalogues. And every day they were adding to the paper, piling up more little drawers with index cards. It seemed to Andrews that the shiny white marble building would have to burst with all the paper stored up within it, and would flood the broad avenue with avalanches of index cards.

“Button yer coat,” snarled a voice in his ear.

Andrews looked up suddenly. An M. P. with a raw-looking face in which was a long sharp nose, had come up to him.

Andrews buttoned up his overcoat and said nothing.

“Ye can't hang around here this way,” the M. P. called after him.

Andrews flushed and walked away without turning his head. He was stinging with humiliation; an angry voice inside him kept telling him that he was a coward, that he should make some futile gesture of protest. Grotesque pictures of revolt flamed through his mind, until he remembered that when he was very small, the same tumultuous pride had seethed and ached in him whenever he had been reproved by an older person. Helpless despair fluttered about within him like a bird beating against the wires of a cage. Was there no outlet, no gesture of expression, would he have to go on this way day after day, swallowing the bitter gall of indignation, that every new symbol of his slavery brought to his lips?

He was walking in an agitated way across the Jardin des Tuileries, full of little children and women with dogs on leashes and nursemaids with starched white caps, when he met Genevieve Rod and her mother. Genevieve was dressed in pearl grey, with an elegance a little too fashionable to please Andrews. Mme. Rod wore black. In front of them a black and tan terrier ran from one side to the other, on nervous little legs that trembled like steel springs.

“Isn't it lovely this morning?” cried Genevieve.

“I didn't know you had a dog.”

“Oh, we never go out without Santo, a protection to two lone women, you know,” said Mme. Rod, laughing. “Viens, Santo, dis bonjour au Monsieur.”

“He usually lives at Poissac,” said Genevieve.

The little dog barked furiously at Andrews, a shrill bark like a child squalling.

“He knows he ought to be suspicious of soldiers.... I imagine most soldiers would change with him if they had a chance.... Viens Santo, viens Santo.... Will you change lives with me, Santo?”

“You look as if you'd been quarrelling with somebody,” said Genevieve Rod lightly.

“I have, with myself.... I'm going to write a book on slave psychology. It would be very amusing,” said Andrews in a gruff, breathless voice.

“But we must hurry, dear, or we'll be late to the tailor's,” said Mme. Rod. She held out her black-gloved hand to Andrews.

“We'll be in at tea time this afternoon. You might play me some more of the 'Queen of Sheba,'” said Genevieve.

“I'm afraid I shan't be able to, but you never can tell.... Thank you.”

He was relieved to have left them. He had been afraid he would burst out into some childish tirade. What a shame old Henslowe hadn't come back yet. He could have poured out all his despair to him; he had often enough before; and Henslowe was out of the army now. Wearily Andrews decided that he would have to start scheming and intriguing again as he had schemed and intrigued to come to Paris in the first place. He thought of the white marble building and the officers with shiny puttees going in and out, and the typewriters clicking in every room, and the understanding of his helplessness before all that complication made him shiver.

An idea came to him. He ran down the steps of a metro station. Aubrey would know someone at the Crillon who could help him.

But when the train reached the Concorde station, he could not summon the will power to get out. He felt a harsh repugnance to any effort. What was the use of humiliating himself and begging favors of people? It was hopeless anyway. In a fierce burst of pride a voice inside of him was shouting that he, John Andrews, should have no shame, that he should force people to do things for him, that he, who lived more acutely than the rest, suffering more pain and more joy, who had the power to express his pain and his joy so that it would impose itself on others, should force his will on those around him. “More of the psychology of slavery,” said Andrews to himself, suddenly smashing the soap-bubble of his egoism.

The train had reached the Porte Maillot.

Andrews stood in the sunny boulevard in front of the metro station, where the plane trees were showing tiny gold-brown leaves, sniffing the smell of a flower-stall in front of which a woman stood, with a deft abstracted gesture tying up bunch after bunch of violets. He felt a desire to be out in the country, to be away from houses and people. There was a line of men and women buying tickets for St. Germain; still indecisive, he joined it, and at last, almost without intending it, found himself jolting through Neuilly in the green trailer of the electric car, that waggled like a duck's tail when the car went fast.

He remembered his last trip on that same car with Jeanne, and wished mournfully that he might have fallen in love with her, that he might have forgotten himself and the army and everything in crazy, romantic love.

