Three Soldiers - John Dos Passos (books to read fiction txt) 📗

dark streets, where the wind, despite the smell of burnt gasolene and army camps, had a faint suavity, something like the smell of mushrooms; the smell of spring.

Yvonne sat under the lamp in the shop, her feet up on a box of canned peas, yawning dismally. Behind her on the counter was the glass case full of yellow and greenish-white cheeses. Above that shelves rose to the ceiling in the brownish obscurity of the shop where gleamed faintly large jars and small jars, cans neatly placed in rows, glass jars and vegetables. In the corner, near the glass curtained door that led to the inner room, hung clusters of sausages large and small, red, yellow, and speckled. Yvonne jumped up when Fuselli and the sergeant opened the door.

“You are good,” she said. “Je mourrais de cafard.” They laughed.

“You know what that mean—cafard?”

“Sure.”

“It is only since the war. Avant la guerre on ne savais pas ce que c’etait le cafard. The war is no good.”

“Funny, ain’t it?” said Fuselli to the top sergeant, “a feller can’t juss figure out what the war is like.”

“Don’t you worry. We’ll all get there,” said the top sergeant knowingly.

“This is the sarjon, Yvonne,” said Fuselli.

“Oui, oui, je sais,” said Yvonne, smiling at the top sergeant. They sat in the little room behind the shop and drank white wine, and talked as best they could to Yvonne, who, very trim in her black dress and blue apron, perched on the edge of her chair with her feet in tiny pumps pressed tightly together, and glanced now and then at the elaborate stripes on the top sergeant’s arm.

 

Fuselli strode familiarly into the grocery shop, whistling, and threw open the door to the inner room. His whistling stopped in the middle of a bar.

“Hello,” he said in an annoyed voice.

“Hello, corporal,” said Eisenstein. Eisenstein, his French soldier friend, a lanky man with a scraggly black heard and burning black eyes, and Stockton, the chalky-faced boy, were sitting at the table that filled up the room, chatting intimately and gaily with Yvonne, who leaned against the yellow wall beside the Frenchman and showed all her little pearly teeth in a laugh. In the middle of the dark oak table was a pot of hyacinths and some glasses that had had wine in them. The odor of the hyacinths hung in the air with a faint warm smell from the kitchen.

After a second’s hesitation, Fuselli sat down to wait until the others should leave. It was long after pay-day and his pockets were empty, so he had nowhere else to go.

“How are they treatin’ you down in your outfit now?” asked Eisenstein of Stockton, after a silence.

“Same as ever,” said Stockton in his thin voice, stuttering a little…. “Sometimes I wish I was dead.”

“Hum,” said Eisenstein, a curious expression of understanding on his flabby face. “We’ll be civilians some day.”

“I won’t” said Stockton.

“Hell,” said Eisenstein. “You’ve got to keep your upper lip stiff. I thought I was goin’ to die in that troopship coming over here. An’ when I was little an’ came over with the emigrants from Poland, I thought I was goin’ to die. A man can stand more than he thinks for…. I never thought I could stand being in the army, bein’ a slave like an’ all that, an’ I’m still here. No, you’ll live long and be successful yet.” He put his hand on Stockton’s shoulder. The boy winced and drew his chair away. “What for you do that? I ain’t goin’ to hurt you,” said Eisenstein.

Fuselli looked at them both with a disgusted interest.

“I’ll tell you what you’d better do, kid,” he said condescendingly. “You get transferred to our company. It’s an Al bunch, ain’t it, Eisenstein? We’ve got a good loot an’ a good top-kicker, an’ a damn good bunch o’ fellers.”

“Our top-kicker was in here a few minutes ago,” said Eisenstein.

“He was?” asked Fuselli. “Where’d he go?”

“Damned if I know.”

Yvonne and the French soldier were talking in low voices, laughing a little now and then. Fuselli leaned back in his chair looking at them, feeling out of things, wishing despondently that he knew enough French to understand what they were saying. He scraped his feet angrily back and forth on the floor. His eyes lit on the white hyacinths. They made him think of florists’ windows at home at Eastertime and the noise and bustle of San Francisco’s streets. “God, I hate this rotten hole,” he muttered to himself. He thought of Mabe. He made a noise with his lips. Hell, she was married by this time. Anyway Yvonne was the girl for him. If he could only have Yvonne to himself; far away somewhere, away from the other men and that damn frog and her old mother. He thought of himself going to the theatre with Yvonne. When he was a sergeant he would be able to afford that sort of thing. He counted up the months. It was March. Here he’d been in Europe five months and he was still only a corporal, and not that yet. He clenched his fists with impatience. But once he got to be a non-com it would go faster, he told himself reassuringly.

He leaned over and sniffed loudly at the hyacinths.

“They smell good,” he said. “Que disay vous, Yvonne?”

