Chapter XVII: Part SIX: Under the Wheels (2)

When Andrews walked by the M.P. at the Gare-St. Lazare, his hands were cold with fear. The M.P. did not look at him. He stopped on the crowded pavement a little way from the station and stared into a mirror in a shop window. Unshaven, with a check cap on the side of his head and his corduroy trousers, he looked like a young workman who had been out of work for a month.

“Gee, clothes do make a difference,” he said to himself. He smiled when he thought how shocked Walters would be when he turned up in that rig, and started walking with leisurely stride across Paris, where everything bustled and jingled with early morning, where from every cafe came a hot smell of coffee, and fresh bread steamed in the windows of the bakeries. He still had three francs in his pocket. On a side street the fumes of coffee roasting attracted him into a small bar. Several men were arguing boisterously at the end of the bar. One of them turned a ruddy, tow-whiskered face to Andrews, and said:

“Et toi, tu vas chomer le premier mai?”

“I'm on strike already,” answered Andrews laughing.

The man noticed his accent, looked at him sharply a second, and turned back to the conversation, lowering his voice as he did so. Andrews drank down his coffee and left the bar, his heart pounding. He could not help glancing back over his shoulder now and then to see if he was being followed. At a corner he stopped with his fists clenched and leaned a second against a house wall.

“Where's your nerve. Where's your nerve?” He was saying to himself.

He strode off suddenly, full of bitter determination not to turn round again. He tried to occupy his mind with plans. Let's see, what should he do? First he'd go to his room and look up old Henslowe and Walters. Then he would go to see Genevieve. Then he'd work, work, forget everything in his work, until the army should go back to America and there should be no more uniforms on the streets. And as for the future, what did he care about the future?

When he turned the corner into the familiar street where his room was, a thought came to him. Suppose he should find M.P.'s waiting for him there? He brushed it aside angrily and strode fast up the sidewalk, catching up to a soldier who was slouching along in the same direction, with his hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground. Andrews stopped suddenly as he was about to pass the soldier and turned. The man looked up. It was Chrisfield.

Andrews held out his hand.

Chrisfield seized it eagerly and shook it for a long time. “Jesus Christ! Ah thought you was a Frenchman, Andy.... Ah guess you got yer dis-charge then. God, Ah'm glad.”

“I'm glad I look like a Frenchman, anyway.... Been on leave long, Chris?”

Two buttons were off the front of Chrisfield's uniform; there were streaks of dirt on his face, and his puttees were clothed with mud. He looked Andrews seriously in the eyes, and shook his head.

“No. Ah done flew the coop, Andy,” he said in a low voice.

“Since when?”

“Ah been out a couple o' weeks. Ah'll tell you about it, Andy. Ah was comin' to see you now. Ah'm broke.”

“Well look, I'll be able to get hold of some money tomorrow.... I'm out too.”

“What d'ye mean?”

“I haven't got a discharge. I'm through with it all. I've deserted.”

“God damn! That's funny that you an' me should both do it, Andy. But why the hell did you do it?”

“Oh, it's too long to tell here. Come up to my room.”

“There may be fellers there. Ever been at the Chink's?”

“No.”

“I'm stayin' there. There're other fellers who's A.W. O.L. too. The Chink's got a gin mill.”

“Where is it.”

“Eight, rew day Petee Jardings.”

“Where's that?”

“Way back of that garden where the animals are.”

“Look, I can find you there tomorrow morning, and I'll bring some money.”

“Ah'll wait for ye, Andy, at nine. It's a bar. Ye won't be able to git in without me, the kids is pretty scared of plainclothes men.”

“I think it'll be perfectly safe to come up to my place now.”

“Now, Ah'm goin' to git the hell out of here.”

“But Chris, why did you go A.W.O.L.?”

“Oh, Ah doan know.... A guy who's in the Paris detachment got yer address for me.”

“But, Chris, did they say anything to him about me?”

“No, nauthin'.”

“That's funny.... Well, Chris, I'll be there tomorrow, if I can find the place.”

“Man, you've got to be there.”

