A shrill broken voice was singing in his ear:
“There’s a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belo-ongs to mee.”
John Andrews opened his eyes. It was pitch black, except for a series of bright yellow oblongs that seemed to go up into the sky, where he could see the stars. His mind became suddenly acutely conscious. He began taking account of himself in a hurried frightened way. He craned his neck a little. In the darkness he could make out the form of a man stretched out flat beside him who kept moving his head strangely from side to side, singing at the top of his lungs in a shrill broken voice. At that moment Andrews noticed that the smell of carbolic was overpoweringly strong, that it dominated all the familiar smells of blood and sweaty clothes. He wriggled his shoulders so that he could feel the two poles of the stretcher. Then he fixed his eyes again in the three bright yellow oblongs, one above the other, that rose into the darkness. Of course, they were windows; he was near a house.
He moved his arms a little. They felt like lead, but unhurt. Then he realized that his legs were on fire. He tried to move them; everything went black again in a sudden agony of pain. The voice was still shrieking in his ears:
“There’s a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belongs to mee.”
But another voice could be heard, softer, talking endlessly in tender clear tones:
“An’ he said they were goin’ to take me way down south where there was a little house on the beach, all so warm an’ quiet. …”
The song of the man beside him rose to a tuneless shriek, like a phonograph running down:
“An’ Mary-land was fairy-land
When she said that mine she’d be …”
Another voice broke in suddenly in short spurts of whining groans that formed themselves into fragments of drawn-out intricate swearing. And all the while the soft voice went on. Andrews strained his ears to hear it. It soothed his pain as if some cool fragrant oil were being poured over his body.
“An’ there’ll be a garden full of flowers, roses an’ hollyhocks, way down there in the south, an’ it’ll be so warm an’ quiet, an’ the sun’ll shine all day, and the sky’ll be so blue …”
Andrews felt his lips repeating the words like lips following a prayer.
“—An’ it’ll be so warm an’ quiet, without any noise at all. An’ the garden’ll be full of roses an’…”
But the other voices kept breaking in, drowning out the soft voice with groans, and strings of whining oaths.
“An’ he said I could sit on the porch, an’ the sun’ll be so warm an’ quiet, an’ the garden’ll smell so good, an’ the beach’ll be all white, an’ the sea …”
Andrews felt his head suddenly rise in the air and then his feet. He swung out of the darkness into a brilliant white corridor. His legs throbbed with flaming agony. The face of a man with a cigarette in his mouth peered close to his. A hand fumbled at his throat, where the tag was, and someone read:
“Andrews, I.432.286.”
But he was listening to the voice out in the dark, behind him, that shrieked in rasping tones of delirium:
“There’s a girl in the heart of Mary-land
With a heart that belongs to mee.”
Then he discovered that he was groaning. His mind became entirely taken up in the curious rhythm of his groans. The only parts of his body that existed were his legs and something in his throat that groaned and groaned. It was absorbing. White figures hovered about him, he saw the hairy forearms of a man in shirt sleeves, lights glared and went out, strange smells entered at his nose and circulated through his whole body, but nothing could distract his attention from the singsong of his groans.
Rain fell in his face. He moved his head from side to side, suddenly feeling conscious of himself. His mouth was dry, like leather; he put out his tongue to try to catch raindrops in it. He was swung roughly about in the stretcher. He lifted his head cautiously, feeling a great throb of delight that he still could lift his head.
“Keep yer head down, can’t yer?” snarled a voice beside him.
He had seen the back of a man in a gleaming wet slicker at the end of the stretcher.
“Be careful of my leg, can’t yer?” he found himself whining over and over again. Then suddenly there was a lurch that rapped his head against the crosspiece of the stretcher, and he found himself looking up at a wooden ceiling from which the white paint had peeled in places. He smelt gasoline and could hear the throb of an engine. He began to think back; how long was it since he had looked at the little frogs in the puddle? A vivid picture came to his mind of the puddle with its putty-colored water and the little triangular heads of the frogs. But it seemed as long ago as a memory of childhood; all of his life before that was not so long as the time that had gone by since the car had started. And he was jolting and swinging about in the stretcher, clutching hard with his hands at the poles of the stretcher. The pain in his legs grew worse; the rest of his body seemed to shrivel under it. From below him came a rasping voice that cried out at every lurch of the ambulance. He fought against the desire to groan, but at last he gave in and lay lost in the monotonous singsong of his groans.
The rain was in his face again for a moment, then his body was tilted. A row of houses and russet trees and chimney pots against a leaden sky swung suddenly up into sight and were instantly replaced by a ceiling and the coffred vault of a staircase. Andrews was still groaning softly, but his eyes fastened with sudden interest on the sculptured rosettes of the coffres and the coats of arms that made the center of each section of ceiling. Then he found himself staring in the face of the man who was carrying the lower end of the stretcher. It was a white face with pimples round the mouth and good-natured, watery blue eyes. Andrews looked at the eyes and tried to smile, but the man carrying the stretcher was not looking at him.