When he got off the car at St. Germain, he had stopped formulating his thoughts; soggy despair throbbed in him like an infected wound.

He sat for a while at the cafe opposite the Chateau looking at the light red walls and the strong stone-bordered windows and the jaunty turrets and chimneys that rose above the classic balustrade with its big urns on the edge of the roof. The park, through the tall iron railings, was full of russet and pale lines, all mist of new leaves. Had they really lived more vividly, the people of the Renaissance? Andrews could almost see men with plumed hats and short cloaks and elaborate brocaded tunics swaggering with a hand at the sword hilt, about the quiet square in front of the gate of the Chateau. And he thought of the great, sudden wind of freedom that had blown out of Italy, before which dogmas and slaveries had crumbled to dust. In contrast, the world today seemed pitifully arid. Men seemed to have shrunk in stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper in slavery. Whichever won, tyranny from above, or spontaneous organization from below, there could be no individuals.

He went through the gates into the park, laid out with a few flower beds where pansies bloomed; through the dark ranks of elm trunks, was brilliant sky, with here and there a moss-green statue standing out against it. At the head of an alley he came out on a terrace. Beyond the strong curves of the pattern of the iron balustrade was an expanse of country, pale green, falling to blue towards the horizon, patched with pink and slate-colored houses and carved with railway tracks. At his feet the Seine shone like a curved sword blade.

He walked with long strides along the terrace, and followed a road that turned into the forest, forgetting the monotonous tread mill of his thoughts, in the flush that the fast walking sent through his whole body, in the rustling silence of the woods, where the moss on the north side of the boles of the trees was emerald, and where the sky was soft grey through a lavender lacework of branches. The green gnarled woods made him think of the first act of Pelleas. With his tunic unbuttoned and his shirt open at the neck and his hands stuck deep in his pockets, he went along whistling like a school boy.

After an hour he came out of the woods on a highroad, where he found himself walking beside a two-wheeled cart, that kept pace with him exactly, try as he would to get ahead of it. After a while, a boy leaned out:

“Hey, l'Americain, vous voulez monter?”

“Where are you going?”

“Conflans-Ste.-Honorine.”

“Where's that?”

The boy flourished his whip vaguely towards the horse's head.

“All right,” said Andrews.

“These are potatoes,” said the boy, “make yourself comfortable.'' Andrews offered him a cigarette, which he took with muddy fingers. He had a broad face, red cheeks and chunky features. Reddish-brown hair escaped spikily from under a mud-spattered beret.

“Where did you say you were going?”

“Conflans-Ste.-Honorine. Silly all these saints, aren't they?”

Andrews laughed.

“Where are you going?” the boy asked.

“I don't know. I was taking a walk.”

The boy leaned over to Andrews and whispered in his car: “Deserter?”

“No.... I had a day off and wanted to see the country.”

“I just thought, if you were a deserter, I might be able to help you. Must be silly to be a soldier. Dirty life.... But you like the country. So do I. You can't call this country. I'm not from this part; I'm from Brittany. There we have real country. It's stifling near Paris here, so many people, so many houses.”

“It seems mighty fine to me.”

“That's because you're a soldier, better than barracks, hein? Dirty life that. I'll never be a soldier. I'm going into the navy. Merchant marine, and then if I have to do service I'll do it on the sea.”

“I suppose it is pleasanter.”

“There's more freedom. And the sea.... We Bretons, you know, we all die of the sea or of liquor.”

They laughed.

“Have you been long in this part of the country?” asked Andrews.

“Six months. It's very dull, this farming work. I'm head of a gang in a fruit orchard, but not for long. I have a brother shipped on a sailing vessel. When he comes back to Bordeaux, I'll ship on the same boat.”

“Where to?”

“South America, Peru; how should I know?”

“I'd like to ship on a sailing vessel,” said Andrews.

“You would? It seems very fine to me to travel, and see new countries. And perhaps I shall stay over there.”

“Where?”

“How should I know? If I like it, that is.... Life is very bad in Europe.”

“It is stifling, I suppose,” said Andrews slowly, “all these nations, all these hatreds, but still... it is very beautiful. Life is very ugly in America.”

“Let's have something to drink. There's a bistro!”

The boy jumped down from the cart and tied the horse to a tree. They went into a small wine shop with a counter and one square oak table.

“But won't you be late?” said Andrews.

“I don't care. I like talking, don't you?”

“Yes, indeed.”

