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.