“Oh, I'll turn up,” said Andrews with a smile.

They shook hands nervously.

“Say, Andy,” said Chrisfield, still holding on to Andrews's hand, “Ah went A.W.O.L. 'cause a sergeant...God damn it; it's weighin' on ma mind awful these days.... There's a sergeant that knows.”

“What you mean?”

“Ah told ye about Anderson...Ah know you ain't tole anybody, Andy.” Chrisfield dropped Andrews's hand and looked at him in the face with an unexpected sideways glance. Then he went on through clenched teeth: “Ah swear to Gawd Ah ain't tole another livin' soul.... An' the sergeant in Company D knows.”

“For God's sake, Chris, don't lose your nerve like that.”

“Ah ain't lost ma nerve. Ah tell you that guy knows.”

Chrisfield's voice rose, suddenly shrill.

“Look, Chris, we can't stand talking out here in the street like this. It isn't safe.”

“But mebbe you'll be able to tell me what to do. You think, Andy. Mebbe, tomorrow, you'll have thought up somethin' we can do...So long.”

Chrisfield walked away hurriedly. Andrews looked after him a moment, and then went in through the court to the house where his room was.

At the foot of the stairs an old woman's voice startled him.

“Mais, Monsieur Andre, que vous avez l'air etrange; how funny you look dressed like that.”

The concierge was smiling at him from her cubbyhole beside the stairs. She sat knitting with a black shawl round her head, a tiny old woman with a hooked bird-like nose and eyes sunk in depressions full of little wrinkles, like a monkey's eyes.

“Yes, at the town where I was demobilized, I couldn't get anything else,” stammered Andrews.

“Oh, you're demobilized, are you? That's why you've been away so long. Monsieur Valters said he didn't know where you were.... It's better that way, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Andrews, starting up the stairs.

“Monsieur Valters is in now,” went on the old woman, talking after him. “And you've got in just in time for the first of May.”

“Oh, yes, the strike,” said Andrews, stopping half-way up the flight.

“It'll be dreadful,” said the old woman. “I hope you won't go out. Young folks are so likely to get into trouble...Oh, but all your friends have been worried about your being away so long.”

“Have they?'” said Andrews. He continued up the stairs.

“Au revoir, Monsieur.”

“Au revoir, Madame.”

III

“No, nothing can make me go back now. It's no use talking about it.”

“But you're crazy, man. You're crazy. One man alone can't buck the system like that, can he, Henslowe?”

Walters was talking earnestly, leaning across the table beside the lamp. Henslowe, who sat very stiff on the edge of a chair, nodded with compressed lips. Andrews lay at full length on the bed, out of the circle of light.

“Honestly, Andy,” said Henslowe with tears in his voice, “I think you'd better do what Walters says. It's no use being heroic about it.”

“I'm not being heroic, Henny,” cried Andrews, sitting up on the bed. He drew his feet under him, tailor fashion, and went on talking very quietly. “Look.. It's a purely personal matter. I've got to a point where I don't give a damn what happens to me. I don't care if I'm shot, or if I live to be eighty...I'm sick of being ordered round. One more order shouted at my head is not worth living to be eighty... to me. That's all. For God's sake let's talk about something else.”

“But how many orders have you had shouted at your head since you got in this School Detachment? Not one. You can put through your discharge application probably....” Walters got to his feet, letting the chair crash to the floor behind him. He stopped to pick it up. “Look here; here's my proposition,” he went on. “I don't think you are marked A.W.O.L. in the School office. Things are so damn badly run there. You can turn up and say you've been sick and draw your back pay. And nobody'll say a thing. Or else I'll put it right up to the guy who's top sergeant. He's a good friend of mine. We can fix it up on the records some way. But for God's sake don't ruin your whole life on account of a little stubbornness, and some damn fool anarchistic ideas or other a feller like you ought to have had more sense than to pick up....”

“He's right, Andy,” said Henslowe in a low voice.

“Please don't talk any more about it. You've told me all that before,” said Andrews sharply. He threw himself back on the bed and rolled over towards the wall.