Yvonne looked at him as if she had forgotten that he was in the room. Her eyes looked straight into his, and she burst out laughing. Her glance had made him feel warm all over, and he leaned back in his chair again, looking at her slender body so neatly cased in its black dress and at her little head with its tightly-done hair, with a comfortable feeling of possession.

“Yvonne, come over here,” he said, beckoning with his head. She looked from him to the Frenchman provocatively. Then she came over and stood behind him.

“Que voulez-vous?”

Fuselli glanced at Eisenstein. He and Stockton were deep in excited conversation with the Frenchman again. Fuselli heard that uncomfortable word that always made him angry, he did not know why, “Revolution.”

“Yvonne,” he said so that only she could hear, “what you say you and me get married?”

“Marries…. moi et toi?” asked Yvonne in a puzzled voice.

“We we.”

She looked him in the eyes a moment, and then threw hack her head in a paroxysm of hysterical laughter.

Fuselli flushed scarlet, got to his feet and strode out, slamming the door behind him so that the glass rang. He walked hurriedly back to camp, splashed with mud by the long lines of grey motor trucks that were throbbing their way slowly through the main street, each with a yellow eye that lit up faintly the tailboards of the truck ahead. The barracks were dark and nearly empty. He sat down at the sergeant’s desk and began moodily turning over the pages of the little blue book of Army Regulations.

 

The moonlight glittered in the fountain at the end of the main square of the town. It was a warm dark night of faint clouds through which the moon shone palely as through a thin silk canopy. Fuselli stood by the fountain smoking a cigarette, looking at the yellow windows of the Cheval Blanc at the other end of the square, from which came a sound of voices and of billiard balls clinking. He stood quiet letting the acrid cigarette smoke drift out through his nose, his ears full of the silvery tinkle of the water in the fountain beside him. There were little drifts of warm and chilly air in the breeze that blew fitfully from the west. Fuselli was waiting. He took out his watch now and then and strained his eyes to see the time, but there was not light enough. At last the deep broken note of the bell in the church spire struck once. It must be half past ten.

He started walking slowly towards the street where Yvonne’s grocery shop was. The faint glow of the moon lit up the grey houses with the shuttered windows and tumultuous red roofs full of little dormers and skylights. Fuselli felt deliciously at ease with the world. He could almost feel Yvonne’s body in his arms and he smiled as he remembered the little faces she used to make at him. He slunk past the shuttered windows of the shop and dove into the darkness under the arch that led to the court. He walked cautiously, on tiptoe, keeping close to the moss-covered wall, for he heard voices in the court. He peeped round the edge of the building and saw that there were several people in the kitchen door talking. He drew his head back into the shadow. But he had caught a glimpse of the dark round form of the hogshead beside the kitchen door. If he only could get behind that as he usually did, he would be hidden until the people went away.

Keeping well in the shadow round the edge of the court, he slipped to the other side, and was just about to pop himself in behind the hogshead when he noticed that someone was there before him.

He caught his breath and stood still, his heart thumping. The figure turned and in the dark he recognised the top sergeant’s round face.

“Keep quiet, can’t you?” whispered the top sergeant peevishly.

Fuselli stood still with his fists clenched. The blood flamed through his head, making his scalp tingle.

Still the top sergeant was the top sergeant, came the thought. It would never do to get in wrong with him. Fuselli’s legs moved him automatically back into a corner of the court, where he leaned against the damp wall; glaring with smarting eyes at the two women who stood talking outside the kitchen door, and at the dark shadow behind the hogshead. At last, after several smacking kisses, the women went away and the kitchen door closed. The bell in the church spire struck eleven slowly and mournfully. When it had ceased striking, Fuselli heard a discreet tapping and saw the shadow of the top sergeant against the door. As he slipped in, Fuselli heard the top sergeant’s good-natured voice in a large stage whisper, followed by a choked laugh from Yvonne. The door closed and the light was extinguished, leaving the court in darkness except for a faint marbled glow in the sky.

Fuselli strode out, making as much noise as he could with his heels on the cobble stones. The streets of the town were silent under the pale moon. In the square the fountain sounded loud and metallic. He gave up his pass to the guard and strode glumly towards the barracks. At the door he met a man with a pack on his back.

“Hullo, Fuselli,” said a voice he knew. “Is my old bunk still there?”

“Damned if I know,” said Fuselli; “I thought they’d shipped you home.”

The corporal who had been on the Red Sox outfield broke into a fit of coughing.

“Hell, no,” he said. “They kep’ me at that goddam hospital till they saw I wasn’t goin’ to die right away, an’ then they told me to come back to my outfit. So here I am!”

“Did they bust you?” said Fuselli with sudden eagerness.

“Hell, no. Why should they? They ain’t gone and got a new corporal, have they?”

“No, not exactly,” said Fuselli.

V

Meadville stood near the camp gate, watching the motor trucks go by on the main road. Grey, lumbering, and mud-covered, they throbbed by sloughing in and out of the mud holes in the worn road in an endless train stretching as far as he could see into the town and as far as he could see up the road.

He stood with his