PART FOUR: RUST

There were tiny green frogs in one of the putty-colored puddles by the roadside. John Andrews fell out of the slowly advancing column a moment to look at them. The frogs' triangular heads stuck out of the water in the middle of the puddle. He leaned over, his hands on his knees, easing the weight of the equipment on his back. That way he could see their tiny jewelled eyes, topaz-colored. His eyes felt as if tears were coming to them with tenderness towards the minute lithe bodies of the frogs. Something was telling him that he must run forward and fall into line again, that he must shamble on through the mud, but he remained staring at the puddle, watching the frogs. Then he noticed his reflection in the puddle. He looked at it curiously. He could barely see the outlines of a stained grimacing mask, and the silhouette of the gun barrel slanting behind it. So this was what they had made of him. He fixed his eyes again on the frogs that swam with elastic, leisurely leg strokes in the putty-colored water.

Absently, as if he had no connection with all that went on about him, he heard the twang of bursting shrapnel down the road. He had straightened himself wearily and taken a step forward, when he found himself sinking into the puddle. A feeling of relief came over him. His legs sunk in the puddle; he lay without moving against the muddy bank. The frogs had gone, but from somewhere a little stream of red was creeping out slowly into the putty-colored water. He watched the irregular files of men in olive-drab shambling by. Their footsteps drummed in his ears. He felt triumphantly separated from them, as if he were in a window somewhere watching soldiers pass, or in a box of a theater watching some dreary monotonous play. He drew farther and farther away from them until they had become very small, like toy soldiers forgotten among the dust in a garret. The light was so dim he couldn't see, he could only hear their feet tramping interminably through the mud.

John Andrews was on a ladder that shook horribly. A gritty sponge in his hand, he was washing the windows of a barracks. He began in the left hand corner and soaped the small oblong panes one after the other. His arms were like lead and he felt that he would fall from the shaking ladder, but each time he turned to look towards the ground before climbing down he saw the top of the general's cap and the general's chin protruding from under the visor, and a voice snarled: “Attention,” terrifying him so that the ladder shook more than ever; and he went on smearing soap over the oblong panes with the gritty sponge through interminable hours, though every joint in his body was racked by the shaking of the ladder. Bright light flared from inside the windows which he soaped, pane after pane, methodically. The windows were mirrors. In each pane he saw his thin face, in shadow, with the shadow of a gun barrel slanting beside it. The jolting stopped suddenly. He sank into a deep pit of blackness.

A shrill broken voice was singing in his ear:

John Andrews opened his eyes. It was pitch black, except for a series of bright yellow oblongs that seemed to go up into the sky, where he could see the stars. His mind became suddenly acutely conscious. He began taking account of himself in a hurried frightened way. He craned his neck a little. In the darkness he could make out the form of a man stretched out flat beside him who kept moving his head strangely from side to side, singing at the top of his lungs in a shrill broken voice. At that moment Andrews noticed that the smell of carbolic was overpoweringly strong, that it dominated all the familiar smells of blood and sweaty clothes. He wriggled his shoulders so that he could feel the two poles of the stretcher. Then he fixed his eyes again in the three bright yellow oblongs, one above the other, that rose into the darkness. Of course, they were windows; he was near a house.

He moved his arms a little. They felt like lead, but unhurt. Then he realized that his legs were on fire. He tried to move them; everything went black again in a sudden agony of pain. The voice was still shrieking in his ears:

But another voice could be heard, softer, talking endlessly in tender clear tones:

“An' he said they were goin' to take me way down south where there was a little house on the beach, all so warm an' quiet...”

The song of the man beside him rose to a tuneless shriek, like a phonograph running down:

Another voice broke in suddenly in short spurts of whining groans that formed themselves into fragments of drawn-out intricate swearing. And all the while the soft voice went on. Andrews strained his ears to hear it.

It soothed his pain as if some cool fragrant oil were being poured over his body.

“An' there'll be a garden full of flowers, roses an' hollyhocks, way down there in the south, an' it'll be so warm an' quiet, an' the sun'll shine all day, and the sky'll be so blue...”

Andrews felt his lips repeating the words like lips following a prayer.

“—An' it'll be so warm an' quiet, without any noise at all. An' the garden'll be full of roses an'...”

But the other voices kept breaking in, drowning out the soft voice with groans, and strings of whining oaths.

“An' he said I could sit on the porch, an' the sun'll be so warm an' quiet, an' the garden'll smell so good, an' the beach'll be all white, an' the sea...”

Andrews felt his head suddenly rise in the air and then his feet. He swung out of the darkness into a brilliant white corridor. His legs throbbed with flaming agony. The face of a man with a cigarette in his mouth peered close to his. A hand fumbled at his throat, where the tag was, and someone read:

“Andrews, 1.432.286.”

But he was listening to the voice out in the dark, behind him, that shrieked in rasping tones of delirium:

Then he discovered that he was groaning. His mind became entirely taken up in the curious rhythm of his groans. The only parts of his body that existed were his legs and something in his throat that groaned and groaned. It was absorbing. White figures hovered about him, he saw the hairy forearms of a man in shirt sleeves, lights glared and went out, strange smells entered at his nose and circulated through his whole body, but nothing could distract his attention from the singsong of his groans.

Rain fell in his face. He moved his head from side to side, suddenly feeling conscious of himself. His mouth was dry, like leather; he put out his tongue to try to catch raindrops in it. He was swung roughly about in the stretcher. He lifted his head cautiously, feeling a great throb of delight that he still could lift his head.

“Keep yer head down, can't yer?” snarled a voice beside him. He had seen the back of a man in a gleaming wet slicker at the end of the stretcher.

“Be careful of my leg, can't yer?” he found himself whining over and over again. Then suddenly there was a lurch that rapped his head against the crosspiece of the stretcher, and he found himself looking up at a wooden ceiling from which the white paint had peeled in places. He smelt gasoline and could hear the throb of an engine. He began to think back; how long was it since he had looked at the little frogs in the puddle? A vivid picture came to his mind of the puddle with its putty-colored water and the little triangular heads of the frogs. But it seemed as long ago as a memory of childhood; all of his life before that was not so long as the time that had gone by since the car had started. And he was jolting and swinging about in the stretcher, clutching hard with his hands at the poles of the stretcher. The pain in his legs grew worse; the rest of his body seemed to shrivel under it. From below him came a rasping voice that cried out at every lurch of the ambulance. He fought against the desire to groan, but at last he gave in and lay lost in the monotonous singsong of his groans.

The rain was in his face again for a moment, then his body was tilted. A row of houses and russet trees and chimney pots against a leaden sky swung suddenly up into sight and were instantly replaced by a ceiling and the coffred vault of a staircase. Andrews was still groaning softly, but his eyes fastened with sudden interest on the sculptured rosettes of the coffres and the coats of arms that made the center of each section of ceiling. Then he found himself staring in the face of the man who was carrying the lower end of the stretcher. It was a white face with pimples round the mouth and good-natured, watery blue eyes. Andrews looked at the eyes and tried to smile, but the man carrying the stretcher was not looking at him.

Then after more endless hours of tossing about on the stretcher, lost in a groaning agony of pain, hands laid hold of him roughly and pulled his clothes off and lifted him on a cot where he lay gasping, breathing in the cool smell of disinfectant that hung about the bedclothes. He heard voices over his head.

“Isn't bad at all... this leg wound.... I thought you said we'd have to amputate?”

“Well, what's the matter with him, then?”

“Maybe shell-shock....”

A cold sweat of terror took hold of Andrews. He lay perfectly still with his eyes closed. Spasm after spasm of revolt went through him. No, they hadn't broken him yet; he still had hold of his nerves, he kept saying to himself. Still, he felt that his hands, clasped across his belly, were trembling. The pain in his legs disappeared in the fright in which he lay, trying desperately to concentrate his mind on something outside himself. He tried to think of a tune to hum to himself, but he only heard again shrieking in his ears the voice which, it seemed to him months and years ago, had sung:

The voice shrieking the blurred tune and the pain in his legs mingled themselves strangely, until they seemed one and the pain seemed merely a throbbing of the maddening tune.

He opened his eyes. Darkness fading into a faint yellow glow. Hastily he took stock of himself, moved his head and his arms. He felt cool and very weak and quiet; he must have slept a long time. He passed his rough dirty, hand over his face. The skin felt soft and cool. He pressed his cheek on the pillow and felt himself smiling contentedly, he did not know why.

The Queen of Sheba carried a parasol with little vermilion bells all round it that gave out a cool tinkle as she walked towards him. She wore her hair in a high headdress thickly powdered with blue iris powder, and on her long train, that a monkey held up at the end, were embroidered in gaudy colors the signs of the zodiac. She was not the Queen of Sheba, she was a nurse whose face he could not see in the obscurity, and, sticking an arm behind his head in a deft professional manner, she gave him something to drink from a glass without looking at him. He said “Thank you,” in his natural voice, which surprised him in the silence; but she went off without replying and he saw that it was a trayful of glasses that had tinkled as she had come towards him.

Dark as it was he noticed the self-conscious tilt of the nurse's body as she walked silently to the next cot, holding the tray of glasses in front of her. He twisted his head round on the pillow to watch how gingerly she put her arm under the next man's head to give him a drink.