They were silent a long time. A sound of voices and footsteps drifted up from the courtyard.

“But, look here, Andy,” said Henslowe nervously stroking his moustache. “You care much more about your work than any abstract idea of asserting your right of individual liberty. Even if you don't get caught.... I think the chances of getting caught are mighty slim if you use your head.... But even if you don't, you haven't enough money to live for long over here, you haven't....”

“Don't you think I've thought of all that? I'm not crazy, you know. I've figured up the balance perfectly sanely. The only thing is, you fellows can't understand. Have you ever been in a labor battalion? Have you ever had a man you'd been chatting with five minutes before deliberately knock you down? Good God, you don't know what you are talking about, you two.... I've got to be free, now. I don't care at what cost. Being free's the only thing that matters.”

Andrews lay on his back talking towards the ceiling.

Henslowe was on his feet, striding nervously about the room.

“As if anyone was ever free,” he muttered.

“All right, quibble, quibble. You can argue anything away if you want to. Of course, cowardice is the best policy, necessary for survival. The man who's got most will to live is the most cowardly... go on.” Andrews's voice was shrill and excited, breaking occasionally like a half-grown boy's voice.

“Andy, what on earth's got hold of you?... God, I hate to go away this way,” added Henslowe after a pause.

“I'll pull through all right, Henny. I'll probably come to see you in Syria, disguised as an Arab sheik.” Andrews laughed excitedly.

“If I thought I'd do any good, I'd stay.... But there's nothing I can do. Everybody's got to settle their own affairs, in their own damn fool way. So long, Walters.”

Walters and Henslowe shook hands absently.

Henslowe came over to the bed and held out his hand to Andrews.

“Look, old man, you will be as careful as you can, won't you? And write me care American Red Cross, Jerusalem. I'll be damned anxious, honestly.”

“Don't you worry, we'll go travelling together yet,” said Andrews, sitting up and taking Henslowe's hand.

They heard Henslowe's steps fade down the stairs and then ring for a moment on the pavings of the courtyard.

Walters moved his chair over beside Andrews's bed.

“Now, look, let's have a man-to-man talk, Andrews. Even if you want to ruin your life, you haven't a right to. There's your family, and haven't you any patriotism?... Remember, there is such a thing as duty in the world.”

Andrews sat up and said in a low, furious voice, pausing between each word:

“I can't explain it.... But I shall never put a uniform on again.... So for Christ's sake shut up.”

“All right, do what you goddam please; I'm through with you.”

Walters suddenly flashed into a rage. He began undressing silently. Andrews lay a long while flat on his back in the bed, staring at the ceiling, then he too undressed, put the light out, and got into bed.

The rue des Petits-Jardins was a short street in a district of warehouses. A grey, windowless wall shut out the light along all of one side. Opposite was a cluster of three old houses leaning together as if the outer ones were trying to support the beetling mansard roof of the center house. Behind them rose a huge building with rows and rows of black windows. When Andrews stopped to look about him, he found the street completely deserted. The ominous stillness that had brooded over the city during all the walk from his room near the Pantheon seemed here to culminate in sheer desolation. In the silence he could hear the light padding noise made by the feet of a dog that trotted across the end of the street. The house with the mansard roof was number eight. The front of the lower storey had once been painted in chocolate-color, across the top of which was still decipherable the sign: “Charbon, Bois. Lhomond.” On the grimed window beside the door, was painted in white: “Debit de Boissons.”

Andrews pushed on the door, which opened easily. Somewhere in the interior a bell jangled, startlingly loud after the silence of the street. On the wall opposite the door was a speckled mirror with a crack in it, the shape of a star, and under it a bench with three marble-top tables. The zinc bar filled up the third wall. In the fourth was a glass door pasted up with newspapers. Andrews walked over to the bar. The jangling of the bell faded to silence. He waited, a curious uneasiness gradually taking possession of him. Anyways, he thought, he was wasting his time; he ought to be doing something to arrange his future. He walked over to the street door. The bell jangled again when he opened it. At the same moment a man came out through the door the newspapers were pasted over. He was a stout man in a dirty white shirt stained to a brownish color round the armpits and caught in very tightly at the waist by the broad elastic belt that held up his yellow corduroy trousers. His face was flabby, of a greenish color; black eyes looked at Andrews fixedly through barely open lids, so that they seemed long slits above the cheekbones.

