Three Soldiers online

and browns merged into a bluish grey monochrome at a little distance.
He wanted to be alone, to wander at random through the city, to stare
dreamily at people and things, to talk by chance to men and women, to
sink his life into the misty sparkling life of the streets. The smell
of the mist brought a memory to his mind. For a long while he groped for
it, until suddenly he remembered his dinner with Henslowe and the faces
of the boy and girl he had talked to on the Butte. He must find Henslowe
at once. A second's fierce resentment went through him against all these
people about him. Christ! He must get away from them all; his freedom
had been hard enough won; he must enjoy it to the uttermost.

"Say, I'm going to stick to you, Andy." Walters's voice broke into his
reverie. "I'm going to appoint you the corps of interpreters."

Andrews laughed.

"D'you know the way to the School Headquarters?"

"The R. T. O. said take the subway."

"I'm going to walk," said Andrews.

"You'll get lost, won't you?"

"No danger, worse luck," said Andrews, getting to his feet. "I'll see
you fellows at the School Headquarters, whatever those are.... So long."

"Say, Andy, I'll wait for you there," Walters called after him.

Andrews darted down a side street. He could hardly keep from shouting
aloud when he found himself alone, free, with days and days ahead of him
to work and think, gradually to rid his limbs of the stiff attitudes
of the automaton. The smell of the streets, and the mist, indefinably
poignant, rose like incense smoke in fantastic spirals through his
brain, making him hungry and dazzled, making his arms and legs feel
lithe and as ready for delight as a crouching cat for a spring. His
heavy shoes beat out a dance as they clattered on the wet pavements
under his springy steps. He was walking very fast, stopping suddenly now
and then to look at the greens and oranges and crimsons of vegetables in
a push cart, to catch a vista down intricate streets, to look into the
rich brown obscurity of a small wine shop where workmen stood at the
counter sipping white wine. Oval, delicate faces, bearded faces of men,
slightly gaunt faces of young women, red cheeks of boys, wrinkled faces
of old women, whose ugliness seemed to have hidden in it, stirringly,
all the beauty of youth and the tragedy of lives that had been
lived; the faces of the people he passed moved him like rhythms of an
orchestra. After much walking, turning always down the street which
looked pleasantest, he came to an oval with a statue of a pompous
personage on a ramping horse. "Place des Victoires," he read the name,
which gave him a faint tinge of amusement. He looked quizzically at the
heroic features of the sun king and walked off laughing. "I suppose they
did it better in those days, the grand manner," he muttered. And his
delight redoubled in rubbing shoulders with the people whose effigies
would never appear astride ramping-eared horses in squares built to
commemorate victories. He came out on a broad straight avenue, where
there were many American officers he had to salute, and M. P.'s and
shops with wide plate-glass windows, full of objects that had a shiny,
expensive look. "Another case of victories," he thought, as he went off
into a side street, taking with him a glimpse of the bluish-grey pile of
the Opera, with its pompous windows and its naked bronze ladies holding
lamps.

He was in a narrow street full of hotels and fashionable barber shops,
from which came an odor of cosmopolitan perfumery, of casinos and
ballrooms and diplomatic receptions, when he noticed an American officer
coming towards him, reeling a little, - a tall, elderly man with a red
face and a bottle nose. He saluted.

The officer stopped still, swaying from side to side, and said in a
whining voice:

"Shonny, d'you know where Henry'sh Bar is?"

"No, I don't, Major," said Andrews, who felt himself enveloped in an
odor of cocktails.

"You'll help me to find it, shonny, won't you?... It's dreadful not to
be able to find it.... I've got to meet Lootenant Trevors in Henry'sh
Bar." The major steadied himself by putting a hand on Andrews' shoulder.
A civilian passed them.

"Dee-donc," shouted the major after him, "Dee-donc, Monshier, ou ay
Henry'sh Bar?"

The man walked on without answering.

"Now isn't that like a frog, not to understand his own language?" said
the major.

"But there's Henry's Bar, right across the street," said Andrews
suddenly.

"Bon, bon," said the major.

They crossed the street and went in. At the bar the major, still
clinging to Andrews' shoulder, whispered in his ear: "I'm A. W. O. L.,
shee?... Shee?.... Whole damn Air Service is A. W. O. L. Have a
drink with me.... You enlisted man? Nobody cares here.... Warsh over,
Sonny.... Democracy is shafe for the world."

Andrews was just raising a champagne cocktail to his lips, looking with
amusement at the crowd of American officers and civilians who crowded
into the small mahogany barroom, when a voice behind him drawled out:

"I'll be damned!"