“A virgin,” he said to himself, “very much a virgin,” and he found himself giggling softly, notwithstanding the twinges of pain from his legs. He felt suddenly as if his spirit had awakened from a long torpor. The spell of dejection that had deadened him for months had slipped off. He was free. The thought came to him gleefully, that as long as he stayed in that cot in the hospital no one would shout orders at him. No one would tell him to clean his rifle. There would be no one to salute. He would not have to worry about making himself pleasant to the sergeant. He would lie there all day long, thinking his own thoughts.

Perhaps he was badly enough wounded to be discharged from the army. The thought set his heart beating like mad. That meant that he, who had given himself up for lost, who had let himself be trampled down unresistingly into the mud of slavery, who had looked for no escape from the treadmill but death, would live. He, John Andrews, would live.

And it seemed inconceivable that he had ever given himself up, that he had ever let the grinding discipline have its way with him. He saw himself vividly once more as he had seen himself before his life had suddenly blotted itself out, before he had become a slave among slaves. He renumbered the garden where, in his boyhood, he had sat dreaming through the droning summer afternoons under the crepe myrtle bushes, while the cornfields beyond rustled and shimmered in the heat. He remembered the day he had stood naked in the middle of a base room while the recruiting sergeant prodded him and measured him. He wondered suddenly what the date was. Could it be that it was only a year ago? Yet in that year all the other years of his life had been blotted out. But now he would begin living again. He would give up this cowardly cringing before external things. He would be recklessly himself.

The pain in his legs was gradually localizing itself into the wounds. For a while he struggled against it to go on thinking, but its constant throb kept impinging in his mind until, although he wanted desperately to comb through his pale memories to remember, if ever so faintly, all that had been vivid and lusty in his life, to build himself a new foundation of resistance against the world from which he could start afresh to live, he became again the querulous piece of hurt flesh, the slave broken on the treadmill; he began to groan.

Cold steel-gray light filtered into the ward, drowning the yellow glow which first turned ruddy and then disappeared. Andrews began to make out the row of cots opposite him, and the dark beams of the ceiling above his head. “This house must be very old,” he said to himself, and the thought vaguely excited him. Funny that the Queen of Sheba had come to his head, it was ages since he'd thought of all that. From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling roses to pieces from the height of her litter, all the aspects' half-guessed, all the imaginings of your desire... that was the Queen of Sheba. He whispered the words aloud, “la reine de Saba, la reine de Saba”; and, with a tremor of anticipation of the sort he used to feel when he was a small boy the night before Christmas, with a sense of new; things in store for him, he pillowed his head on his arm and went quietly to sleep.

“Ain't it juss like them frawgs te make a place like this' into a hauspital?” said the orderly, standing with his feet wide apart and his hands on his hips, facing a row of cots and talking to anyone who felt well enough to listen. “Honest, I doan see why you fellers doan all cash in yer! checks in this hole.... There warn't even electric light till we put it in.... What d'you think o' that? That shows how much the goddam frawgs care....” The orderly was a short man with a sallow, lined face and large yellow teeth. When he smiled the horizontal lines in his forehead and the lines that ran from the sides of his nose to the ends of his mouth deepened so that his face looked as if it were made up to play a comic part in the movies.

“It's kind of artistic, though, ain't it?” said Applebaum, whose cot was next Andrews's,—a skinny man with large, frightened eyes and an inordinately red face that looked as if the skin had been peeled off. “Look at the work there is on that ceiling. Must have cost some dough when it was noo.”

“Wouldn't be bad as a dance hall with a little fixin' up, but a hauspital; hell!”

Andrews lay, comfortable in his cot, looking into the ward out of another world. He felt no connection with the talk about him, with the men who lay silent or tossed about groaning in the rows of narrow cots that filled the Renaissance hall. In the yellow glow of the electric lights, looking beyond the orderly's twisted face and narrow head, he could see very faintly, where the beams of the ceiling sprung from the wall, a row of half-obliterated shields supported by figures carved out of the grey stone of the wall, handed satyrs with horns and goats' beards and deep-set eyes, little squat figures of warriors and townsmen in square hats with swords between their bent knees, naked limbs twined in scrolls of spiked acanthus leaves, all seen very faintly, so that when the electric lights swung back and forth in the wind made by the orderly's hurried passing, they all seemed to wink and wriggle in shadowy mockery of the rows of prostrate bodies in the room beneath them. Yet they were familiar, friendly to Andrews. He kept feeling a half-formulated desire to be up there too, crowded under a beam, grimacing through heavy wreaths of pomegranates and acanthus leaves, the incarnation of old rich lusts, of clear fires that had sunk to dust ages since. He felt at home in that spacious hall, built for wide gestures and stately steps, in which all the little routine of the army seemed unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows.

Andrews was snatched out of his thoughts. Applebaum was speaking to him; he turned his head.

“How d'you loike it bein' wounded, buddy?”

“Fine.”

“Foine, I should think it was.... Better than doin' squads right all day.”

“Where did you get yours?”

“Ain't got only one arm now.... I don't give a damn.... I've driven my last fare, that's all.”

“How d'you mean?”

“I used to drive a taxi.”

“That's a pretty good job, isn't it?”

“You bet, big money in it, if yer in right.”

“So you used to be a taxi-driver, did you?” broke in the orderly. “That's a fine job.... When I was in the Providence Hospital half the fractures was caused by taxis. We had a little girl of six in the children's ward had her feet cut clean off at the ankles by a taxi. Pretty yellow hair she had, too. Gangrene.... Only lasted a day.... Well, I'm going off, I guess you guys wish you was going to be where I'm goin' to be tonight.... That's one thing you guys are lucky in, don't have to worry about propho.” The orderly wrinkled his face up and winked elaborately.

“Say, will you do something for me?” asked Andrews.

“Sure, if it ain't no trouble.”

“Will you buy me a book?”

“Ain't ye got enough with all the books at the 'Y'?”

“No.... This is a special book,” said Andrews smiling, “a French book.”

“A French book, is it? Well, I'll see what I can do. What's it called?”

“By Flaubert.... Look, if you've got a piece of paper and a pencil, I'll write it down.”

Andrews scrawled the title on the back of an order slip.

“There.”

“What the hell? Who's Antoine? Gee whiz, I bet that's hot stuff. I wish I could read French. We'll have you breakin' loose out o' here an' going down to number four, roo Villiay, if you read that kind o' book.”

“Has it got pictures?” asked Applebaum. “One feller did break out o' here a month ago,... Couldn't stand it any longer, I guess. Well, his wound opened an' he had a hemorrhage, an' now he's planted out in the back lot.... But I'm goin'. Goodnight.” The orderly bustled to the end of the ward and disappeared.

The lights went out, except for the bulb over the nurse's desk at the end, beside the ornate doorway, with its wreathed pinnacles carved out of the grey stone, which could be seen above the white canvas screen that hid the door.

“What's that book about, buddy?” asked Applebaum, twisting his head at the end of his lean neck so as to look Andrews full in the face.

“Oh, it's about a man who wants everything so badly that he decides there's nothing worth wanting.”

“I guess youse had a college edication,” said Applebaum sarcastically.

“Well, I was goin' to tell youse about when I used to drive a taxi. I was makin' big money when I enlisted. Was you drafted?”

“Yes.”

“Well, so was I. I doan think nauthin o' them guys that are so stuck up 'cause they enlisted, d'you?”

“Not a hell of a lot.”

“Don't yer?” came a voice from the other side of Andrews, a thin voice that stuttered. “W-w-well, all I can say is, it'ld have sss-spoiled my business if I hadn't enlisted. No, sir, nobody can say I didn't enlist.”

“Well, that's your look-out,” said Applebaum.

“You're goddam right, it was.”

“Well, ain't your business spoiled anyway?”

“No, sir. I can pick it right up where I left off. I've got an established reputation.”

“What at?”

“I'm an undertaker by profession; my dad was before me.”

“Gee, you were right at home!” said Andrews.

“You haven't any right to say that, young feller,” said the undertaker angrily. “I'm a humane man. I won't never be at home in this dirty butchery.”

The nurse was walking by their cots.

“How can you say such dreadful things?” she said. “But lights are out. You boys have got to keep quiet.... And you,” she plucked at the undertaker's bedclothes, “just remember what the Huns did in Belgium.... Poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like I am.”

Andrews closed his eyes. The ward was quiet except for the rasping sound of the snores and heavy breathing of the shattered men all about him. “And I thought she was the Queen of Sheba,” he said to himself, making a grimace in the dark. Then he began to think of the music he had intended to write about the Queen of Sheba before he had stripped his life off in the bare room where they had measured him and made a soldier of him. Standing in the dark in the desert of his despair, he would hear the sound of a caravan in the distance, tinkle of bridles, rasping of horns, braying of donkeys, and the throaty voices of men singing the songs of desolate roads. He would look up, and before him he would see, astride their foaming wild asses, the three green horsemen motionless, pointing at him with their long forefingers. Then the music would burst in a sudden hot whirlwind about him, full of flutes and kettledrums and braying horns and whining bagpipes, and torches would flare red and yellow, making a tent of light about him, on the edges of which would crowd the sumpter mules and the brown mule drivers, and the gaudily caparisoned camels, and the elephants glistening with jewelled harness. Naked slaves would bend their gleaming backs before him as they laid out a carpet at his feet; and, through the flare of torchlight, the Queen, of Sheba would advance towards him, covered with emeralds and dull-gold ornaments, with a monkey hopping behind holding up the end of her long train. She would put her hand with its slim fantastic nails on his shoulder; and, looking into her eyes, he would suddenly feel within reach all the fiery imaginings of his desire. Oh, if he could only be free to work. All the months he had wasted in his life seemed to be marching like a procession of ghosts before his eyes. And he lay in his cot, staring with wide open eyes at the ceiling, hoping desperately that his wounds would be long in healing.