“That's the Chink,” thought Andrews.

“Well,” said the man, taking his place behind the bar with his legs far apart.

“A beer, please,” said Andrews.

“There isn't any.”

“A glass of wine then.”

The man nodded his head, and keeping his eyes fastened on Andrews all the while, strode out of the door again.

A moment later, Chrisfield came out, with rumpled hair, yawning, rubbing an eye with the knuckles of one fist.

“Lawsie, Ah juss woke up, Andy. Come along in back.”

Andrews followed him through a small room with tables and benches, down a corridor where the reek of ammonia bit into his eyes, and up a staircase littered with dirt and garbage. Chrisfield opened a door directly on the stairs, and they stumbled into a large room with a window that gave on the court. Chrisfield closed the door carefully, and turned to Andrews with a smile.

“Ah was right smart 'askeered ye wouldn't find it, Andy.”

“So this is where you live?”

“Um hum, a bunch of us lives here.”

A wide bed without coverings, where a man in olive-drab slept rolled in a blanket, was the only furniture of the room.

“Three of us sleeps in that bed,” said Chrisfield.

“Who's that?” cried the man in the bed, sitting up suddenly.

“All right, Al, he's a buddy o' mine,” said Chrisfield. “He's taken off his uniform.”

“Jesus, you got guts,” said the man in the bed.

Andrews looked at him sharply. A piece of towelling, splotched here and there with dried blood, was wrapped round his head, and a hand, swathed in bandages, was drawn up to his body. The man's mouth took on a twisted expression of pain as he let his head gradually down to the bed again.

“Gosh, what did you do to yourself?” cried Andrews.

“I tried to hop a freight at Marseilles.”

“Needs practice to do that sort o' thing,” said Chrisfield, who sat on the bed, pulling his shoes off. “Ah'm go-in' to git back to bed, Andy. Ah'm juss dead tired. Ah chucked cabbages all night at the market. They give ye a job there without askin' no questions.”

“Have a cigarette.” Andrews sat down on the foot of the bed and threw a cigarette towards Chrisfield. “Have one?” he asked Al.

“No. I couldn't smoke. I'm almost crazy with this hand. One of the wheels went over it.... I cut what was left of the little finger off with a razor.” Andrews could see the sweat rolling down his cheek as he spoke.

“Christ, that poor beggar's been havin' a time, Andy. We was 'askeert to get a doctor, and we all didn't know what to do.”

“I got some pure alcohol an' washed it in that. It's not infected. I guess it'll be all right.”

“Where are you from, Al?” asked Andrews.

“'Frisco. Oh, I'm goin' to try to sleep. I haven't slept a wink for four nights.”

“Why don't you get some dope?”

“Oh, we all ain't had a cent to spare for anythin', Andy.”

“Oh, if we had kale we could live like kings--not,” said Al in the middle of a nervous little giggle.

“Look, Chris,” said Andrews, “I'll halve with you. I've got five hundred francs.”

“Jesus Gawd, man, don't kid about anything like that.”

“Here's two hundred and fifty.... It's not so much as it sounds.”

Andrews handed him five fifty-franc notes.

“Say, how did you come to bust loose?” said Al, turning his head towards Andrews.

“I got away from a labor battalion one night. That's all.”

“Tell me about it, buddy. I don't feel my hand so much when I'm talking to somebody.... I'd be home now if it wasn't for a gin mill in Alsace. Say, don't ye think that big headgear they sport up there is awful good looking? Got my goat every time I saw one.... I was comin' back from leave at Grenoble, an' I went through Strasburg. Some town. My outfit was in Coblenz. That's where I met up with Chris here. Anyway, we was raisin' hell round Strasburg, an' I went into a gin mill down a flight of steps. Gee, everything in that town's plumb picturesque, just like a kid I used to know at home whose folks were Eytalian used to talk about when he said how he wanted to come overseas. Well, I met up with a girl down there, who said she'd just come down to a place like that to look for her brother who was in the foreign legion.”