They ordered wine of an old woman in a green apron, who had three yellow teeth that protruded from her mouth when she spoke.

“I haven't had anything to eat,” said Andrews.

“Wait a minute.” The boy ran out to the cart and came back with a canvas bag, from which he took half a loaf of bread and some cheese.

“My name's Marcel,” the boy said when they had sat for a while sipping wine.

“Mine is Jean...Jean Andre.”

“I have a brother named Jean, and my father's name is Andre. That's pleasant, isn't it?”

“But it must be a splendid job, working in a fruit orchard,” said Andrews, munching bread and cheese.

“It's well paid; but you get tired of being in one place all the time. It's not as it is in Brittany....” Marcel paused. He sat, rocking a little on the stool, holding on to the seat between his legs. A curious brilliance came into his grey eyes. “There,” he went on in a soft voice, “it is so quiet in the fields, and from every hill you look at the sea.... I like that, don't you?” he turned to Andrews, with a smile.

“You are lucky to be free,” said Andrews bitterly. He felt as if he would burst into tears.

“But you will be demobilized soon; the butchery is over. You will go home to your family. That will be good, hein?”

“I wonder. It's not far enough away. Restless!”

“What do you expect?”

A fine rain was falling. They climbed in on the potato sacks and the horse started a jog trot; its lanky brown shanks glistened a little from the rain.

“Do you come out this way often?” asked Marcel.

“I shall. It's the nicest place near Paris.”

“Some Sunday you must come and I'll take you round. The Castle is very fine. And then there is Malmaison, where the great Emperor lived with the Empress Josephine.”

Andrews suddenly remembered Jeanne's card. This was Wednesday. He pictured her dark figure among the crowd of the pavement in front of the Cafe de Rohan. Of course it had to be that way. Despair, so helpless as to be almost sweet, came over him.

“And girls,” he said suddenly to Marcel, “are they pretty round here?”

Marcel shrugged his shoulders.

“It's not women that we lack, if a fellow has money,” he said.

Andrews felt a sense of shame, he did not exactly know why.

“My brother writes that in South America the women are very brown and very passionate,” added Marcel with a wistful smile. “But travelling and reading books, that's what I like.... But look, if you want to take the train back to Paris....” Marcel pulled up the horse to a standstill. “If you want to take the train, cross that field by the foot path and keep right along the road to the left till you come to the river. There's a ferryman. The town's Herblay, and there's a station.... And any Sunday before noon I'll be at 3 rue des Eveques, Reuil. You must come and we'll take a walk together.”

They shook hands, and Andrews strode off across the wet fields. Something strangely sweet and wistful that he could not analyse lingered in his mind from Marcel's talk. Somewhere, beyond everything, he was conscious of the great free rhythm of the sea.

Then he thought of the Major's office that morning, and of his own skinny figure in the mirrors, repeated endlessly, standing helpless and humble before the shining mahogany desk. Even out here in these fields where the wet earth seemed to heave with the sprouting of new growth, he was not free. In those office buildings, with white marble halls full of the clank of officers' heels, in index cards and piles of typewritten papers, his real self, which they had power to kill if they wanted to, was in his name and his number, on lists with millions of other names and other numbers. This sentient body of his, full of possibilities and hopes and desires, was only a pale ghost that depended on the other self, that suffered for it and cringed for it. He could not drive out of his head the picture of himself, skinny, in an illfitting uniform, repeated endlessly in the two mirrors of the Major's white-painted office.

All of a sudden, through bare poplar trees, he saw the Seine.

He hurried along the road, splashing now and then in a shining puddle, until he came to a landing place. The river was very wide, silvery, streaked with pale-green and violet, and straw-color from the evening sky. Opposite were bare poplars and behind them clusters of buff-colored houses climbing up a green hill to a church, all repeated upside down in the color-streaked river. The river was very full, and welled up above its banks, the way the water stands up above the rim of a glass filled too full. From the water came an indefinable rustling, flowing sound that rose and fell with quiet rhythm in Andrews's ears.

Andrews forgot everything in the great wave of music that rose impetuously through him, poured with the hot blood through his veins, with the streaked colors of the river and the sky through his eyes, with the rhythm of the flowing river through his ears.

V

“So I came without,” said Andrews, laughing.

“What fun!” cried Genevieve. “But anyway they couldn't do anything to you. Chartres is so near. It's at the gates of Paris.”