Then after more endless hours of tossing about on the stretcher, lost in a groaning agony of pain, hands laid hold of him roughly and pulled his clothes off and lifted him on a cot where he lay gasping, breathing in the cool smell of disinfectant that hung about the bedclothes. He heard voices over his head.
“Isn’t bad at all, this leg wound. … I thought you said we’d have to amputate?”
“Well, what’s the matter with him, then?”
“Maybe shell-shock. …”
A cold sweat of terror took hold of Andrews. He lay perfectly still with his eyes closed. Spasm after spasm of revolt went through him. No, they hadn’t broken him yet; he still had hold of his nerves, he kept saying to himself. Still, he felt that his hands, clasped across his belly, were trembling. The pain in his legs disappeared in the fright in which he lay, trying desperately to concentrate his mind on something outside himself. He tried to think of a tune to hum to himself, but he only heard again shrieking in his ears the voice which, it seemed to him months and years ago, had sung:
“There’s a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belo-ongs to mee.”
The voice shrieking the blurred tune and the pain in his legs mingled themselves strangely, until they seemed one and the pain seemed merely a throbbing of the maddening tune.
He opened his eyes. Darkness fading into a faint yellow glow. Hastily he took stock of himself, moved his head and his arms. He felt cool and very weak and quiet; he must have slept a long time. He passed his rough dirty hand over his face. The skin felt soft and cool. He pressed his cheek on the pillow and felt himself smiling contentedly, he did not know why.
The Queen of Sheba carried a parasol with little vermillion bells all round it that gave out a cool tinkle as she walked towards him. She wore her hair in a high headdress thickly powdered with blue iris powder, and on her long train, that a monkey held up at the end, were embroidered in gaudy colors the signs of the zodiac. She was not the Queen of Sheba, she was a nurse whose face he could not see in the obscurity, and, sticking an arm behind his head in a deft professional manner, she gave him some
thing to drink from a glass without looking at him. He said “Thank you,” in his natural voice, which surprised him in the silence; but she went off without replying and he saw that it was a trayful of glasses that had tinkled as she had come towards him.
Dark as it was he noticed the self-conscious tilt of the nurse’s body as she walked silently to the next cot, holding the tray of glasses in front of her. He twisted his head round on the pillow to watch how gingerly she put her arm under the next man’s head to give him a drink.
“A virgin,” he said to himself, “very much a virgin,” and he found himself giggling softly, notwithstanding the twinges of pain from his legs. He felt suddenly as if his spirit had awakened from a long torpor. The spell of dejection that had deadened him for months had slipped off. He was free. The thought came to him gleefully, that as long as he stayed in that cot in the hospital no one would shout orders at him. No one would tell him to clean his rifle. There would be no one to salute. He would not have to worry about making himself pleasant to the sergeant. He would lie there all day long, thinking his own thoughts.
Perhaps he was badly enough wounded to be discharged from the army. The thought set his heart beating like mad. That meant that he, who had given himself up for lost, who had let himself be trampled down unresistingly into the mud of slavery, who had looked for no escape from the treadmill but death, would live. He, John Andrews, would live.
And it seemed inconceivable that he had ever given himself up, that he had ever let the grinding discipline have its way with him. He saw himself vividly once more as he had seen himself before his life had suddenly blotted itself out, before he had become a slave among slaves. He remembered the garden where, in his boyhood, he had sat dreaming through the droning summer afternoons under the crêpe myrtle bushes, while the cornfields beyond rustled and shimmered in the heat. He remembered the day he had stood naked in the middle of a base room while the recruiting sergeant prodded him and measured him. He wondered suddenly what the date was. Could it be that it was only a year ago? Yet in that year all the other years of his life had been blotted out. But now he would begin living again. He would give up this cowardly cringing before external things. He would be recklessly himself.
The pain in his legs was gradually localizing itself into the wounds. For a while he struggled against it to go on thinking, but its constant throb kept impinging in his mind until, although he wanted desperately to comb through his pale memories to remember, if ever so faintly, all that had been vivid and lusty in his life, to build himself a new foundation of resistance against the world from which he could start afresh to live, he became again the querulous piece of hurt flesh, the slave broken on the treadmill; he began to groan.
Cold steel-gray light filtered into the ward, drowning the yellow glow which first turned ruddy and then disappeared. Andrews began to make out the row of cots opposite him, and the dark beams of the ceiling above his head. “This house must be very old,” he said to himself, and the thought vaguely excited him. Funny that the Queen of Sheba had come to his head, it was ages since he’d thought of all that. From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling roses to pieces from the height of her litter, all the aspects half-guessed, all the imaginings of your desire … that was the Queen of Sheba. He whispered the words aloud, “la reine de Saba, la reine de Saba”; and, with a tremor of anticipation of the sort he used to feel when he was a small boy the night before Christmas, with a sense of new things in store for him, he pillowed his head on his arm and went quietly to sleep.