Andrews and Chrisfield laughed.

“What you laughin' at?” went on Al in an eager taut voice. “Honest to Gawd. I'm goin' to marry her if I ever get out of this. She's the best little girl I ever met up with. She was waitress in a restaurant, an' when she was off duty she used to wear that there Alsatian costume.... Hell, I just stayed on. Every day, I thought I'd go away the next day.... Anyway, the war was over. I warn't a damn bit of use.... Hasn't a fellow got any rights at all? Then the M.P.'s started cleanin' up Strasburg after A.W.O.L.'s, an' I beat it out of there, an' Christ, it don't look as if I'd ever be able to get back.”

“Say, Andy,” said Chrisfield, suddenly, “let's go down after some booze.”

“All right.”

“Say, Al, do you want me to get you anything at the drug store?”

“No. I won't do anythin' but lay low and bathe it with alcohol now and then, against infection. Anyways, it's the first of May. You'll be crazy to go out. You might get pulled. They say there's riots going on.”

“Gosh, I forgot it was the first of May,” cried Andrews. “They're running a general strike to protest against the war with Russia and....”

“A guy told me,” interrupted Al, in a shrill voice, “there might be a revolution.”

“Come along, Andy,” said Chris from the door.

On the stairs Andrews felt Chrisfield's hand squeezing his arm hard.

“Say, Andy,” Chris put his lips close to Andrews's ear and spoke in a rasping whisper. “You're the only one that knows... you know what. You an' that sergeant. Doan you say anythin' so that the guys here kin ketch on, d'ye hear?”

“All right, Chris, I won't, but man alive, you oughtn't to lose your nerve about it. You aren't the only one who ever shot an...”

“Shut yer face, d'ye hear?” muttered Chrisfield savagely.

They went down the stairs in silence. In the room next, to the bar they found the Chink reading a newspaper.

“Is he French?” whispered Andrews.

“Ah doan know what he is. He ain't a white man, Ah'll wager that,” said Chris, “but he's square.”

“D'you know anything about what's going on?” asked Andrews in French, going up to the Chink.

“Where?” The Chink got up, flashing a glance at Andrews out of the corners of his slit-like eyes.

“Outside, in the streets, in Paris, anywhere where people are out in the open and can do things. What do you think about the revolution?”

The Chink shrugged his shoulders.

“Anything's possible,” he said.

“D'you think they really can overthrow the army and the government in one day, like that?”

“Who?” broke in Chrisfield.

“Why, the people, Chris, the ordinary people like you and me, who are tired of being ordered round, who are tired of being trampled down by other people just like them, who've had the luck to get in right with the system.”

“D'you know what I'll do when the revolution comes?” broke in the Chink with sudden intensity, slapping himself on the chest with one hand. “I'll go straight to one of those jewelry stores, rue Royale, and fill my pockets and come home with my hands full of diamonds.”

“What good'll that do you?”

“What good? I'll bury them back there in the court and wait. I'll need them in the end. D'you know what it'll mean, your revolution? Another system! When there's a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That's what the world's like.”

“But they won't be worth anything. It'll only be work that is worth anything.”

“We'll see,” said the Chink.

“D'you think it could happen, Andy, that there'd be a revolution, an' there wouldn't be any more armies, an' we'd be able to go round like we are civilians? Ah doan think so. Fellers like us ain't got it in 'em to buck the system, Andy.”

“Many a system's gone down before; it will happen again.”

“They're fighting the Garde Republicaine now before the Gare de l'Est,” said the Chink in an expressionless voice. “What do you want down here? You'd better stay in the back. You never know what the police may put over on us.”

“Give us two bottles of vin blank, Chink,” said Chrisfield.

“When'll you pay?”

“Right now. This guy's given me fifty francs.”