They were alone in the compartment. The train had pulled out of the station and was going through suburbs where the trees were in leaf in the gardens, and fruit trees foamed above the red brick walls, among the box-like villas.

“Anyway,” said Andrews, “it was an opportunity not to be missed.”

“That must be one of the most amusing things about being a soldier, avoiding regulations. I wonder whether Damocles didn't really enjoy his sword, don't you think so?”

They laughed.

“But mother was very doubtful about my coming with you this way. She's such a dear, she wants to be very modern and liberal, but she always gets frightened at the last minute. And my aunt will think the world's end has come when we appear.”

They went through some tunnels, and when the train stopped at Sevres, had a glimpse of the Seine valley, where the blue mist made a patina over the soft pea-green of new leaves. Then the train came out on wide plains, full of the glaucous shimmer of young oats and the golden-green of fresh-sprinkled wheat fields, where the mist on the horizon was purplish. The train's shadow, blue, sped along beside them over the grass and fences.

“How beautiful it is to go out of the city this way in the early morning!... Has your aunt a piano?”

“Yes, a very old and tinkly one.”

“It would be amusing to play you all I have done at the 'Queen of Sheba.' You say the most helpful things.”

“It is that I am interested. I think you will do something some day.”

Andrews shrugged his shoulders.

They sat silent, their ears filled up by the jerking rhythm of wheels over rails, now and then looking at each other, almost furtively. Outside, fields and hedges and patches of blossom, and poplar trees faintly powdered with green, unrolled, like a scroll before them, behind the nicker of telegraph poles and the festooned wires on which the sun gave glints of red copper. Andrews discovered all at once that the coppery glint on the telegraph wires was the same as the glint in Genevieve's hair. “Berenike, Artemisia, Arsinoe,” the names lingered in his mind. So that as he looked out of the window at the long curves of the telegraph wires that seemed to rise and fall as they glided past, he could imagine her face, with its large, pale brown eyes and its small mouth and broad smooth forehead, suddenly stilled into the encaustic painting on the mummy case of some Alexandrian girl.

“Tell me,” she said, “when did you begin to write music?”

Andrews brushed the light, disordered hair off his forehead.

“Why, I think I forgot to brush my hair this morning,” he said. “You see, I was so excited by the idea of coming to Chartres with you.”

They laughed.

“But my mother taught me to play the piano when I was very small,” he went on seriously. “She and I lived alone in an old house belonging to her family in Virginia. How different all that was from anything you have ever lived. It would not be possible in Europe to be as isolated as we were in Virginia.... Mother was very unhappy. She had led a dreadfully thwarted life... that unrelieved hopeless misery that only a woman can suffer. She used to tell me stories, and I used to make up little tunes about them, and about anything. The great success,” he laughed, “was, I remember, to a dandelion.... I can remember so well the way Mother pursed up her lips as she leaned over the writing desk.... She was very tall, and as it was dark in our old sitting room, had to lean far over to see.... She used to spend hours making beautiful copies of tunes I made up. My mother is the only person who has ever really had any importance in my life.... But I lack technical training terribly.”

“Do you think it is so important?” said Genevieve, leaning towards him to make herself heard above the clatter of the train.

“Perhaps it isn't. I don't know.”

“I think it always comes sooner or later, if you feel intensely enough.”

“But it is so frightful to feel all you want to express getting away beyond you. An idea comes into your head, and you feel it grow stronger and stronger and you can't grasp it; you have no means to express it. It's like standing on a street corner and seeing a gorgeous procession go by without being able to join it, or like opening a bottle of beer and having it foam all over you without having a glass to pour it into.”

Genevieve burst out laughing.

“But you can drink from the bottle, can't you?” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“I'm trying to,” said Andrews.

“Here we are. There's the cathedral. No, it's hidden,” cried Genevieve.

They got to their feet. As they left the station, Andrews said: “But after all, it's only freedom that matters. When I'm out of the army!...”

“Yes, I suppose you are right... for you that is. The artist should be free from any sort of entanglement.”

“I don't see what difference there is between an artist and any other sort of workman,” said Andrews savagely.

“No, but look.”

From the square where they stood, above the green blur of a little park, they could see the cathedral, creamy yellow and rust color, with the sober tower and the gaudy tower, and the great rose window between, the whole pile standing nonchalantly, knee deep in the packed roofs of the town.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it without speaking.

