Three Soldiers, John Dos Passos [e reader pdf best txt] 📗

along whistling like a school boy.

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

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

“Where are you going?”

“Conflans-Ste.-Honorine.”

“Where’s that?”

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

“All right,” said Andrews.

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

“Where did you say you were going?”

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

Andrews laughed.

“Where are you going?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know. I was taking a walk.”

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

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

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

“It seems mighty fine to me.”

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

“I suppose it is pleasanter.”

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

They laughed.

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

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

“Where to?”

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, indeed.”

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

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

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

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

“Mine is Jean…Jean Andre.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you expect?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marcel shrugged his shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

They laughed.

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

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

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

“Yes, a very old and tinkly one.”

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

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

Andrews shrugged his shoulders.

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

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

Andrews brushed the light, disordered hair off his forehead.

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

They laughed.

“But my mother taught me to play the piano when I was very small,” he went on seriously. “She and I lived alone in an old house belonging to her family in Virginia. How different all that was from anything you have ever lived. It would not be possible in Europe to be as isolated as we were in Virginia…. Mother was very unhappy. She had led a dreadfully thwarted life…that unre-lieved hopeless misery that only a woman can suffer. She used to tell me stories, and I used to make up little tunes about them, and about anything. The great success,” he laughed, “was, I remember,