“Rich, are you?” said the Chink with hatred in his voice, turning to Andrews. “Won't last long at that rate. Wait here.”

He strode into the bar, closing the door carefully after him. A sudden jangling of the bell was followed by a sound of loud voices and stamping feet. Andrews and Chrisfield tiptoed into the dark corridor, where they stood a long time, waiting, breathing the foul air that stung their nostrils with the stench of plaster-damp and rotting wine. At last the Chink came back with three bottles of wine.

“Well, you're right,” he said to Andrews. “They are putting up barricades on the Avenue Magenta.”

On the stairs they met a girl sweeping. She had untidy hair that straggled out from under a blue handkerchief tied under her chin, and a pretty-colored fleshy face. Chrisfield caught her up to him and kissed her, as he passed.

“We all calls her the dawg-faced girl,” he said to Andrews in explanation. “She does our work. Ah like to had a fight with Slippery over her yisterday.... Didn't Ah, Slippery?”

When he followed Chrisfield into the room, Andrews saw a man sitting on the window ledge smoking. He was dressed as a second lieutenant, his puttees were brilliantly polished, and he smoked through a long, amber cigarette-holder. His pink nails were carefully manicured.

“This is Slippery, Andy,” said Chrisfield. “This guy's an ole buddy o' mine. We was bunkies together a hell of a time, wasn't we, Andy?”

“You bet we were.”

“So you've taken your uniform off, have you? Mighty foolish,” said Slippery. “Suppose they nab you?”

“It's all up now anyway. I don't intend to get nabbed,” said Andrews.

“We got booze,” said Chrisfield.

Slippery had taken dice from his pocket and was throwing them meditatively on the floor between his feet, snapping his fingers with each throw.

“I'll shoot you one of them bottles, Chris,” he said.

Andrews walked over to the bed. Al was stirring uneasily, his face flushed and his mouth twitching.

“Hello,” he said. “What's the news?”

“They say they're putting up barricades near the Gare de l'Est. It may be something.”

“God, I hope so. God, I wish they'd do everything here like they did in Russia; then we'd be free. We couldn't go back to the States for a while, but there wouldn't be no M.P.'s to hunt us like we were criminals.... I'm going to sit up a while and talk.” Al giggled hysterically for a moment.

“Have a swig of wine?” asked Andrews.

“Sure, it may set me up a bit; thanks.” He drank greedily from the bottle, spilling a little over his chin.

“Say, is your face badly cut up, Al?”

“No, it's just scotched, skin's off; looks like beefsteak, I reckon.... Ever been to Strasburg?”

“No.”

“Man, that's the town. And the girls in that costume.... Whee!”

“Say, you're from San Francisco, aren't you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I wonder if you knew a fellow I knew at training camp, a kid named Fuselli from 'Frisco?”

“Knew him! Jesus, man, he's the best friend I've got.... Ye don't know where he is now, do you?”

“I saw him here in Paris two months ago.”

“Well, I'll be damned.... God, that's great!” Al's voice was staccato from excitement. “So you knew Dan at training camp? The last letter from him was 'bout a year ago. Dan'd just got to be corporal. He's a damn clever kid, Dan is, an' ambitious too, one of the guys always makes good.... Gawd, I'd hate to see him this way. D'you know, we used to see a hell of a lot of each other in 'Frisco, an' he always used to tell me how he'd make good before I did. He was goddam right, too. Said I was too soft about girls.... Did ye know him real well?”

“Yes. I even remember that he used to tell me about a fellow he knew who was called Al.... He used to tell me about how you two used to go down to the harbor and watch the big liners come in at night, all aflare with lights through the Golden Gate. And he used to tell you he'd go over to Europe in one, when he'd made his pile.”

“That's why Strasburg made me think of him,” broke in Al, tremendously excited. “'Cause it was so picturesque like.... But honest, I've tried hard to make good in this army. I've done everything a feller could. An' all I did was to get into a cushy job in the regimental office.... But Dan, Gawd, he may even be an officer by this time.”