In the afternoon they walked down the hill towards the river, that flowed through a quarter of tottering, peak-gabled houses and mills, from which came a sound of grinding wheels. Above them, towering over gardens full of pear trees in bloom, the apse of the cathedral bulged against the pale sky. On a narrow and very ancient bridge they stopped and looked at the water, full of a shimmer of blue and green and grey from the sky and from the vivid new leaves of the willow trees along the bank.

Their senses glutted with the beauty of the day and the intricate magnificence of the cathedral, languid with all they had seen and said, they were talking of the future with quiet voices.

“It's all in forming a habit of work,” Andrews was saying. “You have to be a slave to get anything done. It's all a question of choosing your master, don't you think so?”

“Yes. I suppose all the men who have left their imprint on people's lives have been slaves in a sense,” said Genevieve slowly. “Everyone has to give up a great deal of life to live anything deeply. But it's worth, it.” She looked Andrews full in the eyes.

“Yes, I think it's worth it,” said Andrews. “But you must help me. Now I am like a man who has come up out of a dark cellar. I'm almost too dazzled by the gorgeousness of everything. But at least I am out of the cellar.”

“Look, a fish jumped,” cried Genevieve. “I wonder if we could hire a boat anywhere.... Don't you think it'd be fun to go out in a boat?”

A voice broke in on Genevieve's answer: “Let's see your pass, will you?”

Andrews turned round. A soldier with a round brown face and red cheeks stood beside him on the bridge. Andrews looked at him fixedly. A little zigzag scar above his left eye showed white on his heavily tanned skin.

“Let's see your pass,” the man said again; he had a high pitched, squeaky voice.

Andrews felt the blood thumping in his ears. “Are you an M. P.?”

“Yes.”

“Well I'm in the Sorbonne Detachment.”

“What the hell's that?” said the M. P., laughing thinly.

“What does he say?” asked Genevieve, smiling.

“Nothing. I'll have to go see the officer and explain,” said Andrews in a breathless voice. “You go back to your Aunt's and I'll come as soon as I've arranged it.”

“No, I'll come with you.”

“Please go back. It may be serious. I'll come as soon as I can,” said Andrews harshly.

She walked up the hill with swift decisive steps, without turning round.

“Tough luck, buddy,” said the M. P. “She's a good-looker. I'd like to have a half-hour with her myself.”

“Look here. I'm in the Sorbonne School Detachment in Paris, and I came down here without a pass. Is there anything I can do about it?”

“They'll fix you up, don't worry,” cried the M. P. shrilly. “You ain't a member of the General Staff in disguise, are ye? School Detachment! Gee, won't Bill Huggis laugh when he hears that? You pulled the best one yet, buddy.... But come along,” he added in a confidential tone. “If you come quiet I won't put the handcuffs on ye.”

“How do I know you're an M. P.?”

“You'll know soon enough.”

They turned down a narrow street between grey stucco walls leprous with moss and water stains.

At a chair inside the window of a small wine shop a man with a red M. P. badge sat smoking. He got up when he saw them pass and opened the door with one hand on his pistol holster.

“I got one bird, Bill,” said the man, shoving Andrews roughly in the door.

“Good for you, Handsome; is he quiet?”

“Um.” Handsome grunted.

“Sit down there. If you move you'll git a bullet in your guts.”

The M. P. stuck out a square jaw; he had a sallow skin, puffy under the eyes that were grey and lustreless.

“He says he's in some goddam School Detachment. First time that's been pulled, ain't it?”

“School Detachment. D'you mean an O. T. C?” Bill sank laughing into his chair by the window, spreading his legs out over the floor.

“Ain't that rich?” said Handsome, laughing shrilly again.

“Got any papers on ye? Ye must have some sort of papers.”

Andrews searched his pockets. He flushed.

“I ought to have a school pass.”

“You sure ought. Gee, this guy's simple,” said Bill, leaning far back in the chair and blowing smoke through his nose.

“Look at his dawg-tag, Handsome.”

The man strode over to Andrews and jerked open the top of his tunic. Andrews pulled his body away.

“I haven't got any on. I forgot to put any on this morning.”

“No tag, no insignia.”

“Yes, I have, infantry.”

“No papers.... I bet he's been out a hell of a time,” said Handsome meditatively.

“Better put the cuffs on him,” said Bill in the middle of a yawn.

“Let's wait a while. When's the loot coming?”

“Not till night.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. Ain't no train.”

“How about a side car?”

“No, I know he ain't comin',” snarled Bill.

