“But the war’s over. I want to start living. Red wine, 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 stuck 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 Brown.”
The other man came back and sank down into his chair in front of the typewriter again. The slow, jerky clicking recommended.
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 redhaired 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.