Applebaum sat on the edge of his cot, dressed in a clean new uniform, of which the left sleeve hung empty, still showing the creases in which it had been folded.

“So you really are going,” said Andrews, rolling his head over on his pillow to look at him.

“You bet your pants I am, Andy.... An' so could you, poifectly well, if you'ld talk it up to 'em a little.”

“Oh, I wish to God I could. Not that I want to go home, now, but ... if I could get out of uniform.”

“I don't blame ye a bit, kid; well, next time, we'll know better.... Local Board Chairman's going to be my job.”

Andrews laughed.

“If I wasn't a sucker....”

“You weren't the only wewe-one,” came the undertaker's stuttering voice from behind Andrews.

“Hell, I thought you enlisted, undertaker.”

“Well, I did, by God! but I didn't think it was going to be like this.”

“What did ye think it was goin' to be, a picnic?”

“Hell, I doan care about that, or gettin' gassed, and smashed up, or anythin', but I thought we was goin' to put things to rights by comin' over here.... Look here, I had a lively business in the undertaking way, like my father had had before me.... We did all the swellest work in Tilletsville....”

“Where?” interrupted Applebaum, laughing.

“Tilletsville; don't you know any geography?”

“Go ahead, tell us about Tilletsville,” said Andrews soothingly.

“Why, when Senator Wallace d-d-deceased there, who d'you think had charge of embalming the body and taking it to the station an' seeing everything was done fitting? We did.... And I was going to be married to a dandy girl, and I knowed I had enough pull to get fixed up, somehow, or to get a commission even, but there I went like a sucker an' enlisted in the infantry, too.... But, hell, everybody was saying that we was going to fight to make the world safe for democracy, and that, if a feller didn't go, no one'ld trade with him any more.”

He started coughing suddenly and seemed unable to stop. At last he said weakly, in a thin little voice between coughs:

“Well, here I am. There ain't nothing to do about it.”

“Democracy.... That's democracy, ain't it: we eat stinkin' goolash an' that there fat 'Y' woman goes out with Colonels eatin' chawklate soufflay.... Poifect democracy!... But I tell you what: it don't do to be the goat.”

“But there's so damn many more goats than anything else,” said Andrews.

“There's a sucker born every minute, as Barnum said. You learn that drivin' a taxicab, if ye don't larn nothin' else.... No, sir, I'm goin' into politics. I've got good connections up Hundred and Twenty-fif' street way.... You see, I've got an aunt, Mrs. Sallie Schultz, owns a hotel on a Hundred and Tirty-tird street. Heard of Jim O'Ryan, ain't yer? Well, he's a good friend o' hers; see? Bein' as they're both Catholics... But I'm goin' out this afternoon, see what the town's like... an ole Ford says the skirts are just peaches an' cream.”

“He juss s-s-says that to torment a feller,” stuttered the undertaker.

“I wish I were going with you,” said Andrews. “You'll get well plenty soon enough, Andy, and get yourself marked Class A, and get given a gun, an—'Over the top, boys!'... to see if the Fritzies won't make a better shot next time.... Talk about suckers! You're the most poifect sucker I ever met.... What did you want to tell the loot your legs didn't hurt bad for? They'll have you out o' here before you know it.... Well, I'm goin' out to see what the mamzelles look like.”

Applebaum, the uniform hanging in folds about his skinny body, swaggered to the door, followed by the envious glances of the whole ward.

“Gee, guess he thinks he's goin' to get to be president,” said the undertaker bitterly.

“He probably will,” said Andrews.

He settled himself in his bed again, sinking back into the dull contemplation of the teasing, smarting pain where the torn ligaments of his thighs were slowly knitting themselves together. He tried desperately to forget the pain; there was so much he wanted to think out. If he could only lie perfectly quiet, and piece together the frayed ends of thoughts that kept flickering to the surface of his mind. He counted up the days he had been in the hospital; fifteen! Could it be that long? And he had not thought of anything yet. Soon, as Applebaum said, they'd be putting him in Class A and sending him back to the treadmill, and he would not have reconquered his courage, his dominion over himself. What a coward he had been anyway, to submit. The man beside him kept coughing. Andrews stared for a moment at the silhouette of the yellow face on the pillow, with its pointed nose and small greedy eyes. He thought of the swell undertaking establishment, of the black gloves and long faces and soft tactful voices. That man and his father before him lived by pretending things they didn't feel, by swathing reality with all manner of crepe and trumpery. For those people, no one ever died, they passed away, they deceased. Still, there had to be undertakers. There was no more stain about that than about any other trade. And it was so as not to spoil his trade that the undertaker had enlisted, and to make the world safe for democracy, too. The phrase came to Andrews's mind amid an avalanche of popular tunes; of visions of patriotic numbers on the vaudeville stage. He remembered the great flags waving triumphantly over Fifth Avenue, and the crowds dutifully cheering. But those were valid reasons for the undertaker; but for him, John Andrews, were they valid reasons? No. He had no trade, he had not been driven into the army by the force of public opinion, he had not been carried away by any wave of blind confidence in the phrases of bought propagandists. He had not had the strength to live. The thought came to him of all those who, down the long tragedy of history, had given themselves smilingly for the integrity of their thoughts. He had not had the courage to move a muscle for his freedom, but he had been fairly cheerful about risking his life as a soldier, in a cause he believed useless. What right had a man to exist who was too cowardly to stand up for what he thought and felt, for his whole makeup, for everything that made him an individual apart from his fellows, and not a slave to stand cap in hand waiting for someone of stronger will to tell him to act?

Like a sudden nausea, disgust surged up in him. His mind ceased formulating phrases and thoughts. He gave himself over to disgust as a man who has drunk a great deal, holding on tight to the reins of his will, suddenly gives himself over pellmell to drunkenness.

He lay very still, with his eyes closed, listening to the stir of the ward, the voices of men talking and the fits of coughing that shook the man next him. The smarting pain throbbed monotonously. He felt hungry and wondered vaguely if it were supper time. How little they gave you to eat in the hospital!

He called over to the man in the opposite cot:

“Hay, Stalky, what time is it?”

“It's after messtime now. Got a good appetite for the steak and onions and French fried potatoes?”

“Shut up.”

A rattling of tin dishes at the other end of the ward made Andrews wriggle up further on his pillow. Verses from the “Shropshire Lad” jingled mockingly through his head:

After he had eaten, he picked up the “Tentation de Saint Antoine,” that lay on the cot beside his immovable legs, and buried himself in it, reading the gorgeously modulated sentences voraciously, as if the book were a drug in which he could drink deep forgetfulness of himself.

He put the book down and closed his eyes. His mind was full of intangible floating glow, like the ocean on a warm night, when every wave breaks into pale flame, and mysterious milky lights keep rising to the surface out of the dark waters and gleaming and vanishing. He became absorbed in the strange fluid harmonies that permeated his whole body, as a grey sky at nightfall suddenly becomes filled with endlessly changing patterns of light and color and shadow.

When he tried to seize hold of his thoughts, to give them definite musical expression in his mind, he found himself suddenly empty, the way a sandy inlet on the beach that has been full of shoals of silver fishes, becomes suddenly empty when a shadow crosses the water, and the man who is watching sees wanly his own reflection instead of the flickering of thousands of tiny silver bodies.

John Andrews awoke to feel a cold hand on his head.

“Feeling all right?” said a voice in his ear.

He found himself looking in a puffy, middle-aged face, with a lean nose and grey eyes, with dark rings under them. Andrews felt the eyes looking him over inquisitively. He saw the red triangle on the man's khaki sleeve.

“Yes,” he said.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to talk to you a little while, buddy.”

“Not a bit; have you got a chair?” said Andrews smiling.

“I don't suppose it was just right of me to wake you up, but you see it was this way.... You were the next in line, an' I was afraid I'd forget you, if I skipped you.”

“I understand,” said Andrews, with a sudden determination to take the initiative away from the “Y” man.

“How long have you been in France? D'you like the war?” he asked hurriedly.

The “Y” man smiled sadly.

“You seem pretty spry,” he said. “I guess you're in a hurry to get back at the front and get some more Huns.” He smiled again, with an air of indulgence.

Andrews did not answer.

“No, sonny, I don't like it here,” the “Y” man said, after a pause. “I wish I was home—but it's great to feel you're doing your duty.”

“It must be,” said Andrews.

“Have you heard about the great air raids our boys have pulled off? They've bombarded Frankfort; now if they could only wipe Berlin off the map.”

“Say, d'you hate 'em awful hard?” said Andrews in a low voice. “Because, if you do, I can tell you something will tickle you most to death.... Lean over.”