Andrews turned and saw Henslowe's brown face and small silky mustache.
He abandoned his major to his fate.

"God, I'm glad to see you.... I was afraid you hadn't been able to work
it."...Said Henslowe slowly, stuttering a little.

"I'm about crazy, Henny, with delight. I just got in a couple of hours
ago...." Laughing, interrupting each other, they chattered in broken
sentences.

"But how in the name of everything did you get here?"

"With the major?" said Andrews, laughing.

"What the devil?"

"Yes; that major," whispered Andrews in his friend's ear, "rather the
worse for wear, asked me to lead him to Henry's Bar and just fed me a
cocktail in the memory of Democracy, late defunct.... But what are you
doing here? It's not exactly... exotic."

"I came to see a man who was going to tell me how I could get to Rumania
with the Red Cross.... But that can wait.... Let's get out of here. God,
I was afraid you hadn't made it."

"I had to crawl on my belly and lick people's boots to do it.... God, it
was low!... But here I am."

They were out in the street again, walking and gesticulating.

"But 'Libertad, Libertad, allons, ma femme!' as Walt Whitman would have
said," shouted Andrews.

"It's one grand and glorious feeling.... I've been here three days. My
section's gone home; God bless them."

"But what do you have to do?"

"Do? Nothing," cried Henslowe. "Not a blooming bloody goddam thing! In
fact, it's no use trying... the whole thing is such a mess you couldn't
do anything if you wanted to."

"I want to go and talk to people at the Schola Cantorum."

"There'll be time for that. You'll never make anything out of music if
you get serious-minded about it."

"Then, last but not least, I've got to get some money from somewhere."

"Now you're talking!" Henslowe pulled a burnt leather pocket book out
of the inside of his tunic. "Monaco," he said, tapping the pocket book,
which was engraved with a pattern of dull red flowers. He pursed up
his lips and pulled out some hundred franc notes, which he pushed into
Andrews's hand.

"Give me one of them," said Andrews.

"All or none.... They last about five minutes each."

"But it's so damn much to pay back."

"Pay it back - heavens!... Here take it and stop your talking. I probably
won't have it again, so you'd better make hay this time. I warn you
it'll be spent by the end of the week."

"All right. I'm dead with hunger."

"Let's sit down on the Boulevard and think about where we'll have lunch
to celebrate Miss Libertad.... But let's not call her that, sounds like
Liverpool, Andy, a horrid place."

"How about Freiheit?" said Andrews, as they sat down in basket chairs in
the reddish yellow sunlight.

"Treasonable... off with your head."

"But think of it, man," said Andrews, "the butchery's over, and you and
I and everybody else will soon be human beings again. Human; all too
human!"

"No more than eighteen wars going," muttered Henslowe.

"I haven't seen any papers for an age.... How do you mean?"

"People are fighting to beat the cats everywhere except on the' western
front," said Henslowe. "But that's where I come in. The Red Cross sends
supply trains to keep them at it.... I'm going to Russia if I can work
it."

"But what about the Sorbonne?"

"The Sorbonne can go to Ballyhack."

"But, Henny, I'm going to croak on your hands if you don't take me
somewhere to get some food."

"Do you want a solemn place with red plush or with salmon pink brocade?"

"Why have a solemn place at all?"

"Because solemnity and good food go together. It's only a religious
restaurant that has a proper devotion to the belly. O, I know, we'll go
over to Brooklyn."

"Where?"

"To the Rive Gauche. I know a man who insists on calling it Brooklyn.
Awfully funny man... never been sober in his life. You must meet him."

"Oh, I want to.... It's a dog's age since I met anyone new, except you.
I can't live without having a variegated crowd about, can you?"

"You've got that right on this boulevard. Serbs, French, English,
Americans, Australians, Rumanians, Tcheco-Slovaks; God, is there any
uniform that isn't here?... I tell you, Andy, the war's been a great
thing for the people who knew how to take advantage of it. Just look at
their puttees."

"I guess they'll know how to make a good thing of the Peace too."

"Oh, that's going to be the best yet.... Come along. Let's be little
devils and take a taxi."

"This certainly is the main street of Cosmopolis."

