“Not a hell of a lot.”
“Don’t yer?” came a voice from the other side of Andrews,—a thin voice that stuttered. “W-w-well, all I can say is, it’ld have sss-spoiled my business if I hadn’t enlisted. No, sir, nobody can say I didn’t enlist.”
“Well, that’s your look-out,” said Applebaum.
“You’re goddam right, it was.”
“Well, ain’t your business spoiled anyway?”
“No, sir. I can pick it right up where I left off. I’ve got an established reputation.”
“What at?”
“I’m an undertaker by profession; my dad was before me.”
“Gee, you were right at home!” said Andrews.
“You haven’t any right to say that, young feller,” said the undertaker angrily. “I’m a humane man. I won’t never be at home in this dirty butchery.”
The nurse was walking by their cots.
“How can you say such dreadful things?” she said. “But lights are out. You boys have got to keep quiet. … And you,” she plucked at the undertaker’s bedclothes, “just remember what the Huns did in Belgium. … Poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like I am.”
Andrews closed his eyes. The ward was quiet except for the rasping sound of the snores and heavy breathing of the shattered men all about him. “And I thought she was the Queen of Sheba,” he said to himself, making a grimace in the dark. Then he began to think of the music he had intended to write about the Queen of Sheba before he had stripped his life off in the bare room where they had measured him and made a soldier of him. Standing in the dark in the desert of his despair, he would hear the sound of a caravan in the distance, tinkle of bridles, rasping of horns, braying of donkeys, and the throaty voices of men singing the songs of desolate roads. He would look up, and before him he would see, astride their foaming wild asses, the three green horsemen motionless, pointing at him with their long forefingers. Then the music would burst in a sudden hot whirlwind about him, full of flutes and kettledrums and braying horns and whining bagpipes, and torches would flare red and yellow, making a tent of light about him, on the edges of which would crowd the sumpter mules and the brown mule drivers, and the gaudily caparisoned camels, and the elephants glistening with jewelled harness. Naked slaves would bend their gleaming backs before him as they laid out a carpet at his feet; and, through the flare of torch-light, the Queen of Sheba would advance towards him, covered with emeralds and dull-gold ornaments, with a monkey hopping behind holding up the end of her long train. She would put her hand with its slim fantastic nails on his shoulder; and, looking into her eyes, he would suddenly feel within reach all the fiery imaginings of his desire.
Oh, if he could only be free to work. All the months he had wasted in his life seemed to be marching like a procession of ghosts before his eyes. And he lay in his cot, staring with wide open eyes at the ceiling, hoping desperately that his wounds would be long in healing.
Applebaum sat on the edge of his cot, dressed in a clean new uniform, of which the left sleeve hung empty, still showing the creases in which it had been folded.
“So you really are going,” said Andrews, rolling his head over on his pillow to look at him.
“You bet your pants I am, Andy. … An’ so could you, poifectly well, if you’ld talk it up to ’em a little.”
“Oh, I wish to God I could. Not that I want to go home, now, but … if I could get out of uniform.”
“I don’t blame ye a bit, Kid; well, next time, we’ll know better. … Local Board Chairman’s going to be my job.”
Andrews laughed.
“If I wasn’t a sucker …”
“You weren’t the only wewe-one,” came the undertaker’s stuttering voice from behind Andrews.
“Hell, I thought you enlisted, undertaker.”
“Well, I did, by God. But I didn’t think it was going to be like this. …”
“What did ye think it was going to be, a picnic?”
“Hell, I doan care about that, or gettin’ gassed, and smashed up, or anythin’, but I thought we was goin’ to put things to rights by comin’ over here. … Look here, I had a lively business in the undertaking way, like my father had had before me. … We did all the swellest work in Tilletsville. …”
“Where?” interrupted Applebaum, laughing.
“Tilletsville; don’t you know any geography?”
“Go ahead, tell us about Tilletsville,” said Andrews soothingly.
“Why, when Senator Wallace d-d-deceased there, who d’you think had charge of embalming the body and taking it to the station an’ seeing everything was done fitting? We did. … And I was going to be married to a dandy girl, and I knowed I had enough pull to get fixed up, somehow, or to get a commission even, but there I went like a sucker an’ enlisted in the infantry, too. … But, hell, everybody was saying that we was going to fight to make the world safe for democracy, and that, if a feller didn’t go, no one’ld trade with him any more.”
He started coughing suddenly and seemed unable to stop. At last he said weakly, in a thin little voice between coughs:
“Well, here I am. There ain’t nothing to do about it.”
“Democracy. … That’s democracy, ain’t it: we eat stinkin’ goolash an’ that there fat ‘Y’ woman goes out with Colonels eatin’ chawklate soufflay. … Poifect democracy! … But I tell you what: it don’t do to be the goat.”
“But there’s so damn many more goats than anything else,” said Andrews.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, as Barnum said. You learn that drivin’ a taxicab, if ye don’t larn nothin’ else. … No, sir, I’m goin’ into politics. I’ve got good connections up Hundred and Twenty-fif ’ street way. … You see, I’ve got an aunt, Mrs. Sallie Schultz, owns a hotel on a Hundred and Tirty-tird street. Heard of Jim O’Ryan, ain’t yer? Well, he’s a good friend o’ hers; see? Bein’ as they’re both Catholics … But I’m goin’ out this afternoon, see what the town’s like … an ole Ford says the skirts are just peaches an’ cream.”