The “Y” man leant over curiously. “Some German prisoners come to this hospital at six every night to get the garbage; now all you need to do if you really hate 'em so bad is borrow a revolver from one of your officer friends, and just shoot up the convoy....”

“Say... where were you raised, boy?” The “Y” man sat up suddenly with a look of alarm on his face. “Don't you know that prisoners are sacred?”

“D'you know what our colonel told us before going into the Argonne offensive? The more prisoners we took, the less grub there'ld be; and do you know what happened to the prisoners that were taken? Why do you hate the Huns?”

“Because they are barbarians, enemies of civilization. You must have enough education to know that,” said the “Y” man, raising his voice angrily. “What church do you belong to?”

“None.”

“But you must have been connected with some church, boy. You can't have been raised a heathen in America. Every Christian belongs or has belonged to some church or other from baptism.”

“I make no pretensions to Christianity.”

Andrews closed his eyes and turned his head away. He could feel the “Y” man hovering over him irresolutely. After a while he opened his eyes. The “Y” man was leaning over the next bed.

Through the window at the opposite side of the ward he could see a bit of blue sky among white scroll-like clouds, with mauve shadows. He stared at it until the clouds, beginning to grow golden into evening, covered it. Furious, hopeless irritation consumed him. How these people enjoyed hating! At that rate it was better to be at the front. Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it. So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression. Oh, but there must be something more in the world than greed and hatred and cruelty. Were they all shams, too, these gigantic phrases that floated like gaudy kites high above mankind? Kites, that was it, contraptions of tissue paper held at the end of a string, ornaments not to be taken seriously. He thought of all the long procession of men who had been touched by the unutterable futility of the lives of men, who had tried by phrases to make things otherwise, who had taught unworldliness. Dim enigmatic figures they were—Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, Christ; so many of them, and so vague in the silvery mist of history that he hardly knew that they were not his own imagining; Lucretius, St. Francis, Voltaire, Rousseau, and how many others, known and unknown, through the tragic centuries; they had wept, some of them, and some of them had laughed, and their phrases had risen glittering, soap bubbles to dazzle men for a moment, and had shattered. And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life.

As soon as he got out of the hospital he would desert; the determination formed suddenly in his mind, making the excited blood surge gloriously through his body. There was nothing else to do; he would desert. He pictured himself hobbling away in the dark on his lame legs, stripping his uniform off, losing himself in some out of the way corner of France, or slipping by the sentries to Spain and freedom. He was ready to endure anything, to face any sort of death, for the sake of a few months of liberty in which to forget the degradation of this last year. This was his last run with the pack.

An enormous exhilaration took hold of him. It seemed the first time in his life he had ever determined to act. All the rest had been aimless drifting. The blood sang m his ears. He fixed his eyes on the half-obliterated figures that supported the shields under the beams in the wall opposite. They seemed to be wriggling out of their contorted positions and smiling encouragement to him. He imagined them, warriors out of old tales, on their way to clay dragons in enchanted woods, clever-fingered guildsmen and artisans, cupids and satyrs and fauns, jumping from their niches and carrying him off with them in a headlong rout, to a sound of flutes, on a last forlorn assault on the citadels of pain.

The lights went out, and an orderly came round with chocolate that poured with a pleasant soothing sound into the tin cups. With a greasiness of chocolate in his mouth and the warmth of it in his stomach, John Andrews went to sleep.

There was a stir in the ward when he woke up. Reddish sunlight filtered in through the window opposite, and from outside came a confused noise, a sound of bells ringing and whistles blowing. Andrews looked past his feet towards Stalky's cot opposite. Stalky was sitting bolt upright in bed, with his eyes round as quarters.

“Fellers, the war's over!”

“Put him out.”

“Cut that.”

“Pull the chain.”

“Tie that bull outside,” came from every side of the ward.

“Fellers,” shouted Stalky louder than ever, “it's straight dope, the war's over. I just dreamt the Kaiser came up to me on Fourteenth Street and bummed a nickel for a glass of beer. The war's over. Don't you hear the whistles?”

“All right; let's go home.”

“Shut up, can't you let a feller sleep?”

The ward quieted down again, but all eyes were wide open, men lay strangely still in their cots, waiting, wondering.

“All I can say,” shouted Stalky again, “is that she was some war while she lasted.... What did I tell yer?”

As he spoke the canvas screen in front of the door collapsed and the major appeared with his cap askew over his red face and a brass bell in his hand, which he rang frantically as he advanced into the ward.

“Men,” he shouted in the deep roar of one announcing baseball scores, “the war ended at 4:03 A.M. this morning.... The Armistice is signed. To hell with the Kaiser!” Then he rang the dinner bell madly and danced along the aisle between the rows of cots, holding the head nurse by one hand, who held a little yellow-headed lieutenant by the other hand, who, in turn, held another nurse, and so on. The line advanced jerkily into the ward; the front part was singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and the rear the “Yanks are Coming,” and through it all the major rang his brass bell. The men who were well enough sat up in bed and yelled. The others rolled restlessly about, sickened by the din.

They made the circuit of the ward and filed out, leaving confusion behind them. The dinner bell could be heard faintly in the other parts of the building.

“Well, what d'you think of it, undertaker?” said Andrews.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

The undertaker turned his small black eyes on Andrews and looked him straight in the face.

“You know what's the matter with me, don't yer, outside o' this wound?”

“No.”

“Coughing like I am, I'd think you'd be more observant. I got t.b., young feller.”

“How do you know that?”

“They're going to move me out o' here to a t.b. ward tomorrow.”

“The hell they are!” Andrews's words were lost in the paroxysm of coughing that seized the man next to him.

“Home, boys, home; it's home we want to be.”

Those well enough were singing, Stalky conducting, standing on the end of his cot in his pink Red Cross pajamas, that were too short and showed a long expanse of skinny leg, fuzzy with red hairs. He banged together two bed pans to beat time.

“Home.... I won't never go home,” said the undertaker when the noise had subsided a little. “D'you know what I wish? I wish the war'd gone on and on until everyone of them bastards had been killed in it.”

“Which bastards?”

“The men who got us fellers over here.” He began coughing again weakly.

“But they'll be safe if every other human being....” began Andrews. He was interrupted by a thundering voice from the end of the ward.

“Attention!”

“Home, boys, home; it's home we want to be.”

went on the song. Stalky glanced towards the end of the ward, and seeing it was the major, dropped the bed pans that smashed at the foot of his cot, and got as far as possible under his blankets.

“Attention!” thundered the major again. A sudden uncomfortable silence fell upon the ward; broken only by the coughing of the man next to Andrews.

“If I hear any more noise from this ward, I'll chuck everyone of you men out of this hospital; if you can't walk you'll have to crawl.... The war may be over, but you men are in the Army, and don't you forget it.”

The major glared up and down the lines of cots. He turned on his heel and went out of the door, glancing angrily as he went at the overturned screen. The ward was still. Outside whistles blew and churchbells rang madly, and now and then there was a sound of singing.

The snow beat against the windows and pattered on the tin roof of the lean-to, built against the side of the hospital, that went by the name of sun parlor. It was a dingy place, decorated by strings of dusty little paper flags that one of the “Y” men had festooned about the slanting beams of the ceiling to celebrate Christmas. There were tables with torn magazines piled on them, and a counter where cracked white cups were ranged waiting for one of the rare occasions when cocoa could be bought. In the middle of the room, against the wall of the main building, a stove was burning, about which sat several men in hospital denims talking in drowsy voices. Andrews watched them from his seat by the window, looking at their broad backs bent over towards the stove and at the hands that hung over their knees, limp from boredom. The air was heavy with a smell of coal gas mixed with carbolic from men's clothes, and stale cigarette smoke. Behind the cups at the counter a “Y” man, a short, red-haired man with freckles, read the Paris edition of the New York Herald. Andrews, in his seat by the window, felt permeated by the stagnation about him: He had a sheaf of pencilled music-papers on his knees, that he rolled and unrolled nervously, staring at the stove and the motionless backs of the men about it. The stove roared a little, the “Y” man's paper rustled, men's voices came now and then in a drowsy whisper, and outside the snow beat evenly and monotonously against the window panes. Andrews pictured himself vaguely walking fast through the streets, with the snow stinging his face and the life of a city swirling about him, faces flushed by the cold, bright eyes under hatbrims, looking for a second into his and passing on; slim forms of women bundled in shawls that showed vaguely the outline of their breasts and hips. He wondered if he would ever be free again to walk at random through city streets. He stretched his legs out across the floor in front of him; strange, stiff, tremulous legs they were, but it was not the wounds that gave them their leaden weight. It was the stagnation of the life about him that he felt sinking into every crevice of his spirit, so that he could never shake it off, the stagnation of dusty ruined automatons that had lost all life of their own, whose limbs had practised the drill manual so long that they had no movements of their own left, who sat limply, sunk in boredom, waiting for orders.