They threaded their way through the crowd, full of uniforms and glitter
and bright colors, that moved in two streams up and down the wide
sidewalk between the cafes and the boles of the bare trees. They climbed
into a taxi, and lurched fast through streets where, in the misty
sunlight, grey-green and grey-violet mingled with blues and pale lights
as the colors mingle in a pigeon's breast feathers. They passed the
leafless gardens of the Tuileries on one side, and the great inner
Courts of the Louvre, with their purple mansard roofs and their high
chimneys on the other, and saw for a second the river, dull jade green,
and the plane trees splotched with brown and cream color along the
quais, before they were lost in the narrow brownish-grey streets of the
old quarters.

"This is Paris; that was Cosmopolis," said Henslowe.

"I'm not particular, just at present," cried Andrews gaily.

The square in front of the Odeon was a splash of white and the collonade
a blur of darkness as the cab swerved round the corner and along the
edge of the Luxembourg, where, through the black iron fence, many brown
and reddish colors in the intricate patterns of leafless twigs opened
here and there on statues and balustrades and vistas of misty distances.
The cab stopped with a jerk.

"This is the Place des Medicis," said Henslowe.

At the end of a slanting street looking very flat, through the haze, was
the dome of the Pantheon. In the middle of the square between the yellow
trams and the green low busses, was a quiet pool, where the shadow of
horizontals of the house fronts was reflected.

They sat beside the window looking out at the square.

Henslowe ordered.

"Remember how sentimental history books used to talk about prisoners who
were let out after years in dungeons, not being able to stand it, and
going back to their cells?"

"D'you like sole meuniere?"

"Anything, or rather everything! But take it from me, that's all
rubbish. Honestly I don't think I've ever been happier in my life....
D'you know, Henslowe, there's something in you that is afraid to be
happy."

"Don't be morbid.... There's only one real evil in the world: being
somewhere without being able to get away;... I ordered beer. This is the
only place in Paris where it's fit to drink."

"And I'm going to every blooming concert...Colonne-Lamoureux on Sunday,
I know that.... The only evil in the world is not to be able to hear
music or to make it.... These oysters are fit for Lucullus."

"Why not say fit for John Andrews and Bob Henslowe, damn it?... Why the
ghosts of poor old dead Romans should be dragged in every time a man
eats an oyster, I don't see. We're as fine specimens as they were. I
swear I shan't let any old turned-toclay Lucullus outlive me, even if
I've never eaten a lamprey."

"And why should you eat a lamp - chimney, Bob?" came a hoarse voice
beside them.

Andrews looked up into a round, white face with large grey eyes hidden
behind thick steel-rimmed spectacles. Except for the eyes, the face had
a vaguely Chinese air.

"Hello, Heinz! Mr. Andrews, Mr. Heineman," said Henslowe.

"Glad to meet you," said Heineman in a jovially hoarse voice. "You guys
seem to be overeating, to reckon by the way things are piled up on the
table." Through the hoarseness Andrews could detect a faint Yankee tang
in Heineman's voice.

"You'd better sit down and help us," said Henslowe.

"Sure....D'you know my name for this guy?" He turned to Andrews....
"Sinbad!"

"Sinbad was in bad in Tokio and Rome, In bad in Trinidad
And twice as bad at home."

He sang the words loudly, waving a bread stick to keep time.

"Shut up, Heinz, or you'll get us run out of here the way you got us run
out of the Olympia that night."

They both laughed.

"An' d'you remember Monsieur Le Guy with his coat?

"Do I? God!" They laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks. Heineman
took off his glasses and wiped them. He turned to Andrews.

"Oh, Paris is the best yet. First absurdity: the Peace Conference and
its nine hundred and ninety-nine branches. Second absurdity: spies.
Third: American officers A.W.O.L. Fourth: The seven sisters sworn to
slay." He broke out laughing again, his chunky body rolling about on the
chair.

"What are they?"

"Three of them have sworn to slay Sinbad, and four of them have sworn to
slay me.... But that's too complicated to tell at lunch time....
Eighth: there are the lady relievers, Sinbad's specialty. Ninth: there's
Sinbad...."

"Shut up, Heinz, you're getting me maudlin," spluttered Henslowe.

"O Sinbad was in bad all around," chanted Heineman. "But no one's given
me anything to drink," he said suddenly in a petulant voice. "Garcon,
une bouteille de Macon, pour un Cadet de Gascogne.... What's the next?
It ends with vergogne. You've seen the play, haven't you? Greatest play
going.... Seen it twice sober and seven other times."

"Cyrano de Bergerac?"