“No, he's not that,” said Andrews. “Look here, you ought to keep quiet with that hand of yours.”

“Damn my hand. Oh, it'll heal all right if I forget about it. You see, my foot slipped when they shunted a car I was just climbing into, an'...I guess I ought to be glad I wasn't killed. But, gee, when I think that if I hadn't been a fool about that girl I might have been home by now....”

“The Chink says they're putting up barricades on the Avenue Magenta.”

“That means business, kid!”

“Business nothin',” shouted Slippery from where he and Chrisfield leaned over the dice on the tile floor in front of the window. “One tank an' a few husky Senegalese'll make your goddam socialists run so fast they won't stop till they get to Dijon.... You guys ought to have more sense.” Slippery got to his feet and came over to the bed, jingling the dice in his hand. “It'll take more'n a handful o' socialists paid by the Boches to break the army. If it could be broke, don't ye think people would have done it long ago?”

“Shut up a minute. Ah thought Ah heard somethin',” said Chrisfield suddenly, going to the window.

They held their breath. The bed creaked as Al stirred uneasily in it.

“No, warn't anythin'; Ah'd thought Ah'd heard people singin'.”

“The Internationale,” cried Al.

“Shut up,” said Chrisfield in a low gruff voice.

Through the silence of the room they heard steps on the stairs.

“All right, it's only Smiddy,” said Slippery, and he threw the dice down on the tiles again.

The door opened slowly to let in a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a long face and long teeth.

“Who's the frawg?” he asked in a startled way, with one hand on the door knob.

“All right, Smiddy; it ain't a frawg; it's a guy Chris knows. He's taken his uniform off.”

“'Lo, buddy,” said Smiddy, shaking Andrews's hand. “Gawd, you look like a frawg.”

“That's good,” said Andrews.

“There's hell to pay,” broke out Smiddy breathlessly. “You know Gus Evans and the little black-haired guy goes 'round with him? They been picked up. I seen 'em myself with some M. P.'s at Place de la Bastille. An' a guy I talked to under the bridge where I slep' last night said a guy'd tole him they were goin' to clean the A. W. O. L.'s out o' Paris if they had to search through every house in the place.”

“If they come here they'll git somethin' they ain't lookin' for,” muttered Chrisfield.

“I'm goin' down to Nice; getting too hot around here,” said Slippery. “I've got travel orders in my pocket now.”

“How did you get 'em?”

“Easy as pie,” said Slippery, lighting a cigarette and puffing affectedly towards the ceiling. “I met up with a guy, a second loot, in the Knickerbocker Bar. We gets drunk together, an' goes on a party with two girls I know. In the morning I get up bright an' early, and now I've got five thousand francs, a leave slip and a silver cigarette case, an' Lootenant J. B. Franklin's runnin' around sayin' how he was robbed by a Paris whore, or more likely keepin' damn quiet about it. That's my system.”

“But, gosh darn it, I don't see how you can go around with a guy an' drink with him, an' then rob him,” cried Al from the bed.

“No different from cleaning a guy up at craps.”

“Well?”

“An' suppose that feller knew that I was only a bloody private. Don't you think he'd have turned me over to the M. P.'s like winkin'?”

“No, I don't think so,” said Al. “They're juss like you an me, skeered to death they'll get in wrong, but they won't light on a feller unless they have to.”

“That's a goddam lie,” cried Chrisfield. “They like ridin' yer. A doughboy's less'n a dawg to 'em. Ah'd shoot anyone of 'em lake Ah'd shoot a nigger.”

Andrews was watching Chrisfield's face; it suddenly flushed red. He was silent abruptly. His eyes met Andrews's eyes with a flash of fear.

“They're all sorts of officers, like they're all sorts of us,” Al was insisting.

“But you damn fools, quit arguing,” cried Smiddy. “What the hell are we goin' to do? It ain't safe here no more, that's how I look at it.”

They were silent.

At last Chrisfield said:

“What you goin' to do, Andy?”