“He juss s-s-says that to torment a feller,” stuttered the undertaker.
“I wish I were going with you,” said Andrews.
“You’ll get well plenty soon enough, Andy, and get yourself marked Class A, and get given a gun, an—‘Over the top, boys!’… to see if the Fritzies won’t make a better shot next time. … Talk about suckers! You’re the most poifect sucker I ever met. … What did you want to tell the loot your legs didn’t hurt bad for? They’ll have you out o’ here before you know it. … Well, I’m goin’ out to see what the mamzelles look like.”
Applebaum, the uniform hanging in folds about his skinny body, swaggered to the door, followed by the envious glances of the whole ward.
“Gee, guess he thinks he’s goin’ to get to be president,” said the undertaker bitterly.
“He probably will,” said Andrews.
He settled himself in his bed again, sinking back into the dull contemplation of the teasing, smarting pain where the torn ligaments of his thighs were slowly knitting themselves together. He tried desperately to forget the pain; there was so much he wanted to think out. If he could only lie perfectly quiet, and piece together the frayed ends of thoughts that kept flickering to the surface of his mind. He counted up the days he had been in the hospital; fifteen! Could it be that long? And he had not thought of anything yet. Soon, as Applebaum said, they’d be putting him in Class A and sending him back to the treadmill, and he would not have reconquered his courage, his dominion over himself. What a coward he had been anyway, to submit. The man beside him kept coughing. Andrews stared for a moment at the silhouette of the yellow face on the pillow, with its pointed nose and small greedy eyes. He thought of the swell undertaking establishment, of the black gloves and long faces and soft tactful voices. That man and his father before him lived by pretending things they didn’t feel, by swathing reality with all manner of crêpe and trumpery. For those people, no one ever died, they passed away, they deceased. Still,
there had to be undertakers. There was no more stain about that than about any other trade. And it was so as not to spoil his trade that the undertaker had enlisted, and to make the world safe for democracy, too. The phrase came to Andrews’s mind amid an avalanche of popular tunes, of visions of patriotic numbers on the vaudeville stage. He remembered the great flags waving triumphantly over Fifth Avenue, and the crowds dutifully cheering. But those were valid reasons for the undertaker; but for him, John Andrews, were they valid reasons? No. He had no trade, he had not been driven into the army by the force of public opinion, he had not been carried away by any wave of blind confidence in the phrases of bought propagandists. He had not had the strength to live. The thought came to him of all those who, down the long tragedy of history, had given themselves smilingly for the integrity of their thoughts. He had not had the courage to move a muscle for his freedom, but he had been fairly cheerful about risking his life as a soldier, in a cause he believed useless. What right had a man to exist who was too cowardly to stand up for what he thought and felt, for his whole makeup, for everything that made him an individual apart from his fellows, and not a slave to stand cap in hand waiting for someone of stronger will to tell him to act?
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:
“The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.”
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 alrea
dy unbearable agony of human life.
As soon as he got out of the hospital he would desert; the determination formed suddenly in his mind, making the excited blood surge gloriously through his body. There was nothing else to do; he would desert. He pictured himself hobbling away in the dark on his lame legs, stripping his uniform off, losing himself in some out of the way corner of France, or slipping by the sentries to Spain and freedom. He was ready to endure anything, to face any sort of death, for the sake of a few months of liberty in which to forget the degradation of this last year. This was his last run with the pack.
An enormous exhilaration took hold of him. It seemed the first time in his life he had ever determined to act. All the rest had been aimless drifting. The blood sang in his ears. He fixed his eyes on the half-obliterated figures that supported the shields under the beams in the wall opposite. They seemed to be wriggling out of their contorted positions and smiling encouragement to him. He imagined them, warriors out of old tales, on their way to slay dragons in enchanted woods, clever-fingered guildsmen and artisans, cupids and satyrs and fauns, jumping from their niches and carrying him off with them in a headlong rout, to a sound of flutes, on a last forlorn assault on the citadels of pain.
The lights went out, and an orderly came round with chocolate that poured with a pleasant soothing sound into the tin cups. With a greasiness of chocolate in his mouth and the warmth of it in his stomach, John Andrews went to sleep.
There was a stir in the ward when he woke up. Reddish sunlight filtered in through the window opposite, and from outside came a confused noise, a sound of bells ringing and whistles blowing.
Andrews looked past his feet towards Stalky’s cot opposite. Stalky was sitting bolt upright in bed, with his eyes round as quarters.
“Fellers, the war’s over!”
“Put him out.”
“Cut that.”
“Pull the chain.”
“Tie that bull outside,” came from every side of the ward.
“Fellers,” shouted Stalky louder than ever, “it’s straight dope, the war’s over. I just dreamt the Kaiser came up to me on Fourteenth Street and bummed a nickel for a glass of beer. The war’s over. Don’t you hear the whistles?”
Three Soldiers Page 20