"That's it. Nous sommes les Cadets de Gasgogne, rhymes with ivrogne and
sans vergogne.... You see I work in the Red Cross.... You know Sinbad,
old Peterson's a brick.... I'm supposed to be taking photographs of
tubercular children at this minute.... The noblest of my professions
is that of artistic photographer.... Borrowed the photographs from the
rickets man. So I have nothing to do for three months and five hundred
francs travelling expenses. Oh, children, my only prayer is 'give us
this day our red worker's permit' and the Red Cross does the rest."
Heineman laughed till the glasses rang on the table. He took off his
glasses and wiped them with a rueful air.

"So now I call the Red Cross the Cadets!" cried Heineman, his voice a
thin shriek from laughter.

Andrews was drinking his coffee in little sips, looking out of the
window at the people that passed. An old woman with a stand of flowers
sat on a small cane chair at the corner. The pink and yellow and
blue-violet shades of the flowers seemed to intensify the misty straw
color and azured grey of the wintry sun and shadow of the streets. A
girl in a tight-fitting black dress and black hat stopped at the stand
to buy a bunch of pale yellow daisies, and then walked slowly past the
window of the restaurant in the direction of the gardens. Her ivory
face and slender body and her very dark eyes sent a sudden flush through
Andrews's whole frame as he looked at her. The black erect figure
disappeared in the gate of the gardens.

Andrews got to his feet suddenly.

"I've got to go," he said in a strange voice.... "I just remember a man
was waiting for me at the School Headquarters."

"Let him wait."

"Why, you haven't had a liqueur yet," cried Heineman.

"No... but where can I meet you people later?"

"Cafe de Rohan at five... opposite the Palais Royal."

"You'll never find it."

"Yes I will," said Andrews.

"Palais Royal metro station," they shouted after him as he dashed out of
the door.

He hurried into the gardens. Many people sat on benches in the frail
sunlight. Children in bright-colored clothes ran about chasing hoops. A
woman paraded a bunch of toy balloons in carmine and green and purple,
like a huge bunch of parti-colored grapes inverted above her head.
Andrews walked up and down the alleys, scanning faces. The girl had
disappeared. He leaned against a grey balustrade and looked down
into the empty pond where traces of the explosion of a Bertha still
subsisted. He was telling himself that he was a fool. That even if he
had found her he could not have spoken to her; just because he was free
for a day or two from the army he needn't think the age of gold had come
back to earth. Smiling at the thought, he walked across the gardens,
wandered through some streets of old houses in grey and white stucco
with slate mansard roofs and fantastic complications of chimney-pots
till he came out in front of a church with a new classic facade of huge
columns that seemed toppling by their own weight.

He asked a woman selling newspapers what the church's name was. "Mais,
Monsieur, c'est Saint Sulpice," said the woman in a surprised tone.

Saint Sulpice. Manon's songs came to his head, and the sentimental
melancholy of eighteenth century Paris with its gambling houses in the
Palais Royal where people dishonored themselves in the presence of their
stern Catonian fathers, and its billets doux written at little gilt
tables, and its coaches lumbering in covered with mud from the provinces
through the Porte d'Orleans and the Porte de Versailles; the Paris of
Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques, with its muddy streets and its
ordinaries where one ate bisques and larded pullets and souffles; a
Paris full of mouldy gilt magnificence, full of pompous ennui of the
past and insane hope of the future.

He walked down a narrow, smoky street full of antique shops and old
bookshops and came out unexpectedly on the river opposite the statue of
Voltaire. The name on the corner was quai Malaquais. Andrews crossed and
looked down for a long time at the river. Opposite, behind a lace-work
of leafless trees, were the purplish roofs of the Louvre with their high
peaks and their ranks and ranks of chimneys; behind him the old houses
of the quai and the wing, topped by a balustrade with great grey stone
urns of a domed building of which he did not know the name. Barges were
coming upstream, the dense green water spuming under their blunt bows,
towed by a little black tugboat with its chimney bent back to pass under
the bridges. The tug gave a thin shrill whistle. Andrews started walking
downstream. He crossed by the bridge at the corner of the Louvre, turned
his back on the arch Napoleon built to receive the famous horses from
St. Marc's, - a pinkish pastry-like affair - and walked through the
Tuileries which were full of people strolling about or sitting in the
sun, of doll-like children and nursemaids with elaborate white caps, of
fluffy little dogs straining at the ends of leashes. Suddenly a peaceful
sleepiness came over him. He sat down in the sun on a bench, watching,
hardly seeing them, the people who passed to and fro casting long
shadows. Voices and laughter came very softly to his ears above the
distant stridency of traffic. From far away he heard for a few moments
notes of a military band playing a march. The shadows of the trees
were faint blue-grey in the ruddy yellow gravel. Shadows of people kept
passing and repassing across them. He felt very languid and happy.