“Ain’t it juss like them frawgs te make a place like this into a hauspital?” said the orderly, standing with his feet wide apart and his hands on his hips, facing a row of cots and talking to anyone who felt well enough to listen. “Honest, I doan see why you fellers doan all cash in yer checks in this hole. … There warn’t even electric light till we put it in. … What d’you think o’ that? That shows how much the goddam frawgs care. …” The orderly was a short man with a sallow, lined face and large yellow teeth. When he smiled the horizontal lines in his forehead and the lines that ran from the sides of his nose to the ends of his mouth deepened so that his face looked as if it were made up to play a comic part in the movies.
“It’s kind of artistic, though, ain’t it?” said Applebaum, whose cot was next Andrews’s,—a skinny man with large, frightened eyes and an inordinately red face that looked as if the skin had been peeled off. “Look at the work there is on that ceiling. Must have cost some dough when it was noo.”
“Wouldn’t be bad as a dance hall with a little fixin’ up, but a hauspital; hell!”
Andrews lay, comfortable in his cot, looking into the ward out of another world. He felt no connection with the talk about him, with the men who lay silent or tossed about groaning in the rows of narrow cots that filled the Renaissance hall. In the yellow glow of the electric lights, looking beyond the orderly’s twisted face and narrow head, he could see very faintly, where the beams of the ceiling sprung from the wall, a row of half-obliterated shields supported by figures carved out of the grey stone of the wall, handed satyrs with horns and goats’ beards and deep-set eyes, little squat figures of warriors and townsmen in square hats with swords between their bent knees, naked limbs twined in scrolls of spiked acanthus leaves, all seen very faintly, so that when the electric lights swung back and forth in the wind made by the orderly’s hurried passing, they all seemed to wink and wriggle in shadowy mockery of the rows of prostrate bodies in the room beneath them. Yet they were familiar, friendly to Andrews. He kept feeling a half-formulated desire to be up there too, crowded under a beam, grimacing through heavy wreaths of pomegranates and acanthus leaves, the incarnation of old rich lusts, of clear fires that had sunk to dust ages since. He felt at home in that spacious hall, built for wide gestures and stately steps, in which all the little routine of the army seemed unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows.
Andrews was snatched out of his thoughts. Applebaum was speaking to him; he turned his head.
“How d’you loike it bein’ wounded, buddy?”
“Fine.”
“Foine, I should think it was. … Better than doin’ squads right all day.”
“Where did you get yours?”
“Ain’t got only one arm now. … I don’t give a damn. … I’ve driven my last fare, that’s all.”
“How d’you mean?”
“I used to drive a taxi.”
“That’s a pretty good job, isn’t it?”
“You bet, big money in it, if yer in right.”
“So you used to be a taxi-driver, did you?” broke in the orderly. “That’s a fine job. … When I was in the Providence Hospital half the fractures was caused by taxis. We had a little girl of six in the children’s ward had her feet cut clean off at the ankles by a taxi. Pretty yellow hair she had, too. Gangrene. … Only lasted a day. … Well, I’m going off. I guess you guys wish you was going to be where I’m goin’ to be tonight. … That’s one thing you guys are lucky in, don’t have to worry about propho.” The orderly wrinkled his face up and winked elaborately.
“Say, will you do something for me?” asked Andrews.
“Sure, if it ain’t no trouble.”
“Will you buy me a book?”
“Ain’t ye got enough with all the books at the ‘Y’?”
“No. … This is a special book,” said Andrews smiling, “a French book.”
“A French book, is it? Well, I’ll see what I can do. What’s it called?”
“By Flaubert. … Look, if you’ve got a piece of paper and a pencil, I’ll write it down.”
Andrews scrawled the title on the back of an order slip.
“There.”
“What the hell? Who’s Antoine? Gee whiz, I bet that’s hot stuff. I wish I could read French. We’ll have you breakin’ loose out o’ here an’ going down to number four, roo Villiay, if you read that kind o’ book.”
&
nbsp; “Has it got pictures?” asked Applebaum.
“One feller did break out o’ here a month ago. … Couldn’t stand it any longer, I guess. Well, his wound opened an’ he had a hemorrhage, an’ now he’s planted out in the back lot. … But I’m goin’. Goodnight.”
The orderly bustled to the end of the ward and disappeared.
The lights went out, except for the bulb over the nurse’s desk at the end, beside the ornate doorway, with its wreathed pinnacles carved out of the grey stone, which could be seen above the white canvas screen that hid the door.
“What’s that book about, buddy?” asked Applebaum, twisting his head at the end of his lean neck so as to look Andrews full in the face.
“Oh, it’s about a man who wants everything so badly that he decides there’s nothing worth wanting.”
“I guess youse had a college edication,” said Applebaum sarcastically.
Andrews laughed.
“Well, I was goin’ to tell youse about when I used to drive a taxi. I was makin’ big money when I enlisted. Was you drafted?”
“Yes.”
“Well, so was I. I doan think nauthin o’ them guys that are so stuck up ’cause they enlisted, d’you?”
Three Soldiers Page 19