Steps creaked somewhere, and the old man looked at him through spectacles placed on the end of his nose. Andrews recognized the irregular face full of red knobs and protrusions.
“Thanks very much,” he said.
All three looked at him silently for some time. Then the old man pulled a newspaper out of his pocket, unfolded it carefully, and fluttered it above Andrews’s eyes. In the scant light Andrews made out the name: “Libertaire.”
“That’s why,” said the old man, looking at Andrews fixedly, through his spectacles.
“I’m a sort of a socialist,” said Andrews.
“Socialists are good-for-nothings,” snarled the old man, every red protrusion on his face seeming to get redder.
“But I have great sympathy for anarchist comrades,” went on Andrews, feeling a certain liveliness of amusement go through him and fade again.
“Lucky you caught hold of my rope, instead of getting on to the next barge. He’d have given you up for sure. Sont des royalistes, ces salauds-la.”
“We must give him something to eat; hurry, Maman… Don’t worry, he’ll pay, won’t you, my little American?”
Andrews nodded his head.
“All you want,” he said. “No, if he says he’s a comrade, he shan’t pay, not a sou,” growled the old man.
“We’ll see about that,” cried the old woman, drawing her breath in with an angry whistling sound.
“It’s only that livin’s so dear nowadays,” came the girl’s voice.
“Oh, I’ll pay anything I’ve got,” said Andrews, peevishly, closing his eyes again.
He lay a long while on his back without moving.
A hand shoved in between his back and the pillow roused him. He sat up. Rosaline was holding a bowl of broth in front of him that steamed in his face.
“Mange ça,” she said.
He looked into her eyes, smiling. Her rusty hair was neatly combed. A bright green parrot with a scarlet splash in its wings, balanced itself unsteadily on her shoulder, looking at Andrews out of angry eyes, hard as gems.
“Il est jaloux, coco,” said Rosaline, with a shrill little giggle.
Andrews took the bowl in his two hands and drank some of the scalding broth.
“It’s too hot,” he said, leaning back against the girl’s arm.
The parrot squawked out a sentence that Andrews did not understand.
Andrews heard the old man’s voice answer from somewhere behind him:
“Nom de Dieu!”
The parrot squawked again.
Rosaline laughed.
“It’s the old man who taught him that,” she said. “Poor Coco, he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“What does he say?” asked Andrews.
“‘Les bourgeois à la lanterne, nom de dieu!’ It’s from a song,” said Rosaline “Oh, qu’il est malin, ce Coco!”
Rosaline was standing with her arms folded beside the bunk. The parrot stretched out his neck and rubbed it against her cheek, closing and unclosing his gem-like eyes. The girl formed her lips into a kiss, and murmured in a drowsy voice:
“Tu m’aimes, Coco, n’est-ce pas, Coco? Bon Coco.”
“Could I have something more, I’m awfully hungry,” said Andrews.
“Oh, I was forgetting,” cried Rosaline, running off with the empty bowl.
In a moment she came back without the parrot, with the bowl in her hand full of a brown stew of potatoes and meat.
Andrews ate it mechanically, and handed back the bowl.
“Thank you,” he said, “I am going to sleep.”
He settled himself into the bunk. Rosaline drew the covers up about him and tucked them in round his shoulders. Her hand seemed to linger a moment as it brushed past his cheek. But Andrews had already sunk into a torpor again, feeling nothing but the warmth of the food within him and a great stiffness in his legs and arms.
When he woke up the light was grey instead of yellow, and a swishing sound puzzled him. He lay listening to it for a long time, wondering what it was. At last the thought came with a sudden warm spurt of joy that the barge must be moving.
He lay very quietly on his back, looking up at the faint silvery light on the ceiling of the bunk, thinking of nothing, with only a vague dread in the back of his head that someone would come to speak to him, to question him.
After a long time he began to think of Geneviève Rod. He was having a long conversation with her about his music, and in his imagination she kept telling him that he must finish the “Queen of Sheba,” and that she would show it to Monsieur Gibier, who was a great friend of a certain concert director, who might get it played. How long ago it must be since they had talked about that. A picture floated through his mind of himself and Geneviève standing shoulder to shoulder looking at the Cathedral at Chartres, which stood up nonchalantly, above the tumultuous roofs of the town, with its sober tower and its gaudy towers and the great rose windows between. Inexorably his memory carried him forward, moment by moment, over that day, until he writhed with shame and revolt. Good god! Would he have to go on all his life remembering that? “Teach him how to salute,” the officer had said, and Handsome had stepped up to him and hit him. Would he have to go on all his life remembering that?
“We tied up the uniform with some stones, and threw it overboard,” said Rosaline, jabbing him in the shoulder to draw his attention.
“That was a good idea.”
“Are you going to get up? It’s nearly time to eat. How you have slept.”
“But I haven’t anything to put on,” said Andrews, laughing, and waved a bare arm above the bedclothes.
“Wait, I’ll find something of the old man’s. Say, do all Americans have skin so white as that? Look.”
She put her brown hand, with its grimed and broken nails, on Andrews’ arm, that was white with a few silky yellow hairs.
“It’s because I’m blonde,” said Andrews. “There are plenty of blonde Frenchmen, aren’t there?”
Rosaline ran off giggling, and came back in a moment with a pair of corduroy trousers and a torn flannel shirt that smelt of pipe tobacco.
“That’ll do for now,” she said. “It’s warm today for April. Tonight we’ll buy you some clothes and shoes. Where are you going?”
“By God, I don’t know.”
“We’re going to Havre for cargo.” She put both hands to her head and began rearranging her straggling rustycolored hair. “Oh, my hair,” she said, “it’s the water, you know. You can’t keep respectable-looking on these filthy barges. Say, American, why don’t you stay with us a while? You can help the old man run the boat.”
He found suddenly that her eyes were looking into his with trembling eagerness.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said carelessly. “I wonder if it’s safe to go on deck.”
She turned away from him petulantly and led the way up the ladder.
“Oh, v’là le camarade,” cried the old man who was leaning with all his might against the long tiller of the barge. “Come and help me.” The barge was the last of a string of four that were describing a wide curve in the midst of a reach of silvery river full of glittering patches of pale, pea-green lavender, hemmed in on either side by frail blue roots of poplars. The sky was a mottled luminous grey with occasional patches, the color of robins’ eggs. Andrews breathed in the dank smell of the river and leaned against the tiller when he was told to, answering the old man’s curt questions.
He stayed with the tiller when the rest of them went down to the cabin to eat. The pale colors and the swishing sound of the water and the blue-green banks slipping by and unfolding on either hand, were as soothing as his deep sleep had been. Yet they seemed only a veil covering other realities, where men stood interminably in line and marched with legs made all the same length on the drill field, and wore the same clothes and cringed before the same hierarchy of polished belts and polished puttees and stiff-visored caps, that had its homes in vast offices crammed with index cards and card catalogues; a world full of the tramp of marching, where cold voices kept saying:-“Teach him how to salute.” Like a bird in a net, Andrews’s mind struggled to free itself from the obsession.