“What d'you say we have a little liquor, Bill? Bet this bloke's got money. You'll set us up to a glass o' cognac, won't you, School Detachment?”

Andrews sat very stiff in his chair, staring at them.

“Yes,” he said, “order up what you like.”

“Keep an eye on him, Handsome. You never can tell what this quiet kind's likely to pull off on you.”

Bill Huggis strode out of the room with heavy steps. In a moment he came back swinging a bottle of cognac in his hand.

“Tole the Madame you'd pay, Skinny,” said the man as he passed Andrews's chair. Andrews nodded.

The two M. P.'s drew up to the table beside which Andrews sat. Andrews could not keep his eyes off them. Bill Huggis hummed as he pulled the cork out of the bottle.

“It's the smile that makes you happy, It's the smile that makes you sad.”

Handsome watched him, grinning.

Suddenly they both burst out laughing.

“An' the damn fool thinks he's in a school battalion,” said Handsome in his shrill voice.

“It'll be another kind of a battalion you'll be in, Skinny,” cried Bill Huggis. He stifled his laughter with a long drink from the bottle.

He smacked his lips.

“Not so goddam bad,” he said. Then he started humming again:

“It's the smile that makes you happy, It's the smile that makes you sad.”

“Have some, Skinny?” said Handsome, pushing the bottle towards Andrews.

“No, thanks,” said Andrews.

“Ye won't be gettin' good cognac where yer goin', Skinny, not by a damn sight,” growled Bill Huggis in the middle of a laugh.

“All right, I'll take a swig.” An idea had suddenly come into Andrews's head.

“Gee, the bastard kin drink cognac,” cried Handsome.

“Got enough money to buy us another bottle?”

Andrews nodded. He wiped his mouth absently with his handkerchief; he had drunk the raw cognac without tasting it.

“Get another bottle, Handsome,” said Bill Huggis carelessly. A purplish flush had appeared in the lower part of his cheeks. When the other man came back, he burst out laughing.

“The last cognac this Skinny guy from the school detachment'll get for many a day. Better drink up strong, Skinny.... They don't have that stuff down on the farm.... School Detachment; I'll be goddamned!” He leaned back in his chair, shaking with laughter.

Handsome's face was crimson. Only the zigzag scar over his eye remained white. He was swearing in a low voice as he worked the cork out of the bottle.

Andrews could not keep his eyes off the men's faces. They went from one to the other, in spite of him. Now and then, for an instant, he caught a glimpse of the yellow and brown squares of the wall paper and the bar with a few empty bottles behind it. He tried to count the bottles; “one, two, three...” but he was staring in the lustreless grey eyes of Bill Huggis, who lay back in his chair, blowing smoke out of his nose, now and then reaching for the cognac bottle, all the while humming faintly, under his breath:

“It's the smile that makes you happy, It's the smile that makes you sad.”

Handsome sat with his elbows on the table, and his chin in his beefy hands. His face was flushed crimson, but the skin was softly moulded, like a woman's.

The light in the room was beginning to grow grey.

Handsome and Bill Huggis stood up. A young officer, with clearly-marked features and a campaign hat worn a little on one side, came in, stood with his feet wide apart in the middle of the floor.

Andrews went up to him.

“I'm in the Sorbonne Detachment, Lieutenant, stationed in Paris.”

“Don't you know enough to salute?” said the officer, looking him up and down. “One of you men teach him to salute,” he said slowly.

Handsome made a step towards Andrews and hit him with his fist between the eyes. There was a flash of light and the room swung round, and there was a splitting crash as his head struck the floor. He got to his feet. The fist hit him in the same place, blinding him, the three figures and the bright oblong of the window swung round. A chair crashed down with him, and a hard rap in the back of his skull brought momentary blackness.

“That's enough, let him be,” he heard a voice far away at the end of a black tunnel.

A great weight seemed to be holding him down as he struggled to get up, blinded by tears and blood. Rending pains darted like arrows through his head. There were handcuffs on his wrists.

“Git up,” snarled a voice.

He got to his feet, faint light came through the streaming tears in his eyes. His forehead flamed as if hot coals were being pressed against it.

“Prisoner, attention!” shouted the officer's voice. “March!”

Automatically, Andrews lifted one foot and then the other. He felt in his face the cool air of the street. On either side of him were the hard steps of the M. P.'s. Within him a nightmare voice was shrieking, shrieking.