Andrews was roused suddenly from his thoughts; he had been watching the snowflakes in their glittering dance just outside the window pane, when the sound of someone rubbing his hands very close to him made him look up. A little man with chubby cheeks and steel-grey hair very neatly flattened against his skull, stood at the window rubbing his fat little white hands together and making a faint unctuous puffing with each breath. Andrews noticed that a white clerical collar enclosed the little man's pink neck, that starched cuffs peeped from under the well-tailored sleeves of his officer's uniform. Sam Brown belt and puttees, too, were highly polished. On his shoulder was a demure little silver cross. Andrews' glance had reached the pink cheeks again, when he suddenly found a pair of steely eyes looking sharply into his.

“You look quite restored, my friend,” said a chanting clerical voice.

“I suppose I am.”

“Splendid, splendid.... But do you mind moving into the end of the room.... That's it.” He followed Andrews, saying in a deprecatory tone: “We're going to have just a little bit of a prayer and then I have some interesting things to tell you boys.”

The red-headed “Y” man had left his seat and stood in the center of the room, his paper still dangling from his hand, saying in a bored voice: “Please fellows, move down to the end.... Quiet, please.... Quiet, please.”

The soldiers shambled meekly to the folding chairs at the end of the room and after some chattering were quiet. A couple of men left, and several tiptoed in and sat in the front row. Andrews sank into a chair with a despairing sort of resignation, and burying his face in his hands stared at the floor between his feet.

“Fellers,” went on the bored voice of the “Y” man, “let me introduce the Reverend Dr. Skinner, who—” the “Y” man's voice suddenly took on deep patriotic emotion—“who has just come back from the Army of Occupation in Germany.”

At the words “Army of Occupation,” as if a spring had been touched, everybody clapped and cheered.

The Reverend Dr. Skinner looked about his audience with smiling confidence and raised his hands for silence, so that the men could see the chubby pink palms.

“First, boys, my dear friends, let us indulge in a few moments of silent prayer to our Great Creator,” his voice rose and fell in the suave chant of one accustomed to going through the episcopal liturgy for the edification of well-dressed and well-fed congregations. “Inasmuch as He has vouchsafed us safety and a mitigation of our afflictions, and let us pray that in His good time He may see fit to return us whole in limb and pure in heart to our families, to the wives, mothers, and to those whom we will some day honor with the name of wife, who eagerly await our return; and that we may spend the remainder of our lives in useful service of the great country for whose safety and glory we have offered up our youth a willing sacrifice.... Let us pray!”

Silence fell dully on the room. Andrews could hear the selfconscious breathing of the men about him, and the rustling of the snow against the tin roof. A few feet scraped. The voice began again after a long pause, chanting:

“Our Father which art in Heaven...”

At the “Amen” everyone lifted his head cheerfully. Throats were cleared, chairs scraped. Men settled themselves to listen.

“Now, my friends, I am going to give you in a few brief words a little glimpse into Germany, so that you may be able to picture to yourselves the way your comrades of the Army of Occupation manage to make themselves comfortable among the Huns.... I ate my Christmas dinner in Coblenz. What do you think of that? Never had I thought that a Christmas would find me away from my home and loved ones. But what unexpected things happen to us in this world! Christmas in Coblenz under the American flag!”

He paused a moment to allow a little scattered clapping to subside.

“The turkey was fine, too, I can tell you.... Yes, our boys in Germany are very, very comfortable, and just waiting for the word, if necessary, to continue their glorious advance to Berlin. For I am sorry to say, boys, that the Germans have not undergone the change of heart for which we had hoped. They have, indeed, changed the name of their institutions, but their spirit they have not changed.... How grave a disappointment it must be to our great President, who has exerted himself so to bring the German people to reason, to make them understand the horror that they alone have brought deliberately upon the world! Alas! Far from it. Indeed, they have attempted with insidious propaganda to undermine the morale of our troops....” A little storm of muttered epithets went through the room. The Reverend Dr. Skinner elevated his chubby pink palms and smiled benignantly..."to undermine the morale of our troops; so that the most stringent regulations have had to be made by the commanding general to prevent it. Indeed, my friends, I very much fear that we stopped too soon in our victorious advance; that Germany should have been utterly crushed. But all we can do is watch and wait, and abide by the decision of those great men who in a short time will be gathered together at the Conference at Paris.... Let me, boys, my dear friends, express the hope that you may speedily be cured of your wounds, ready again to do willing service in the ranks of the glorious army that must be vigilant for some time yet, I fear, to defend, as Americans and Christians, the civilization you have so nobly saved from a ruthless foe.... Let us all join together in singing the hymn, 'Stand up, stand up for Jesus,' which I am sure you all know.”

The men got to their feet, except for a few who had lost their legs, and sang the first verse of the hymn unsteadily. The second verse petered out altogether, leaving only the “Y” man and the Reverend Dr. Skinner singing away at the top of their lungs.

The Reverend Dr. Skinner pulled out his gold watch and looked at it frowning.

“Oh, my, I shall miss the train,” he muttered. The “Y” man helped him into his voluminous trench coat and they both hurried out of the door.

“Those are some puttees he had on, I'll tell you,” said the legless man who was propped in a chair near the stove.

Andrews sat down beside him, laughing. He was a man with high cheekbones and powerful jaws to whose face the pale brown eyes and delicately pencilled lips gave a look of great gentleness. Andrews did not look at his body.

“Somebody said he was a Red Cross man giving out cigarettes.... Fooled us that time,” said Andrews.

“Have a butt? I've got one,” said the legless man. With a large shrunken hand that was the transparent color of alabaster he held out a box of cigarettes.

“Thanks.” When Andrews struck a match he had to lean over the legless man to light his cigarette for him. He could not help glancing down the man's tunic at the drab trousers that hung limply from the chair. A cold shudder went through him; he was thinking of the zigzag scars on his own thighs.

“Did you get it in the legs, too, Buddy?” asked the legless man, quietly.

“Yes, but I had luck.... How long have you been here?”

“Since Christ was a corporal. Oh, I doan know. I've been here since two weeks after my outfit first went into the lines.... That was on November 16th, 1917.... Didn't see much of the war, did I?... Still, I guess I didn't miss much.”

“No.... But you've seen enough of the army.”

“That's true.... I guess I wouldn't mind the war if it wasn't for the army.”

“They'll be sending you home soon, won't they?”

“Guess so.... Where are you from?”

“New York,” said Andrews.

“I'm from Cranston, Wisconsin. D'you know that country? It's a great country for lakes. You can canoe for days an' days without a portage. We have a camp on Big Loon Lake. We used to have some wonderful times there... lived like wild men. I went for a trip for three weeks once without seeing a house. Ever done much canoeing?”

“Not so much as I'd like to.”

“That's the thing to make you feel fit. First thing you do when you shake out of your blankets is jump in an' have a swim. Gee, it's great to swim when the morning mist is still on the water an' the sun just strikes the tops of the birch trees. Ever smelt bacon cooking? I mean out in the woods, in a frying pan over some sticks of pine and beech wood.... Some great old smell, isn't it?... And after you've paddled all day, an' feel tired and sunburned right to the palms of your feet, to sit around the fire with some trout roastin' in the ashes and hear the sizzlin' the bacon makes in the pan.... O boy!” He stretched his arms wide.

“God, I'd like to have wrung that damn little parson's neck,” said Andrews suddenly.

“Would you?” The legless man turned brown eyes on Andrews with a smile. “I guess he's about as much to blame as anybody is... guys like him.... I guess they have that kind in Germany, too.”

“You don't think we've made the world quite as safe for Democracy as it might be?” said Andrews in a low voice.

“Hell, how should I know? I bet you never drove an ice wagon.... I did, all one summer down home.... It was some life. Get up at three o'clock in the morning an' carry a hundred or two hundred pounds of ice into everybody's ice box. That was the life to make a feller feel fit. I was goin' around with a big Norwegian named Olaf, who was the strongest man I ever knew. An' drink! He was the boy could drink. I once saw him put away twenty-five dry Martini cocktails an' swim across the lake on top of it.... I used to weigh a hundred and eighty pounds, and he could pick me up with one hand and put me across his shoulder.... That was the life to make a feller feel fit. Why, after bein' out late the night before, we'd jump up out of bed at three o'clock feeling springy as a cat.”

“What's he doing now?” asked Andrews.

“He died on the transport coming 'cross here. Died of the flu.... I met a feller came over in his regiment. They dropped him overboard when they were in sight of the Azores.... Well, I didn't die of the flu. Have another butt?”

“No, thanks,” said Andrews.

They were silent. The fire roared in the stove. No one was talking. The men lolled in chairs somnolently. Now and then someone spat. Outside of the window Andrews could see the soft white dancing of the snowflakes. His limbs felt very heavy; his mind was permeated with dusty stagnation like the stagnation of old garrets and lumber rooms, where, among superannuated bits of machinery and cracked grimy crockery, lie heaps of broken toys.