“I hardly know. I think I'll go out to St. Germain to see a boy I know there who works on a farm to see if it's safe to take a job there. I won't stay in Paris. Then there's a girl here I want to look up. I must see her.” Andrews broke off suddenly, and started walking back and forth across the end of the room.

“You'd better be damn careful; they'll probably shoot you if they catch you,” said Slippery.

Andrews shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I'd rather be shot than go to Leavenworth for twenty years, Gawd! I would,” cried Al.

“How do you fellers eat here?” asked Slippery.

“We buy stuff an' the dawg-faced girl cooks it for us.”

“Got anything for this noon?”

“I'll go see if I can buy some stuff,” said Andrews. “It's safer for me to go out than for you.”

“All right, here's twenty francs,” said Slippery, handing Andrews a bill with an offhand gesture.

Chrisfield followed Andrews down the stairs. When they reached the passage at the foot of the stairs, he put his hand on Andrews's shoulder and whispered:

“Say, Andy, d'you think there's anything in that revolution business? Ah hadn't never thought they could buck the system thataway.”

“They did in Russia.”

“Then we'd be free, civilians, like we all was before the draft. But that ain't possible, Andy; that ain't possible, Andy.”

“We'll see,” said Andrews, as, he opened the door to the bar.

He went up excitedly to the Chink, who sat behind the row of bottles along the bar.

“Well, what's happening?”

“Where?”

“By the Gare de l'Est, where they were putting up barricades?”

“Barricades!” shouted a young man in a red sash who was drinking at a table. “Why, they tore down some of the iron guards round the trees, if you call that barricades. But they're cowards. Whenever the cops charge they run. They're dirty cowards.”

“D'you think anything's going to happen?”

“What can happen when you've got nothing but a bunch of dirty cowards?”

“What d'you think about it?” said Andrews, turning to the Chink.

The Chink shook his head without answering. Andrews went out.

When he cams back he found Al and Chrisfield alone in their room. Chrisfield was walking up and down, biting his finger nails. On the wall opposite the window was a square of sunshine reflected from the opposite wall of the Court.

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

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

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

“Good God!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

“At last I've got to you!”

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

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

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

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

“Your mother said you were here.”

“And how do you like it, my Poissac?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And your hair. 'Je les tiens dans les doits, je les tiens dans la bouche.... Toute ta chevelure, toute ta chevelure, Melisande, est tombee de la tour.... D'you remember?”

“How wonderful you are.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Madame Boncour.”

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

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

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

“How wonderful!”

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

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

Andrews laughed.

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

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

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

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

“You just watch me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You must tell me them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman smiled broadly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right. I'll fill it out now,” said Andrews, his heart thumping.

Without thinking what he was doing, he put the paper on the edge of the billiard table and wrote: “John Brown, aged 23. Chicago Ill., Etats-Unis. Musician. Holder of passport No. 1,432,286.”

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

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

“John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
But his soul goes marching on.”

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

Gradually John Andrews felt the silvery quiet settle about him. He pulled a sausage and a piece of bread out of the pocket of his coat, took a long swig of water from the pitcher on his washstand, and settled himself at the table before the window in front of a pile of ruled sheets of music paper. He nibbled the bread and the sausage meditatively for a long while, then wrote “Arbeit und Rhythmus” in a large careful hand at the top of the paper. After that he looked out of the window without moving, watching the plumed clouds sail like huge slow ships against the slate-blue sky. Suddenly he scratched out what he had written and scrawled above it: “The Body and Soul of John Brown.” He got to his feet and walked about the room with clenched hands.

“How curious that I should have written that name. How curious that I should have written that name!” he said aloud.

He sat down at the table again and forgot everything in the music that possessed him.

The next morning he walked out early along the river, trying to occupy himself until it should be time to go to see Genevieve. The memory of his first days in the army, spent washing windows at the training camp, was very vivid in his mind. He saw himself again standing naked in the middle of a wide, bare room, while the recruiting sergeant measured and prodded him. And now he was a deserter. Was there any sense to it all? Had his life led in any particular direction, since he had been caught haphazard in the treadmill, or was it all chance? A toad hopping across a road in front of a steam roller.