Suddenly he started up; he had been dozing. He asked an old man with a
beautifully pointed white beard the way to rue du Faubourg St. Honore.

After losing his way a couple of times, he walked listlessly up some
marble steps where a great many men in khaki were talking. Leaning
against the doorpost was Walters. As he drew near Andrews heard him
saying to the man next to him:

"Why, the Eiffel tower was the first piece of complete girder
construction ever built.... That's the first thing a feller who's wide
awake ought to see."

"Tell me the Opery's the grandest thing to look at," said the man next
it.

"If there's wine an' women there, me for it."

"An' don't forget the song."

"But that isn't interesting like the Eiffel tower is," persisted
Walters.

"Say, Walters, I hope you haven't been waiting for me," stammered
Andrews.

"No, I've been waiting in line to see the guy about courses.... I want
to start this thing right."

"I guess I'll see them tomorrow," said Andrews.

"Say have you done anything about a room, Andy? Let's you and me be
bunkies."

"All right.... But maybe you won't want to room where I do, Walters."

"Where's that? In the Latin Quarter?... You bet. I want to see some
French life while I am about it."

"Well, it's too late to get a room to-day."

"I'm going to the 'Y' tonight anyway."

"I'll get a fellow I know to put me up.... Then tomorrow, we'll see.
Well, so long," said Andrews, moving away.

"Wait. I'm coming with you.... We'll walk around town together."

"All right," said Andrews.



The rabbit was rather formless, very fluffy and had a glance of madness
in its pink eye with a black center. It hopped like a sparrow along the
pavement, emitting a rubber tube from its back, which went up to a bulb
in a man's hand which the man pressed to make the rabbit hop. Yet the
rabbit had an air of organic completeness. Andrews laughed inordinately
when he first saw it. The vendor, who had a basket full of other such
rabbits on his arm, saw Andrews laughing and drew timidly near to the
table; he had a pink face with little, sensitive lips rather like a real
rabbit's, and large frightened eyes of a wan brown.

"Do you make them yourself?" asked Andrews, smiling.

The man dropped his rabbit on the table with a negligent air.

"Oh, oui, Monsieur, d'apres la nature."

He made the rabbit turn a somersault by suddenly pressing the bulb hard.
Andrews laughed and the rabbit man laughed.

"Think of a big strong man making his living that way," said Walters,
disgusted.

"I do it all... de matiere premiere au profit de l'accapareur," said the
rabbit man.

"Hello, Andy... late as hell.... I'm sorry," said Henslowe, dropping down
into a chair beside them. Andrews introduced Walters, the rabbit man
took off his hat, bowed to the company and went off, making the rabbit
hop before him along the edge of the curbstone.

"What's happened to Heineman?"

"Here he comes now," said Henslowe.

An open cab had driven up to the curb in front of the cafe. In it sat
Heineman with a broad grin on his face and beside him a woman in a
salmon-colored dress, ermine furs and an emerald-green hat. The cab
drove off and Heineman, still grinning, walked up to the table.

"Where's the lion cub?" asked Henslowe.

"They say it's got pneumonia."

"Mr. Heineman. Mr. Walters."

The grin left Heineman's face; he said: "How do you do?" curtly, cast a
furious glance at Andrews and settled himself in a chair.

The sun had set. The sky was full of lilac and bright purple
and carmine. Among the deep blue shadows lights were coming on,
primrose-colored street lamps, violet arc lights, ruddy sheets of light
poured out of shop windows.

"Let's go inside. I'm cold as hell," said Heineman crossly, and they
filed in through the revolving door, followed by a waiter with their
drinks.

"I've been in the Red Cross all afternoon, Andy.... I think I am going
to work that Roumania business.... Want to come?" said Henslowe in
Andrews' ear.

"If I can get hold of a piano and some lessons and the concerts keep up
you won't be able to get me away from Paris with wild horses. No, sir,
I want to see what Paris is like.... It's going to my head so it'll be
weeks before I know what I think about it."

"Don't think about it.... Drink," growled Heineman, scowling savagely.

"That's two things I'm going to keep away from in Paris; drink and
women.... And you can't have one without the other," said Walters.

"True enough.... You sure do need them both," said Heineman.

Andrews was not listening to their talk; twirling the stem of his
glass of vermouth in his fingers, he was thinking of the Queen of