John Andrews sat on a bench in a square full of linden trees, with the pale winter sunshine full on his face and hands. He had been looking up through his eyelashes at the sun, that was the color of honey, and he let his dazzled glance sink slowly through the black lacework of twigs, down the green trunks of the trees to the bench opposite where sat two nursemaids and, between them, a tiny girl with a face daintily colored and lifeless like a doll's face, and a frilled dress under which showed small ivory knees and legs encased in white socks and yellow sandals. Above the yellow halo of her hair floated, with the sun shining through it, as through a glass of claret, a bright carmine balloon which the child held by a string. Andrews looked at her for a long time, enraptured by the absurd daintiness of the figure between the big bundles of flesh of the nursemaids. The thought came to him suddenly that months had gone by,—was it only months?—since his hands had touched anything soft, since he had seen any flowers. The last was a flower an old woman had given him in a village in the Argonne, an orange marigold, and he remembered how soft the old woman's withered lips had been against his cheek when she had leaned over and kissed him. His mind suddenly lit up, as with a strain of music, with a sense of the sweetness of quiet lives worn away monotonously in the fields, in the grey little provincial towns, in old kitchens full of fragrance of herbs and tang of smoke from the hearth, where there are pots on the window-sill full of basil in flower.

Something made him go up to the little girl and take her hand. The child, looking up suddenly and seeing a lanky soldier with pale lean face and light, straw-colored hair escaping from under a cap too small for him, shrieked and let go the string of the balloon, which soared slowly into the air trembling a little in the faint cool wind that blew. The child wailed dismally, and Andrews, quailing under the furious glances of the nursemaids, stood before her, flushed crimson, stammering apologies, not knowing what to do. The white caps of the nursemaids bent over and ribbons fluttered about the child's head as they tried to console her. Andrews walked away dejectedly, now and then looking up at the balloon, which soared, a black speck against the grey and topaz-colored clouds.

“Sale Americain!” he heard one nursemaid exclaim to the other. But this was the first hour in months he had had free, the first moment of solitude; he must live; soon he would be sent back to his division. A wave of desire for furious fleshly enjoyments went through him, making him want steaming dishes of food drenched in rich, spice-flavored sauces; making him want to get drunk on strong wine; to roll on thick carpets in the arms of naked, libidinous women. He was walking down the quiet grey street of the provincial town, with its low houses with red chimney pots, and blue slate roofs and its irregular yellowish cobbles. A clock somewhere was striking four with deep booming strokes, Andrews laughed. He had to be in hospital at six. Already he was tired; his legs ached.

The window of a pastry shop appeared invitingly before him, denuded as it was by wartime. A sign in English said: “Tea.” Walking in, he sat down in a fussy little parlor where the tables had red cloths, and a print, in pinkish and greenish colors, hung in the middle of the imitation brocade paper of each wall. Under a print of a poster bed with curtains in front of which eighteen to twenty people bowed, with the title of “Secret d'Amour,” sat three young officers, who cast cold, irritated glances at this private with a hospital badge on who invaded their tea shop. Andrews stared back at them, flaming with dull anger.

Sipping the hot, fragrant tea, he sat with a blank sheet of music paper before him, listening in spite of himself to what the officers were saying. They were talking about Ronsard. It was with irritated surprise that Andrews heard the name. What right had they to be talking about Ronsard? He knew more about Ronsard than they did. Furious, conceited phrases kept surging up in his mind. He was as sensitive, as humane, as intelligent, as well-read as they were; what right had they to the cold suspicious glance with which they had put him in his place when he had come into the room? Yet that had probably been as unconscious, as unavoidable as was his own biting envy. The thought that if one of those men should come over to him, he would have to stand up and salute and answer humbly, not from civility, but from the fear of being punished, was bitter as wormwood, filled him with a childish desire—to prove his worth to them, as when older boys had illtreated him at school and he had prayed to have the house burn down so that he might heroically save them all. There was a piano in an inner room, where in the dark the chairs, upside down, perched dismally on the table tops. He almost obeyed an impulse to go in there and start playing, by the brilliance of his playing to force these men, who thought of him as a coarse automaton, something between a man and a dog, to recognize him as an equal, a superior.

“But the war's over. I want to start living. Red wine, streets of the nightingale cries to the rose,” said one of the officers.

“What do you say we go A.W.O.L. to Paris?”

“Dangerous.”

“Well, what can they do? We are not enlisted men; they can only send us home. That's just what I want.”

“I'll tell you what; we'll go to the Cochon Bleu and have a cocktail and think about it.”

“The lion and the lizard keep their courts where... what the devil was his name? Anyway, we'll glory and drink deep, while Major Peabody keeps his court in Dijon to his heart's content.”

Spurs jingled as the three officers went out. A fierce disgust took possession of John Andrews. He was ashamed of his spiteful irritation. If, when he had been playing the piano to a roomful of friends in New York, a man dressed as a laborer had shambled in, wouldn't he have felt a moment of involuntary scorn? It was inevitable that the fortunate should hate the unfortunate because they feared them. But he was so tired of all those thoughts. Drinking down the last of his tea at a gulp, he went into the shop to ask the old woman, with little black whiskers over her bloodless lips, who sat behind the white desk at the end of the counter, if she minded his playing the piano.

In the deserted tea room, among the dismal upturned chairs, his crassened fingers moved stiffly over the keys. He forgot everything else. Locked doors in his mind were swinging wide, revealing forgotten sumptuous halls of his imagination. The Queen of Sheba, grotesque as a satyr, white and flaming with worlds of desire, as the great implacable Aphrodite, stood with her hand on his shoulder sending shivers of warm sweetness rippling through his body, while her voice intoned in his ears all the inexhaustible voluptuousness of life.

An asthmatic clock struck somewhere in the obscurity of the room. “Seven!” John Andrews paid, said good-bye to the old woman with the mustache, and hurried out into the street. “Like Cinderella at the ball,” he thought. As he went towards the hospital, down faintly lighted streets, his steps got slower and slower. “Why go back?” a voice kept saying inside him. “Anything is better than that.” Better throw himself in the river, even, than go back. He could see the olive-drab clothes in a heap among the dry bullrushes on the river bank.... He thought of himself crashing naked through the film of ice into water black as Chinese lacquer. And when he climbed out numb and panting on the other side, wouldn't he be able to take up life again as if he had just been born? How strong he would be if he could begin life a second time! How madly, how joyously he would live now that there was no more war.... He had reached the door of the hospital. Furious shudders of disgust went through him.

He was standing dumbly humble while a sergeant bawled him out for being late.

Andrews stared for a long while at the line of shields that supported the dark ceiling beams on the wall opposite his cot. The emblems had been erased and the grey stone figures that crowded under the shields,—the satyr with his shaggy goat's legs, the townsman with his square hat, the warrior with the sword between his legs,—had been clipped and scratched long ago in other wars. In the strong afternoon light they were so dilapidated he could hardly make them out. He wondered how they had seemed so vivid to him when he had lain in his cot, comforted by their comradeship, while his healing wounds itched and tingled. Still he glanced tenderly at the grey stone figures as he left the ward.

Downstairs in the office where the atmosphere was stuffy with a smell of varnish and dusty papers and cigarette smoke, he waited a long time, shifting his weight restlessly from one foot to the other.

“What do you want?” said a red-haired sergeant, without looking up from the pile of papers on his desk.

“Waiting for travel orders.”

“Aren't you the guy I told to come back at three?”

“It is three.”

“H'm!” The sergeant kept his eyes fixed on the papers, which rustled as he moved them from one pile to another. In the end of the room a typewriter clicked slowly and jerkily. Andrews could see the dark back of a head between bored shoulders in a woolen shirt leaning over the machine. Beside the cylindrical black stove against the wall a man with large mustaches and the complicated stripes of a hospital sergeant was reading a novel in a red cover. After a long silence the red-headed sergeant looked up from his papers and said suddenly:

“Ted.”

The man at the typewriter turned slowly round, showing a large red face and blue eyes.

“We-ell,” he drawled.

“Go in an' see if the loot has signed them papers yet.”

The man got up, stretched himself deliberately, and slouched out through a door beside the stove. The red-haired sergeant leaned back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette.

“Hell,” he said, yawning.

The man with the mustache beside the stove let the book slip from his knees to the floor, and yawned too.

“This goddam armistice sure does take the ambition out of a feller,” he said.

“Hell of a note,” said the red-haired sergeant. “D'you know that they had my name in for an O.T.C.? Hell of a note goin' home without a Sam Browne.”

The other man came back and sank down into his chair in front of the typewriter again. The slow, jerky clicking recommenced.

Andrews made a scraping noise with his foot on the ground.

“Well, what about that travel order?” said the red-haired sergeant.

“Loot's out,” said the other man, still typewriting.

“Well, didn't he leave it on his desk?” shouted the red-haired sergeant angrily.

“Couldn't find it.”

“I suppose I've got to go look for it.... God!” The red-haired sergeant stamped out of the room. A moment later he came back with a bunch of papers in his hand.

“Your name Jones?” he snapped to Andrews.

“No.”

“Snivisky?”

“No.... Andrews, John.”

“Why the hell couldn't you say so?”

The man with the mustaches beside the stove got to his feet suddenly. An alert, smiling expression came over his face.

“Good afternoon, Captain Higginsworth,” he said cheerfully.

An oval man with a cigar slanting out of his broad mouth came into the room. When he talked the cigar wobbled in his mouth. He wore greenish kid gloves, very tight for his large hands, and his puttees shone with a dark lustre like mahogany.

The red-haired sergeant turned round and half-saluted.

“Goin' to another swell party, Captain?” he asked.

The Captain grinned.

“Say, have you boys got any Red Cross cigarettes? I ain't only got cigars, an' you can't hand a cigar to a lady, can you?” The Captain grinned again. An appreciative giggle went round.

“Will a couple of packages do you? Because I've got some here,” said the red-haired sergeant reaching in the drawer of his desk.

“Fine.” The captain slipped them into his pocket and swaggered out doing up the buttons of his buff-colored coat.

The sergeant settled himself at his desk again with an important smile.

“Did you find the travel order?” asked Andrews timidly. “I'm supposed to take the train at four-two.”

“Can't make it.... Did you say your name was Anderson?”

“Andrews.... John Andrews.”

“Here it is.... Why didn't you come earlier?”

The sharp air of the ruddy winter evening, sparkling in John Andrews's nostrils, vastly refreshing after the stale odors of the hospital, gave him a sense of liberation. Walking with rapid steps through the grey streets of the town, where in windows lamps already glowed orange, he kept telling himself that another epoch was closed. It was with relief that he felt that he would never see the hospital again or any of the people in it. He thought of Chrisfield. It was weeks and weeks since Chrisfield had come to his mind at all. Now it was with a sudden clench of affection that the Indiana boy's face rose up before him. An oval, heavily-tanned face with a little of childish roundness about it yet, with black eyebrows and long black eyelashes. But he did not even know if Chrisfield were still alive. Furious joy took possession of him. He, John Andrews, was alive; what did it matter if everyone he knew died? There were jollier companions than ever he had known, to be found in the world, cleverer people to talk to, more vigorous people to learn from. The cold air circulated through his nose and lungs; his arms felt strong and supple; he could feel the muscles of his legs stretch and contract as he walked, while his feet beat jauntily on the irregular cobblestones of the street. The waiting room at the station was cold and stuffy, full of a smell of breathed air and unclean uniforms. French soldiers wrapped in their long blue coats, slept on the benches or stood about in groups, eating bread and drinking from their canteens. A gas lamp in the center gave dingy light. Andrews settled himself in a corner with despairing resignation. He had five hours to wait for a train, and already his legs ached and he had a side feeling of exhaustion. The exhilaration of leaving the hospital and walking free through wine-tinted streets in the sparkling evening air gave way gradually to despair. His life would continue to be this slavery of unclean bodies packed together in places where the air had been breathed over and over, cogs in the great slow-moving Juggernaut of armies. What did it matter if the fighting had stopped? The armies would go on grinding out lives with lives, crushing flesh with flesh. Would he ever again stand free and solitary to live out joyous hours which would make up for all the boredom of the treadmill? He had no hope. His life would continue like this dingy, ill-smelling waiting room where men in uniform slept in the fetid air until they should be ordered-out to march or to stand in motionless rows, endlessly, futilely, like toy soldiers a child has forgotten in an attic.

Andrews got up suddenly and went out on the empty platform. A cold wind blew. Somewhere out in the freight yards an engine puffed loudly, and clouds of white steam drifted through the faintly lighted station. He was walking up and down with his chin sunk into his coat and his hands in his pockets, when somebody ran into him.

“Damn,” said a voice, and the figure darted through a grimy glass door that bore the sign: “Buvette.” Andrews followed absent-mindedly.

“I'm sorry I ran into you.... I thought you were an M.P., that's why I beat it.” When he spoke, the man, an American private, turned and looked searchingly in Andrews's face. He had very red cheeks and an impudent little brown mustache. He spoke slowly with a faint Bostonian drawl.

“That's nothing,” said Andrews.

“Let's have a drink,” said the other man. “I'm A.W.O.L. Where are you going?”

“To some place near Bar-le-Duc, back to my Division. Been in hospital.”

“Long?”

“Since October.”

“Gee.... Have some Curacoa. It'll do you good. You look pale.... My name's Henslowe. Ambulance with the French Army.”

They sat down at an unwashed marble table where the soot from the trains made a pattern sticking to the rings left by wine and liqueur glasses.

“I'm going to Paris,” said Henslowe. “My leave expired three days ago. I'm going to Paris and get taken ill with peritonitis or double pneumonia, or maybe I'll have a cardiac lesion.... The army's a bore.”

“Hospital isn't any better,” said Andrews with a sigh. “Though I shall never forget the night with which I realized I was wounded and out of it. I thought I was bad enough to be sent home.”

“Why, I wouldn't have missed a minute of the war.... But now that it's over...Hell! Travel is the password now. I've just had two weeks in the Pyrenees. Nimes, Arles, Les Baux, Carcassonne, Perpignan, Lourdes, Gavarnie, Toulouse! What do you think of that for a trip?... What were you in?”

“Infantry.”

“Must have been hell.”

“Been! It is.”

“Why don't you come to Paris with me?”

“I don't want to be picked up,” stammered Andrews.

“Not a chance.... I know the ropes.... All you have to do is keep away from the Olympia and the railway stations, walk fast and keep your shoes shined... and you've got wits, haven't you?”

“Not many.... Let's drink a bottle of wine. Isn't there anything to eat to be got here?”

“Not a damn thing, and I daren't go out of the station on account of the M.P. at the gate.... There'll be a diner on the Marseilles express.”

“But I can't go to Paris.”

“Sure.... Look, how do you call yourself?”

“John Andrews.”

“Well, John Andrews, all I can say is that you've let 'em get your goat. Don't give in. Have a good time, in spite of 'em. To hell with 'em.” He brought the bottle down so hard on the table that it broke and the purple wine flowed over the dirty marble and dripped gleaming on the floor.

Some French soldiers who stood in a group round the bar turned round.

“V'la un gars qui gaspille le bon vin,” said a tall red-faced man, with long sloping whiskers.

“Pour vingt sous j'mangerai la bouteille,” cried a little man lurching forward and leaning drunkenly over the table.

“Done,” said Henslowe. “Say, Andrews, he says he'll eat the bottle for a franc.”

He placed a shining silver franc on the table beside the remnants of the broken bottle. The man seized the neck of the bottle in a black, claw-like hand and gave it a preparatory flourish. He was a cadaverous little man, incredibly dirty, with mustaches and beard of a moth-eaten tow-color, and a purple flush on his cheeks. His uniform was clotted with mud. When the others crowded round him and tried to dissuade him, he said: “M'en fous, c'est mon metier,” and rolled his eyes so that the whites flashed in the dim light like the eyes of dead codfish.

“Why, he's really going to do it,” cried Henslowe.

The man's teeth flashed and crunched down on the jagged edge of the glass. There was a terrific crackling noise. He flourished the bottle-end again.

“My God, he's eating it,” cried Henslowe, roaring with laughter, “and you're afraid to go to Paris.”

An engine rumbled into the station, with a great hiss of escaping steam.

“Gee, that's the Paris train! Tiens!” He pressed the franc into the man's dirt-crusted hand.

“Come along, Andrews.”

As they left the buvette they heard again the crunching crackling noise as the man bit another piece off the bottle.

Andrews followed Henslowe across the steam-filled platform to the door of a first-class carriage. They climbed in. Henslowe immediately pulled down the black cloth over the half globe of the light. The compartment was empty. He threw himself down with a sigh of comfort on the soft buff-colored cushions of the seat.

“But what on earth?” stammered Andrews.

“M'en fous, c'est mon metier,” interrupted Henslowe.

The train pulled out of the station.

Henslowe poured wine from a brown earthen crock into the glasses, where it shimmered a bright thin red, the color of currants. Andrews leaned back in his chair and looked through half-closed eyes at the table with its white cloth and little burnt umber loaves of bread, and out of the window at the square dimly lit by lemon-yellow gas lamps and at the dark gables of the little houses that huddled round it.

At a table against the wall opposite a lame boy, with white beardless face and gentle violet-colored eyes, sat very close to the bareheaded girl who was with him and who never took her eyes off his face, leaning on his crutch all the while. A stove hummed faintly in the middle of the room, and from the half-open kitchen door came ruddy light and the sound of something frying. On the wall, in brownish colors that seemed to have taken warmth from all the rich scents of food they had absorbed since the day of their painting, were scenes of the Butte as it was fancied to have once been, with windmills and wide fields.

“I want to travel,” Henslowe was saying, dragging out his words drowsily. “Abyssinia, Patagonia, Turkestan, the Caucasus, anywhere and everywhere. What do you say you and I go out to New Zealand and raise sheep?”

“But why not stay here? There can't be anywhere as wonderful as this.”

“Then I'll put off starting for New Guinea for a week. But hell, I'd go crazy staying anywhere after this. It's got into my blood... all this murder. It's made a wanderer of me, that's what it's done. I'm an adventurer.”

“God, I wish it had made me into anything so interesting.”

“Tie a rock on to your scruples and throw 'em off the Pont Neuf and set out.... O boy, this is the golden age for living by your wits.”

“You're not out of the army yet.”

“I should worry.... I'll join the Red Cross.”

“How?”

“I've got a tip about it.”

A girl with oval face and faint black down on her upper lip brought them soup, a thick greenish colored soup, that steamed richly into their faces.

“If you tell me how I can get out of the army you'll probably save my life,” said Andrews seriously.

“There are two ways...Oh, but let me tell you later. Let's talk about something worth while...So you write music do you?”

Andrews nodded.

An omelet lay between them, pale golden-yellow with flecks of green; a few amber bubbles of burnt butter still clustered round the edges.

“Talk about tone-poems,” said Henslowe.

“But, if you are an adventurer and have no scruples, how is it you are still a private?”

Henslowe took a gulp of wine and laughed uproariously.

“That's the joke.”

They ate in silence for a little while. They could hear the couple opposite them talking in low soft voices. The stove purred, and from the kitchen came a sound of something being beaten in a bowl. Andrews leaned back in his chair.

“This is so wonderfully quiet and mellow,” he said.... “It is so easy to forget that there's any joy at all in life.”

“Rot...It's a circus parade.”

“Have you ever seen anything drearier than a circus parade? One of those jokes that aren't funny.”

“Justine, encore du vin,” called Henslowe.

“So you know her name?”

“I live here.... The Butte is the boss on the middle of the shield. It's the axle of the wheel. That's why it's so quiet, like the centre of a cyclone, of a vast whirling rotary circus parade!”

Justine, with her red hands that had washed so many dishes off which other people had dined well, put down between them a scarlet langouste, of which claws and feelers sprawled over the tablecloth that already had a few purplish stains of wine. The sauce was yellow and fluffy like the breast of a canary bird.

“D'you know,” said Andrews suddenly talking fast and excitedly while he brushed the straggling yellow hair off his forehead, “I'd almost be willing to be shot at the end of a year if I could live up here all that time with a piano and a million sheets of music paper...It would be worth it.”

“But this is a place to come back to. Imagine coming back here after the highlands of Thibet, where you'd nearly got drowned and scalped and had made love to the daughter of an Afghan chief... who had red lips smeared with loukoumi so that the sweet taste stayed in your mouth.” Henslowe stroked softly his little brown mustache.

“But what's the use of just seeing and feeling things if you can't express them?”

“What's the use of living at all? For the fun of it, man; damn ends.”

“But the only profound fun I ever have is that...” Andrews's voice broke. “O God, I would give up every joy in the world if I could turn out one page that I felt was adequate.... D'you know it's years since I've talked to anybody?”

They both stared silently out of the window at the fog that was packed tightly against it like cotton wool, only softer, and a greenish-gold color.

“The M.P.'s sure won't get us tonight,” said Henslowe, banging his fist jauntily on the table. “I've a great mind to go to Rue St. Anne and leave my card on the Provost Marshal.... God damn! D'you remember that man who took the bite out of our wine-bottle...He didn't give a hoot in hell, did he? Talk about expression. Why don't you express that? I think that's the turning point of your career. That's what made you come to Paris; you can't deny it.”

They both laughed loudly rolling about on their chairs.

Andrews caught glints of contagion in the pale violet eyes of the lame boy and in the dark eyes of the girl.

“Let's tell them about it,” he said still laughing, with his face, bloodless after the months in hospital, suddenly flushed.

“Salut,” said Henslowe turning round and elevating his glass. “Nous rions parceque nous sommes gris de vin gris.” Then he told them about the man who ate glass. He got to his feet and recounted slowly in his drawling voice, with gestures. Justine stood by with a dish full of stuffed tomatoes of which the red skins showed vaguely through a mantle of dark brown sauce. When she smiled her cheeks puffed out and gave her face a little of the look of a white cat's.

“And you live here?” asked Andrews after they had all laughed.

“Always. It is not often that I go down to town.... It's so difficult.... I have a withered leg.” He smiled brilliantly like a child telling about a new toy.

“And you?”

“How could I be anywhere else?” answered the girl. “It's a misfortune, but there it is.” She tapped with the crutch on the floor, making a sound like someone walking with it. The boy laughed and tightened his arm round her shoulder.

“I should like to live here,” said Andrews simply.

“Why don't you?”

“But don't you see he's a soldier,” whispered the girl hurriedly.

A frown wrinkled the boy's forehead.

“Well, it wasn't by choice, I suppose,” he said.

Andrews was silent. Unaccountable shame took possession of him before these people who had never been soldiers, who would never be soldiers.

“The Greeks used to say,” he said bitterly, using as phrase that had been a long time on his mind, “that when a man became a slave, on the first day he lost one-half of his virtue.”

“When a man becomes a slave,” repeated the lame boy softly, “on the first day he loses one-half of his virtue.”

“What's the use of virtue? It is love you need,” said the girl.

“I've eaten your tomato, friend Andrews,” said Henslowe. “Justine will get us some more.” He poured out the last of the wine that half filled each of the glasses with its thin sparkle, the color of red currants.

Outside the fog had blotted everything out in even darkness which grew vaguely yellow and red near the sparsely scattered street lamps. Andrews and Henslowe felt their way blindly down the long gleaming flights of steps that led from the quiet darkness of the Butte towards the confused lights and noises of more crowded streets. The fog caught in their throats and tingled in their noses and brushed against their cheeks like moist hands.

“Why did we go away from that restaurant? I'd like to have talked to those people some more,” said Andrews.

“We haven't had any coffee either.... But, man, we're in Paris. We're not going to be here long. We can't afford to stay all the time in one place.... It's nearly closing time already....”

“The boy was a painter. He said he lived by making toys; he whittles out wooden elephants and camels for Noah's Arks.... Did you hear that?”

They were walking fast down a straight, sloping street. Below them already appeared the golden glare of a boulevard.

Andrews went on talking, almost to himself. “What a wonderful life that would be to live up here in a small room that would overlook the great rosy grey expanse of the city, to have some absurd work like that to live on, and to spend all your spare time working and going to concerts.... A quiet mellow existence.... Think of my life beside it. Slaving in that iron, metallic, brazen New York to write ineptitudes about music in the Sunday paper. God! And this.”

They were sitting down at a table in a noisy cafe, full of yellow light flashing in eyes and on glasses and bottles, of red lips crushed against the thin hard rims of glasses.

“Wouldn't you like to just rip it off?” Andrews jerked at his tunic with both hands where it bulged out over his chest. “Oh, I'd like to make the buttons fly all over the cafe, smashing the liqueur glasses, snapping in the faces of all those dandified French officers who look so proud of themselves that they survived long enough to be victorious.”

“The coffee's famous here,” said Henslowe. “The only place I ever had it better was at a bistro in Nice on this last permission.”

“Somewhere else again!”

“That's it.... For ever and ever, somewhere else! Let's have some prunelle. Before the war prunelle.”

The waiter was a solemn man, with a beard cut like a prime minister's. He came with the bottle held out before him, religiously lifted. His lips pursed with an air of intense application, while he poured the white glinting liquid into the glasses. When he had finished he held the bottle upside down with a tragic gesture; not a drop came out.

“It is the end of the good old times,” he said.

“Damnation to the good old times,” said Henslowe. “Here's to the good old new roughhousy circus parades.”

“I wonder how many people they are good for, those circus parades of yours,” said Andrews.

“Where are you going to spend the night?” said Henslowe.

“I don't know.... I suppose I can find a hotel or something.”

“Why don't you come with me and see Berthe; she probably has friends.”

“I want to wander about alone, not that I scorn Berthe's friends,” said Andrews...."But I am so greedy for solitude.”

John Andrews was walking alone down streets full of drifting fog. Now and then a taxi dashed past him and clattered off into the obscurity. Scattered groups of people, their footsteps hollow in the muffling fog, floated about him. He did not care which way he walked, but went on and on, crossing large crowded avenues where the lights embroidered patterns of gold and orange on the fog, rolling in wide deserted squares, diving into narrow streets where other steps sounded sharply for a second now and then and faded leaving nothing in his ears when he stopped still to listen but the city's distant muffled breathing. At last he came out along the river, where the fog was densest and coldest and where he could hear faintly the sound of water gurgling past the piers of bridges. The glow of the lights glared and dimmed, glared and dimmed, as he walked along, and sometimes he could make out the bare branches of trees blurred across the halos of the lamps. The fog caressed him soothingly and shadows kept flicking past him, giving him glimpses of smooth curves of cheeks and glints of eyes bright from the mist and darkness. Friendly, familiar people seemed to fill the fog just out of his sight. The muffled murmur of the city stirred him like the sound of the voices of friends.

“From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling roses to pieces from the height of her litter... all the imagining of your desire....”

The murmur of life about him kept forming itself into long modulated sentences in his ears,—sentences that gave him by their form a sense of quiet well-being as if he were looking at a low relief of people dancing, carved out of Parian in some workshop in Attica.

Once he stopped and leaned for a long while against the moisture-beaded stern of a street-lamp. Two shadows defined, as they strolled towards him, into the forms of a pale boy and a bareheaded girl, walking tightly laced in each other's arms. The boy limped a little and his violet eyes were contracted to wistfulness. John Andrews was suddenly filled with throbbing expectation, as if those two would come up to him and put their hands on his arms and make some revelation of vast import to his life. But when they reached the full glow of the lamp, Andrews saw that he was mistaken. They were not the boy and girl he had talked to on the Butte.

He walked off hurriedly and plunged again into tortuous streets, where he strode over the cobblestone pavements, stopping now and then to peer through the window of a shop at the light in the rear where a group of people sat quietly about a table under a light, or into a bar where a tired little boy with heavy eyelids and sleeves rolled up from thin grey arms was washing glasses, or an old woman, a shapeless bundle of black clothes, was swabbing the floor. From doorways he heard talking and soft laughs. Upper windows sent yellow rays of light across the fog.